Common Place No. 32

Twelve Years of Prose:2008–2020 Common Place No. 32, Winter 2021

Twelve Years of Prose 2008–2020

This special issue gathers in one place various prose pieces that appeared in Common Place from numbers 1 through 31. Edited and sometimes condensed, these are more definitive versions in this respect, but everything I write is in some sense "in progress."

I. Quotes & Thoughts

Michael Wood, London Review of Books, 22 May 2008, page 12 In people, in families, in nations and in war, the unintended, the inexplicable, the groundless is for Tolstoy what instigates action and produces results; and we understand these results, if we understand them at all, only long after they are achieved and over. The unconscious rules Tolstoy’s world, but it is not Freud’s zone of repression: it is the realm of everything we don’t know about ourselves, about all the real, multifarious and inaccessible causes and effects we childishly simplify and pretend to understand, as if a plan could decide a battle, or a mere promise of virtue protect us from the ambush of desire The ambush of desire Each person has her own destiny, fundamentally different from my own. We fall through time, but it seems to me that when we land, we’re among a cohort of time travelers, some of which are clearer than others about the tumbling dice nature of this process.

Something accumulated arrives with us, like luggage that someone else has packed. We spend our lives unpacking it. Our arrivals are plus or minus—it’s not an exact science, plunging through time, and it may take decades before we finally meet up. Yet there’s a kind of clustering of the cohort. Or perhaps the cluster that we encounter makes certain threads of time more important than the rest.

Each person having her own destiny, paths inevitably cross more often than they join.

The woods are full of paths and, like Dante in the Inferno, we can find ourselves lost in them “in the middle of our lives”. What we find is that a path we took proved to be diverging. The decision to take one path and not another can be “gut wrenching,” to quote a friend who just wrote me about his decision to leave an untenable situation for one that’s full of promise. He knows this, yet he’s torn apart by thoughts of the people he’s deserting. What he’s really experiencing is a path ending for them both, one they pursued together and believed in—until he didn’t.

Many people seem to arrive finally at a vantage point that makes it possible to glimpse how destiny unfolded, and how each fold, whatever its nature and apparent result, was vitally necessary. Yet this necessity could be dismissed as mere survivorship, our human tendency to find meaning, even when we’ve been wandering in circles. It could be a delusion, or not, but wisdom may lie in accepting meaning wherever we can find it.

Perhaps we have to detach the meaning from the person who provided it, acknowledging that when a path diverges, the meanings that went with it go their separate ways. My meaning can never be yours, but finding meaning in the encounter—this may be possible to acknowledge later on, and even to appreciate.

The realm of everything we don’t know about ourselves Recently, I had the chance to view in their entirety the 16mm films my father made from 1949 until 1956. I’m two and then eventually I’m nine. I’m not the star of the show—my sister gets more footage—but there I am, a small person who is nonetheless myself at different ages. My father filmed or photographed much of what he experienced. It makes part of my life accessible to me. Of course, it’s really his life that I’m watching. He shows me what he wants me to see, but the characters have lives of their own.

Most days, I make an entry in the diary I carry with me. The current one extends from mid-2005 until now. It has a few pages left, but it may take me two months more to finish it. There are other volumes. The one that covers 1998 is missing. Its absence

makes it live in memory more than the others. I can see the terrible drawings I made on a terrace in Rome and can picture the patio at my friends’ house near Zurich where I wrote out my frustrations and recorded a memorable wedding party on the lake. I remember the quintet that played for them and the relationship I intuited between the violinist, a 19th-century figure, and the stunning cellist. The diary is lost, but all of this is still with me.

Several years ago, I tried to make a chronology of my life’s events. I found that whole parts of it could not be accurately placed. When did I go to Orcas Island with the kids?

The years in which events took place escaped me. I have an associative memory, which means that time lines up in reference to specific people and I recall relevant things that pertain to them. In the absence of someone to line things up, much that I’ve experienced seems to fall away, and then she or he reappears and it all comes pouring back.

August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books, 22 May 2008, page 26 He would take the idea of economy to a radical extreme, and it is this, along with the scrambling of syntax and confusion of parts of speech, that makes for most of the difficulty in his work—this attempt to fold the universe into a matchbox, as Kenner somewhere puts it.

Fold the universe into a matchbox Reading an edition of Odes of Horace that placed the Latin original across from a freewheeling English translation, I was struck by Latin's condensed nature, packing a huge amount of meaning into relatively few words. How is it, I wondered, that French, Italian, and Spanish take up more space than English does, typically, to convey the same thoughts? When Horace is unfolded into English, the meaning is intact, so the packing must have been done carefully, omitting nothing.

Take the idea of economy to a radical extreme Seeing in black and white is too radical an economy, a matchbox with the heads left off.

Barbara Everett, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet,” London Review of Books, 8 May 2008, page 14

As in a private journal (and his Sonnets do speak of journals, given and received as gifts), the poems allude to time lived through. Thus comes this extraordinary writing: Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, Since I saw you fresh These effects are almost cinematic, the product of a modern awareness of the feeling of life, the way external change alters or fails to alter the internal mind.

These effects are almost cinematic No film could so quickly summarize what Shakespeare depicts here. He’s only folded three years into this matchbox, but there’s so much heat that it could peel paint off a barn.

“Time lived through” is time in specific, time that cuts a path through a larger landscape.

The subject is the beloved, present and absent. These are the seasons, their procession, but the sonnet’s force is from its unfolding present: snows build up and melt, fields flood and dry out, a torch is set to them—a procession that circles back on itself, tail in mouth.

In process of the seasons have I seen The truism suggests that time passes faster as we grow older. Yet time still slows down when events pull us off to the side. The world outside flows at its usual pace and we fall behind. That falling behind is part of the pleasure of these events, to take a brief vacation from the march. Mostly, we move distractedly through time, aware of the seasons but only briefly open to their particular beauty. When we’re present in time, beauty is called forth from everything. (If someone objects that beauty is ephemeral, I can point to this.)

The Pillow Book is the record of a woman who lived within and wrote about the “process of the seasons” and noted beauty whenever or wherever she saw it. When you read it, you live in it at her pace. The notes of the translator, Ivan Morris, fill in the blanks: how the empress she serves is supplanted by a younger favorite and then dies tragically in childbirth, age 24. How the author admires the brother of the empress, even as he betrays her, seeing something grand about him and understanding his motives in putting her younger sister forward. In the peculiar society of that era, when the power of the dominant family depended on marrying daughters to the emperors, his feelings for his sister were necessarily down the list. The author’s capacious mind accepts this, even as she deplores their effects on the empress she loves. All of this plays out against the seasons of the court, which are meant to be unchanging. Births and deaths are accidents of fate, while the beauty of the moment, regularly reenacted, is a talisman, like taking a lover for a night, experiencing the ritually delayed departure, and getting the poem. The ephemeral is also the cyclical. The real unfolds randomly, heightening the effect or crushing it.

Three hot Junes burned, since I saw you fresh The Odes have memorable lines about a half-drowned sailor hanging his soaked clothes up to dry in a temple, having again risked that glittering sea. To be left thus is to be wrung out. Shakespeare is writing from another angle, but both poems are as much about now as then. Despite centuries passing, there’s no actual distance. The lover— present, absent, or gone—is still with us, as is the one who loves, waits, or is betrayed.

Clare Wigfall, interview, Good Books Guide blog, 18 May 2008 Writing a short story presents its own specific challenges. One aspect I appreciate is the economy of the form; the story must create a world, a mood, a plot, wholly real characters, an exploration of life and its complexities, and all within the space of only a few pages. There’s something beautifully mathematical and precise about it, and what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. For that reason, your safety net is taken away, because when you write a short story you’re relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps, with a short story you’re forced to leave these for your reader to complete—the difficulty for

the author is getting the balance perfectly right, creating something that will satisfy.

This is probably what makes short stories—when they’re written well—such an intellectually demanding form of literature. A great short story may be brief, but it demands and relies upon personal investment from the reader. The very best short stories can haunt you long after you’ve read the concluding line, because so much of the experience is not just about the words on the page, but is individual to you and the way your own brain interprets and digests what you’ve read.

It may be brief, but it demands and relies upon personal investment The late architect Joseph Esherick's Cary House is “intentionally anti-material and antifocal.” It “exposes people to the passing of the day, using light rather than form as the main medium of the design, refusing to let form predominate,” and “gets away from form as something to see.” Houses are the short stories of architecture, and the best ones are intellectually demanding—not by forcing dwellers to come to terms with an overlay of theory, but by acknowledging their participation in the house’s unfolding as settings within settings whose meaning shifts constantly as they are inhabited and experienced.

The house is deliberately spare and open-ended, making what it looks out on (the setting) as important as what it is (the building) and what it contains (the rooms and furnishings).

The house is about particular things, the larger setting most of all, yet that setting also changes. The design acknowledges that one moment gives way to the next, yet we stitch these moments together to make a world and live in it. We are still the measure of all things, still the ones who endow them with meaning—an ongoing process.

(The embedded quotes are from Joseph Esherick and John Parman, “The Pursuit of the Ordinary,” Space & Society, June 1983, page 52.)

What you leave out is as important as what you leave in In Stendhal’s Life of Henri Brulard, he says plainly that waiting for genius to strike is a waste of time for a writer. He spent his adult life writing novels, memoirs, and traveler’s journals. Like Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, The Charterhouse of Parma was written late in life. He wrote at a fast clip, drawing on experience. Tomasi di Lampedusa similarly waited until the eleventh hour before writing his great novel.

Although they were both diplomats at different points, Stendhal was a man of action who sought to make a mark in the world and came close enough to get in trouble with women and the authorities. His memoirs anticipate an eventual audience, but he wrote them to work out what his life meant. This happens in real time: he notes in the margins how fast he’s writing, how his hand aches, and how he can’t put his pen down.

With Tomasi di Lampedusa, there were many distractions. Eventually, though, he set them aside and wrote, but then he died before the book found a publisher. For all he knew, it might not be—it was at odds with the prevailing sense of the novel, rejected by one editor after another for this reason. Finally, one editor saw that it was a masterpiece.

Tomasi di Lampedusa’s article of faith is that the story he recounts, the world of The Leopard, is sufficiently interesting to find readers. Stendhal has the same faith about his memoirs—a sense of his life being of future interest, both because he writes about it compellingly and because his own character is proto-modern, anticipating a world in which he will finally feel at home. That world is not so much modern, though, as cosmopolitan. We recognize in Stendhal a type that makes his or her way through the decades, sometimes out in the open, but more often not.

Cary House (Roy Flamm photo)

The Charterhouse of Parma was meant to remind his contemporaries that he,

Stendhal, mattered much more than his station in life suggested. Assigned to a peripheral Italian city by a French government that saw him as a has been, he took immense license with the terms of his employment, absenting himself to better climes to write a life for the drawer and a valedictory novel for publication that drew renewed attention. Tomasi di Lampedusa, writing in the shadow of his ancestor, was more like Herodotus in his desire to convey to his readers the ephemeral texture of a man, a family, and a place.

What to leave in or out is a problem for novels, too—Marguerite Yourcenar’s manuscript of Memoirs of Hadrian ran much longer than her book, and Tomasi di Lampedusa also worried about leaving in or taking out certain chapters, decisions he left to his editor to make. We try to imagine The Leopard without the chapter focusing on the priest who attends the Prince. Given its large canvas, the omission would be less crucial than in a story. Tomasi di Lampedusa pared it down, whereas Stendhal wrote what he hasd to say, the manuscripts of his memoirs suggest. For Tomasi di Lampedusa, novels had to stop in time, avoiding the extraneous. For Stendhal, they had to give the story the room it needed to be told fully—no more, no less. And he was the judge of that.

There’s something beautifully mathematical and precise about it

Architects turn to methods to up the odds of beauty, commodity, and delight. Vitruvius is credited with starting this and his successors regularly drive the idea into the ground. In 1968, Horst Rittel debunked this tendency by separating wicked from tame problems.

Architecture is wicked. “Anything goes," as Paul Feyerabend put it. He was discussing the scientific method, but the point is similar. As Rittel used to say, the creative leaps on which architecture depends take place offstage—methods can’t begin to describe them.

Clare Wigfall looks at a short story and sees its gorgeous balance. We can imagine that Palladio saw something similar, “like mathematics,” and then sat down to write his treatise. Architects should just build, and not write about their work, Manfredo Tafuri said. Then he added that when Reagan met with Gorbachev, he wasn’t carrying a copy of Machiavelli in his pocket. No safety net there, either.

(Source for Tafuri: Richard Ingersoll in Design Book Review 9, Spring 1986, pages 8-11.)

Dawn Potter, “Self-Portrait with War and Peace,” Threepenny Review, Summer 2008, page 21 When I recall this scene—myself in the throes of childbirth reading about Tolstoy’s little princess in the throes of childbirth—the memory has a play-within-a-play quality.

What remains tangible is a sensation of profound mutual sympathy. I was, at that instant, enduring with this familiar yet imaginary woman the dance of torment and reprieve, torment and reprieve. We were, at each paroxysm, in the talons of death; at each release seized again by life. It was an accident and strange miracle to read it and suffer it simultaneously.

What remains tangible is a sensation of profound mutual sympathy When my oldest son was in high school, he was assigned The Odyssey. Finding it lying around, I read it again and found a completely different book. A long prologue stood out for me because it described the son’s search for his father, which I'd forgotten, and also laid out, as a preface to the fantastic tales that Odysseus tells a king about his journey, a true-to-life account of the care with which he handled his initial encounter with the Princess Nausicaä—honoring her on every level, thus ensuring that he will live to tell those tales to her and her father, and also preserving himself as a potential lover by respecting her privacy and remaining hidden. The passage makes it clear that while Odysseus appreciates her striking beauty, there’s no lechery. He encounters her and intuits her nature, as we learn. We also grasp his nuanced response—his sensitivity to a woman who caught his interest without knowing it. Yet he also savors what he senses.

None of this meant anything to me when I first read the book. Twenty-four years later, reading it again, I knew the territory it describes, ripped of its mythic trappings.

We were, at each paroxysm, in the talons of death A woman should be honored for having children. She should receive medals and wear them proudly on a special day set aside solely to recognize her role in keeping our species going. She should receive a soldier’s pension for the pain and suffering she endured. I write this knowing that women often have children because they love the men who father them and want that love to be embodied, to take it in and transform it into another human being. They have children because they love children and love mothering them, because they believe in something beyond themselves and children are part of this. They have children because they forget the torment once it’s over or manage to put it aside and have another. For any and all of these reasons, women should be honored evermore.

In the US workplace, there's a certain jealousy, impatience, or resentment of working mothers of young children. There’s a tendency to point to rules or assumptions that were put in place by men for the immediate benefit of the enterprise. Today, not as frontally stated, but still very much in place: have a child and watch your career suffer and possibly die. Yet the women, with or without children, who accept the rules as given don’t often get the brass ring that’s promised them, or they get it and it’s snatched away.

The whole edifice needs to be rethought. Women should be able to have children if they want them, and to raise them well, with or without a father or family to support them. That support should be unplugged from marriage and redefined as responsibilities that people take on that are shared with society and geared to personal circumstances.

The survival of marriage is wrapped up in property and inheritance, issues that can be sorted out in many other ways. Father and mother are more durable traits than husband

and wife. Men should be encouraged to become fathers by other means than fathering.

The tradition of godparents could play into this—men who make parenting a vocation.

Work also needs to be rethought. Too much is wrapped up in it, and society—US society—gets off easily. Instead, the money is spent waging pointless wars and building bridges to nowhere. The things that are fundamental to society’s wellbeing—like raising and educating children—are starved for funds. Women and children bear the burden of this disproportionately. Perhaps, as in Lysistrata, it’s time for the women to go on strike.

Charles Simic, London Review of Books, 20 March 2008, page 33 For someone whose preoccupation in much of what he wrote was with the erotic, Cavafy is a strangely chaste poet. He was a sensualist who left unmentioned what he was most excited about. His descriptions of lovemaking never get specific. It is up to the reader’s imagination to supply the missing body parts. He used words in their primary meaning and was perfectly satisfied in calling a naked body young and beautiful and leaving it at that. In his view, this is not an issue. Art doesn’t represent reality, imitate life or copy nature. Experience is primarily an aesthetic matter. It imposes its own will on the subject, removing it from the contingencies of the natural and social worlds.

Simic quotes Cavafy’s poem, “Has Come to Rest” (translated by Stratis Haviaras in The Canon). An excerpt goes, “No one could actually see us, but we’d / already provoked ourselves so thoroughly / that we were incapable of restraint. / Our clothing half-opened— not much to begin with, / that month of July being so divinely sultry.” This transcends gender. I’m not sure I agree with Simic that the poem is detached from reality or from the contingencies of the larger world. We know the month, the weather, how they might have dressed, and the state of their arousal. What the poet found is left to us.

Is “experience primarily an aesthetic matter”? Sometimes we're entirely sensory, but more often we’re putting the world we move through into context. Lovemaking can shift the plane, enabling a purely bodily connection that triggers our responses, an instinctual dance that unfolds partly of its own accord. The body imposes its own will, but it does so in the interest of the dance, and because it also desires the one who aroused it.

When lovemaking is memorable, everything about where it happened also figures. As love dissipates, lovers depart the scene, yet Eros’ traces linger there. It retains its potency, long after. The lovers who steam up a café need a context that Eros provides. From then on, they will number cafés among the god’s venues.

“If he hadn’t been a poet, Cavafy said, he would have been a historian. The historical periods that interested him were the Hellenic Age and the late Byzantine, with their cosmopolitan way of life, their high civilization and the political and religious turmoil that eventually did them in,” Simic tells us. Cavafy wrote about what resonated, whether it was a fragment of vanished worlds or examples from his own life of the pleasures that linked him to those eras and their exemplars—that were in their tradition.

What Simic observes about these poems—that the reader has to supply what Cavafy leaves out—relates to Clare Wigfall's comment about short stories. He is asking us to draw on our own experience and find our own equivalents to what he leaves to imagination, not wanting to preclude any possible interpretation by imposing his own.

Elizabeth Lowry, London Review of Books, 1 November 2007, page 14 One of the catastrophes of alcoholism is that it arrests the growth of personality, and Lowry’s relationships with his wives, friends and family were often marked by childlike rages and startling abreactions. It is hard not to see his writing as an attempt to reintegrate himself. When writing he could surprise himself being himself, and it seems he could approach a sense of wholeness only by translating the experience into the written word. (The painter Julian Trevelyan once told Lowry that he didn’t need therapy; he needed to write.)

In his 2006 book, Dōgen on meditation and thinking, Hee-Jin Kim writes that the 13thcentury founder of Soto Zen “offers what I would call a ‘realizational’ view of language, in contrast to the ‘instrumental’ view that is epitomized in the Zen adage ‘the finger pointing to the moon.’ Inasmuch as language is the core of discriminative thought, it has the power—perhaps the only power there is—to liberate it.” Kim adds that “Enlightenment, from Dōgen’s perspective, consists of clarifying and penetrating one’s muddled, discriminative thought in and through our language to attain clarity, depth, and precision in the discriminative thought itself. This is enlightenment or vision.”

(The quotes are from chapter four, “The Reason of Words and Letters”, pages 62-63.)

J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, Inner Workings, Penguin, 2008, pages 5-6 Svevo disparaged Triestine as a dialettaccio, a petty dialect, or a linguetta, a sublanguage, but he was not being sincere. Much more from the heart is Zeno’s lament that outsiders ‘don’t know what it entails for those of us who speak dialect (il dialetto) to write in Italian. With every Tuscan word of ours, we lie!’ Here Svevo treats the step from the one dialect to the other, from the Triestine in which he thought to the Italian in which he wrote, as inherently treacherous (traditore taduttore). Only in Triestine could he tell the truth. The question for non-Italians as well as Italians to ponder is whether there might have been Triestine truths that Svevo felt he could never get down on the Italian page.

Only in Triestine could he tell the truth The preponderance of architecture today speaks in a kind of global patois or pidgin. The high moments, as proclaimed by design critics and the design press that follows their lead, play with form by riffing on new materials and the structural derring-do that computer analysis makes possible (or doesn’t, as the Charles de Gaulle Airport terminal’s partial collapse suggests). Very little that’s designed is recognizably speaking in a voice that’s idiosyncratically local, “Triestine.”

What truths could be spoken by an architecture that’s genuinely of this place or another? Are there instances, even now, of architects who could be said to work with this goal in mind? In the early 1980s, George Homsey told me that it was his ambition to move the architecture of the region forward, and his work, or some of it, seems rooted in local history and culture. His Garfield Elementary School in San Francisco’s North Beach is an example of a building that relates to its past on a psychological level, invoking

Garfield Elementary School the history of elementary schools in that city as a building type. It manages to combine this with a great sensitivity to a streetscape that is mainly residential in scale and nature.

Because of these choices, the voice in which the new school speaks is idiomatic, of that place, and tied to a larger history that’s unique to the city.

Stanley Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Shalom at 14th Avenue and Clement in San Francisco riffs on synagogues as he experienced them as a boy growing up in South Africa. It also takes in the neighborhood—low and tightly packed Richmond district houses—in which it rises, imposing a slightly larger scale and a definitely different look, but one that’s accessible rather than defiant, a kind of Noah’s Ark that floats serenely above the ground, visually reassuring. Beth Sholom, its different parts arrayed around a street-like entry court, is a separate and yet semiporous world, with a gate-like but transparent entry to mediate open and closed. Up the road, Temple Emanuel uses a more mosque-like strategy of surrounding walls and gardens, but Beth Sholom is modern and urban, part of its neighborhood, even when it’s not.

The rabbi who commissioned Saitowitz was a Zen Buddhist who returned to Judaism and became a rabbi without abandoning Zen. As a client, he encouraged his architect to investigate the history of synagogues and their meaning in Judaism, and to design the different parts in light of what he discovered. Not all of it has been carried out, but the big moves are there—compelling in their straightforward expression. To me, there’s something vernacular and local about it, a voice that’s appropriate for a congregation in the avenues that takes its Judaism straight up.

Congregation Beth Sholom

J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, Inner Workings, Penguin, 2008, page 4 Like any good bourgeois..., Svevo fretted about his health: what constituted good health, how was it to be acquired, how maintained? In his writings, health comes to take on a range of meanings, from the physical and psychic to the social and ethical.

Where does the discontented feeling come from, unique to mankind, that we are not well, and what is it that we desire to be cured of? Is cure possible? If cure entails making our peace with the way things are, is it necessarily a good thing to be cured?

What is it that we desire to be cured of?

We’d like to be cured of death—isn’t this really what we want? We’d like to be the gods that we resemble, in our own minds, but are not. Instead, we’ve done a reasonable job of extending life, eliminating the short order deaths like heart attacks and strokes, so that now we can survive to succumb to the slower ones, with their greater agony and expense.

It’s enough to make you start smoking cigars and buttering your steaks with lard.

Is it necessarily a good thing to be cured?

One summer, I ran into a neighbor who was suffering from a serious illness. Steadied by his wife, he was out walking on a shopping street near my house. I greeted them— surprised actually to see him walking, as I’d heard he was wheelchair-bound. “I’m cured,” he told me. That winter, I went to his memorial. At the wake afterward, I heard that he was bitter the last few months. Yes, I thought, it’s that word “cure”. Better to have told him that he's bought a bit more time, “so use it well!” Part of the “waking up” that George Gurdjieff urged on his followers was an awareness of death, “the terror of the situation,” which should be a constant prod to live fully. In his memoirs, he quotes his grandmother’s admonition to live consciously—conscious of who he is and where he is. Life is a unique opportunity and we squander it in neurosis, laziness, and timidity. Despite our selfregard, we rarely take our lives seriously. We're less then fully ourselves in consequence— holding back, walling ourselves off from life. This gets us nowhere in the end, as Death takes us anyway, slipping all too easily through every last one of our defenses.

(I believe that the source for Gurdjieff is his book Views from the Real World, but it may be Meetings with Remarkable Men or his introduction to All and Everything. Gurdjieff attributes his attitude to his grandmother, who summed up the choice as either doing something remarkable or accepting a life of non-entity—what he would call "automatic" and unworthy of our real potential as human beings, children of His Endlessness.")

"Quotes & Thoughts" is excerpted from Common Place No. 1, August 2008.

2. Caucasia

A Jaguar XK-120 Some preliminary remarks I often picture my father in his two-door Jaguar, one hand draped outside the window, holding a cigarette. This would have been in the second half of the 1950s—he quit smoking in 1960, when he was 45. He still has the car, along with his tortoiseshell glasses.

He’s quite elegant, even with the wrinkles. An early taste for bespoke suits continues.

Despite his age, despite having made a ton of money, or perhaps because of it, he still drives himself to the station three days a week, down from five, rides into Penn Station, and makes his way to his desk.

That desk is the one he had made from the teak crates he shipped from Singapore in 1953. The walls, too, attest to his past—a childhood in Hanoi, student days in Paris and London, wartime service in Malaya, a trader’s life in Singapore, the decades in New York, and all the travel back-and-forth to Asia when China and Indochina opened up.

Despite that focus, my father is a Europhile—having spent his formative years on that continent and in its colonies. At my age, I’m lucky that he’s still alive. When your father dies, turning that corner must bring the wall of your own life into view. That, at any rate, is what my father notes in his journal. He was just 37 when his own father died, age 76.

“Borrowed time” is how he’s described every birthday he’s had since 1991. So far, he owes someone 17 years.

When he turned 90, my father invited me to lunch. “I’m not really immortal,” he said, adding that when he looked back at the totality of his life, it seemed like a story worth telling. “Yet, having lived most of it, it’s hard for me to know where to begin. And I would be tempted to leave things out. You know—you don’t want to hurt people, and yet there they were, smack bang in the middle of your life, or vice versa.” In short, he needed someone to get the broad outline from conversations and then read the letters and the journals, all of which he’d somehow managed to keep despite the war, the moves, and my mother. Apparently, that was me.

I should say a few things about my family. Although born in Hanoi, my father is of Chinese descent, the son of a wealthy merchant who traded with France and China. My mother is Vietnamese, but they first met in Paris. According to the family legend, he knew immediately that they would marry. Despite provocations on both sides, they still are.

My mother is more or less the opposite of my father, who is happiest at his desk or in intimate company. My mother likes to socialize. She also enjoys sticking her nose in everyone’s business except my father’s. That’s their pact—each asks no questions of the other. Roughly once a day, they talk about topics of mutual interest. For every trip they

take together, there are five or six they make alone. Yet they discuss every potential destination. “You should go,” he tells her.

He’s been saying that all their married life, beginning in 1940 when he presciently sent her to New York to spend the war out of the line of fire. Neither of them wasted much time being lonely, but my sister—born in 1942—was the more tangible evidence of this.

My father loved her the instant he learned of her existence. Her father, a Japanese expatriate, is still with us, living in New York. Decades later, my mother still has herself driven to the city to be with him.

“We aren’t very alike,” my father commented at lunch. “For some reason, marriage throws you together with another whose differences become clearer as you grow older.

Yet you have these ties—family, property, and the ease of long familiarity.” Then there was the war and their years of separation. “I was in the jungle, out of reach. There was literally no way for her to know what would happen. In a situation like that, you have to be very tactful when you reenter the world you left. And besides, I had my own life to consider.”

Our lunch opened the door to my father’s private papers. There are letters, personal poems, and the diaries he’s kept since he was a student. The letters are voluminous. When motivated, he’ll write five or six times a day. The diaries are difficult to read, written in his tiny script. They sometimes overlap the letters, but mostly they comment on things that the letters address in the moment, creating a kind of double reflection.

When will you retire? When people ask this of my father, he always smiles. “When there’s no more reason to head into town” is what he thinks.

"Caucasia" is from Common Place No. 1, August 2008. This is the story's opening part.)

Not Too Slow, Not Too Smart

Can we “slow” the growth of San Francisco’s metropolitan region without stopping it?

"Slow" refers to Slow Food, especially its emphasis on the value and pleasures of regional difference. “Without stopping it” is to acknowledge the region’s projected growth.

"Smart" refers to smart growth—livable is another favored adjective, endorsing density without always asking what it means in practice. Like the Buddha, we seek a middle way between Slow and Smart (or Fast, as some put it) that aims at enjoyment and conviviality.

The Problem Space Between 2007 and 2030, the nine counties that make up the Bay Region will grow in population from 7.2 million to 8.7 million people, a net gain of about 1.5 million people.1 Will these newcomers be housed within the 700,000 acres of currently developed land, about 15.5% of the region’s total land area of 4.5 million acres? Or will they continue to erode the undeveloped balance, reducing still further the land available for farming, recreation, wildlife, and the maintenance of the region’s ecosystem? (No small matter, as it includes much of the river delta that supplies many California cities with water—an area for which substantial low-density residential development has been proposed.2) This is half of the problem; the other half has to do with the density of development required within the region’s already developed areas simply to maintain their current boundaries.

(Ideally, it would be possible to pull them in, especially where low-density sprawl has penetrated mindlessly into farmland or the ecosystem.) Greenbelt Alliance and others have tried to determine what density would be required, but this analysis does not fully consider the qualitative side of the problem: what increases in density would actually mean for a neighborhood in human, experiential terms.3 So, the problem space that the region poses is how to accommodate future growth in ways that preserve and even reclaim open space, yet do so in ways that are not just sound in terms of current planning dogma (e.g., “dense, compact, and transit-served”), but create appropriate settings for a humane and enjoyable life as this is broadly understood by those who live and work in its towns and cities. Framing it in this way emphasizes that the region's future must be thought of holistically, seeing open space preservation and finegrained development as connected ideas, both of which point to the pleasure and prosperity that the region can offer its residents.

Greenbelt Alliance’s Prescription Focused on preserving open land, Greenbelt Alliance has formulated a program that is widely accepted by other policy-shaping organizations in the region. Here's the gist:

Growth boundaries: cities, towns, and other communities in the region should agree to establish inviolable boundaries for development. Lands falling outside them (but within their jurisdiction) are to be left as open space, whether under private or public ownership. Walkable urbanism: to accommodate future growth, cities and towns should require a higher density of development, especially around transit (train and light rail stations) and transit corridors (arterials served by buses). Even when transit is not yet in place, patterns of development should anticipate it by favoring compactness and higher density.

Opposition to this program came initially (and predictably) from some owners of large land parcels that fell outside of the growth boundaries established on the urban edge.

Elections in these communities often feature ballot measures aimed at creating exceptions

for specific parcels. Opposition also comes from some of the affected urban neighborhoods. The Association of Bay Area Governments sets goals for housing development in the region that, if disregarded, can theoretically impact a city’s ability to tap regional grants for affordable housing and other purposes. In Berkeley, for example, meeting the goal would require the construction of 14 16-story housing towers in its downtown core, according to the city’s planning staff. The state has also mandated development “bonuses” that increase multi-unit housing density and override local zoning.

Density and its Enemies Density is emerging as a major point of contention in the region. In the urban core, the focus is on absolute density—height and bulk—and how it contributes to or detracts from the community around it. In relatively-dense urban neighborhoods, the question of impact is heightened. Style, use, ownership, and a desire to preserve the existing fabric figure in the debates about each and every project. In the outer suburbs, intensification of established areas to preserve greenspace vies with efforts to carve out new territory for office campuses and large single-family home developments.

Especially in the city and the older, closer-in suburbs, the debate about density comes down to two positions: (1) that it’s good because it provides affordable housing and prevents sprawl; and (2) that it’s bad because it undermines a community’s existing character (and, by implication, its property values: Berkeley was extensively down-zoned in the 1970s by residential real estate interests, representing middle- and upper-middleclass owners). In recent years, these positions have hardened Density is “entirely good” and preservationists “almost always wrong” (about the aesthetic and historic merits of what they try to preserve), YIMBYs argue. NIMBY's argue the reverse. The deadlock has created a vacuum that developers and politicians have not failed to fill and exploit.

San Francisco and Berkeley have so politicized development that almost every project of any size has to be reviewed in a way that stretches out the entitlements process and makes the owner or developer liable to a variety of political pressures. The time and money involved favor politically-connected developers with the “deep pockets” needed to get through it. This creates a “duopoly” that links their interests with their political gatekeepers. It produces projects of a scale and nature at odds with their surroundings and even with the city itself as a place with a unique character—oversized and overly prepackaged. Prewar development left room for demotic content, not just in the retail mix, but also in the ways that “communal” open space was provided and used. In the grip of the duopoly, we've lost this art. Our cities fail to encourage ordinary people to participate in reshaping them over time. Marketecture substitutes for real life.

Slow in the Bay Region The Slow Movement has tremendous resonance in the Bay Area, where a love of good food and wine has led to a renaissance in local organic farms catering to food halls and farmers’ markets. The wineries started this, moving from purely domestic mass products to high-end “appellation” wines that compete globally for prizes and buyers. Chefs like Alice Waters, one of Slow Food’s leaders, fostered a cuisine based on the availability of locally grown, seasonal ingredients, drawing on her experience as a student in France.

The Slow Movement can seem like something from The Theory of the Leisure Class, yet its manifesto has a commonsensical truth. Whether we are thinking of food or city life, the pleasures of living well are worth defending from politics, the market, and ignorance.

A metropolis like ours would benefit from Slow thinking—but not too Slow. Efforts to apply a Slow Food perspective to urban life began in small towns in Tuscany that were worried about the impact of tourism and development. Cittaslow (Cityslow), the offshoot that resulted, limits itself to “cities” of no more than 50,000 residents. This is smaller even than Berkeley, which has about 122,000 residents. It ignores the fact that a city like San Francisco is made up of districts that are not so different in size or in the pressures they face from the Tuscan towns whose citizens first penned Cittaslow’s manifesto.

Resisting the forces of Fast Preserving the quality of urban life means accommodating growth sustainably. This is the other side of Slow. In urging local producers to find global markets, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini acknowledged that growth can be positive, a sign of quality and urbanity.

This is a crucial distinction. Folco Portinari’s Slow Food manifesto, written in 1989, attacked speed rather than growth as the enemy of “a better future.” The 20th century, he wrote, that “began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.” He asserted that “real culture is about developing taste rather than demeaning it,” arguing for “a firm defense of material pleasure” as “the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life” that “in the name of productivity has changed our way of being and threatens our environment.”3 The forces arrayed against the quality of our urban life are also Fast, and Smart development is too often part of it—asking us to accept bad design if it hits a density target. But implacable opponents of growth often deny the possibility of denser urbanity.

If Fast is problematic, so is a Slow that clings without reflection to what exists. Slow is not the same as No. Growth is desirable when it enables a region to remain "alive,” and to “rediscover the flavors and savors” (quoting Portinari) that make it what it is. That this may require some pruning and paring should be accepted as part of this active cultivation.

There are signs of change. Politically-connected architects who regularly scored commissions in San Francisco based on their ability to push projects through the entitlements process are out. Talented architects (and the developers who hire them) are showing that pleasure is possible. Ironically, some of their best work is aimed at lowerincome residents—the least served by the marketplace. If a proper balance can be restored between the city as a looser framework for development and its citizens as more active city makers, then life will be more pleasurable and the region will be better protected.

Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

At Risk: The Bay Area Greenbelt, 2006 edition, Greenbelt Alliance, 2006, pp. 2-3.

See Jane Wolff, Delta Primer, William Stout, 2003.

Smart Infill, Greenbelt Alliance, 2008.

The quotes are from Fabio Parasecoli, “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds,” Gastronomica. Summer 2003. Cittaslow’s founding charter is in English on the Cittaslow UK website. Also see Paul L. Knox, “Creating Ordinary Places: Slow Cities in a Fast World,” Journal of Urban Design, February 2005.

(A version of a paper written with Professor Richard Bender for the "Forms in the City/Spaces in the Metropolis" conference, Rome, 2-3 April 2007, published in Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica no. 126, September–December 2007, pgs. 50–55.)

OUR SLOWBAY MANIFESTO

A first draft of a manifesto for a Slow Bay Region that affords urbanity and pleasure while still accommodating the growth in population that experts are projecting.

Create boundaries for density, not just growth We need to cut through the current impasse by agreeing on what we mean by density wherever development occurs. Density is not an abstraction; it has to serve communities and support their existing residents as well as new ones. There’s nothing wrong with establishing goals for density, but it has to contribute in clear and fundamental ways to the experiential qualities that make a place what it is (or could be).

Make urbanity count We need a robust vision of the region’s urbanity that takes lessons from its rich culture of food and wine, not shrinking from creativity, experimentation, and the demotic element that challenges and changes tastes, and is unafraid of outside influences—knowing that the region will absorb them and make them its own. Then we need to put this vision first.

Restore the demotic; end the duopoly The tendency of the region's cities to politicize development at almost every scale, making owners and leaseholders jump through endless hoops, deprives them of the spontaneous contributions of individuals, operating within rules that are broad enough to allow creative interpretation. It makes for a duopoly that favors large projects that are shaped by “global” assumptions about market preferences, and that attract only the biggest players.

There are exceptions, but this is too much the norm.

See the region as a whole Understanding the region holistically, especially as an ecosystem, would immediately put a halt to insanities like the current pressure to develop the Delta, one of California’s main sources of fresh water, as single-family housing. It would encourage us to invest much more in transit and much less in freeways, and to value open land like our first-born.

Honor our real traditions The historic patterns of the region have favored a humane density in urban development coupled with the preservation of the natural landscape. They have always acted as a brake to heedless sprawl, and making them the law of the land would solve a lot of problems.

Put our money where our mouth is Americans tend to wait until the future they dreaded arrives before dealing with it. We have to break this habit. The best way to do so is to fall in love again with a region that, for many of us, captured our hearts when we first set eyes on it, savored its delicious food and wine, and walked its captivating streets. Something this beautiful demands our indulgence, our generosity, and our commitment. We know how to treat it well, and yet we have so often failed to do so. It’s time to change.

(Written with Professor Bender as part of the same conference paper and published in Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica no. 126, September–December 2007, pgs. 50–55.)

Urban Terroir

Terroir refers to the conditions of terrain and microclimate in wine-growing regions and, more specifically, within a given vineyard. It takes in those attributes of place that influence the grapes and thus the wine. Terroir is an evolving context, subject to human intervention and to the vicissitudes of nature in a larger sense. It evolves, but the pace of evolution of its different elements can vary radically. As a mix of the found and the cultivated, terroir can be improved, revived, diminished, and even destroyed.

We use words like structure, scale, density, and fabric to describe the urban context, but these are all elements of something larger. By calling this “something larger” terroir, we raise the possibility of cultivation, but against a deeper background—the regional ecosystem in which a city is situated. Terroir could also be said to be that part of nature we can influence; its boundaries are potentially vast. Exurbia, the embodiment of our economically and culturally divided society, is also a byproduct of a cultivation strategy that treats social displacement in its different forms as an externality. The question of who cultivates, and why, is as legitimate for city making as it is for farming, fishing, or forestry.

Reclaiming terroir In Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi writes of scale that “it is conceivable that a change in scale modified an urban artifact in some way; but it does not change its quality.” Citing the urban geographer Richard Ratcliff, he adds, “To reduce metropolitan problems to problems of scale means to ignore…the actual structure of the city and its conditions of evolution.”1 Rossi then quotes the critic Giuseppe Samonà, writing in the mid-1960s:

It is absolutely out of the question, in my opinion, to nurture any idea of gigantic spatial parameters. In truth, we find ourselves, as at all times, in a situation that, from a general point of view, presents man and his space in well-balanced proportion, and in a relationship analogous to that of the ancients, except that in today’s relationship all the spatial measures are greater than were the more fixed ones of fifty years ago.2 The key words here are quality, well-balanced proportion, and relationship. What is to be avoided are “gigantic spatial parameters” which ignore or traduce the relationship between “man and his space.” Terroir posits human cultivation, and cultivation in an urban sense is how a city becomes “our space.” In cultivating our urban terroir, we address and value the relationship itself. Whatever furthers it—scale, for example—becomes part of the terroir, cultivated both for its own sake and for what it can contribute to the outcomes we desire to achieve and also to sustain. Sustainability is intrinsic to terroir, one reason why we cultivate it. Structure and scale, for example, lack this connotation. They can be dead, to use Christopher Alexander’s apt word for it; terroir is organic and alive,3 and if it has efficacy compared to a word like density or fabric, this is because it explicitly takes in humanity and nature. We can't treat it as something separate and unmoored from both.

Resisting gigantism Samonà cautions us that scale is necessarily a human scale, or gigantism may result. In a different context, Wallace Stegner described his talkative aunt. Finally noticing the huge rock formation rising dead ahead of them—they were in a car—she was rendered speechless, unable to wrap her mind around it. “You have to get used to an inhuman scale,” Stegner wrote.4 Cities can also have a scale that diminishes the possibility of a human relationship. If we build canyons that become wind tunnels, we have to cultivate the affected streets and plazas to bring them back to life.

Campo di Fiori (Mary Lebeck) If every act of building has the potential to further the human relationship, then gigantism is really an egotism that disregards that possibility. As this suggests, gigantism flows from a willful or mindless ignorance with respect to terroir. Preservationists that reflexively resist higher-density development, privileging their own neighborhoods over the region’s remaining open space, show a similar egotism, yet their fears of gigantism seem justified by experience. 5 Why is it that we get gigantism much more often than we get urbanity? One could say, borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard, that the “grand narrative” of regional open space preservation, so well accepted by Bay Area opinion makers, has become a pretext for the “soft terrorism” of Smart Growth. The results fall right in line with Lyotard’s now 30-yearold critique: “On the one hand, the system can only function by reducing complexity, and on the other, it must induce the adaptation of individual aspirations to its own ends. The reduction in complexity is required to maintain the system’s power capability.”6 This power capability is very much in place. Reforming it doesn’t mean streamlining the process—we tried that under former Mayor Willie Brown—but taking it out of the hands of politicians, restoring consensus and rule of law, yet doing so as postmodernists, accepting nuance and difference.

Rethinking tradition Entire swathes of San Francisco—neighborhoods we know and love—were built based on a shared understanding of the city’s terroir. The introduction of taller, more massive buildings, first in the financial district and then in lower-density industrial areas to the north and south, ended that consensus. Especially south of Market, the results are mixed.

Yet there are a growing number of examples of higher-density projects that achieve the kind of urbanity that we associate with the best of the city’s established districts. Certain architects stand out in their ability to do this across a range of building types and scales, and their work in the city is worth studying as potential precedents.7 The best new tall buildings around the city’s Mission Street corridor make room for the people on the ground. These aren’t lifeless plazas, either. They’re run just as well as they’re designed, and their owners clearly get that a civic gesture not only buys them constant goodwill, but makes their properties stand out from the competition. The best mid-sized developments create open space and through-block porosity, add balconies that people really use, and vary the building's height, shape, and rhythm to avoid an oppressively monolithic look.

Rethinking cultivation Pattern books were part of a consensus about city form at different levels that made the rule of law in development possible. Although pattern books posited specific designs, they were liberally interpreted by individual builders. More importantly, they reflected a shared understanding of how neighborhoods took shape, with the underlying house pattern reflecting the way the individual blocks were divided up In A Pattern Language,8 Alexander and his collaborators documented the elements that make everyday life worth living. It may be timely to take their work further—to update the patterns that supported the quality of everyday life in our cities through the early postwar period, but then fell into disuse as the desire for a higher density took hold.

We have never really replaced these older patterns, which could be tailored to each and every block. Without them, we are cast adrift in the politicized world of case by case, and cultivation becomes a shouting match. With them, city making can shift back to what it was for eons: a widely-shared human activity.9 The cultivation of urban terroir requires this kind of “working” consensus. Despite a planning apparatus and an elaborate playbook, the recent development of cities like San Francisco and Berkeley has mainly reflected the developer-influenced whims of politicians, with each new project serving as a vehicle for securing contributions and bragging rights. Only GSA and the genuinely civic groups responsible for the new public museums have used this license intelligently. Since those philosopher-kings (and queens) are not always available, putting cultivation back in the hands of the community is safer.

The city’s leadership still has a role to play in guiding cultivation. They are the stewards, to use a word that often arises in university campus planning. Part of their responsibility, part of what they steward, is the urban terroir. They have to balance the claims of the region—the necessary preservation of open land, for example—with the claims of the community to live well within necessarily higher densities. They have to connect the dots, do the math, and help the community understand and explore its options—not in abstract, but literally neighborhood by neighborhood. Most of all, they have to avoid the “grand narratives” that paper over false solutions, and acknowledge that consensus can only really be achieved at the local level, as an evolving, constantly negotiated resolution.

The community, too, has responsibilities. Neighborhoods are alive because the people that live in them care about and participate in their cultivation. One way to make this happen is to devolve power to them, but to hand that power over with stipulations. How a higher density is to be achieved is ideally a neighborhood decision. Friedrich Engel’s idea that the housing crisis could be solved by rethinking how existing housing is used is relevant to a number of San Francisco and Berkeley districts.

Density does not always mean bigger—it can also mean used more intensively. Many neighborhoods are working to address urban crime and post-earthquake recovery— topics that force them to interact with adjoining blocks to pursue shared interests and initiatives. They could also come to grips with how to meet their communal obligations to the region—to absorb expected population growth, reduce congestion and pollution, use water and energy more efficiently, and preserve the larger ecosystem while maintaining, reviving, and creating urbanity where it counts.

Rethinking participation At a time when, in virtually every other walk of life, people go online to find information and plug into specific communities to understand their options and track and cultivate their personal interests, the mechanisms of “community” are inefficient and out of touch.

Community organizers show what can happen when the means and methods of the rest of life are applied at a neighborhood scale: a dialogue opens among “interested” parties, which the official city can support, participate in, and sometimes help frame or augment.10 Our cities need to face reality and begin to leverage the tools that everyone else uses to put urban cultivation on a new footing so that this shared civic responsibility can be carried out in a more open and balanced way, with terroir in mind. Politics will continue, but bringing the city and the community back on the same page is a necessity to define a new consensus about the city’s cultivation, one neighborhood at a time, and change the relationship between them. The city’s broad powers need to be curtailed, while the community needs to do more. Every neighborhood needs to tend its own vineyard, with a better understanding of how this contributes to the urban and regional terroir.

Notes

1. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1982, pages 160–161.

2. Rossi is quoting (on page 161) from an essay by Giuseppe Samonà, published in 1964.

3. Alexander’s insistence, in The Nature of Order, that we measure the built realm by its vitality, radically asserts its connection to the rest of life. Alexander, the Tolstoy of architectural theory, is much criticized for his discursive and messianic writings, but on the fundamentals, he has always been on to something.

4. Wallace Stegner, “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Modern Library, 2002, pages 52–54. The quote reads, “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.”

5. It isn't just regional open space that is treated as an externality by gigantism of this sort; the homeless are another “urban externality” that mysteriously drops out of the frame of neighborhood preservation on the one hand and high-density redevelopment on the other. One could mention the exclusionary nature of public employment here, too: no sign of the poor sweeping up the parks, for example, and their rifling of recycling bins is considered a crime in the well-to-do neighborhoods of Berkeley.

6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, page 61. The book was first published in 1979. It’s interesting to me that Rossi, Alexander, Lyotard, and others—like Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, and Paul Feyerabend—whose works also have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on the theme of terroir, were all writing around the same time. That period was characterized by left/right debates on issues that are back on the table today, from oil shortages to urban terrorism. It ended with the US and the UK shifting rightward toward unfettered global capitalism. As the US now shifts the other way, let’s hope we learned something in the interim.

7. Collectively, the good work is the exception and banality is the rule—in a region that is remarkably and even courageously cosmopolitan in many other respects.

8. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Alexander is best at recording specific attributes of towns and cities—their settings at

different scales—that make them truly livable and enjoyable. His willingness to say that we know if a place or a building is alive or dead restores ordinary people to their rightful place as measurers of all they survey. When we start to consider new patterns of city making that are in tune with humanity and nature, we often find that Alexander has been there before us. We may not agree with his account of the terrain, but we can appreciate what he knows and what he’s seen.

9. Ivan Illich comments on modernity’s “loss of proportionality” or “common sense” (in

The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, Anansi, 2005, pages 136–137):

This loss of proportionality points to the historical uniqueness of modernity, its incomparability. The poetic, performative quality of existence was erased and forgotten in field after field. ... In this transition from a world based on experience of fit, of appropriateness, to a world ... in which words have lost their contours, what was once called common sense has been washed out. Common sense, as this term was used of old, meant the sense of what fits, what belongs, what is appropriate. It was by common sense, for example, that the physician understood the limits of what he could and should do.

Illich and Alexander share a sense that modernity is fatal to humane patterns of living/being. I think they would argue, in contrast to Samonà’s statement about scale in a modern context, that gigantism is inherent—that is, a constant danger—in the modern loss of proportionality and common sense (as Illich puts it). In an earlier introduction to Illich and his work (Ivan Illich in Conversation, Anansi, 1992, page 15), Cayley writes that Illich follows Leopold Kohr, a philosopher of social size: To each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales. … In each of these dimensions, tools that require time periods or space or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional.

In Rivers North, Illich describes the introduction of tempered scales in music (pages 134–136)—a passage that suggests to me that modernity requires us to find “tempered” forms that can be harmoniously combined. We have to “learn not to hear disharmony,” he says. Perhaps we have to learn not see it, either, in order both to feel at home in the modern city and begin to reclaim it for ourselves. It is in this spirit that I point to Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Sholom and Mayne’s Federal Office Building, each of which has been accused (by John King and Dean Macris, respectively) of disharmony—buildings that are tempered as the latter building’s neighbor, the SoMA Grand, is not. Seeing them, I felt that each fits harmoniously with its context, but in a new way. By studying this new way, we may be able to find new patterns of city making that are suited to the city we’ve become. (By pattern I mean precedents that suggest ideas about how to work—plan, design, and build—in a given context.)

10. In Berkeley, Kitchen Democracy provides an online forum to discuss and weigh in on issues of public debate. There are signs that the city’s leaders are paying attention.

(This first appeared in _line in January 2009. This online journal no longer exists.)

A Visit to Granada and the Alpujarra

The Albaicin from our window (Saturday, 26 April 2008) Granada is a bigger city than I expected. The new part flows out of the old, which is well preserved. The topography is dramatic—the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the south, the Alhambra and the summer palace on a tree-covered hillside, south of the old town, and a second hillside that’s filled with houses off of narrow, winding streets. We climbed both these hills today in reverse order, finding a plaza at the summit with a commanding view. The hills form a river valley, but there’s a drought, Elizabeth said, so the river’s low. The streets are cobblestone, but they’re made of smaller river stones, not the large, square stones you find in France, and so are easier to walk on.

(Tuesday, 29 April 2008) Yesterday, we drove to the valley where Elizabeth lives, meeting up with her friend Ananda, who was working in Órgiva, the nearest market town. He’s an earnest young man of 19, good at anything of a technical nature, I'm told. He and his family live downhill. Her house, shared with Julia, from Madrid, consists of a kitchen and a main room, plus a separate room where Elizabeth sleeps. It has a west-facing window that frames a view of the valley. The house is made of dark brown stones and mortar. It sits on one of the terraces that the Moors made, and gets a terrific amount of sunlight, Elizabeth said, although there’s some shade from a pine tree and other, smaller trees in front. It would be easy to put a garden in. She used to live on the other hillside, much lower down, and she would look up enviously at the house, picturing all that sun.

The other occupant of the house is Ruth, who came down from Madrid a week before, after breaking off with her boyfriend. She was writing an allegorical story about him, drawn as an elf that, because of a spell, is condemned to wear armor. It comes off

magically for one night when the moon is full. The story continues, as the spell is complicated. Each part is illustrated with drawings in pastel crayons. Her depiction of the elf made Julia and I laugh as she told us the story.

(Wednesday, 30 April 2008) Back in Granada, we went to the cathedral in all its baroque splendor, whitewashed stone and painted-on gold. The plan of the building is a cross with an imposed X. It includes a sculpture-and-painting of King Ferdinand conquering the Moors (in this case, one Moor) and a weird, dark gold side chapel dedicated, I think, to the Holy Ghost. The gold looked almost spray-painted on. You can see the origin of lots of things that were emulated and/or parodied later. A detail from a painting by Bellini, “Presentation of the Virgin” hung on one side of the main altar.

Tomorrow is “Las Cruces,” a holiday specific to Granada. It’s also the first of May, workers’ day everywhere else (and here, too). According to the man at the café, the local event includes “alcohol and processions of the Virgin.” The town will be crowded, and the event goes on through the weekend.

Walking back here, I realized that the church at the head of the alley that leads to our building must have been a mosque and that its location across from the “Arab baths” implies that it was once in the very center of the town, downhill from the Alhambra. The area is called the Albaicin, and it’s where the Moors briefly lived after the Alhambra fell.

According to Elizabeth, the valley she lives in was their last stop before they were expelled. The whole of southern Spain reflects or is steeped in the Moorish heritage: the names, the cuisine, the music and dancing, the general appearance of the people.

“The Moors” is a misnomer—they came from different places, ruled in different cities as their emirate was diminished by re-conquest. The original capital was in Cordoba, and it shifted to Granada after Cordoba fell, existing for 300 years as a vassal state of the Spanish king. The Moors were expelled, I read, because of edicts, after the fall of Granada, eliminating their language and culture—very similar to the benighted policies of Franco in reference to the Basques and the Catalan (and also of the northern French kings toward the kingdoms of Provence).

At seven p.m., we went back to the Church of St. John of God, a local saint born in 1495, to hear the rosary (although we didn’t know this is what we’d hear). The church is amazing, a basilica with an entirely gold interior, an altar that climbs three or four stories, and a dome at the center. After the service, they lit up the whole church. The saint himself is represented in three life-size sculptures, and the Virgin presides over the altar, holding the baby Jesus in her arms, with a crescent moon before her. The service, recited in Spanish, was familiar enough that I could follow parts of it, including the Lord’s Prayer.

Numerous older women appeared, but there was an audience of tourists behind them (and us). It’s hard to describe just how encrusted with ornament this church is, and yet it has more integrity than the cathedral in terms of self-consistency. The last time I heard the rosary recited was at Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, also a basilica, now that I think of it—perhaps this is the form that churches dedicated to the Virgin take? That church was built after a plague, my Venetian friend Marta Moretti told me. They pledged to build it if God would end it. Or perhaps they made this pledge to the Virgin.

Walking over there, I began to see what how cars plague a town like this. They’re everywhere, and they demand to share the tiniest streets with pedestrians. Scooters invade even the alleys that, because of stairs and other obstacles, are really only wide enough for people to walk. There are public buses that are inexpensive to use, yet everyone drives. The car we rented is sitting in a public parking garage, chewing up 18

An irrigation channel and offshoot euros every 24 hours. It seems like a waste to have it, but it was cheaper to take it for six days than to rent it twice.

Owing to accidents of time and geography, the sun is just going down at nine p.m. I think it’s because we’re an hour ahead of GMT, but not very far to the east of the demarcation line. And despite being in the “south,” I guess we’re actually fairly far north.

The Lebanese restaurant that we’ve gone to every night was closed, so we went to a Moroccan restaurant a little higher up, run by an impresario, fluent in all the different tourist languages. Several families from California were at the next table—I heard Napa Valley mentioned, and Elizabeth said later that the snippets of conversation she overheard were typical of someone’s friend being grilled about her experiences here and answering with a recitation of her classes.

The restaurant itself, together with the food, was the polar opposite of the other one, as overdone in décor as one of the cathedral’s side chapels, and with ingredients that came from a can, whereas the Lebanese restaurant has the wife as cook and everything is made fresh. The soups are especially good because of this, with very subtle flavors.

The last building on our alley, which ends at the garden gate of a former convent, houses a woman who goes around Granada yelling things like, “You’re really ugly” (in Spanish) at students. Late at night, she emerges from her building and calls her dogs in a loud, manly voice—I thought it was a man, but Elizabeth said, “No, it’s a woman. I know her.” I guess you never forget a voice like that. I haven’t lain eyes her, but ears—yes. I heard her while I was washing up, but in that interval, she went inside. Sleep well.

(Thursday, 1 May 2008) Back in the valley, Elizabeth and I walked down to Ananda’s house and met his father, Nuriel, who speaks Spanish slowly and clearly enough that I could understand. Their house, which he built on the ruins of an older one, is well made—he laid and mortared the stones himself. You can see how it’s progressed over the 26 years he’s lived there, adding a room for his wife and a sleeping alcove for both of them.

The boys' “studio” downstairs has a computer and various music-related electronics. The brother is into hip-hop and the Internet. I met him on Monday and again this evening— he showed up wearing earphones and carrying an mpeg player. Modern life, I said to Nuriel. As a parting gift, Nuriel gave us avocados and squash from their root cellar.

Then we came back and Elizabeth made a salad, soup, and quinoa, which was all very good. We ate on two orange-crate-like tables, seated on the floor—this seems to be the

norm here, as Alma and Nuriel also sit on the floor, Turkish style. (However, Nuriel produced a chair for me and I noticed another. The boys also have chairs in their studio.)

Before we went down to Nuriel’s house, I started rereading Elizabeth’s copy of the book on Dōgen that I have at home. There was much that I’d forgotten. Later, we were briefly visited by Julio Donat, the author of the book on the plants of the Alpujarra. He speaks English, although he said that he had difficulty understanding my American accent. I asked if I could buy two copies of the book—one for Elizabeth, one for me. Like every other man in the valley, he has a beard. I would probably have one, too, if I lived here for long, since shaving takes a certain effort (and you either have to heat the water on the stove or wait for the sun to heat it up the water in the hose on the roof. The valley’s irrigation system is amazing—channels of water that wind down the hill, with a smaller system to divert it to the plots. Nuriel’s plot has a sprinkler system that Ananda installed.

(Friday, 2 May 2008) Julia, the housemate of Elizabeth, arrived this afternoon. At least, I think she arrived—it might have been someone else passing through. There’s a path that comes down from the road—I could have parked the car there and walked down, avoiding the narrow drive, but I felt it would be harder to carry things down from there, since the incline is steeper. I met Julio while he was walking down from the road after the bus dropped him off. Yesterday, a woman tourist walked by and apologized for intruding.

(Later) Elizabeth has just left in the near-darkness, assuring me that she can find her way to Ananda’s house, where we had dinner this evening—a salad with avocado that she whipped into a kind of yogurt (as Nuriel described its consistency before she started). I learned that he’s from Seville originally and was an artist who sold his wares in different places until he settled here 27 years ago. His wife Alma, who’s from Barcelona, came here 20 years ago. He is a master of reiki, a healing method that he learned from “una maestra de Canada” who lived in the valley. He gave me a booklet in Spanish, printed in Idaho, which described it. The patriarch, a Japanese Christian who studied at the University of Chicago, returned to Japan and studied Zen, and after much searching worked out a method that he believed was shared by Buddha and Jesus, “the laying on of hands”. He offered me a session (and offered a second after he walked me back here). Most of it was cradling my head in different ways, and at one point I felt like my head was in his hands and body was floating. Whether it has healing powers remains to be seen, although there’s at least one positive sign—my digestive system is working again.

Reading the Dōgen book, I was struck by the phrase “topsy-turvy world” and its Japanese original. The valley, despite its beauty and slowness, is very much a part of this.

The larger area is just as damaged by tourism as Granada, although this same tourism makes certain good things possible. Could it be done in a different way that would keep those things alive, allow tourists their access, but—for example—ban private cars, which are the principal menace, in favor of the bus system, which works well and is used by all the locals? (It costs a euro to ride it.) I could have come here directly from Granada by bus. Instead, I spent hundreds of Euros on a car that has presented a parking challenge in every village.

Elizabeth assures me that the only animal life that’s the least untoward are the coyotes that roam the hills. She sometimes hears them howling when the moon’s full. There are bullfrogs that sound like raccoons attacking squirrels, and endless clicks and scratches and thumps. Walking up here with Nuriel, he discovered a small snake that wrapped up into a tight circle when he prodded it after it lunged at him. Let snakes lie is my credo.

Alma and Nuriel's entry path (Saturday, 3 May 2008) Slowing down is a way of recharging, and perhaps the real meaning of Slow is in taking the time—taking enough time—to gain rather than lose energy along the way. Elizabeth and Julia are talking with a friend of theirs in the kitchen.

I had a real cup of coffee, made on the stovetop, and brushed my teeth, but I still have to shave. It’s a little after noon. The sun is out and it’s warming up—there’s warm water from the spigot, for example.

Last Saturday, I was in Granada recovering from the flight. Elizabeth and I walked up to the Alhambra. She was fighting the city, which took a lot out of her. Over the ensuing week, we’ve been talking about that. I’ve quoted Dōgen, who said that light and dark can’t be distinguished, that enlightenment emerges from everyday existence, the topsyturvy world, as he calls it, as part of the giddiness of karmic life (another phrase of his).

Trying to separate yourself from the world is as pointless as trying to make a mirror by polishing a tile. We arise in life and are eventually subsumed by it, organic and transient creatures that we are, unfolding from the spark that set us into being, a journey in which we are enlightened and deluded in turn, being in the midst of life, not apart from it.

Buddhism is “very yang,” Elizabeth said a few days ago. Yesterday, I asked her to explain, and she answered that she finds Buddhism more of a man’s than a woman’s philosophy of life. After we heard the rosary at the Church of St. John of God, I said that it was really like chanting. It’s also repetitive, a daily ritual of a cyclic nature, focused on the mother, on women as vessels. From this perspective, the importance of Jesus is that he “was made flesh,” that God immersed Himself in the world and a woman was the only way He could do it. This is true of the old gods, too. They desired women and begot

various semi-divinities with them. Jesus is one, “half-man, half-God”—and when he shed his body, God entirely, according to the Trinity.

I agree with Swedenborg that everything in the world has its corresponding thing in heaven or hell. That Swedish gentleman took in it all in dispassionately. He was good at reading malice and falsity, and ignoring both when he encountered them. The world didn’t slow him down because he didn’t waste his time resisting it, but instead gave his time to things that resonated—studies, public service, people whose goodness deserved his notice and kindness. Other things he sidestepped.

This valley is as rich in correspondence as any city. It has its hell as well as its heaven.

Thanks (or no thanks) to having access to wireless, I’ve kept up with events at home.

Nothing seems to have changed much in these days, although small “urgencies” (as the Spanish call them) have arisen. I like that Spanish word, urgencia, which feels better than emergency as a descriptor. The latter puts its emphasis on “things developing,” emerging in a particularly bad way, but the former just lets it go at that: whatever it is, however it developed, it is urgent now.

(Later) Nuriel appeared and asked me if I wanted a second session of reike. I agreed, and walked with him down to his house, this time to have a full front-and-back treatment, which involves, he explained, a subtle transfer of negative and positive energy. At the outset, he produced crystals, pink quartz, and an egg of onyx. I liked the egg, I said, and he commented that onyx is the stone of Capricorn. (He’s one, too.) The different minerals represent air, fire, water, and earth. Alternatively, he may have meant that they channel forces from the heavens. I’m not sure which it was. My Spanish is getting better, listening to him. Sometimes I could follow him, but not consistently.

Elizabeth said that she and Alma are studying chiropractic with a German adept who’s told them to obtain the original book on the subject, by a man named Zimmer. Alma has a copy of the German edition, but no one can read it except the teacher, so Elizabeth’s been trying to track down a copy via the Internet. She said that the difference in methods has to do with their subtlety, and that modern chiropractic is something like shiatsu, while the old school is very gentle because their knowledge of the spinal cord is more detailed and their methods more sensitive.

The reiki session lasted maybe 90 minutes—this is a guess. Elizabeth arrived meanwhile, and she and Nuriel made an elaborate salad. I watched Nuriel add oil and lemon juice and then mix it in. He sliced everything up so the salad bowl was heaping when he was finished. I realized that I could make it, too, having watched him, and said to Elizabeth later that this is rare for me, to learn something by observation.

I asked Nuriel (with Elizabeth translating) if he knew how to garden when he came here. “No,” he said. “I learned mostly by myself, but when I got into some difficulty, I went to see a more experienced older man named Antonio.” Elizabeth feels that you just plunge in, and maybe she’s right, but I said that I like to know someone who can help me when I get into difficulties, as I inevitably do. While in the midst of the reiki, I thought about the garden of my house and about my room. I’ve had “remake the room” on my list since the turn of the year, but now I have a clearer image of what to do: empty it out.

When I came here before, the terrace in front of Elizabeth’s room was filled with people, friends from the valley plus one who’s not. They said hello nicely, but were caught up in their own talk, and I came and went, getting my camera so that I could document the way the water system works. It’s quite something how intricate it is and with what exactitude it delivers water where you need it. That makes sense, of course, in a climate that’s basically a step away from being a desert. There’s been a drought for four years,

Elizabeth's doorway Julio said two days ago. We’re supposed to visit him—the Henry Thoreau of Alpujarra— this evening. Right now, though, Elizabeth is still with Nuriel and Ananda.

(Later) Close to dusk, we walked over to the house of Julio Donat. He was out, and we met Pedro, his tenant, who lives in Granada, but comes down here for the weekend, and Pedro’s girlfriend Julia, who’s originally from Munich, Polish-German, and an artist, studying at the University of Granada. What kind of artist, I asked? Etchings, she said, but at Granada you have to study every sort of art—you can only specialize as a doctoral student. She works in copper, after finding working with zinc too toxic. This was later, though. Pedro was the first to greet us, and then Julio appeared. He’d been up organizing the flow of water, as his area will get some next from the channel system. He said that it begins at the highest village—I don’t remember the name—and is fed from a source that comes directly from the mountain. The water depends on the snow pack, and this past winter was dry and warm, so there isn’t much. The spring rains didn’t really help.

Julio took us to his attic, which is a herbarium—shelf after shelf of herbs and plants, which he makes up into herbal or plant mixtures for various conditions. “Hawthorne is good for the heart and circulation,” he explained. “You drink an infusion, and you can drink it as often as you like without ill effect.” This in response to my comment about foxglove (digitalis): “You never know what the result will be, so you can only take it in a hospital, not at home.” Elizabeth explained later, when I asked why he didn’t sell his mixtures online, that a larger market would strip the region of its plants. “He sells them in local markets,” she said, “and earns enough money for what he needs here.”

I bought two copies of his book at 20 euros each. It’s a wonderful book, and I urged Elizabeth to translate at least a chapter so we can show it to publishers. Julio speaks

English, although he had trouble understanding my Californian, and Elizabeth says he teaches classes locally to small groups. He’d be an interesting visitor to our region, and book would find an audience. It’s a model that other regions could profitably emulate.

I brought over a bottle of red wine, so he invited Julia and Pedro to come over and we had a supper that was the opposite of our two meals with Nuriel—cosmopolitan in spirit, talking about New York (which Julia intends to visit), Berlin (a city she likes), US and Spanish politics, the films of Peter Greenaway, books like Ecotopia (a copy of which Julio produced, and which led me to mention that I’d met the author, Ernest Callenbach), and the music of Jobim (playing in the background). Elizabeth drank some wine and enjoyed the conversation. It was a fitting way to end my last full day here. Julia loaned us a headlamp and we walked home in the dark. I followed Elizabeth, who knew the path.

Something else about the channels that Julio said: they predate the Moors, as do the villages—they were probably put there by the Romans, which makes complete sense to me, thinking of their skill with aqueducts and other waterways. This was the land of the Hispano-Latin population that fell on hard times in the fifth century A.D., as I learned during my visit to the Archaeology Museum in Madrid. They did well, and it stuck.

(Sunday, 4 May 2008) I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and washed up. It’s surprising how easy this proved to be, after all my qualms before getting to the valley. From the experience of the morning before, I left the room closed up so its warmth didn’t dissipate. A few days before, with all the windows open, I got so cold that I had to get back under the covers.

Worried that Elizabeth wasn’t coming, I went down to find her, encountering her and Ananda just at the beginning of the path down to Nuriel’s house. I continued down and said goodbye to Nuriel, thanking him for helping Elizabeth, and then walked up again, running into Ananda, who was coming back down, and said goodbye to him.

I left the house before Elizabeth, and met up with Julio Donat at the top of the path where the car was parked. We spent 10 minutes talking. Then Elizabeth arrived and we headed off, talking the whole way until we reached the bus station in Granada, where we left him, on his way to Madrid to visit his mother.

Julio said that the largest of the towns in the Alpujarra, Lanjaron, is a spa whose waters are said to help rheumatism. It’s also a source for bottled water, and as a result, the bottling enterprise is taking water from the irrigation system, to the detriment of the local community. His sister lives in Vancouver, he said—she’s married to a Canadian Chinese who’s a diplomat. I hope he’ll come to California. He knew about Yosemite and other parks. His other interest is trees, Elizabeth told me yesterday. In the car, he told us that he studied psychology at the university in Madrid, but then came to the valley a bit before Nuriel—which means that he’s been there for about 30 years. “My father came to visit a few months before he died,” he said. “That visit was important for me, because he said, after seeing the valley, that he understood why I’d chosen to make a life there instead of pursuing work as a psychologist.” He’s acquired all his knowledge of plants since then.

Note

Julio Donat and Anabel Sandoval: A tus plantas, Alpujarra, Asoc. de Mujeres Órgiva, 2006

View from Elizabeth's front porch Postscript The valley where Elizabeth lived is surrounded by market and tourist towns, and connected to the wider world by wireless as well as by mail (delivered to Órgiva). A naturalist like Julio Donat is able to write and publish his book on the medicinal plants of the region locally, and to lead tours that draw people from England and elsewhere. He subsists on the infusions he sells in local markets, and the rent he gets from a spare room attached to his small house. Everyone in the valley who doesn’t have an outside income raises their own vegetables. It’s a way of life that was lived by Elizabeth's grandfather on the outskirts of Miami in the 1930s, when he and his brothers made what cash the family had delivering newspapers, everything else being raised, hunted, or fished.

At a conference on future metropolitan regions held at U.C. Berkeley in 2005, the landscape architect Randy Hester said in passing that “government “should limit itself to regions and neighborhoods—focus on them, and everything else will take care of itself.”

While recognizing the utopian and also flippant nature of the comment, I think it’s true.

Regions are typically defined by their ecosystems, while neighborhoods are defined by clusters of people who identity with them and with each other. A city is more arbitrarily defined, and its interests are often at odds with the region and with its neighborhoods.

Cities will deliberately harm the ecosystem in the name of short-term interests. Regions, especially if environmental stewardship is their main responsibility, have a harder time doing so. Neighborhoods, like families, are conservative when it comes to disregarding their own traditions. And yet, like families, they can be remarkably, contradictorily cosmopolitan when they see an evolutionary reason to do so.

Just as, in a marriage that breaks with racial or cultural taboos, the appearance of children mends generational rifts, regionally-beneficent changes to a neighborhood's fabric that the neighbors themselves interpret as a favorable evolution will do much more to transform it in the long run than an intervention that bypasses the steps that make this possible. These changes attract favor, not exactly by fitting in, although that’s part of it, but by opening a door to the future that invites people in. Much of what is presented to us as the putative future has an “eat your spinach” quality. Cities nag and scold. Meanwhile, their own hypocrisies are too much in evidence for them to hold much moral authority.

Despite its primitive character, Alpujarra is a product of successive civilizations—the generations of people that terraced the land and then built the elaborate system of channels that brings fresh water to every valley from the melting snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Civilizations come and go, but what is valued regionally is preserved,

maintained, and extended locally. Cities once had the knack. The church near where we stayed in Granada, a former mosque adapted to the new order, is an example.

When Elizabeth was back in Berkeley last summer, we talked about the relative “simplicity” of life here. I put the word in quotes because it’s a byproduct of affluence, reflecting how the urban affluent organize their days. In the valley, much more time is spent subsisting, but there is still time for reflection. It is possible for a naturalist like Julio Donat to pursue the kind of program of local knowledge that Thoreau pursued in Concord, cataloguing what is in front of him and understanding and documenting its value. This happens here, too, of course, but the connection between nature and the naturalist is more tenuous. There are people who consciously come to a place in order to master its secrets and then put them to work in a pragmatic manner, but how often do we encounter them? Thoreau is the great American example, setting his sights on Concord without provincialism, the world then being alive in Concord and Concord in turn being alive to the world—at the epicenter, actually, of our nascent, transatlantic culture, its tendrils reaching out to Europe and Asia.

A while ago, I read a memoir by Richard Olney, a chef and writer on food and wine who ended his days living on a hillside in the French countryside, “letting the world come to him.” His tendrils were also Transatlantic—an admiring network of friends, colleagues, and readers. Planted in rural France, Olney remained cosmopolitan. This seems true of Julio Donat. Born and educated in Madrid, he’s comfortable enough in both worlds to move between them easily although he chooses to live in one place, not the other. To be a citizen of the cosmos may require this, in the same way that I live in Berkeley.

Note

Richard Olney: Reflexions, Brick Tower Press, 2005 (This originally appeared in Common Place No. 3, April 2009.)

Four Kinds of Fire

1. The diarist Samuel Pepys describes London’s Great Fire, during which King James II, besmirched with soot, made sure he was seen helping to put it out. Large swathes of San Francisco burned down following the 1906 earthquake, although a few landmarks survived. In 1968, the tenements of Newark were set aflame by rioters and then left by the city as burnt-out shells, much as the corpses of the condemned were displayed at the gates of medieval towns.

Tokyo burned in the wake of the 1923 earthquake. Rebuilt, it was destroyed again by US bombs. German cities were whipped into firestorms. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte filed a story on the aftermath, when those left for dead were shot pointblank by the authorities. A man who survived the atom-bomb attacks on Japan died recently.

Fleeing Hiroshima for Nagasaki, he was trying to describe the light the bomb made to a friend when the other A-bomb fell. “Like that,” he said.

Napalm rained down on hapless villagers in Vietnam. Lately in Gaza, phosphorus is the rain of choice. Each storm has its screaming child. That a generation separates them shows how little we are moved by these images to put a halt to the barbarous calculations that engender them. Smart bombs and drones now personalize the delivery; instead of the countryside, it’s an apartment in Belgrade or a schoolhouse in Pashtun. The replies, too, are personal, wrapped around the body.

2. “Give tongue” is the phrase that my father’s book of World War II photographs used to caption an English battleship engaging a German foe. “Fire!” belongs to the sphere of warfare, but has spread to terror and judicial murder. German firing squads used machine guns in France. As Goya depicts, French firing squads used muskets in Spain against loyalists fighting for the king.

Gary Gilmore chose a Utah firing squad rather than the noose. “Let’s do it,” he said.

Spies and deserters, once hanged, were by World War I mostly shot. In China until recently, a .45 to the back of the head was the means of dispatch for literally thousands.

Someone told me that it’s the quickest death, more humane than the poison drip that’s replaced it, even there. The drip puts some distance between us and the condemned, but his or her consciousness agonizingly persists.

Sometime in the 1990s, “Ready, fire, aim!” emerged as a business buzz-phrase. Marx’s “MCM,” as explained by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century, describes how capitalism goes back and forth between a money focus (M) and a commodity focus (C, like China now). “Ready, aim, fire” is a commodity formula; whereas “Ready, fire, aim” describes money’s endless innovation. Fire is the key word in both phrases, however. It connotes a commitment to action that, once taken, is hard if not impossible to undo. “Fire sale” is a potential outcome for both C and M, although (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out) the purveyors of M are not always willing to admit it.

3. The oil crisis of the mid–1970s led me to stay in graduate school as job prospects for architects dropped off drastically. Arriving in the Bay Area in 1971, I was able to find work, but was also laid off twice—once because the client didn’t pay, and then (in my own opinion) because I was too slow. I would count the second layoff as a firing.

Firms staff up and use downturns as the occasion to pare. Tough times are when they’re forced to pare more than they’d like, making “hard choices,” as they like to say, among the deserving. It’s not anyone’s favorite process, but firing and being fired are the truest expressions of the nature of work in these United States, which is always a mash-up of trajectories, yours and theirs.

As with any relationship, expectations abound and delusion is endless: the territory of ego. We are exhorted to “work on it,” too, making ourselves “fireproof” by constantly upping our game. Yet the bigger picture of the workplace is fuzzy at best. You specialize and find there’s no more demand. You refuse to specialize and are penalized for failing to be team player. Similarly, you decline to move to where the work is—or you move and they decide the market isn’t worth it.

Being fired can be liberating. It invites us to wonder about them and us. Even if our being fired was lunatic, what do we do with that—seek out new lunatics? What if the whole field abounds with lunacy? As Rahm Emanuel put it, “A disaster is a terrible thing to waste.” And keep I.M. Pei in mind. “I retired from my firm in 1990,” he told Fumihiko Maki in 2008. “I decided then to devote the rest of my life—I didn’t know at that time it would last so long—to do projects of interest only to me. It’s very selfish.” Emerson called it self-reliance: Hitch your wagon to a star.

4. In the mid-1970s, I read some 120 building-fire case studies. This left me with a lifetime habit of noting exits and an aversion to IKEA stores, which are designed like roach hotels. (Casinos also fall in this category, and they encourage smoking!) Another takeaway: the best thing you can do in a fire is get out as fast as possible. (So the best thing you can do beforehand is to simulate getting out quickly until it becomes second nature.) The principal victims of building fires are the old, the infirm, and the very young—anyone likely to become disoriented by smoke, or to be incapable of saving themselves in a hurry or at all.

Fire is an accompaniment to domestic life. Clothes dryers are a frequent source of fires in nursing homes, while still plugged-in irons, pots left burning on the stove, etc., also do their part. Candles on the Christmas trees of my father’s childhood burned some neighbor’s house down often enough to be a distinct memory for him. When my daughter lights candles in her room when she meditates and then forgets to blow them out, my father’s stories come back to mind.

Sometimes I wish I’d never read those case studies. My father-in-law used to set up a barbeque in front of our front door—a hibachi, actually, that sat on the walk, the kids circling around it. He was usually having a drink at this point in the party sequence.

When I was a kid, a neighbor squirted lighter fluid into his barbeque and it blew up the can. Or so I heard. I must have a genius for storing away these episodes. In Barcelona, when my oldest son was two, every affordable hotel had the only stairs and the elevator joined to form a single “chimney,” with no second exit. I took the front room closest to the ground, figuring we’d escape with our lives if we had to jump.

When my father-in-law died, he was cremated and his remains were buried in a box about the size of a concrete block. He’d been an All-American football player in college, so it was odd to see him so diminished. I have a theory that there’s a certain amount of residual consciousness once you’re dead. Fire, once again, puts an end to it. I think I’d prefer a .45 to the head.

(This first appeared in ARCADE in June 2010, part of a series on alchemy: fire.)

Marriage, Family, and Friendship

Angelica Bell and Virginia Woolf Preamble This essay revives and completes another, "Love & Marriage," that I started in 2001. It consists of eight theses and two codas. I use the word thesis because the essay draws on my lived experience of the human condition and its conundrums. A thesis is not a law or rules; life is not a set of algorithms, but it has discernible patterns. There's no map, just a way in and a way out, neither very well marked.

My polemical goals are several. I want to lift the improbable weight that tradition has placed on marriage by demanding that it fulfill every human need. There may be such marriages, truly self-contained, but they seem unlikely. I believe that we need a new tradition of marriage and, along with it, a new tradition of family. I also want to raise the stature of friendship, acknowledging the potential and even the likelihood that it will overlap marriage and family. Friendships are voluntary and self-renewing. How they relate to the friends' familial contexts, if there are any, cannot be prescribed or proscribed in advance. Any new traditions of marriage and family need to account for this, which suggests in turn that a new tradition of friendship may be needed, too.

Thesis 1: Marriage continues family Marriage, as the continuation of childhood, is as wrapped up in family as it is in the desire for love that gives rise to it. We are born into a family and it forms the context of our early lives. We make friends and eventually we split off from our family in order to form another. But that act, if we pursue it, is also part of the family dynamic, which posits its continuation and views marriage, particularly from the standpoint of the parents, as a vehicle of generation. Marriage could be thought of as a genetic conspiracy between grandparents and their grandchildren. In time, everyone joins up. The year's feast days bring the family together “under one roof.” Cousins meet and form a larger cohort. The elders may age and die, but the family lives on.

Marriage recreates the intimate tension of the family at its heart. We enter the family by passing through our mother's birth canal and then attaching ourselves to her breasts.

Long before this, we take hold amid passion and make our presence felt. Once born, we relate to our mother physically. That physical intimacy, the realm of childhood, is forcibly put aside until our hormones stir and our bodies change. At that point, we may seek lovers. Not always consciously, we may want children.

There's a hardwired aspect to this, and not everyone shares the wiring. So, instead, I could say that at a certain point, we want another (or others) with whom to share an intimate tension. Family may be both the cause and consequence of this. We do so despite the inconveniences, the unhappiness, and even the dangers that come with it.

For my purposes here, I'm going to set the untoward aside. Marriage in one form or another is a common feature of life, so it exhibits the full range of human behavior. There are sociopaths and psychopaths out there. A lot of family life is toxic in one way or another. This is not about that toxicity. Its sense of family is more benign than not.

Yet the inconveniences and unhappiness are real. And there are dangers, even among the benign. You can be messed with without anyone laying a hand on you, often with the best of intentions. Misunderstandings abound. We bring our natures with us, on arrival.

Parents do their best to deal with us, and then friends, lovers, and partners take their turns. Yet we invite this, throwing our ill-suited natures into unlikely combinations that nonetheless attract us. This too is like a family, which despite the bond of blood is a genetic menagerie. Perhaps instinctively, we want to mix it up. (Personally, I give destiny some credence.)

What family has going for it is staying power. Not for nothing do cults seek to break its hold. Cults and gangs are family substitutes, but poor ones that suffice only when the real family doesn't cut it. Of course, a lot of families don't; those that do manage to transcend our species’ self-centeredness often enough to be altruistic. This altruism is limited, as Swedenborg noted. (He condemned families for tending to restrict their kindnesses to themselves.) It's limited, but it's a start. You have to learn altruism somewhere. Altruism is an evolutionary tactic for the family and our species. Xenophobia and tribalism persist, but the cosmos we inhabit suffers from them. Intimate tensions at the community level have a way of exploding. The family is where we first learn to negotiate difference. (Not everyone learns, of course.)

Thesis 2: Marriage is always in transition Marriage passes through what Zen Buddhism calls gates or barriers. One of these is the transition from personal to familial love. In Zen parlance, gates and barriers are not markers of progress, but of the depth of exploration of the same phenomenon, so to speak. Love, marriage, and friendship are practices, too. Family is one of their contexts.

When I first arrived at this thesis, I was thinking of the birth of my oldest son, a remarkable event that even now I can remember vividly. Birth reminds us that we’re a species. It puts us in the timeframe of evolution, faster moving than geological time, for example, but also subject to time's river-like shaping. My son stared at us and we stared at him, meeting for the first time in one of life's sacramental moments. In this respect, acts of lovemaking are like the collisions of galaxies, each bringing a unique but overlapping genetic ancestry, conjoined at the heart.

Marriage exists in everyday time and evolutionary time. The family is both a socioeconomic unit and an evolutionary unfolding, dynastic and genetic. Against this background, the marriage partners work through their individual and shared desires, dilemmas, and frustrations. They acquiesce and they rebel. They age. Life unfolds and the marriage experiences stresses and strains.

Many of these are age-old. Sometimes they break us, break the marriage, and break the family, but the family can also be a refuge. Families are typically more accepting, between the generations and among siblings, than the partners in a marriage may be in the midst of its turmoil. The family in this sense provides both a reason to keep the

marriage going and a model for how to do so. What families exhibit—familial love—is more likely to forgive, more likely to be unconditional and accepting, and more likely to see ruptures as an aberration.

This reflects a consciousness of evolutionary time that becomes clearer as we get older. We begin to understand that our own life has threads, a "heaping up of small acts," as both the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching put it. This continual modest effort may get us further than repeated acts of "reinvention." Time is a background dimension in life, but families can bring it into higher relief.

One of the purposes of marriage is to bring us out of ourselves. This is something that work, for example, only partly accomplishes. Behind this is our individual ripening, the slow shedding of ego for being. The "great matter," as the Zen Buddhists call it, seems to relate to this. (I'm not an adept. I only know what I've read.) Familial love exemplifies being as much as having. In their dynastic aspects, families appear rooted in having, but when you scratch the surface, being is what persists. What families possess is more often the means to new ends.

Thesis 3: Marriage needs freedom The acceptance of marriage's dynastic purpose is aided rather than subverted by the freedom its parties allow themselves. I've used the word familial to describe what married love becomes when personal love is transmuted or transcended by the family's pull. To the extent that families will consciously or unconsciously seek their perpetuation, familial love is tied up in what tradition knows as dynastic purpose. And while this seems like the stuff of aristocracies of one kind or another, all families nonetheless engage in it to the extent that they look to their future as a family, concerning themselves with their children's and their grandchildren’s lives, wishing for and often working for their success.

Accepting the dynastic purpose of marriage is a logical development of familial love.

The family provides a context for the marriage, and the marriage partners start to see themselves as an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, they end up as elders. If they've earned it, they're respected and sought out as guides by the younger generation. There are often property and other assets to be considered. Some families are like businesses: the elders look for successors, if they can find them, to carry it on.

Let me be clear that what I'm describing is one pattern out of many. Not every married couple even thinks of itself as a family. Not every married person wants to "get past" an initial desire for a purely personal relationship with another. Indeed, this transition can be difficult and even a disaster. Yet from the other side it can look more like a breaking through than a breaking down.

Accepting the dynastic purpose of marriage makes the family more valuable to the partners. Whatever tensions exist between them, they have more incentive to resolve them. This can be taken in several ways. Tradition argues for hierarchy: family first, often with one or the other partner "in command." Despite the lip service paid to modernity, this model persists. In its modern form, the family may be invoked to stifle dissent. To me, this is not a modern marriage. It's the traditional model trying to cope with modernity. A modern marriage accepts that its partners are individuals, with their own lives. It acknowledges the love—personal and familial—that each brings to the marriage, but recognizes that love can take many different forms. When a modern marriage accepts the dynastic purpose of marriage, it commits itself to perpetuating the family. How it does so is not and cannot be wholly predetermined. Tradition is often of little use when a couple faces a crisis that tradition suggests should end the marriage.

It's like the difference between the Decalogue, with its moral absolutes, and the Buddhist precepts, which focus on state of mind and not causing harm. There are times in a marriage when for practical reasons the partners are almost totally dependent on each other. If the marriage vow has its reasons, they are these. Our responsibilities to offspring are similar, but we recognize that there's a point when we have to let go.

A modern marriage is open ended about the means but less so about the ends. As the I Ching says, it seeks "an end that endures." These ends can’t be foreseen in any detail, but they reflect a hope for the family that is like that of the gardener who considers not just the next season, but the future of the garden itself. There's an element of cultivation to it.

That this hope may be pointless in the grander scheme of things, life's ephemeral nature, means little to families of cultivators. There's an element of stewardship to them, a sense of connection to an enterprise that predates them, often by a considerable amount, and on this basis alone posits their future. I can trace part of my family by individual names back to the early 17th century, and its previous history can be inferred to its arrival in Parma.

Within any family history, its "dynasty," are the individuals involved and their personal histories. Modern marriage accepts that these individuals matter and looks for ways to enable them to live as fully as they can. The individual freedom that this implies carries risks for the dynasty, but modern marriage accepts that they're worth taking.

The stretching out of life means that modern marriage has more incentive to do this than traditional marriage did. The freedom to live fully becomes more important as one grows older. The truism that "youth is wasted on the young" seems true in that there's a ripening in human life. That ripeness pervades individual experience. Its actual potential is to enrich the marriage, but this is not always immediately apparent.

Tradition, Friedrich Hayek noted, is received wisdom or evolutionary lore. The norms and laws of society are not designed, he said, but handed down. Traditions evolve as part of unfolding life, and there are points at which we disregard them. If today the dynastic purpose of marriage is no longer on the minds of every family that considers itself to be one, I would guess that cultivators can be found in the vast majority of them.

Thesis 4: Marriage needs a new tradition It needs to accept the partners as individuals whose lives unfold independently.

Marriages evolve and the couple gets older. In the childbearing years, if relevant, the couple are more dependent on each other. This dependence occurs again if one or the other partner becomes seriously ill. Any new tradition should acknowledge this. I would revise the marriage vow to say, marriage is a commitment to treat as family the issue and estate of the partners, however acquired, and to treat one's partner as family, whatever else may happen. There are instances of long-divorced couples reuniting around an illness, because the sick person is the children's parent and often has no one else.

The mutual obligations of the partners in a marriage evolve over time. As two individuals, what they owe each other versus what they owe themselves changes. A new tradition of marriage accepts and works with this. It doesn't say what to do, but acknowledges that something may need to be done.

The nature and timing of marriage's evolution is up in the air. A partner may object; the new tradition of marriage says fine, but don't point to tradition to back you up. You knew going in that this might happen at the point when mutual dependence is no longer an issue. Instead of seeing of it as an affront, see it as a time of growth.

Marriage, as an "honorable estate," has legal meanings and involves the couple in a legal process to undo its status and redefine its obligations. In proposing a new tradition

of marriage, I hope to prompt discussion of this legal context. Just as the old tradition seems out of sync with the realities of modern life, the legal framework of marriage feels rooted in another era.

If there's a pattern to the evolution of marriage, it coincides with the evolution of self, the slow or precipitous shedding of narcissism and possessiveness in favor of being, with its greater willingness to accept others as they are and allow life to unfold. Being as I understand it isn't passivity or fatalism. You still plan and daily life still has its discipline and élan. What's different is that you recognize life's contingent and ephemeral nature, valuing others for who they are, but not as yours. This takes an act of will. Sometimes this shift can feel like your skin is being pulled off, yet it is the necessary step. To unfold in life is the only way to live with it as it really is, accepting our unfolding nature, too.

A new tradition of marriage accepts life on its own terms. It accepts the partner as an individual, part of something larger, a family, to which both belong. That identity is indelible, but this says nothing about one partner belonging to the other. "Until death," as the vow has it, is about a path they embark on together without losing their individuality.

As this implies, a new tradition of marriage should see it as open and capacious. The old tradition left it to the couple to negotiate the openness and deal with their marriage.

The new tradition is more forthright about its possible trajectories, more willing to see it as a union of individuals who necessarily grow and change. It acknowledges what arises from the union—the sense or the reality of family—and anticipates its importance.

Thesis 5: Marriage’s freedom makes friendships possible Close friendships are important human relationships that complement a marriage. The factors that lead us to marry are many and varied, so it is difficult to generalize. In my own experience, the attraction between the marriage partners obscures their differences.

Someone in my family noted that the first four years of marriage are spent sorting them out as they arise in the daily experience of a shared life and household.

My sense is that beneath that sorting out are deeper differences that can't be fully sorted. For the marriage to continue there has to be an accommodation. Beyond this is whatever the marriage partners cannot or will not provide each other. Part of the ripening of a marriage is often the desire for a fuller life. Individuality asserts itself, and with it comes the impulse to transcend the marriage or, in effect, to enlarge it.

Part of the initial sorting out early in a marriage is the sorting out of friends. Their claims and their relative compatibility with both partners are examined. Some friends survive this vetting and others don’t. Friendships made in later life may revive the past or arise anew, but they again reflect truly individual preferences.

Friendship grows in importance because it is part of the territory the individual is exploring and extending, the territory of the self. The friends one makes there may be exclusive to it or they may come to relate to the marriage, too. This cannot be predicted in advance. What is possible to say is that the marriage can be enriched by friendship and vice versa. For this to happen, the territory of individuality has to be respected.

The other partner may envy or regret a friendship, because it speaks to differences between the married couple. One cannot be what one is not. Yet friendship makes a different point: we are who we are. This applies to the marriage, too.

Friendship is not a familial tie, although it may become one. The friend of one or the other partner may become the friend of the couple and the family, or may simply be the particular friend of one of the partners, accepted and respected as such, but not part of a larger circle. Couples, families, and friends have to work this out for themselves.

What makes friendship a core human relationship is its tie to our individuality. As we get older, this aspect of our humanity comes forward. Friends figure, often profoundly, as the heart of a close friendship is the friends' willingness to take each other straight up.

Thesis 6: Our individuality is fundamental Each one is her or his own person, not the property of another. Vows cannot transcend this basic fact. Individuality is fundamental, which is why to be works better in the long run than to have. We don't actually possess even ourselves, these ephemeral would-be vessels of our possible souls, but we can be more assuredly than we can have. That's the Buddha's take, but this is also the territory of François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, what the French call amour-propre. Love between two individuals dances around their singularity, which is to say their self-love and self-regard.

Individuals are not unchanging monoliths. As their lives unfold, their interests, desires, tastes, pursuits, and natures evolve. So does their use of time. It's not just their appearances that change; they are literally not the same from point to point. Yet viewed within, there’s a kind of thread of identity that makes each one feel that she or he has a self, is the same individual all along. We are and we are not, which is to say that we are best understood as having an inherent uncertainty, like particles of light. Try to possess this other and there's nothing there beyond the moment. This can be maddening, especially to those who see life in a binary black and white. To extend the analogy to Newtonian and quantum physics, the old tradition of marriage is rooted in the former, simplifying existence by holding to an ordered universe in which a binary view of things is of a piece.

This mode of life works up to a point. It ceases to work is when it runs up against the realities described above—when it becomes obvious that its narrow descriptive power and limited repertoire of responses are unequal to our actual human condition. The old tradition of marriage declaims its absolutes and the partners deal with the nuances of their specific situations.

A new tradition of marriage acknowledges the quantum nature of life. It sees life's basic relationships taking place between individuals. While they have responsibilities to each other and to their issue, if any, they are still individuals. A new tradition brings the nuances of life to the forefront, acknowledging that the real history of women and men, their intimate history, is vastly richer than the absolutes of the old tradition posit.

Most of all, a new tradition makes modest claims, not sweeping ones. It recognizes that many of the problems we face in life are wicked, as the philosopher Horst Rittel called them: they can be resolved, but the solutions are ad hoc and provisional. One could say that the solutions to wicked problems are bound by time and context. A new tradition accepts this. It seeks a better understanding of how life works. It's more interested in narratives, in individual histories, than in absolutes.

All of this points to the need to set aside whatever properly belongs to the past. The grudges we hold, the slights and betrayals we count against others, are our baggage, our artifacts of memory. They can become objects of identity, but this puts the brakes on our own unfolding. We owe it ourselves, our individuality, to acknowledge this and set these burdens down. We owe to the present an ability to be present within it, to be open to what unfolds and able to respond with immediacy. To live otherwise is to be prejudiced, and experience suggests that prejudices are seldom warranted.

Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant Thesis 7: Friendship anchors our relationships It's the core of all successful human relationships. I could argue that affection is the core, but I want to bring friendship forward and give it proper emphasis. La Rochefoucauld exemplifies how with love and affection friendship can overcome the obstacles that plague close relationships. Late in life, unhappy and disillusioned, he met a woman, Madame de la Fayette, who truly befriended him and placed this friendship ahead of other considerations. Said to be successful with women, he was by then disfigured and outmaneuvered, his ambitions thwarted. But the mind is the true engine of our feelings, to which the tongue and pen give expression. Left with only this essence, he found a friend who truly loved him for it.

Consider Vanessa Bell. Married to Clive Bell, she grew to resent his familiarity with other women. Falling in love with Roger Fry, she tried out what could have been a second marriage and household, but gave it up, returning to the households she and Clive Bell originally shared. Their marriage kept going. Meanwhile, she fell in love with Duncan Grant. Her sexual relationship with him, which Grant found singular enough to record, produced a daughter, Angelica Bell. Once Vanessa Bell was pregnant, or soon after, Grant ceased to be her lover. Despite the unhappiness this caused her, they lived together and painted together, and their closeness seems only to have grown stronger.

Angelica Bell's memoir describes her ambivalent relationships with her parents.

Gradually she came to understand that Grant was her biological father, although Clive Bell had always stood in. Ten years after writing it, she observed in a new foreword that her she now saw her parents in a different light. Even in the first edition, she pointed to her daughters as compensating for any unhappiness she suffered growing up and in her marriage to David Garnett, who was once the lover of Duncan Grant.

I recount these episodes in one extended family to note how, as the I Ching says, affection underlies all close human relationships. Marriage, family, and friendship alike are either grounded in affection or risk becoming a sea of unhappiness. In asserting this, I recognize that I'm projecting my own nature, which is more affectionate than not.

In an interview in the Paris Review, the poet Frederick Seidel said that you reach a point in life where you're unwilling not to be yourself. You write what you write and if people don't like it, that's their problem. I agree with this, but feel it has to be tempered when one is together with others. I've observed that some people take pleasure in constant strife. "This is sex for them," I sometimes think. I'm not speaking here of the flashes of anger that are inherent to close human interaction, but of a chronic penchant for behavior that quells affection.

As we get older, the loosening of the mortal coil allows us a greater openness to others, a clearer sense of who they are beneath their foibles and grievances. It's as if we can feel their hearts beating, sense the humanity that connects us. We no longer think of them as part of our circle or orbit, revolving around us. They take on a different hue.

We're finally on better terms with our past and more willing to let life surprise us with its possibilities. It's at this point that close friendships take center stage.

Thesis 8: Close friendships require mutual acceptance The Soto Zen priest Kosho Uchimaya made the point that there are limits to how well we can know others. His spiritual ancestor Dōgen Eihei made another point about our mutability: we're better understood as a spectrum of behaviors. Enlightenment is a transient awareness, he asserted, that can't be privileged over other states of being. This is why he emphasized on "Just sit!" To sit is to find the ground again by whatever means.

"The ground" as a metaphor points to the moment we let go of whatever carried us away and place ourselves again in the unfolding life that we've been undividedly part of all along. Place is not quite right, since everything is in flux. Usually, we're somewhere when we find our ground again. It becomes our vantage point, the shore to which we venture, with others or on our own. Although we cannot know the ground or the path of others, these metaphors help us describe what we share with them, which is to be present in a world that, although we see it and respond to it individually, unfolds for all of us.

Close friendships are rare, in my experience. Like light, it's one thing at one moment, something else at another. The quantum nature of life governs it, so we have to accept that it isn't wholly bound by time or space. A close friend is often in our thoughts, but our encounters reflect our individuality. We accept each other's individuality because we value it in ourselves. We leave it to her to shape her own life. We accept each other's nature. If advice is sought, we give it, but we try not to make a habit of it.

This in itself is bucking the tide. We live in an era when perfectibility is on a lot of lips.

There's a lot of complaining, too, since life doesn't really work that way. Self-cultivation shouldn't aim at perfection, but at sustaining and enlivening one's existence. Close friends accept that this is one point of their friendship. There's an inherent element of playfulness to it. We are a mix of animal spirits and various higher callings. What Dōgen saw, his insistence that it all shades together, is what true friends accept of each other; they do their level best to live at the higher end, but they know it doesn't always happen. They may have to go off and lick their wounds in consequence, but they know the other suffers, too. Find the ground again: this is what true friends ask of each other. That's what their mutual acceptance means.

Coda 1: Family Family is detaching itself from marriage or extending beyond it. It's worth noting this. It means that marriage in the context of this essay should be understood as any pairing that, formally or informally, acknowledges and seeks recognition as such, from each other and from others. I want to distinguish this from what Roger Fry described as a "little marriage"—his brief, intense relationship with Vanessa Bell, an innately domestic person, although iconoclastic. We might call this an affair, but Fry aptly captured the fact that it was more. And he suffered more because of it, being attached not only to her but also to domesticity itself. It pulled him psychologically into the orbit of her family, where in a sense he remained, but further from its emotional center than he desired. This brings us to the borders of friendship, a separate topic, but I mention it to say that the boundaries of marriage are broad: not only formal/informal, but brief/long, too.

Another trend, still being fought by the forces of reaction, is the pairing of men, of women, and of older women with younger men. Paralleling this is the decision of single women to have children, often with a gay donor who participates in raising them, sometimes with his partner. Such families are more and more common now. They are families and a new tradition of family needs to include them.

Social transformation happens at the edges. Vanessa Bell did what she wanted thanks to a legacy and a devoted, tolerant husband. She exemplifies the motive power of family, which she held together despite its unorthodox arrangements. She also exemplifies the fluid boundaries between love, marriage, and friendship. Artists and writers stake out this territory, as do the poor and dispossessed. Sometimes they resemble each other, but the latter, as they rise, often crave a conventional life.

A new tradition of family would expand its boundaries and enable the members of the expanded family to identify themselves as such. It would recognize that this expanded family, too, has ties that are indelible. The old tradition of family maps to other concerns, like inheritance, in its aristocratic and bourgeois manifestations. This became rights and responsibilities in the era of the no-fault divorce. A new tradition would apply them across this larger collectivity, the expanded family.

Because this discussion overlaps the legal apparatus that's grown up around the family, I run the risk of seeming idealistic and unrealistic. When I look at my own limited experience with family situations that challenged convention, I would say that what was crucial to a good outcome was the shared desire for it. This led the individuals involved to set aside their theoretical prerogatives and consider the outcome.

And because of this—because of the familial love that each person felt toward the one most at risk—that one now has an expanded family to draw on and identifies with all of it.

There were formal agreements behind this, but they never really figured. Would it have been any different if there hadn’t been? I'm not sure, but I don't think so.

Not every married couple has offspring, yet dependencies arise. For example, a partner gets seriously ill or lapses into senescence. These situations will tax the resources of most individuals. A new tradition of family would both recognize the idea of collective responsibility and tie it to a social safety net that comes into play with certain triggering events. For an advanced country, we are shockingly stupid in the way we provide supports, rarely doing so or providing enough when they're actually needed. This is perverse. Alone of the developed nations, we're still adding population and our ratio of young to old isn't disastrously out of whack. We need to maintain this, not make it harder.

A new tradition of family should cut the family loose from every organization that's ever tried to exploit it for political or religious reasons (which are often the same thing). It

needs to reassert the underlying realities of human life and gear public support accordingly, sharing responsibility across a larger community of which the family is part.

The key phrase here is "sharing responsibility"—not taking on full responsibility, but acknowledging that our individual resources are not always enough. That's when families fall apart, with huge social costs.

Coda 2: Modus vivendi Over lunch, a friend told me that, despite years of separation and a current relationship of long standing, he and his wife were still married. This is reminiscent of Vanessa and Clive Bell, discussed previously, who stayed married while they went their mostly separate ways. Formally, there's marriage and there's divorce. More recently, there are also domestic partnerships, a halfway house toward marriage. Meant to extend some of marriage's rights to those excluded from it, the category could disappear if marriage grows more inclusive. Its existence sets up the possibility that a married person, living separately with a different partner, might embrace it in order to afford the new relationship more rights and standing.

Marriage and divorce are usually seen as a binary pairing, a black-and-white rendition of a landscape that we know full well is resplendently colorful, textured, messy, and in flux. When you look back in history, especially across cultures, you see a lot of variation.

Looking across a table sometimes, you see former partners breaking bread. I realize that time is a factor here, but when you consider both the tumult and the reconciliation, life can prove bigger than the partners imagined. Certain ties still bind them.

We speak of no-fault divorce, but what about no-fault marriage? This is to recognize that much of what affects a marriage reflects our human dilemmas. Moreover, if a marriage is a partnership of two individuals, then we have to accept everything this implies. In particular, we have to accept the essential good will of the other, even when the situation seems impossible. This is not an argument for any particular outcome, but for modus vivendi—the ability to take a larger view of things and use one's imagination.

Empathy, if one has it, makes a mockery of any insistence that there's only one course to follow. This is the basic fallacy of a black-and-white view of life. We are, each of us, a boiling pot of desires, fears, limitations, and smarts. We slowly acquire wisdom as we age, but slowly is the operative word. Our wisdom, though hard-won, can be gone in a flash.

Volatile, subject to our natures, we make our way, and marriage has to deal with the carnage. There are times when we've had enough, but then we remember that we're like that ourselves.

Part of the idea of no-fault is to accept that along with the individuals involved, the nature of a marriage changes over time. The form it takes matters infinitely less than the attitude of the individuals toward this. "An end that endures" is how I Ching tells us to see "the woods for the trees.” Paths are about this, too.

(Excerpted from a longer piece that appeared in Common Place No. 5, October 2011.)

Sort of a Memoir

3 January 2014 Stendhal uses three different memoir-writing strategies: in media res, placing the reader at some middle point in the life from which the years that led up to it are recounted; starting from childhood, which Stendhal characteristically uses to show a certain authorial self-consistency; and the coming-of-age recapitulation that gets the hero from mere youth to the beginning of maturity. The first two can be found in his Memories of Egotism and Henri Brulard, and the third in the opening chapter of his great last novel, The Charterhouse of Parma.

Stendhal wrote Memories of Egotism 10 years after meeting the object of fixation it depicts. She dies in between, he eventually reveals, but his obsession with her persists. I can understand this. The book closes with an account of an assignation that he and a friend have with two English prostitutes. Bringing a repast of food and wine along, they make a party of it and the women are charmed—their English clients are not as thoughtful. Stendhal praises their chestnut hair, his spirits momentarily recovered. The impression he leaves us with is of a man who is haunted by his great love and yet clearly and observantly in the world. And despite his faithfully rendered day-to-day activities and distractions, we never doubt his single-minded devotion to her.

4 January 2014 The year after I got my BA, I worked at the oldest private library west of the Mississippi, as it styled itself. My colleagues were older women, like characters from a Tennessee Williams play, I thought at the time. The men among the coupon-clipping old-money patrons were often drunk after lunch, smelling of onions and alcohol. I couldn’t help but take these things in. Cautionary tales are useful when you’re young, showing you what to

avoid. I remember thinking this later when, having lunch with colleague, I saw two old businessmen sitting near us, both veritable rhinoceroses in appearance owing to decades of eating the same fare we were consuming.

The most beneficial work I did between undergraduate and graduate school was as a term-paper ghostwriter. To make a decent hourly rate, I had to write every paper in six hours or less, so I developed a method and also honed my writing to the bone. In one case, I had to write five papers on different topics for the same class, so I varied my tone.

Every paper got an A from whoever was grading them at Stanford. When, six weeks into the job, I was offered work at an architecture firm, I quit. It turned out I was the ghostwriting shop’s only writer, and they closed down after I left. The benefit for me was that I lost my awe of academia, or whatever you call it, and gained the ability to write quickly on any topic handed me. That’s served me well ever since.

My method was straightforward. I found a general source that gave me the basic plot. Volumes of the 1920s-era Encyclopedia Britannica, on which Wikipedia is supposedly based, were great for this. Then I would find two or three plausible current sources, quickly absorb their theses and grab some quotes and added references— sometimes found near them in the stacks, which is not something that could happen easily today. Then I would write. It helped that I’m a fast and accurate typist. I never polished the papers too thoroughly, which lent them authenticity.

The term-paper mill’s one sop to ethics was to make the students propose their own theses. This was a mistake—they were often completely wrong and I'd have to argue the negative, since I couldn't change them. I managed to pull this off: on-the-job rhetoric.

Later To want to live parallel lives is in keeping with our human sense of self. We embody different roles without much difficulty, navigating life’s predictable contexts in a manner that more or less meets each one’s expectations, so it seems reasonable to push this idea further. One problem we encounter is the inelastic nature of time. It’s true that time slows down in certain situations, but this is not the same as having more of it at your disposal.

We often push the idea further because we want our lives to be bigger or fuller than they seem. The opportunities to do so arise with what appears to be uncannily good timing. If they didn’t, they would be easier to resist. My own experience suggests that our ability to lead parallel lives is limited. What we really want is separate lives—a life here, a life there, with time and space between them. That would really be ideal, not to say convenient. Some reputedly arrange their lives in this manner, but I’ve never been able to pull it off. If we’re honest about it, what we really want is a life that’s both fluid and frictionless. We want the usual boundaries to come down. It’s a child’s view of things, I think, in which “choosing sides” is all part of the game. To a child, the point of living is to play, alone or with others. We go to school, of course, and clean our rooms, but our hearts long to make up stories or get a scene going. And this persists.

Separately My daughter came over this evening after writing me a long note in answer to a question about the impact of travel that I’d posed the night before: How does it affect her? We talked a bit more about it. I said that place to me is a totality—conveyed in talk and writing, as well as experienced directly—of how specific things look and feel, and are cherished, neglected, or reshaped, and how people are (or were), as we experience (or experienced) them there.

St Etienne-de-Bag0rry, France

Over the course of my life, I’ve seen a great many places, uniquely themselves in a way that felt intrinsic, become “like the rest.” As business and tourism continue to search for still-distinctive places, I imagine they are as endangered now as the elephants that roam the African plain.

5 January 2014

While an element of bossiness floats through life, mandatory is a broad, resistible category for me, taking in other people’s ideas of how I should spend my time and even the consequences of my earlier, positive decisions to attend parties, openings, concerts, dinners, and other events. Travel also creates a sense of dread as the date of departure looms, not out of any fear of traveling, but from a countervailing desire to stay home.

Knowing that I will invariably resist, I try willing myself through it. I think this resistance, this sense of dread, relates to the desire to lead parallel lives: events seem appealing in prospect, and are of course the source of all that we draw on in retrospect, but we have to live through them, experience them, to gain it. Despite their allure, there are times when we’d prefer that someone else went and did the living for us. (I believe V.S. Pritchett made this same point about writers in general—their bifurcated lives.)

At the urging of a colleague, I once took the Meyers-Briggs personality test, learning that I’m an INFJ, the least numerous of its types. One trait was familiar: craves company and then flees it unexpectedly. That’s not resistance, I thought when I read it; it’s selfpreservation.

As a child in Singapore, I used to move through the adult-filled garden of my parents’ parties. I was small for my age and my vantage point was low enough that the adults’ legs were like tree trunks, their upper torsos like spreading branches. Their attention meanwhile was at eye level.

(When I think of these parties, I think of the women in their long dresses, the men in their white suits and uniforms, and the Chinese lanterns aglow, strung across the garden.

Once I talked an intoxicated RAF pilot into giving me his wings. To my dismay, he came sheepishly back the next day to reclaim them. I think my mother explained to me that he couldn’t fly without them.)

Nowadays at parties I try to float in and out, departing as quietly (and quickly) as possible. This is in no way a comment on the parties themselves, which are perfectly fine.

Separately Each person’s nature is distinct from every other’s, yet we generalize constantly about how people fall into categories and how the categories differ. These generalizations are both true and false. Since we chalk a lot of behavior up to them, believing in their truth must be part of our social-navigating apparatus, a heuristic that keeps us from stopping every five minutes to figure out what just happened.

For me (and for Borges, I read recently), distinctiveness is all, especially in the closer relationships. The beloved one has these specific qualities of self, and every time I catch a glimpse of her, I’m reminded of every other time these qualities were evident. The thread of her distinctiveness is visible whenever it appears. I see it and remember, “You aren’t like anyone else.” The best gift of self that we can give each other is our distinctiveness.

Later

I read—V.S. Pritchett via Russell Banks—that death is a mark of seriousness in literature.

It is the “great matter” according to the Buddhists. I believe they’re talking about our coming to grips with mortality, a dance that began for me when I first realized that I would die. How one contends with death—with the unavoidable fact of it—varies with one’s age. At my age, the imagined perils of getting older are more dreaded than death itself, which can start to look like a relief. (Borges notes this, saying that the old get impatient for death. Recently, I stood and watched an aged neighbor hobbling—there’s no other word for it—to her front door, a task that for her has become Herculean, like climbing the Alps. I wanted to rush over, but sensed that this would be unwelcome, that each one has her Alps to climb, that climbing them is the point.)

Kosho Uchimaya, a 20th-century commentator on the Soto Zen, explained what "mind" means from a Zen perspective. Our world, he wrote, lives and dies with us. Mind is everything that ever existed for us, accumulated across our lifetime. No one else can experience it as we did, so reading it written out is like encountering the residue of the spray on a sea-facing window in some cottage we happen to visit. You can get a sense of the pounding waves or the way the sea smells at a certain distance, but how it was, beyond these images, and what it meant to someone else, is limited by the medium, the intent, and the impenetrable boundary between the other’s world and yours. A memoir, like poetry, tries to bridge this distance.

Is love not also a mark of seriousness? Love involves play, but play takes in death as well, long before we understand that death applies to us. From the start, love is a serious game: our life depends on it. It exposes us to the perils of misunderstanding and the limits of our ability to shape events to suit our desires. It plunges us into unhappiness, almost from the outset.

Still later It’s characteristic of me to play the same music again and again. Right now, it’s Angela Hewitt’s version of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, especially the second half of notebook one. Before that, my favorite was Keith Jarrett’s recording of some of Handel’s harpsichord suites. My life is organized in a habitual way, so that even my variants from habit soon become habitual.

My four-shaft Saori loom Friends occasionally express amazement at the way I cram culture into short trips, but this too is a habit. I pack my days with activity because otherwise I’d get depressed.

When this happens, I become lethargic—when I’m really depressed, I hardly stir, which is difficult to pull off when traveling, as everyone wants you to circulate and of course you have to get up and go out to eat.

My life was organized for me very early on. Whenever a structure is provided, I fall right in with it. Where it isn’t, I have to create one—a slow, trial-and-error process.

Weaving, which I do on most Saturday mornings, is an example of success in this arena. I have to extend it, I tell myself, thinking of everything that isn’t getting done, isn’t habitual, and needs to be—an old, old story.

One characteristic of contemporary life is that its disruptions erode my habits.

Bookstores where I used to go have vanished. Music arrives in ways I can’t fully fathom (and most of it isn’t the music I want). I have to decide and decide again which parts of “the new” really pertain—and learn and relearn how to navigate the subtle ways the everyday is altered over time.

Return If lovemaking is a kind of conversation (between two souls, Borges asserts, quoting another poet), why does it always blow up? Is there a way to sustain it? These are the questions that arise. It should be simpler, but both parties have to see it that way first.

The one psychic I know told me that relationships between men and women have children as their trajectory when fecundity is in the picture. Children are where it wants to go, whatever the conscious feelings of the participants may be. I think there’s some truth to this, based on my own experience. Getting older is therefore potentially liberating, freeing relationships to take other directions. (When I look back at them, I wish they’d been friendships solely, and I don’t. What I really wish is for friendships to emerge that preserve their intimacy in new forms. Later in life, possibly, something like this can be regained, but I don’t know yet. What I do know is that love can emerge within friendship, and sometimes does. The reverse surely takes time and commitment—you each have to become someone else to the other, yet still close. Then a true friendship may finally emerge. Whether it’s materially different than it might have been had you never become lovers is a question that can’t be resolved. It’s one of love’s questions, however.)

Separately When I read Claudio Naranjo’s Enneagram Structures, I saw that my enneagram number is seven. I thought I was a five or a nine, but he showed me that I’m a seven through and through. The flaws of this character type—my character type—are to want to live anywhere but in the present (and especially in the future), to be dependent on personal charm to dodge the bullets of interpersonal relationships, and (a related trait) to avoid anything remotely painful.

6 January 2014 Some time ago, I dreamt I was walking in the middle of a curving, residential London street, the kind that’s lined with shade trees and row houses. There was no traffic.

Looking down, I saw a thin gold ribbon embedded in the pavement. I picked it up. In dark-blue letters against the gold, it read, “You are an editor.” I didn’t argue. It also made me realize that I’m a writer of a specific type. I write well, and this ability has served me my whole career, but I don’t think I’m capable of writing anything longer than a chapter, and most of what I write is much shorter. When I look at what I’ve written, I see a miniaturist, a belletrist. This means that I have to treat many topics as fragments, if I can treat them at all, while others are perfectly suited to their small frame.

The diary form of this illustrates how I drag content onto the page. It reflects my lifelong tendency to plunge in without much if any prior design beyond an intuition of what might emerge. The fiction I enjoy clearly emerges from life experience, projected on to the subject, as with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. The book is about Novalis, but with a sensibility honed by her own life—a sensibility with which Novalis resonated. She depicts the poet as a human being whose Bildungsroman falters on the rocks of fate, time, circumstance—all that conspires to keep the things life seems to promise him from happening. For Fitzgerald, the big event—the lucky break—was to live on to write, to live out and fulfill her destiny. It’s no small thing. Borges’ modesty and his superstitious wariness of hubris reflect his awareness that luck is luck. In the end, we have to write, “just write”, and keep on writing, because, as with fishing, something good may eventually strike. It’s the only way.

In the photo below, taken by my daughter, I’m reading for the first time and with astonishment the poems of Wallace Stevens, in the house of Simone and John Opalak, 30 minutes by car from Bayonne, France—the house where I started “The Barn Partitas,” the sonnet series collected in Common Place 6. The poem that particularly caught my eye was “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” On that same trip, at Daunt’s in London, I believe, I bought a copy of Sylvia Plath’s original edit of Ariel, with its remarkable opening poem, the first line of which made me wonder at the depth of her suicidal depression, the terrible grip of ego and narcissistic grief and rage, which I’ve also experienced in a greatly reduced form, sufficient to understand it and eventually get through it, see it for what it is—for which thanks especially to A.H. Almaas, whose book The Point of Existence, while coy about his patented path to enlightenment, is very clear about the territory of ego and narcissistic grief, how it appears to be the real and telling thing, but is not.

While I occasionally have ideas for stories, I can’t see where a story should go next.

And where it usually goes is a blind alley, which is frustrating. I feel that my story has been hijacked, that its protagonists wouldn’t go there, and yet clearly, I took them in that direction. It takes more work, in other words, than I’ve been prepared to give, so hats off to the real writers of fiction!

Thirty minutes east of Bayonne Separately What are my actual topics? They probably begin and end with me. As Christopher Isherwood put it, “I am a Camera,” but the camera is holographic. My topics are meaningful to me, resonant. This doesn’t mean that other topics don’t figure, but how to work them in? When I think of another’s distinctiveness, I could cite the most specific details. In fiction, this might be useful, but in other kinds of writing, even poetry, it feels gratuitous and indiscreet. Some of my photo-collages get into this territory. Art and fiction blur identity or subsume it to make a different point: not her but this. A fictional narrative could be useful, but my version of reality has been challenged often enough to make me wonder, with Hayden White, if every narrative isn’t fictive? Certainly, every narrative is subjective. (As White notes, none of them are “true.”)

Also, separately In 2005, a Sephardic friend in Tokyo suggested that my father’s family was Sephardic. I don’t know if it’s true, but certain things argue for it. My surname derives from a city, which is how the Sephardim named themselves. (An artist friend in San Francisco also noted this, but I didn’t know the history of Jewish migrations in Europe well enough to take her remark to heart.) Parma had a large Sephardic community, granted the freedom of the city but then attacked invidiously, enviously, by others. History suggests that my family, who were bookbinders, part of the burgeoning printer trade that swept north and south in Europe, left Parma in the 1560s, traveling first to Germany and then splitting up, some going to Denmark and Norway, and others to Finland. The family bible records that “they were bookbinders, arriving in Odense in 1620.” Everyone after them is named.

This was strange, my sister and I always thought. I read a late essay by Peter Drucker on the history of printing, a 200-year trajectory. My family headed north because the jobs were there—the technology was taking hold, far from major printing centers like Parma.

They came as experts. When they got there, I imagine they said, “Hello, we’re Italian.

You’re Lutheran? What a coincidence. So are we.” When I look at my family in Norway, some look entirely Nordic, but others look like the portraits of Modigliani—faces that could be from Italy or Andalusia, elongated by Nordic intermarriage.

When I visited my daughter in the Alpujarra, I had an impulse to settle. I love Madrid, a more likely destination, but something about that region felt like home. If true, this must be a genetic memory. Is that possible?

12 January 2014 A friend posted a short essay positing that a memoir isn’t really an autobiography, so you shouldn’t expect accuracy from it. Nabokov also made this point, only revising Speak, Memory after his sisters complained about certain “facts.” (“We were too in Nice,” they complained.) Reviewers often assert that memoirs are “unreliable,” that other evidence contradicts them. But life happens in real time. No one sees things the same way.

19 January 2014 One morning I visited a close friend of longstanding who’s being treated for a serious illness. It took a toll on him, from which he’s gradually recovering. Observing that his life has become more bounded, he said he wanted to find things to do that fit this new reality.

Weaving, which I’ve done for several years, is an example of what he meant. I understood.

Many of the things I do are essentially domestic arts. (My character is phlegmatic, although leavened with sanguinity. This—the temperaments—is yet another means of characterizing our species, the third I’ve mentioned here. I wrote a sonnet about mine that mocks my tendency to wait passively and contemplate life more than live it.

Inside the room, inside the head: one could write stories of such stasis: nothing goes right or wrong; there’s neither must do nor should.

Around the desk, around the chair, life flows like a mysterious substance. Women come and go. The book lies upside-down, tent of paper and board, small markings like Zen, those koans, so hard to read, if they meant anything to anyone else: doubtful.

Cats also come and go. A jay lands, screams.

The mind wanders in its confining skull.

Somewhere, it thinks, a woman dreams or creams.

Wake! A cloud of sanguinity draws close.

A black bee, meandering, snorts a dose.

This is true and not true, of course—a phlegmatic temperament tolerates contemplation more readily than other types, producing insights that are mixed with a healthy dose of blankness. Yet there’s something crocodile-like about my type, springing into action when inspiration finally strikes.)

Later I read an article in the Financial Times about long-lived Japanese men and women, and the doctors who tend to them. The goal is a good quality of life, said one. They cited a term that roughly translates to “live life to the fullest and then die fast.” One person’s "full life" is not another’s. When I sum mine up at the end of the year, there’s an illusion of activity, being here and there trying to maintain it. It’s a comical process, especially in company. Owing to repetitiveness, the everyday is supposed to have less resonance for us than unusual events, and yet I crave it. Perhaps its resonance for me is a deeper one.

Postscript I'll soon begin the final year of that transitional decade in life, one's sixties, arguably the vestibule of true old age. In Conversations, edited by Osvaldo Ferrari, Borges says that what separates us from other living things is our foreknowledge of death. I’m not sure I agree. Late in 2001, I saw a menagerie shared by several fish restaurants on an island in Hong Kong Bay. It was immediately clear that all captive life there, even the shrimp, were aware of their doom. What’s terrible about capital punishment is the terror that attaches to it. Death within life has its terrors, but it’s different, I think, part of life’s warp and weft, the last part that we reach at the other end, inevitable and in some sense welcome, especially in the case of a long life well lived.

When you’re my age, you’re more aware that your existence is no longer assured. The Zen idea of “getting breakfast on the table” becomes more useful as a prod to go on living, to contribute. “Who else would do it?” the old monk asked Dōgen when he, a young student at a Chinese monastery, asked if the man wasn’t too old to be gathering firewood on a hot day. This is what I do, the old man said—these are my roles in life, my purposes, how I pay for my upbringing. This discipline took hold in me early on, yet I still accuse myself of laziness. It seems best to write a memoir along the way, even if the plot has twists and turns up ahead. One can add to it episodically if there’s more to get down, but meanwhile you leave a marker: “I made it here.”

Addendum Looking for a poem written long ago, apparently lost, I found typed-out extracts from a 20-year old diary. Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed that a diary’s immediacy gives it a faithfulness to unfolding events that’s missing in post-facto accounts. We live among others who may observe, comment, write down what they saw and thought, even about us, and perhaps recount some of it. Diarists do this, and I’m one of them.

Rudolf Steiner: “Fully mature human beings give themselves their own worth. It not pleasure they seek, handed to them by nature or by their creator as a gift of grace; nor is it some abstract duty they fulfill, recognized by them after they have stripped away all striving for pleasure. They act as they want, that is, in accordance with their moral intuitions; and they experience the attainment of what they want as their true enjoyment in life. They determine the value of life by the relation of what they have attained to what they have striven to achieve.” (Early 1991) In my dream existence, I write 3.5 hours a day like Virginia Woolf, and learn and master new arts. In my real existence, I squander time. I seem to “unlearn” and have no real calling or motivation. (6, 7 and 13 September 1993)

Margaret Duras: “Between men and women, imagination is at its strongest.” (February 1993) My neighbor described a planned exhibit on William Wurster. What one wants to know about him, I thought, is his context and history—like Joe Esherick’s sister who died of pneumonia because she’d never turn the heat on: the details and ephemera that rise and fall around architects and their buildings. Since I saw Venice a second time, I only think of buildings in a contextual sense, and the lives of architects interest me purely as lives. So, I imagine that an exhibit on Wurster could up the ante on the importance he gave to the Bay Region—what it meant to him. I remember visiting the art museum in Gothenburg in late 1977 and being struck by that city’s cultural self-sufficiency in the late 19th century— a self-centeredness that allowed it briefly to flower. (This is the same epoch that Ingmar Bergman depicts in the Stockholm of Fanny and Alexander.) We had it here, as well, even when I first arrived, but then we lost it.

For all these reasons, I want to know what Gardner Dailey thought about as he plunged toward the bay, and to see on the wall a series of photographs that show how Esherick’s three daughters resemble him and each other, despite their several mothers.

Like the adherents of a cargo cult, I imagine that these rituals of remembering may reverse entropy, revive the corpse, and bring a newly rebirthed Venus floating to our shores. As I write this, I see what I meant when I noted earlier in my diary that I’d like to write an essay on the impossibility or extreme difficulty of regionalism. Perhaps a region’s moments in the sun are just flukes, momentary delusions, or acts of discovery or rediscovery—by outsiders, inevitably—that bring the region suddenly into focus, only to decline back to lethargy or indifference. Of my generation, Stanley Saitowitz alone fulfills this role of outsider, addressing the region from the standpoint of discovery, in the same way that Esherick and Chuck Bassett did before him. (25 July 1993) (This piece originally appeared in Common Place No. 7, January 2015.)

Crossing from France into Spain

Table Music

At the Museum of Modern Art After waking In the dream, an older man goaded him: “Are you good?” No, he answered, but the man wanted a more robust response. “Not really bad,” he ventured. Waking, he thought that love—physical love—was an addiction, so any sudden rupture of it was like crashing. He replayed this crash, seeing how she weighed him against a new lover, reducing what was between them to a litmus test. Later, walking back from the pier, he told her that he’d loved her honestly. It was true: he really had loved her, for all the good it did him or her.

He saw too how everything he did thereafter was meant to forestall the recurrence of this addiction. Perhaps the point of marriage then is to domesticate the drug of physical love so that the married couple can get on with their lives. It’s not enough, at some points, this methadone-like substitute, but it has staying power, like any evolutionary fixture.

Returning from Europe, he found her letter: “Stepping back from an unknown future." He could only agree and yet he believed that, if lived out, life would reveal the logic of their pairing, just as it had eventually revealed to him how easily one can mistake a lover for an expected other. It made sense that their wires crossed, given their coincident hunger at that moment to be reaffirmed. The other’s arrival later on also made sense.

Given the choice, he preferred to sleep alone. He related to women most easily on a conversational plane, needing time otherwise to settle in and catch their rhythm. Breaks in the flow of arousal made room for exchanges that were as memorable to him as the rest, snippets of which also drew his attention. Each woman is distinct, and conversation and lovemaking bring this out. At times, they come down to the same thing.

Bourgeois life He was older now and felt more solidly bourgeois, despite the latitude the West Coast bestows—a default tolerance that papers over the prejudices and tics. Wealth is relative.

Many were wealthier, but he’d done okay and they’d done splendidly, husband and wife, managing to accumulate productive assets and leverage what they knew. They ranged far at times in search of something else, but what they found there was never discussed nor held against the other. At every juncture, they opted to stay together. Once, talking with a woman they’d retained to help them sort things out, they gave entirely different answers to the question, “What do you want from the marriage?” The woman told him at another point that his wife was dishonest, but to him her answers were completely true and her sense of their marriage was more accurate than his own.

Within bourgeois marriage, one accumulates not only progeny, settings, and assets, but also familiarity, mutual knowledge, and acceptance of the other. Of the different ways that men and women cohabit, marriage struck him as the best. That they were intended to cohabit was never self-evident, given that they often seemed like two separate species.

A blurred self in a man’s body, he concluded, after a psychic described a play of many acts in which the couple regularly exchanges roles and genders. His own borders were certainly fluid. The femininity of the one brings out the masculinity of the other. Those with fluid borders may crave this, even as it walls other things off. Better the woods and meadows of the self, with occasional visitors, but this had proved difficult. We spend our lives trying to arrange things to suit our peculiar natures, he thought. We do so within the confines of received life, of course, working the seams of its now-solid, now-porous boundaries. The evening his lover tested him and found him wanting, she became as opaque as the rock face of a canyon wall—a clairvoyant moment that echoed another, when he could see his family dead, present or absent in their graves. Women open to a word or a gesture, and then they don’t. This is one of their specific powers.

Sometimes he wore the tie she gave him, its fabric expressive of her. He never really fell out of love, but time freed him from hunger and sadness—everything that compelled him to take another up or that left him bereft and distraught. The look back was strewn with delusion and madness—paths and blind alleys that wove in between the great roads of work and family—those twin highways that keep life going despite every hazard.

A pre-modern adrift He approached life like an amateur, trying to construct a working theory of everything he sensed, making notes in daybooks like an 18th-century naturalist. “A child of the Enlightenment,” he told himself, but he felt as he said it that he didn’t know enough to be sure it was true. The titans of the current economic order were like condottiere, he thought, focused on the main chance and disdainful of any resistance to their will. “They bid the future to come to them,” one said, but Machiavelli had made much the same point, adding salient details on how to execute one’s plan, and when and why to extinguish those who stood in the way.

Humanism is an old man’s game, a redemptive last act. He admired those who soldiered on, intent on passing along what they’d acquired to their progeny in a bid for genetic immortality. Here and there, it worked. In the Douro Valley he saw remnants of the aristocracy’s long game: the manor with its vineyards, renewed by generations that drew their identity from it and fell back on it for their livelihood.

In the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans, there were the major gods, the local gods, and the fates. Instinctively, he placed himself within this system that addressed life as he understood it. He prayed to a protective parent in moments of peril, and to the local gods for luck, but knew that the fates ran the show. As the Buddha said, it didn’t matter.

Life is about life, “one world at a time,” as Thoreau said. He agreed and kept working.

A child of moderns It always shocked him that people tried to undo what the moderns succeeded in doing.

Yet he also saw himself as postmodern, wary of canon and grand narrative. Politically, he was more interested in the operative than the ideological. Politicians were liars and incompetents, with a few exceptions, mesmerized and corrupted by money. Very little worked well, at a time when events constantly exposed this, reinforcing the point.

If the grand narratives are dead, as Lyotard wrote, then narrative’s grandeur is ephemeral and our vision of it is fatally impaired. In every Portuguese town, every church had a baroque altar or side chapel, layers upon layers meant to resist time’s steady erosion of significance. And here and there, secular palaces stood as bulwarks against anarchy, while cloisters made a place for silence while declining to put walls up against emptiness.

Time also eroded resonance and made no-go zones of the places he loved. He kept a supply of resonant landmarks at hand to ease the pain of so much colonization, but they failed to compensate. It wasn’t that he wanted to fix the world arbitrarily, but the effort of travel should be compensated by ample difference and too often there was none. It wasn’t just that a place had changed, but that it became like every other place that had changed in the same way. Contemporary life arrived like acid reflux on the heels of a sublime meal.

It was hard to imagine, some of it, but depravity is often a failure of the imagination, a failure engorged by repetition. We are struck by the engorgement—human appetite in the thrall of monomania. And these monomaniacs were on the ascendant, banners flying.

A child of moderns, he grew up in a modern house filled with modern furniture. Only the TV, an ungainly brown metal box, felt out of place, interrupting conversations the way the radio did in the car when the talking started or the lyrics asserted themselves.

In the ideal modern apartment as Le Corbusier drew it, the worker read his paper in peace. In Tokyo, he stood in a replica of this very space, trying to imagine being the worker, a householder with a family. The apartment was smaller than he expected, although a view might have made it seem more spacious. A lecturer said of the sketch that, “Le Corbusier designed spaces for men as if they were gods.” Household gods.

The law of least resistance The I Ching refers to “the law of least resistance” and also points to water analogously as a perennial solution to our human dilemmas. “Flow on,” it suggests. In another lecture, an expert in river deltas described the folly of trying to alter the flow of rivers like the Mississippi and watersheds like the Veneto. That Venice’s lagoon is becoming a bay he attributed to alterations made to its watershed in the 13th century. The law of least resistance is partly about inexorable force—how it seeks a way through, propelled along by whatever propels it. We cling to our illusions of free agency as our lives take us from one meal or bed to another, dictated by fortune and our nature. It’s a miracle we get anything done, but the doing is largely to keep the game going. A good life is when the doing has its own pleasures that outweigh the attendant pains of living.

Where the heart is We underestimate how tied we are to a place. Once, in a period of estrangement, he moved to an apartment and immediately felt alienated from all that mattered. After this, he gave up imagining he could ever leave. The different aspects formed a greater whole, and they were seen constantly in a new light that revealed something not seen or grasped before. He understood its contingency—a gift that the gods might snatch away—but that was the sort of contingency life presents, acknowledged yet put out of mind.

Two blocks uphill, an earthquake fault was overdue for its next big shift. Downhill, the view awaited obstruction. Time ravages it all and nothing is immune. And while he gave up imagining, he still found himself picturing places purpose-built for another—a world of their own, detached from their respective lives. He considered buying tickets to this parallel paradise, but in the end none of them were good for travel.

Possibilities and limits Friedrich Hayek wrote that describing accurately is a valid move in the social sciences.

Writing was like this to him, a process of “writing out” or “writing down” in order to capture and make sense, some kind of sense, of snippets of experience. His life appeared to him as an unbroken narrative, which—he learned quite late in life—is the opposite of what some others experience. This explained how the accrual of time, so important to him as a sign of love and commitment, meant nothing to these others. His sense of narrative gave the women who came into it a claim on him that he could never set aside.

The frisson might wane, but his pleasure in their company remained. And sometimes, despite themselves, there was laughter and reconnection. To him, this was part of their particular story, unfolding over time. Flying back from Europe, he thought he should write them out, to the best of his ability—approximate, but true to his impressions.

Once, banished from a doomed but intensely close relationship, he wrote a short book that tried to capture it. From time to time, he reread it as a kind of diary, written in an effort to forestall the immense pain that followed. It didn’t work and he was plunged into narcissistic grief, a terrible but necessary period, but in retrospect he was glad he wrote it, because it set down the experience of their relationship with considerable accuracy. His diary entries and correspondence from this period, on the other hand, were almost unbearable to read. There’s very little we can do when life really goes south. We act heedlessly, like true idiots, until we finally recover ourselves and accept things as they are. Whatever we write about what we’re experiencing in these periods is deplorable from end to end. It would be best to abandon personal writing for the duration, but we don't.

A buzz in the head Waking from a nap, he heard a buzzing in his head and saw numbers turning rapidly. If I can slow them down, perhaps it will stop, he thought. If not, I’m probably having a stroke. Later, it was clear that he hadn’t, but the possibility was there, part of this new territory. (Gombrowicz, writing on the mind/body problem, said that they’re inseparable, and yet the mind seems to float apart from the body, impervious.) We land in life, as Nabokov wrote so memorably, this tenuous bridge between two blanks. We share this intermediate zone with the living and the graves and detritus of the dead. Some of it speaks to us and makes us grateful for another’s presence. Geologic time dwarfs us and cosmic time subsumes the lot. Whatever was flung out originally to expand and evolve collapses into unimaginable density and then presumably is flung out again.

As he grew older, he began to see his parents as contemporaries. They sometimes appeared in his dreams, still family members but no longer parents. In these dreams, there was always a failure to arrive that he attributed to the fact that they were dead—a loss of agency, despite their presence. It was as if they were moving upstream against the flow of his narrative, resisting time in order to deliver a message. But what was it?

His own work, as he saw it, was done in the spirit of this interlude that the gods or chance afforded him and in the face of doubt that anything he did would resonate very far.

The making itself resonated and doubt was pointless. He was no genius but had enough talent to interest himself. The test, Schopenhauer wrote, is if you fall asleep when left to your own devices. He knew who and what resonated, but was less clear about why. He saw resonance as an attribute of the mind in the presence of whatever inspires it.

From the Whitney's roof terrace Form and substance Perhaps the question should be, “Who are you to me?” but, “Who am I to you?” felt like its truer meaning. He tried to answer honestly and to situate himself within the enormous landscape of the questioner’s feelings—not least to counter the unrecognizable places and depictions handed him. His past was a series of hallways, each giving off to rooms.

Memory gave it form and substance: the sound of a knife as the vegetables were chopped; or the sight of tears as the raft Medusa on which they drifted, spectators and participants, became unavoidably clear. The raft splits apart and each one washes up on a different shore, with a few exceptions. There were the suicide twins, paired in his mind although the means, reasons, and timing were different. Put them together in the afterlife and it would take an eternity for them to understand what they had in common.

Long after waking Christopher Alexander wrote that we know the good by seeing that it has life. In the heat of loving, “good” has a meaning that has its own truth, but like lovers’ correspondence and life’s narratives, its truth is contextual—stories he told himself were completely different from the stories those who shared these events with him told themselves. If he looked back at them later on, he had to admit that in those unfolding moments, they were good.

(The original of this edited piece appeared in Common Place No. 8, July 2015.)

Short Prose, 2016

Some entries

I dreamt I was in France, perhaps. I go for a drive, getting lost. At one point, I see a valley of startling beauty. Then I come upon an apartment that I go into, come out of, go to lock the door but it won’t. It becomes the trunk of a car. A woman tells me not to bother locking it. Then I start to drive back. In reality, I know what I saw—the actual, unfolding circumstances complete with an awaited sign that pointed somewhere, but how I get there is unclear. Beauty appears when it does and you wonder how you’ll find your way.

I’m between texts, unless I count re-reading Pound’s Cathay. After a conversation, I thought that I should have read aloud several pertinent poems. Perhaps in a year I’ll have that chance again. Or maybe she’ll find them beforehand, but this seems doubtful.

They often want you to love them on their own exclusive terms.

Fecundity and death shape or warp our lives. Fecundity is life’s initial push and its pull; death is the shadow of extinction. This is obvious, and yet they’re the main things. At night I write and make art, so what's to be read piles up. I toss it out, but with a sense of loss or guilt, which suggests time as a third “main thing.”

You ran off yelling. It confused me when it happened, but eventually I called your name, a pointless gesture. (A snippet of reality.) I’m bewildered when things slip out of sync. My mind runs behind some others. It’s like I have to screen the film to grasp what happened.

But some interactions are prolonged by this. That's the sort of human I am.

The bus driver calls out for me to be careful disembarking. I think later of writing something on the theme of metamorphosis. It’s been done, but can it ever really be done?

Two women friends wrote in succession that they were bisexual. They’re with men, but bisexual still. Something like this is surfacing in my poems.

Ted Hughes waited nearly to the end.

We were discussing the Sea Ranch, which I’ve never visited. The hedonism of one of its architects came up, “but no one talks about that.” As we corresponded, I thought of other, comparable venues. In a poem, Cavafy implies that desire infuses a setting so it takes on a different character. Poets leave more evidence of this in their wake than architects do.

My daughter came by and we talked next stages, a topic that follows us through life. How you get from stage to stage often looks odd or untoward as you live it, but makes more sense when you look back. We carry our regrets and sorrows, things we’d take back or do differently if we could, but we only have ourselves and this time.

Making a photo-collage. I could see it all as material, but Elizabeth Bishop complained to Robert Lowell about this. Somewhere I wrote about de Kooning painting as his mind gave out, wondering if this gave his work greater directness. Robert Walser worked out a method to get past the blocks to self-expression. Certain photos people post online strike me as dealing with this issue—the boundary between inside the self and outside the self.

In Robert Graves’s White Goddess, the Corn King reigns in the sowing and reaping, and is then ritually murdered: winter arrives with its sharpened knife and nature sleeps.

Obama is waning and Trump waxing. Clinton partisans now sound like Sanders partisans. The pre-election noise has if anything grown louder, even as it’s punctuated by ugliness from those emboldened by Trump’s win to take his dog whistles as meant for them. The evil around Trump is the reductive, simplistic thinking promoted by hucksters and ideologues. The possibilities he raises relate to breaking with the postwar consensus, of which Clinton was an exemplar, and reshaping the political landscape around new realities. We need a progressive alternative to come forward, leaders prepared to take this project on without Clinton’s inherited baggage. It’s not enough to oppose Trump; he has to be transcended. We need to step through the wall he breached and define a different future than the nostalgic and ahistorical one the Tea Party thinks it can impose on us.

Most Sundays, I write a letter to a friend in Maine. We started corresponding some years ago, reintroduced by a mutual friend. All this takes place online. I read in an obituary of a London literary agent that he felt collections of letters were dead as a genre, but I’ve never stopped writing them. This may reflect a habit begun in childhood, when letters were the medium. My parents produced a Christmas letter they sent around the world. My annual wrap-up is in their honor. Letters are particular. A diary is written both as notes to self, a record, and to an audience that’s intuited rather than known. I’ve reposted the writings of another—her prose poems—that I admire for their openness and evocative language.

My daughter urged me to collect the diary entries, as I do with my poems. It’s an interesting idea to gather what’s been written over the year and see what’s there— harvesting material that seems ephemeral as I write it. I keep everything because it may be valuable later, not least because it was written in the moment. Reading it brings things back to mind when I have some distance from them. This raises possibilities itself.

I sometimes think that I’ve been wronged. There’s an attic full of these complaints.

For three successive days, I’ve asked the I Ching for advice. I usually do this only three or four times a year, but each result I got this time seemed to be part of a longer answer. It also prompted me to sharpen the question in light of it. They fit together I saw today. My queries of the I Ching yielded hexagrams 22, “Grace,” 63, “After Completion,” and 15, “Modesty,” becoming 52, “Keeping Still, Mountain.” The opening query solicited advice about my becoming 70, but the response focused on my current position, far enough from the real action that my work is ornamental rather than substantive. The second query followed up on the first, noting a conversation with someone loosely in my field who’s stepping away from it for personal reasons. The response pointed to what I’ve accomplished and how in many ways it’s at a close, so the real attention needs to be on what follows. (A theme of the I Ching is to let the situation unfold.) It also said to limit myself to small things. So, what are they, I asked? It pointed to “Modesty,” which states that the Mountain (an image with which I identify in the sense of “grounded”) is the youngest son of the Creative, and then shifted to “Keeping Still, Mountain,” which states that “the way to expansion is through contraction.” So “small things” is both staying clear of ego and paring down in order to focus on the things that really matter. Hexagram 52 adds that the Mountain’s stillness is a deliberate pausing before it moves again.

Australia

I go back to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see the white art of Australia, which lags Norway by about 20 years, based on what I saw, but retains the provincial peculiarity I’ve seen elsewhere—in Göteborg, for example. Mixed in with this are some stunners, like Sidney Nolan’s mid-‘40s Ned Kelly series. Then I give in to tourism and take a taxi to see Utzon’s Opera House—surprisingly good, the way Gehry’s Bilbão was, although I expected otherwise.

In Melbourne, having dinner at Supernormal, a Japanese fusion place across from the hotel—jammed. I went to half of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) earlier. The indigenous art was thin, but an exhibit on the Australian artist John Olsen (b. 1928) made up for it—really stunning, mostly landscape-derived work. In a film, he explained that he looks at the structure of things: heads, bodies, topography. Melbourne is quite different from Sydney. I’m staying in the heart of it, surrounded by restaurants and shops that line the back streets. The scale is good—not especially tall, but dense in a good way.

I napped after my afternoon in Melbourne’s wine country. While there, I encountered a man who’d just moved back from Slovenia. He’s half Slovenian, he said, and planning to desert a woman there because moving her to Australia “would be hard.” This is our human condition, I thought. After he left, I told my friend that he had the look of a film actor, which was true.

At home, it’s evening. Out here over the Pacific, time is a question of progress from one point to another. I wrote a poem thinking of a laconic correspondent whose prose poems, if that’s the right term for them, I admire. Sometimes I think that if I were a woman and younger, I would be like her as I intuit her nature. Or perhaps what I mean is that there’s an inner part of me that’s like her, like my sense of her. But my poem was directed at what we share as two humans, parents and observers—a simpler connection.

The poem I wrote about the MoVida bar is similarly observational—not a love poem, but a poem about love. I still write love poems, but they come from a different place: memory’s play with the unfolding present, mostly, and those flashes of desire that are also our human nature.

Women touch their hair as they get ready to be loved.

They laugh as the men excite them with their muscular arms. Their mouths open and their eyes widen.

Later they will narrow.

Here at MoVida’s bar she rehearses love’s sixteen steps, starting with her hair, her hands, mouth open, eyes widened, closer, closer, leaning over, hand in her hair.

(Excerpted from Common Place No. 9, Spring 2017, and collected from my Tumblr site.)

After Rilke

Love An affliction and an addiction, love is also a kind of play we engage in early on and are always ready to take up again unless or although prudence and experience argue otherwise. Affliction is both illness and curse. Kicking an addiction (or being deprived of it) leads to a range of terrors. We learn this in stages. If I have consciously walled love off, it’s because I no longer believe in it.

Love is an odd word that covers a huge territory. I haven’t walled love off, in reality, but I’ve foresworn acting on the desire for a woman to arouse and possess—to use the typical language, the shorthand, of a desire that is equally for the proximity or closeness love permits, with its unique exchanges, many if not all of which are as much between minds as bodies, or evidence yet again of the meaninglessness of that distinction. (Yet a dichotomy, and part of the terror.)

“No longer believe in it” is imprecise. It’s like the difference between the quantum universe and Newton’s. There’s an element of destiny in love (that isn’t pursued purely as sport or habit) that’s uncanny in my personal experience. Like light as a particle, you think you can hold on to it. The world is as Newton described; like him, we sense that more is going on. This insight has no practical value. Goethe’s maxim, “Only love a woman you’re prepared to marry,” reflected his attempts to live otherwise. Hayek argued that tradition embodies evolutionary experience at a cultural level—widely shared “facts on the ground.”

Facts can change, as Keynes noted, but the cataclysms are also part of the facts tradition incorporates. We tell ourselves we’re immune.

Love can be revolutionary, two against the world. From that stance, tradition is there to be overthrown. Love’s approximation of being, at its peak moments, roots us in an unfolding here and now, but this is the flimsiest of constructs unless we take conscious steps to strengthen it. That means acknowledging the past and future that figure in any here and now. Anything less than this is artifice, however delightful. This brings us back to play, the scenes of childhood.

Part of love’s motivation is to recapture a time when being came naturally and living here and now was all that was expected of us. Our upbringing hammers much of this out of us. That we should take life seriously is the message that accompanies the physical duress we experience testing our limits. We equate maturity with sobriety, but crave relief more or less constantly—a craving for a remembered paradise we believe we can recreate in an entirely different context.

Maturity is a ripening. A clear head is helpful, a conscious decision to be free of a negative force, whatever it is, that exerts power over us. But maturity is also letting play ripen into something less destructive. Love isn’t precluded, but its negative aspects are acknowledged, brought into the picture. We look around us, not back.

Death “On borrowed time,” my father wrote me. At the time, I didn’t quite follow, but later I saw that he was referring to his own father, who died at 76. My father lived longer, dying at 79, about six weeks short of 80, so in his 80th year. I’m now in my 72nd year. My mother died in her 76th year, but her father lived into his 80s, dying in a car accident along with his wife. His father lived to be 97, I remember hearing, but I don’t know this for sure. A farmer, he continued to farm pretty much until the end.

My father spent part of World War II in London, where he was bombed out—a lucky escape, waking up and going out for a beer, hearing the air-raid sirens, seeking shelter, coming back to find his building flattened. He was also inadvertently in the Battle of the

Bulge. His survival is of course my survival. So, I too may be living on borrowed time, time handed me, a possible life.

I’m not sure exactly how old I was when my personal mortality came to me in its full terror. I think 14, but can that be possible? A fear of death led me to stop flying at one point, but it was so impractical that I was soon back in the air. Mortality has two aspects: the transience of our material selves, no matter what; and the randomness of the larger world, no matter what. Much time is given, individually and collectively, to extending life and taming the world’s randomness. We even keep score, comparing peoples, cities, and nations. When I was diagnosed with cancer, my doctor told me that the longer I could forestall treatment, the better it was likely to be. Now it’s my eyes: if I can keep them stable, a genetic treatment may emerge in lieu of surgery.

Consciousness survives a stopped heart by five minutes, I read. That is, the brain continues to function, although what that’s like within is unclear. (It has a bearing on efforts to revive people.) But a body is a package. You can work around deficits up to a point, but beyond that, you’re probably better off dead than living strapped to a machine.

Suicide or its contemplation runs ambiguously through life. It has its varying traditions, some of which make martyrs, heroes, or stoics of the life-takers. I sometimes thought of it while waiting for trains or, in one instance, standing on a balcony, but I was never serious. Visiting my cousins in Norway, I woke up in the night and realized that their late son had visited me and left a message for his father. There was no ghost, but no doubt, either. When I recounted this to its recipient, he told me I was the third person to do so. Afterward, I went to the nearby graveyard where my cousin, his brother, and his son are buried, and saw clearly, clairvoyantly, that they were gone and he wasn’t. His daughter, then a teenager, kept him tied to that place. Perhaps his wife did, also. The destiny that draws us to others reflects time travel with intervals. This is my theory. The passage across may be loosely choreographed; it may even be a game. We’ll see.

Love Poetry lends itself to writing around love. And death.

Place By the time I was six, I’d circumnavigated the world by ship. Much of what I experienced no longer exists. The architect-designed house my parents built in suburban New Jersey in 1954, although a prime example of midcentury modernism, was torn down 45 years later. The only house of my childhood I can still visit is the one in which my late cousin also grew up. It still exists and I continue to visit it. My great-grandfather’s summer house, which I also knew as a kid, is nearby. I walked past it in May 2016, and my late cousin’s daughter lives on its grounds.

I arrived in Berkeley in March 1969, having driven out from St. Louis for spring break. One of our party, who was from San Francisco, stopped the car at the top of the Berkeley Campus. I can’t really say, “I knew I would live here,” but it feels true.

I sometimes say that I knew immediately that my wife and I would marry when I first met her, but the reality is that I felt we knew each other. She first moved to the block we live on in 1968. After our first son was born, we moved to her building, which her parents owned. Later, they moved into it, leaving San Francisco. We bought our own house across the street in 1984. Square and shingled, it was built by Charmian Kittredge in 1902. Her father was locally prominent—a street is named after him. She went on to marry Jack London. Ours is a Queen Anne-period pattern house made to look “shingle

style,” as was popular at the time. It’s compact, but has a Victorian floor plan with a foyer and four small bedrooms upstairs. A previous owner added to the kitchen and built a large deck. There’s a 1902 shed in the back.

From the room in which I sleep, I can see most of the Golden Gate, Angel Island, and the coast range that extends north to Mount Tamalpais. The view is part of the place, to me—an assertion that is actively rejected by advocates for higher density in “urban” cities like this. The location, four blocks uphill from what was once the main streetcar route through Berkeley, is “walkable”—close to shops, cafés, and one renowned restaurant, Chez Panisse. Living here has become “European” as the food and wine of the region have come up and up. This happened more or less from the time I arrived, creating a market for local agriculture and viniculture.

But “Progress” (capital “P”) is constantly on the hunt to wreck this idyll. The region suffers from fragmentation, and each fragment imagines it can solve the region’s problems alone. The rise of the tech sector has created a kind of five-tiered economy, with the lower tiers steadily losing out. Young professionals of my acquaintance are leaving. This is said to be a catastrophe. And this is the Left Coast, a haven of old lefties and new ones. But the region’s politics are more complicated, often libertarian rather than progressive.

(Tech-progressive, one could say.) The human mix feels like the future and is widely supported; the rest struggles to keep up. The regional economy is the size of the Netherlands (in a state economy bigger than France), but the pervading sense is a lack of public investment—austerity amid vast wealth—and a public sector that’s expensive and ineffective. Fragmentation ensures that reform is very difficult to enact.

In 1989, I visited a friend who’d taken up a visiting academic position in Tokyo. He lived in one of the districts along the circle line that demarks the inner and outer wards of the city. In the 11 days I spent there, I came to love the texture of the neighborhood, which was dense but low. Someone told me the average height of the city was 1.3 stories. I imagine that Berkeley has a comparable statistic. When I heard it, I thought that adding density in Tokyo is mainly a matter of modest increases in height—something that was going on in the neighborhood around us. In fact, we lived in a three-story condominium building that consolidated the site of two or three single-family, probably single-story houses. The building fit well with its surroundings. Not every building on the narrow street needed to be redeveloped to add housing. The process, mainly instigated by owners in the immediate community, happened slowly. Slow is a good tempo at city scale, because the size of a city multiplies these small acts so they make a difference. Slow makes allowance for the character of a place in a way that fast often doesn’t. And fast in an urban context is typically glacial—a real slow that adds cost and discourages local initiative.

Slow is made possible by a shared consensus about a place. The pattern houses that gave rise to much of Berkeley were densely sited and modest, affordable to young families. Most of them were built by small-scale entrepreneurs. Zoning reflected this consensus; now it doesn’t. A step was missed and building and owning property became politicized. This is a recipe for corruption.

Death From the sidelines, I watched the mother of a friend pass from a vigorous old age to frailty to death. Her daughter reported this to me and, to some extent, I also saw it in social media. Some years before, I interviewed a well-known local critic twice in the space of about a year. He'd declined significantly between the two conversations, apologizing

the second time for a mind that worked slowly because his heart was failing. According to a friend’s report, he died surrounded by his old colleagues, having excused himself to take a nap from which he failed to wake up.

In 2006, I was diagnosed with cancer. The man who made the diagnosis urged me to arrange for the surgery he proposed to perform, but I found another doctor and delayed treatment for four years. I also avoided surgery, which had no real advantages over the radiation treatment I received. Falling in with this doctor, who I liked and trusted, damped down the incredible anxiety I felt at first. I went to two concerts with a friend immediately after the diagnosis and, at the second, I realized that I had no memory of the first. This isn’t just about the fear of death, it’s also about the fear of dismemberment.

The territory of old age is perilous. I fell on the sidewalk twice in my early 60s and realized that not falling is part of it. You learn to be careful. But being careful only gets you so far. Part of the transition I’m making now involves learning how to be fitter than I am. I have episodically become fit, but the motivation wasn’t self-preservation. The observation, “He treats his body as separate and thus it is preserved,” found in Tao Te Ching, applies. But which body, exactly?

According to Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sages joked about being bent over double by old age. As bodies age, this happens. It’s definitely a reason to be fit, as another doctor, then in his late 80s, pointed out. My body has always varied, now tiny and thin, now taller but fat, now thin again, now heavier. It seems to hit a plateau, but then it changes again.

I remember a professor who was so undone by the treatment he received for cancer that he died of a cold. He had a six-year-old son, the result of a late marriage to a younger woman. Once I saw him walk by my office, slumping from the burdens of illness and age, and then come skipping back in the company of his child. My mother, dying from a stroke, paused in her dying to listen to “The Book of Ruth.” My mother-in-law willed herself through the holidays so her grandchildren could visit her. Then she let herself go.

A few years ago, I met with a friend who, unexpectedly, was visibly, even fatally ill. I’d learned from another that it’s best to let the sick talk, to reveal what they want to reveal, discuss what they want to discuss. He was as much of a messenger as my late cousin, but messengers have their own lives and thoughts. This poem is from his wake.

I stood not far from you. A glance, I think it was a glance, the way particles dissipate when chance spares them collision, a rebirth— the sort that warrants us to pray.

Of prayers there was a dearth; just mirth of a funereal sort. A few preened, gossiped, until grief broke in.

We can speak of it or something new, the measure of what we’ll miss. Musil pointing the crowd ahead, Berlin ambling toward an abyss, toward a nil, yet cracking jokes in the middle.

We edge away from it, often unnerved if life proves too brittle.

He had his work, future, promise.

Saw him just weeks before, so thin, hopeful. Is it the work we’ll miss?

Or is it up to us to write it?

In my case, occasional talk, cigarettes and spare words, his wit, his surprising affection, like a dog or guide on a walk that turns and looks for attention.

Afternoon light in an upstairs room Place When I was an undergraduate, a friend who had an aunt in St. Louis sometimes took me on drives in the country or to different landmarks in the city. One of them was the Bellefontaine Cemetery, with its mausoleums and Victorian-era sculptures. Where part of my family lives in Norway, the community lives around a Romanesque church and a cemetery that extends down the hillside, with a walkway that’s a shortcut to the rocks where we went to swim as kids.

That we make places for the dead is interesting in itself. My wife’s mother gave her body to the medical school, which will cremate it along with others, mixing their ashes and scattering them in the Pacific in a ceremony to which the families are invited. Yet she has a grave marker next to her husband. We had a ceremony for her there, as we had for him. The constant search for mass graves, the identification and reburial of the dead— these actions speak to a desire to give each death a respect that’s often elusive in life itself.

The impulse is often tribal. (I learned from a brother-in-law that the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s cemetery at Gallipoli is untended.)

That the dead have markers at all, let alone mausoleums, reflects a long tradition of giving them repositories that, when the survivors could afford it, also testify to their value among the living. In the Greek Hall at the Met there are a few that honor women as mothers and as the beauties they once were. This seems fitting. The photos of women in the paid obituaries of the New York Times often show them at the height of their beauty.

The men blend together, as in life, but the women are memorable.

I’d like my ashes scattered in our back garden. Along with the upstairs view of the bay, it has the strongest connection for me. A marker near my cousins’ graves in Norway, a gathering place of family spirits, might be good—a bit of me in both places.

Family My college girlfriend's parents and grandparents were like characters from a Tolstoy novel. The full weight of that history fell on her, and to work through it, she recreated those events and dramas as a personally dangerous ordeal. The mystic George Gurdjieff called this “voluntary suffering,” from which her baby daughter finally released her.

The families my wife and I combined also have histories. On my wife’s side, there’s Edmund Burke’s sister Mary. On mine, although I’m not sure by what route, there’s James Lawrence, the Naval hero who reputedly implored his men, “Don’t give up the

ship!” My great-grandfather was a Knight of the Danish Court, someone said, in honor of his giant school-room maps. He brought his family into the upper middle class, an aristocracy of merit that persists through its adherence to such givens as educating the children and prodding them to improve on their forebears. The work ethic loomed large.

The bourgeoisie threw off the aristocracy. This happened in Japan, too, despite its isolation, led by the “arrogant merchants” of Osaka. In Hagakure, written by a samurai in the employ of a baronial family, these merchants are condemned. Aristocracy wants its privileges and will go to war for them; the bourgeoisie will also go to war, but would rather not. I’m bourgeois to the core, but as a child, living in a British Crown Colony, my nascent sense of loyalty and patriotism became attached to the aristocracy whose visits required me and my classmates to turn out.

I encountered aristocracy in childhood and an emotional and irrational attachment formed. When Diana and Charles married, I cried involuntarily, watching their wedding, to my wife’s horror. (“They’re just Krauts,” she memorably told our oldest son.) Vladimir Putin has let the Romanovs be rehabilitated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He casts himself as the Consort of Mother Russia, a self-anointed, Napoleonic emperor. The trappings are imperial. The latest plebiscite is meant to seal his popular mandate. It’s the opposite of Xi’s party politics, eliminating his rivals in a corporate takeover.

Unlike hereditary aristocracies, these autocracies lack the standing that tradition might give them. Putin and Xi rule by their wits, at considerable personal danger. They’ve accumulated enemies. Despite their ruthlessness, they’re innately vulnerable. They can’t show weakness, yet they have to be seen as human, parentally empathetic, compassionate in a tough-love way.

Charles de Gaulle saw China and Russia as stereotypically themselves. Who’s in charge is incidental to their behavior in a larger sense: innate, indelible, predictable. This sounds like stasis, but is also a predilection to play a long game and work doggedly to bring reality—or at least perception—into sync with national myth. It’s an evolutionary strategy. Aristocracies used marriage to cement ties and infuse waning dynasties with new blood. That their fortunes derived from land was a problem they never fully resolved.

They were tied by blood to territories that they personified. Landless younger sons ended up competing with and then marrying their tenants. My wife’s grandfather, scion of nearlandless provincial gentry, was accepted by a rising local family on the strength of his name. Their first son secured a bank loan at age 10 because he embodied the prospect of revival their union represented. Putin trades on this idea—Mother Russia in danger and him as her consort, prodding their progeny on to greater things, while Xi has stepped into the traditional role in China of securing a new dynasty. But the kids may get restless.

Self Our sense of self is illusory, the Buddhists say, because our lives are contingent. Judging from my children, our natures—the raw material of identity and character—arrive with us.

Our lives can unfold like a novel in which we’re both author and actor, mixing with others who come and go, but whose places in our story are never clear or final; or they can seem like a series of discontinuous events in which others figure provisionally and can be shed.

Although “one damn thing after another” is a cliché, I failed to understand it as lived human experience until I quoted the phrase, having just read an interview with Lucian Freud in which he referred to it to justify his cutting off friends and relations. “That’s me,” someone exclaimed, meaning the discontinuity, not the cutting off, but I thought of both.

My memory is associative. When triggered by people who I haven’t seen in a while, our shared past comes forward. It's easy to pick up the thread because the emotional ties are there. The idea of social capital similarly reflects an accrual of experience in which the good persists and anything less than good seem exceptional. My associative memory may bridge across intervening time, but the novel’s plot twists sometimes disrupt the flow.

Family Our family is extensive and connected by unconditional affection and the desire for each to do well, whatever this might mean to her or him. It’s more a desire than an expectation, but active support comes along with it. “Start where you are” is a Buddhist saying that relates to this. It’s a pragmatic admonition meant to bring you back to yourself. It accepts that we live in a world that’s both organized and random. Families embody this paradox.

History depicts their persistence and contingency. Unconditional affection is optimistic about the family’s attributes, its ability to persist and improvise. It honors evolutionary traits like bearing and intelligence, and upholds traditional obligations, from marriage itself to the effort and money invested in the progeny’s education and upbringing.

That families do this in the face of the contingencies that dog most marriages and the fraught transitions their children make in their dependencies—is evidence of their dynastic nature. It also speaks to the world that revolves around families: relations, friends, colleagues and friends of friends, and acquaintances, initially of the founding couple and later of their adult children. Reading the first of Anthony Powell’s journals, a writer for whom family in this respect was his principal subject, the outlook he depicts is novelistic: everyday life as a series of linked encounters. (Alan Clark's political diary, in contrast, reads like dispatches to the future. It reminded me of Stendhal’s Memories.)

“Novelistic” means that experience is overlaid by speculation. Powell quotes someone saying that one consolation of old age is learning how careers, marriages, and reputations turn out. The affection the narrator feels is like a novelist’s affection for her characters.

However deplorable, there they are, still a focus of her attention. Our memories of them are never entirely fixed. Not even their deaths accomplish this.

Work At certain points, I privileged work over other aspects of life. Relieved of the exigencies of fulltime work, I’m less sure I was ever addicted to it. It was a lifestyle, in my wife’s view.

My work combined art and skill with a degree of influence. While it was ephemeral, it aided the ambitions of the firms that commissioned it. This was especially true in the second half of my career, when I produced a magazine and other “statements of intent.” that helped my firm explain itself—to itself, also. I’m not sure its leaders ever grasped that, with an internal audience, this is better done indirectly than propagandistically.

Writing is the heart of my odd career, the means by which I found a place in a field— architecture and design—in which I had no other talent. I can’t really draw, and while I have a strong spatial sense, it only serves my criticism. I resorted to drugs, but the results weren’t much good. My presentations amused the gods, including the Chicago architect Harry Weese, who saved me from being tossed out of undergraduate school.

From childhood, really, I wrote, largely at the prompting of others, starting with my mother. In high school, an insightful English teacher had me absorb the New York Times’ house style by reading it in full daily. This augmented my childhood in Singapore, where I heard English spoken by educated people (and spoke it as an absorbed variant on

the standard American English spoken by my parents that, with their American east coast circle, was reinforced by newscasters, cultural program hosts, and talking heads).

Writing for oneself is as much about finding suitable forms as finding a distinctive voice. My forte is correspondence, short essays and commentary, and poems. Concision is a common feature, although one person's brief may be another's too long. As an editor, I prefer concision. As a writer, I unfold things—poems with extraneous preludes and essays with asides. My writing wanders discursively, too. When I edit it, I sometimes aim for its supposed heart, but more often I leave it beating securely within its plumage.

Self When we’re young, gender differences are less pronounced. Then puberty kicks in. I wonder if the profusion of identities and the striving for a more fluid spectrum are a working out of this bodily imposition, which haphazardly makes us “men” or “women.”

Three women I know noted at different points that, as the first put it, “my figure didn’t come in.” Humans vary around a shifting norm; in high school, that nightmare of postpuberty, they try to get near it and fit in.

Making something of ourselves, as older people admonish us, is one of life’s main projects. The criteria handed us are often ill-suited to our nature, talents, and inclinations, which means that the breakthroughs in this project center on our willingness, sooner or later, to embrace our differences, to vary quite distantly from what others want of us to pursue our own agenda. In a way, this repeats our early adventures, when real life hammered us with its lessons about sharp objects, gravity, and our peers. Donald Winnicott says we build our egos early on. Later, tempted to push beyond the limits of common sense, we crack that carapace, but we learn again why we built it. This second time, we gain self-reliance or go under. Going under is one way to learn.

Authenticity is crucial to the project of making something of ourselves. We can’t help but see how the terms on offer to realize our ambitions work against what we’re really here to do. We may acquiesce, defer, evade, or rebel, but those choices are reactive. The other option is to do what we’re here to do from the outset, but this involves a different kind of trial and error.

When I was in my thirties, with two young children, a friend used to torture me by asking, “What’s your 10-year plan?” He had one, presumably, but then his marriage went off the rails. On New Years’ Day, I used to write out a kind of prospectus. Some things reappeared from year to year, not getting done; other things took place, but rarely as envisioned. The supposed path through a life is really an accumulation of experiences from which we learn or not. Making something of yourself means staying open to life and learning from it. There’s no other way.

Work When I was younger, the therapists claimed that marriages “took work.” I saw it differently. The household and its responsibilities take work, no doubt, but marriage itself as a close relationship that can be fraught or pleasurable or stagnant in turns isn’t something “to work on.” Anything involving love is a creative act first and foremost, to which the phrase “the art of living” speaks.

We tend to divide life into the categories handed us as soon as we’re packed off to school. We may question them, even rebel at certain points, but it’s rare that we act effectively on the impulse to transcend them. Those who do—the fashion/street photographer Bill Cunningham and the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz come to

mind—seem as modest as they are passionate about living without the usual divisions. I see them as “working models,” not for how to balance but how simply to refuse to set boundaries on one’s activities or to categorize them.

The divvying up reflects the way we allow time to infiltrate our lives for others’ convenience. We live factory-like existences, showing up here and there at appointed times, and being counted present because we literally are. The higher their status, the more people flaunt this convention with impunity, often with breathtaking hypocrisy on full but unconscious display. The frequent lapses into bad behavior in the workplace strike me as an untoward but logical extension of an attitude that assumes bodily possession of employees by those higher up. If we work as serfs for 10 or 12 hours, recovering from it is a tiny bit like it was for the real serfs Alexander Herzen describes in his autobiography: freedom is like staggering into the light.

So, most of us are proletarians of a sort, alienated from our birthright as the creators of our own lives. The working world is organized otherwise, and to resist takes courage, frugality, persistence, and imagination. It may also take insight that the world “as given” is a fragile construct, much more ephemeral than its overlords dare themselves to think. The paranoia the powerful often display reflects their unease about the hierarchy they’ve surmounted.

And yet, like school, the workplace in its different forms involves relationships that, if not “close” are proximate. We’re among familiars and there’s a kind of camaraderie. In the end, we are all human, and the imbalances in power—also found in marriages and families—distort this. If there’s a fundamental reason for refusing to divide life up arbitrarily and work according to the dictates of the factory, it’s that it diminishes our humanity—the root of every creative act. We are exhorted to “work on it,” but work of this kind is spiritually toxic, equally for marriage.

If work fails to sustain spiritual as well as material life, then forget about fulfillment.

We may choose to live a disciplined life within time. We may even choose a factory-like workplace as an easier way to organize works of interest. But these choices should be conscious, voluntary, and provisional. What we mean by discipline, how we deal with time—these are always in flux.

“The art of living” applies to life in full. Each of life’s major categories comes with the vast weight of its tradition and the sheer momentum of its unproductive habits. This is why the true artists of life are so rare. Yet they alone accept life as it really is and live creatively within it. As it was when we were young, and as it still is in dreams, the world they inhabit is raw material for their work, its medium, and its audience. That world has life, as Christopher Alexander says.

(Excerpted from Common Place No. 10, Spring 2018.)

Four Fragments

Issue How we contrive to end up in sideways intercourse! Domesticity tries to tame this by conflating it with sleep, but we resist even as we acquiesce. We want and need the artifice, often supplied randomly by nature, the wind billowing the curtains to mimic briefly a pregnant belly, or the light moving across a bed. In these self-chosen scenes, we speak sometimes from and to our realest selves.

We like a bed, but rutting’s what we’re there to do. Naturally, we deny this to each other. “Oh, no!” There’s no lie committed by this fiction. As a friend’s mother put it, “Not terrible either way.”

For issue is a hazard of traditional horizontality. Arise! Arise! Vertical, we stagger from bed to crib or lie under siege, pawed or overheard, our quarters exposed as invariably too small. We must get away, we tell ourselves, but the pairs who flee may vary from issue’s parentage. We breed, not always by design.

Time Life’s relentless chronology tricks us into allowing later events to overshadow what went before. With biography, the completeness of a life and the distance from the subject flatten the narrative, although subjecting it to the biographer’s biases. In dreams, though, there’s often a remarkable immediacy.

Travel When I was 16, my sister and I traveled around Europe together. She was a junior abroad, studying at the Sorbonne, and I worked like a dog delivering newspapers to join her on our summer vacation. I think our parents doubted that I could do it, but I rose stoically most mornings at 4:30 and rode my three-speed black Rudge past the railroad station and under the trestle to where my route began.

My memory of that route is caught up in the woods I rode through as dawn broke.

Once a family of dwarf rabbits, tiny and brown, broke into a run before me—wildlife persisting amid suburban houses. Looking back, that town seems so bucolic, the opposite of suburbs as we’ve come to know them. In 1963, New Jersey was still often rural—farms, meadows, and expanses of woods. My father took me skiing once on some hillside, lending me his father’s wooden skis, brought to America from Norway.

I arrived in Paris on 13 July, spending the next evening with my sister on the balcony of Madame Mercier’s apartment on rue Bonaparte, which looked down on all the dancing. I spotted a cabin mate from the Aurelia, the Italian liner we took to Le Havre along with 1,100 other students. Madame Mercier was a friend of my mother’s father. She was small but imposing. Her apartment was filled with the furniture and art of another era, but her sensibility reflected everything she’d lived through.

One of my sister’s friends, attached to the Embassy of the Cameroon, got us tickets to an evening performance of its National Dance Company at a huge and massively hot old theater. For hours, every kind of tribal dance was performed, even those of pygmies, as the audience set sweating and enthralled.

Betsy After my mother died, I noted at her funeral that her life took in both the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse. Her birth in August 1915 also preceded the Armenian Massacre, nine days of terror that cost a million lives. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my mother studied Russian on public television, getting up early to watch the program. She had difficulty with foreign languages, but was able to thank a visiting Russian oil chemist in his language when my parents went to a convention in Texas.

I knew my mother best in the period from the early 1950s through my high-school graduation in 1965. She was 35 when we arrived in Singapore and 50 when they quit New Jersey for Washington, D.C., where they rented a narrow townhouse in Georgetown and bought a 30-foot Canadian sloop they kept on Chesapeake Bay. My mother decided to secure the degree she abandoned when she married my father. We both got our B.A. degrees in 1970. Then she slowly went mad—strident at the outset. The political context in which it happened masked its seriousness. With each successive year, she got worse.

On the plane, flying back to Washington in 1984 to deal with her, I read Ivan Illich’s Gender and wondered if her problems were physical or cultural. Faced with her full-bore insanity, it was hard to sustain the thesis that she was the victim of oppression. What struck me was how like a speed addict she’d become, unable to sleep and plagued by paranoia. Yet there were also moments of lucidity and pathos. That my father had fled affected her, even as she proclaimed her independence.

We shared a lot of anxieties, but hers were amped up to max. Her values were inverted, too. A handful of dead leaves became objects of great beauty. Each trip in the car was like traveling with Don Quixote.

My parents’ tiny house in Alexandria was a place of despair; every object felt like residue. Thanks to the help of my mother’s sister Sylvia and my cousin Cynthia—and my mother, too, who told the clearly alcoholic judge that my father was a secret drinker—she was committed and restored to sanity. In the annals of my family, this really was a miracle.

My mother would have ended up a bag lady otherwise.

Soon after her death, I dreamt of my mother as her younger self. She wore one of her fashionable outfits—in Singapore, she’d had her tailors knock off Chanel—and seemed entirely engaged and happy, in her element in a place where she felt modern and cosmopolitan, the most herself in her own view.

(From Common Place No. 11, Summer 2018. My mother is in blue in the film still.)

Walking Cure

My life has been a mix of work—my unlikely career—and various relationships and friendships, and considerable travel. I’m now at an age, the I Ching reminds me, when one puts one’s career aside and gets on with the work that leisure makes possible.

It was said of Alexander Herzen that all his writing was autobiographical. Mine is self-reflective. This isn’t simply solipsistic: one task of memoir is to situate oneself.

When I had a job, I pursued my own work in a more compressed way, fitting it in amid the rest. Weaving, which I took up and mastered, was the closest I came to leisure pursued as a practice. I don’t think of my own writing as a practice. The poetry editor with whom I consult sets to work early, but I write when I have something to say.

There’s a remark in the Tao Te Ching that I’ve taken to heart: “He treats his body as separate and thus it’s preserved.” It seems paradoxical that Master Lao wrote this, despite his reservations about carving things up, yet I’m sure it’s true: on every level, one is one’s own project. In my career, I was often the means for others to further theirs. Now I need to leave that situation and take up this other. This means to do it. Lethargy often hides out as good intentions or wishful thinking. It means preparation, some of it open-ended and intuitive to spark ideas that may grow into something.

Correspondence with my anthropologist friend Vasilina Orlova, writing from the village in Siberia that’s the site of her fieldwork, brings into focus my reading this summer of an introduction to and an intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin. Talking with my daughter last night, I tried to summarize our recent exchange and elaborate on it.

Benjamin coined the term now-time, insisting that the past is always actually in the present, but fragmentary—fragments as pregnant with meaning as metaphors, and like them accessed through resonance rather than through explanation. Past, present, and future in this conception are exempt from mechanical time. Now-time forms a territory that is within and outside of us, personal and impersonal, but impossible to transmit or share except in fragments. For Benjamin, the more fragments, the better in order to up the odds of putting something across.

In her introduction to Illuminations, a collection of Benjamin’s writings, Hannah Arendt calls his approach poetic. In writing about my own past, poetry is the easiest way to access it as experience and avoid the need to explain that prose requires.

Reading the opening of Umberto Eco’s version of Instructions to the Cook led me to look through papers I made in graduate school for a funded research project that, in an ideal world, would have led to my doctoral dissertation. While I assembled preliminary and final reports on this work, and an article good enough to be excerpted later in a reader, I failed to finish. Later, however, I taught a course, “How to Write a Thesis,” as part of a graduate architecture studio. I clarified the assignment by showing half a dozen different examples of theses that were acceptable to the faculty—a range sufficient to cover most possibilities. Mainly, though, I read what the students wrote. I’d proposed the course because the studio masters only did so late in the semester. To develop their ideas, the students needed criticism and support in equal measure.

When I was a graduate student, I once published more articles in one academic year than any of the faculty. They were on point, too, but instead of rolling up conveniently into a dissertation, they extinguished any interest I had in the topic. I recently went this material again, marveling at the industrious person who wrote it. Having read enough of Eco to know that even turning it into a thesis, let alone a dissertation, would require considerable additional work, I’m wondering how best to write it up, as the content is valuable. (As Eco writes emphatically, “Do what you can do!”)

The writer and scholar Eva Hagberg once shared her list of 40 things that her students must scrupulously avoid. Like Eco’s book, it was written from kindness and generosity. I was quick to note how many of these things I did, sometimes simply because language has changed—modern no longer also means contemporary, for example. I used to read with a dictionary next to me; now I keep my iPhone handy. When I don’t understand a term, I look it up. My neighbor asked a visitor to explain “critical theory,” receiving an explanation that was cogent and memorable. I try to ask such questions without embarrassment—to acknowledge that I don’t know, if it seems valuable to know. There are words I’ve looked up many times, but their infrequency means that I only remember that I looked them up before. I’m unlikely to use these words, but academic writers do so because they have precise meanings.

My books elude me, even within the confines of my house and study. For two days, I’ve searched for Kafka’s diary. While looking, I found others by Adorno and Judd for which I’d searched even longer. The Adorno book was in a different lower shelf, a hardback not a paperback, while the Judd book was thicker and a different color than I remembered.

Kafka’s diary in my imagination may also be at odds with the book itself.

Before we remodeled our kitchen, we had a cabinet in the dining room that I told the family was clearly the portal to the fourth dimension. Cameras stored in it would disappear for years at a stretch, then reappear unexpectedly exactly as they’d been. By removing it, we may have condemned certain objects to their fate, but I doubt ours is the only fourth-dimensional portal in the universe, so they’ll turn up somewhere.

A lifetime spent acquiring books leaves me with too many. Should I should cull or reorganize them. Cull and reorganize, maybe, or the reverse. (I just read Eric Griffiths’s lecture on timing, so perhaps cull while reorganizing.) The books flow into hallways and bedrooms, doubled up on shelves in a way that reflects their purchase, privileging new over old and expediency over importance. My guess is that whatever process I adopt, if that ever happens, would need to be place-specific, ideally with some annotation.

One quality of a library is to reflect the evolution of one’s interests, especially the paths anticipated, like journeys you plan and then postpone. Unlike these possible destinations, a book stays as it was (subject to external depredations). There are also a few books that I reread regularly. William Morris’s News from Nowhere , "the only good utopia," per Ray Lifchez, is the only book that will revive me when I’ve lost all interest in everything else.

An old friend visits and I recall moments of discomfort he used to cause me by asking about my 10-year plan. Nearly 80, he’s turned his attention to life’s endgame. It’s clear that he’s making the most of it, involving himself in a variety of activities. He swims and bikes, he spends planned time with his grandchildren, he writes and publishes on organizational topics, and he’s involved in a primary school in his neighborhood. All this is worthy and leads me to wonder about my own largely unplanned, wandering life.

It’s not that I don’t plan in a larger sense. For me, this consists of moving toward while moving away, and the latter is much clearer to me at the outset than the former. I tend to “move toward” in steps, letting the situation unfold, whereas the impulse to move away arises from specific causes and is weighed against inertia and sunk costs. I should interject that planning in the sense of “living in the future” is said by Claudio Naranjo to be one of the bad habits of Enneagram Sevens, of which I am one (based on his Enneagram Structures, a useful book on this system.) Citing Oscar Ichazo, Naranjo says that Sevens seek refuge in the future to ward off pain. But I also have elements of Enneagram Five, a detached and observant diagnostician. Paired together, they enable me to provide a pithy summary of what’s happening and then use my synthetic and narrative abilities to extract foresight from these insights.

In Robert Grudin’s Time & The Art of Living, he makes the crucial point that we can give shape to our lives in time if we choose, but we’re shockingly blind to this possibility. In Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time, he argues for lingering rather than rushing through our everyday, dodging the Web, which has replaced TV as a time sink.

But then there's Walter Benjamin, ever open to experiences in all media, ever willing to push his synthesis engine further, yet orbiting always around the lodestar of his being.

Buddhism’s oxymoronic willingness to accept life’s bargain at face value is its main attraction to me. Being is transient and having is an illusion, but life is rooted in both. In practice, then, living obliges us to live well regardless, detached from the outcome but mindful of our actions, the need to live as the situation warrants.

Something here too of human limits, of time as necessarily finite in relation to our capacities even as we test it. Most of our mistakes are bound up in the attempt. This is the “ground” in which we plan, which is why I tend to approach it intuitively—that is, as intimations from an unfolding present. Walter Benjamin teaches us not to abandon any ambition entirely. His death in Port Bou did not negate the reception he foresaw for his work, like Stendhal before him. Moreover, any great work is also a departure point.

Diaries and letters occasion most of my writing, and much else I write lifts off from them.

Even my poems are reflections by other means on the raw material life hands me. My photo-collages are a version of this strategy. Behind these activities is a sense of a small, immediate audience and another that is speculative. When I left the film Obit, screened at the University Art Museum, I noted some grim faces among the men older than me.

Lesser mortals should know their places, but they don’t. Not while the clock is running.

Obituaries compress time, even as they try to register the ups and downs of life as lived. Those who take the most care to enforce their reputations when alive indulge in a form of hubris that invites reprisal. It’s better simply to acknowledge that we do what we love, as Swedenborg wrote. This at least is my own experience. Swedenborg wrote that it could land us in Heaven or Hell. But wherever, it’s our own doing, our desire.

One point that the I Ching makes is, in essence, to work on whatever come easiest and make it your own. This is a reliable starting point. Virginia Woolf was a constant diarist and correspondent, and her diaries and letters live on as a window into her life and mind, a meta-narrative or leitmotif to her novels, essays, reviews, and radio talks.

It’s not a coincidence that Woolf’s formative education came from the library of her father, editor of the National Biography. Like an obituary writer, Leslie Stephen assessed reputations. To be noticed by him at all was an honor, of course. The paid death notices in the New York Times attest to the human impulse to redress: tributes from institutions, companies, and friends; and obituary-like synopses of the dead from their families.

Berkeleyside, a local online daily, now runs article-length tributes to our dead. It’s an improvement on the display-ad format. Freed from the clichés of funeral home writing, they’re often quite interesting because the writers knew and liked the deceased. This resembles the memorable parts of funerals and memorials—the moments when we laugh knowingly about the person's foibles and are moved by things we forgot or never knew, by our human sense of resonance that we express again as grief, admiration, and love.

I wrote in my diary that lethargy is my main problem, but then added that this conclusion may be premature. I don’t yet take advantage of my momentary abundance of time. I think this points to a lack of a working theory about leisure. It can be approached like work, but it has other aspects that, once under way, are evidently also worth doing.

Like school before it, work is structured to spark action by scheduling it, demanding progress toward goals, and setting limits on “extra” time for leisure. That limited time is a microcosm of what happens as structured work falls away. Looking back, I see much squandering or, more accurately, much wringing of hands when the productive leisure I anticipated over a long weekend went unmet. Retirement puts this ordeal on repeat.

If I were to write my own prescription, it might be to establish a weekly routine expansive enough to accommodate, concertina-like, productive leisure as well as life’s impingements. The corollary of lethargy is resentment. Reestablishing a modus vivendi that suits self and chosen others is the necessity of this moment. When the Buddhists say that death is the great question, I think they really mean that transience is a reality we should accept as our human condition. Just as we’re whirling along in space, we’re moving inexorably and unpredictably in time. Nothing we do can alter this, despite our nostalgia for the potent immortality we imagined for ourselves as children.

I followed an online persona created, I eventually established, by an English poet.

Although he stated clearly that Charlotte “is not a real person,” I began to see her as one.

Hints around the edges suggest her creator’s affinity with Fernando Pessoa, who seems to have inhabited the different personae in whose voices he wrote. I have my own theater of gender and have navigated outer life in light of my oxymoronic nature. Gender is a placeholder for many different things that we bring along with us and loosely chalk up to our nature. Its fluidity reflects the influence of others as we fall in or out of love with them.

Some of my poems consider the middle years, those territories of desire and turmoil that we cross, even seek out, only to wonder later why. Who is the self that embarked on this?

More to the point, who is the self that now asks the question? I have regrets galore about the mess that love caused, but love has the purity of any calamity. Would it be simpler or truer to think of love as something that befalls us? More pertinently, we could also ask, Where are we carried when we’re carried away? And to what do we return?

A friend recounted how another left her and then promptly poured salt into her wounds. I remembered how I became marooned in time—fixed on the status quo ante and mired in its contrast to current discontents. My friend used the word grief. When I was searching for a cure, I read that I was in the grip of narcissistic grief. Yet grief is grief, no less terrible when it arises from events that tore your ego off layer by layer.

It’s said that part of the process of confronting death is a stage of bargaining with it.

We look for a version of reality that can encompass the ways that we’re diverging from it— a more capacious reality that will somehow solve our problem, ignoring the fact that reality inevitably excludes parts of what we’re trying to maintain. It is the essence of being human that, falling or failing, we wonder how it could have happened.

“My mind is like the dressing room at the Kabuki Theater,” I wrote in a poem. Our gender is improvised but also ritualized, more a fluid quality than a given. Alone in the dressing room, we find again that mirrored self who puts these props aside and finally just is—the same self who lives constantly in death’s shadow, I believe.

I’m reading Eric Karpeles’s biography of the Polish artist and writer Józef Czapski. Last night, I read an account of Poland’s defeat by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union— treachery all around, despite the real resistance the Poles put up. Had its allies, Britain and France, intervened, it’s likely the Poland would have held out, although the Soviet Union still might have come in. I can’t bring myself to read the next chapter, on the terrible aftermath of Poland’s defeat for its officer class. Czapski survived, almost inexplicably, but thousands of his compatriots were murdered on Stalin’s orders.

It was in this period, in 1940, that Czapski gave talks on Proust to his fellow prisoners that two of them transcribed. Karpeles made a translation that I also read. Czapski gives an account of Proust that’s like a bildungsroman, explaining how he clarified for himself why he had to write what he wrote: to bring back to life the entirety of what he’d seen. In Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me, he asserts that Proust was writing from fragments of memory rather than from a seamless narrative. What he means is that Proust didn't live life as a narrative, but instead recovered it piecemeal in fragments that surfaced.

Walter Benjamin would say that they arise in the course of one's now-time as it unfolds.

Why do I write and what’s my aim in doing so? I write to explain myself to myself and to describe the territories that I’ve lived through, alone and with others.

No longer acting on desire led me to a friendship in which it surfaces only in poems. It has to surface somewhere, I imagine. Poems are not to be taken literally, although the poet may mean every word. I can write, “her woman’s gait” and recall everything I read into it at the time. To act on desire is to want to know, down to the bone, what’s there.

Friendship leaves this knowing to others. You could say this decision was forced on me by age, but it’s really experience that led to it—a sense that consummated desire, like thwarted desire, is an obstacle to friendship. But it’s a dilemma.

It’s a dilemma because lovemaking includes conversations of a kind that are unusual between friends—the transparency that loosened boundaries makes possible, one of the most remarkable, ephemeral things we experience as human beings. Quantum theory captures the way something so tangible can be so fleeting. We want gravity to turn off and yet we want solidity, ground beneath our feet. The teleology of desire is family and perpetuation, tradition says; everything else strikes us as improvised and unsatisfactory.

Where are we when we’re carried away? Still looking for a mooring.

We sometimes follow our hearts in life, not just driven to do so by desire but also by hope and imagination. We're as gods, for love carries us to their world, with its fragments of eternity, each lived as a slow-moving eddy within life’s normal rush. Briefly, we have all the time in the world, but we’re like two musicians—composers, players, and instruments all at once—caught up in the sheer pleasure of improvising. Caught up and caught out, when gravity reasserts itself, yet our human métier, perhaps, and another reason for being.

The entirety of our life's experience is the raw material we try to express with all the means at our disposal, knowing that it will come out in fragments. Poems are fragmentary in the same way that Heraclitus is the best kind of notes in a bottle. Floating imperviously across time, they are constantly rediscovered, inviting each reader to make them hers.

When I consider the totality of what I personally lived through, there are things that are worth setting out. Some of it has to be transmuted, and there are aspects of life that elude all direct attempts to capture them meaningfully. Painting and poetry come closest.

They're closely related, in my view, although I’m thinking of particular forms of them.

(From Common Place No. 12, Spring 2019. The photo is from our Easter 2019 dinner.)

Diverse Theses

“In making a selection from the infinite flux of what has been, we give it a shape, and all shapes suggest some primitive species of starting point and imply some vaguely adumbrated end.”—Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination (Oxford, 2019), quoted by Jack Ingram in “Backwards,” TLS, 28 June 2019, p. 24.

1. Possible evidence for other worlds In correspondence with a friend, I mentioned applying quantum theory to life, how what we try to grasp eludes us and how so much that seems solid proves not to be. This could be mere contingency and not the physicist’s conjuring act or the cat in Schrödinger’s box, reminiscent of a Zen koan, neither cat particularly lucky. But let’s go with it, extending quantum theory to love with its time-bound, evaporating truths.

I read, vaguely apropos of this, an introduction to some short stories about women by Robert Musil, praised for his writing on love. It isn’t easy to write about. I wrote a letter to the aforementioned friend that accurately recounted an experience, then I wondered later how it would be received. A film arises when I think of the event, but it’s not a film I could exactly make. A given afternoon is a series of incidents that string together as a whole—my correspondent made this point, how things have a beginning and an end. She was thinking of a relationship’s trajectory, as opposed to a relationship playing out over several hours. Yet this too is a whole, especially in memory: I remember it whole.

I read belatedly of the death of a woman friend. Our college friendship was derailed by my inability to make love to her when she wanted me. It took me a long time to get past this block with women, desire inhibited by inexperience. In a truly crazy gesture, she arranged for me to lose my virginity to her mentally unstable friend. I liked the woman, but the experience was horrid and it seemed to unhinge my classmate, also. Before this, though, we spent time driving around St. Louis in her aunt’s old Pontiac. We went to the Bellefontaine Cemetery, which has some remarkable Victorian tomb statuary, and out into the country. I found her an easy companion, and these travels were memorable.

My friend died in 2007 at the age of 59, I read. Her survivors didn’t provide a cause.

Unlike me, she stayed on in St. Louis, although her father made speedboats in Florida.

When I noted her death on social media, a colleague wrote that he’d worked with her and found her a helpful mentor. Her given name was from the Greek, she told me: “Bearer of Victory.” I used to pronounce every vowel when I said it. She was taller than me, with long blonde hair. She had the money to buy Marimekko fabric by the bolt when we were in Manhattan together. On that occasion, when I suggested that we share a bed, she said, “What’s the point?” So, I slept on the floor. Yet I really did enjoy her friendship.

Last night, writing about her, I was reminded of a trip I made in college to visit my sister at New Year’s. She had a guest, a woman around 30 who said she preferred women to men. At one point we danced slow and I got a hard on, which made her laugh. This was a new and singular experience for me. She'd taken herself out of contention, relieving me of any inner pressure to perform. My response to her was pure inclination.

In an interview, the poet Robert Duncan used the term “male lesbian.” I'd define it as a man who’s attracted to women because he identifies with them. Masculine and feminine aspects are fluidly present for me. My weight and body shape fluctuated growing up. I was initially quite tiny and then ballooned in grade school and into high school, and then lost weight. The I Ching argues that these traits are complements, Receptivity and Creativity, each with its contingent moments of ascendancy. That seems true.

A good friend noted to me that he knew early on that he was homosexual. Even as a boy, I saw sexuality as playfulness, and my initial hesitation with women was to fail to see that lovemaking was improvisational for them, too, a game played with the senses. As a boy, I played such games with other boys, but girls would have been better. I was in love with several, one deeply enough to be stung when we quarreled. But I had a close friend, Paul, who caused me heartache when he moved away. I was angry in a way that scared and embarrassed me, so that when he came back later to visit, I couldn’t bring myself to meet him. I still regret this, because he was a good friend. Youth is fraught because we don’t know what we don’t know and are caught out by our actions. They are inexplicable to us, yet they remain as blotches on our life’s fabric when time has faded so much else.

Duncan bemoaned the loss of conviviality, the desire for others without the need to have sex with them, therefore avoiding the coercive element that the conflating of sex and love brings into play. He saw marriage as an alternative to breaking off a close relationship.

And marriage is where it needs to go to continue. The stress of trying to ignore this trajectory should not be underestimated. Goethe understood this and warned against it, but I'd hoped he wasn’t right. Experience has made me a convert to conviviality.

Many things are in play when an offer is put on the table. Desire is one factor among others. If the partners have shared issues to resolve, this may be the point, but it's only revealed in retrospect and at different paces. Much else happens that becomes indelible.

Close friendships can have aspects of this, and it may be that age and the falling away of benighted past experience free the friends to have a deeper intimacy. One or the other may see the limits of destiny—how even something uncanny at the start is not enough.

Fragments of our past surface inevitably and inconveniently in the present. A range of feelings attaches to love’s talismans and places—everything from guilt to longing. As we live it—testing life’s limits, trying and failing to do no harm—we seem to be repeating old mistakes, but mostly we’re facing new situations and applying the wrong lessons to them.

2. Space-time disturbances “Something uncanny” can be a bona fide of authentication. Such markers of connection may speak to long-held expectations, but they come with no instructions. A psychic friend told me, in reference to my wife and daughter, how long those connections stretch back.

No instructions, so we do our best and with conviction, since we saw what we saw. Yet everything gets frayed as the missteps multiply. Is it really the “whole” my correspondent mentioned, bounded by a start and a finish? It seems to be and yet what about destiny?

For some time, I’ve been awakened by vivid dreams of executions that play out with great realism and diversity. Why am I having these dreams? My first thought was past lives, but their variety argues against this. Then I remembered an article I read about the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku—how certain survivors of that disaster were plagued by dreams in which the dead recounted their horrific experiences. What was happening was that some survivors were, unwittingly, mediums for spirits who needed to tell their stories because they were caught up in their experience and unable to get past it.

This may explain what’s happening—that I'm an inadvertent medium these executed dead seek out to share their stories and get free of them. I imagine a spirit world in which I’m a portal they find and pass through on their way, finally, somewhere else. Unlike the Tohoku survivors, I’m not overwhelmed, but the experiences can be realistic enough that I find them disturbing. Having a working theory about their origins makes them less so.

3. Reflections on writing In an essay about writing, Natalia Ginzburg notes the shifting emotions that arise, how the act of writing can be pleasurable, necessary, and hard going. Her point is the necessity of writing and how life can interfere with that, put it out of reach despite our desire. She made her living as a book editor. She published novels and books of essays, finding an audience, but—unlike Trollope and his mother—was never financially independent. The money her books produced was extra. I also made my living as an editor, and my own writing is a vocation, to use Ginzburg’s word, “something I do.”

A vocation is a summoning or a calling. “Inner necessity” might be another way to define it, but without the compulsion that necessity seems to imply. Writers on writing often describe it as a practice, but “something I do” is truer for me. I did it for money, out of friendship, and entirely of my own volition. The first shifted from writing to editing, and I made a good living as an editor. The second are several close collaborations. The third is everything I write for myself. I started Common Place in 2008, a personal journal modeled on David Diderot, who passed manuscripts around to his friends, and Virginia Wolff, who started a press to publish her own work directly and exactly as she wanted.

I’m not much good with longer pieces, although I can generate sets of shorter ones. I give them titles and even imagine they have themes, but if anything ties them together, it’s the season of their writing. The last one spanned a year, interrupted by a comment my daughter made that I had to digest, so two seasons, perhaps, distinct yet related.

Letters, poems, and prose pieces lend themselves to their subject matter, as they differ as vehicles of self-expression. My letters to friends are discursive and informal. Short pieces are more pointed, if polemical; or sidestep digression by spreading it out. Poems have a scrim of varying porosity. Only poems can say certain things, as—unlike prose— they can touch on life without having to explain it.

4. Narcissism’s taxonomy A correspondent described how psychology parses narcissism. She located her field between neuroscience and philosophy—an interesting placement. For me, narcissism has two categories, ordinary and toxic. The first, which takes in solipsism and self-regard, is wrapped up in ego, and sometimes harmful to self and others. The second overlaps it.

There’s a border area between the two, and then it grows more toxic and dangerous.

I took a semester of abnormal psychology. The male professor said that knitting was sublimated masturbation. He may have been joking. When I studied it, it was clear to me that parts of it applied to me in some fashion, so what exactly was this “normal”?

Donald Winnicott, the child psychologist. posited that a toddler is pure being and the hard knocks dealt by life—gravity and other inescapable limits—lead the ego to form as a protective layer. Wilhelm Reich called it character armor, which for adults becomes a hindrance. A.H. Almaas, a follower of Winnicott, observes that because love immerses us accidentally in moments of being, if a lover breaks it off, it’s like being forced to quit an intoxicant. We try obsessively to recover what we lost instead of letting ourselves “be.”

The Zen philosopher Dōgen Eihei argued that these moments of being are transient states like any other, so awareness is really recognition. Recovering from narcissistic grief requires us to recognize ego and being when they surface. Imperfectly and tentatively, this makes us more willing to let life unfold and less prone to cast blame angrily or to feel hurt, humiliated, or spurned. Narcissism makes too much of us and too little. Delusively, we puff ourselves up and beat ourselves up. Toxic narcissism dials this way up. Ordinary narcissism is more readily seen through, despite the pain involved. We can recover.

There's a point at which their sheer accumulation overwhelms that possibility. Toxic narcissism is most of all about control, organizing life so your whims are its only focus. As long as you can keep that game going, controlling it as its epicenter, anything goes. It ranges from there into the territory of true monsters. God help you if you encounter one.

5. Friendship between women and men, unfolding A friend translated a Chinese saying as “Fated to meet but not to stay together.” She wrote it out as calligraphy and gave it to me as a gift. We both have some experience with this, I said, mentioning La Rochefoucauld. What makes for a close friendship, I asked, and why, between men and women, are they so fraught? Attraction, affection, and desire overlap, and we encounter each other “out of order" and yet sometimes feel the hand of destiny. What do we do with it when we sense it?

We see how destiny is triggered by intuitions. We construct narratives around these events and constantly rework them in light of experience. While life is a series of wholes, episodes with beginnings and ends, as a Melbourne friend asserts, the important human connections persist even after death. (Stendhal made a theme of this.) Another correspondent applied this idea to human history, arguing that the collapse of a political system and its collective dream of progress is never final. When we look back, Walter Benjamin wrote, we find emissaries from the present alive in earlier periods. It follows that emissaries from the future are also vying for significance in our here and now.

To the extent that we learn things from each period, life may progress dialectically, but this imposes a narrative that we may “make true” by artful revision. My calligrapher friend, an historian, shares my view that “narrative” is a valid term when it comes to describing life, but many people appear to live without much sense of it having a narrative at all.

Close friendships between women and men need an asynchronous open-endedness to thrive. You vow not to possess and yet honor your unfolding connection. You share an acceptance and empathy leavened by affection, and appreciate the freedom from love’s complications. Marriage too can move toward friendship, a rediscovery. If love’s hazard is heartbreak, close friendships between women and men consciously seek to forestall it.

Heartbreak puts you out of sync with life. Only when you can swim again in time do you recover. “The glittering sea,” as a translator of Horace’s Odes put it: the half-drowned sailor drying his clothes in a temple plans another journey. Bon voyage, I say to him.

6. Profiles of inference Writing “my past and thoughts,” as Alexander Herzen put it, makes an oral history feel superfluous. But the presence of interlocutors may prompt thoughts that may not surface in self-reflection. It’s also more spontaneous than a written text. For real spontaneity, though, consider the profiles we create inadvertently as our online transactions are tracked as data points and analyzed. Amazon provides a version of this when it offers us related goods, sometimes prompted by an immediate purchase, but also gathered as “things you might like.” Ads on social media respond to the edge conditions of these forays, but are also calculated bets that our demographic might go for something like this.

Ubiquitous surveillance constructs profiles based on tracked data and then uses them for social control by turning privileges on or off. It’s still possible to avoid this but you have to work at it and financial institutions can hold the lack of data against you. What’s oppressive about these regimes is the algorithmic certainty of their cause and effect.

“Nothing is hidden,” Dōgen Eihei remarked. It seems true—every last thing will surface in time, so it’s tempting to reveal it yourself. The liberating move of living openly is better than late-in-life confessions, but both can still make you look silly. Will anyone care?

The Stasi investigator in The Lives of Others focused on figures of cultural importance, even celebrity; ordinary people were left to their neighbors to denounce. Surveillance is like block wardens on a mass scale, but the sheer numbers involved, even with AI doing the sorting, means triage. And workarounds emerge, of course, when the algorithm keeps people from buying something like a train ticket. For a price, scalpers stand ready to help.

If I write openly about my life, it’s because we're presented with a binary world, but soon realize that people who see it this way are deluded. I try to make sense of a life that never entirely makes sense, and will never align with how convention wants to construct it. One of life’s dilemmas is that we have to live with these conventions. If we choose to live as privately as possible, it’s to put some distance from them. Yet this may be an era when it’s better to go public with our nonconformance so we can quickly find our cohort and our cohort’s cohort, parading our idiosyncrasies in a spirit of solidarity.

(The original of this edited version appeared in Common Place No. 13, Summer 2019.)

Rites & Writs: A Miscellany

Bowl by Masayuki Miyajima Writs are instruments of authority; rites are petitions we make to the gods, acts of propitiation: two aspects of the same impulse. This was originally titled “Rites & Privileges,” because writs are a form of privileged speech. They narrow privilege down, even as they empower it. Rites and writs are paired when privileged speech relies on the weight of tradition. China's Chairman Xi turned to Confucius, demigod of stasis. His rule is one-sided, its writs out of sync with the times and tone deaf; its rites empty. It’s less clear how our rites and writs pair—the majesty of the law is tarnished by politics, and patriotism rarely feels genuine. Tweets trail the mighty, sometimes to their undoing, Male authority was delegated in matriarchies. Usurpers kept the outward signs of the queen’s power, originally lent them. Earlier, the kings were sacrificed to ensure a good harvest. I started a story that's set in a matriarchy. Matriarchs chose close male relatives, not husbands or lovers, to lead battles. They married boys who they promptly divorced, then took lovers, including commoners and foreigners. I set my story in the 2600s, believing that a matriarchy might exist by then, but I keep moving the date closer.

People maintain the standards of their set—habitual, unquestioned behaviors overlaid by the variants acquired along the way. Novelists and filmmakers sum us up as a gallery of these tics. Gathered, given bodily form, a voice and agency, these characters cross apparently normal territory like aliens or monsters. In a novel, we can inhabit them, but in films and in life, we can only infer their inner worlds. Our self-knowledge is inexact and our inference is guesswork. We’re rarely outside ourselves, in reality. The divide may be nominal, even illusory, but it holds. At night, we lock the doors and close the blinds. Only love is licensed to defy convention, as young children do. We slip our leashes.

Life is like the children’s story in which a man applies the lesson of what just happened to the next event. (This reflects probability: whether events are dependent or independent.)

At the end of the story, he walks through a town carrying a donkey, the sight of which makes a deeply depressed princess laugh out loud. The man's reward is the princess's

hand in marriage, as her father the king had vowed. Life is one thing after another, we know, yet he gets the girl and half the kingdom. (Half of success is due to luck, I read.)

A life based on intuition is freighted with destiny. The term “successive approximations” is germane, because intuition is notoriously inexact. When you look back, you see more precisely where and why you went wrong. Others are there for their own reasons, their own destinies equally in play. Blame attaches to this if expectations are inadvertently raised and unfulfilled. These encounters can be unhinging.

Destiny is an inner necessity to act on what you intuited and make as much sense as you can of the sequence as it unfolds. Who is this other? You abandon your expectations only to find that they're here again, but you've changed in ways that seem intended. The feelings that arise make their current claims. They’re fragments of what was true between you—like love, which lives in moments and is oblivious to larger questions until they impinge too much. Let's give love its due: it lives on as memory and bits and pieces of expression, but is practically, laughably nothing. At certain points, we can’t do without it.

When love is uncoerced, then attaching blame to an unhappy denouement is unfair.

Nothing is more human, because unhappiness is injurious and wipes out the memory of happiness for some. Perhaps it renders love false in their view. “How could it not be, as I was left injured?” So, the whole episode is fed to the fire and the other put out of mind.

I’m not capable of this. If I loved another, I can’t extinguish love altogether, even as I see that it has no real standing here and now. Distance and estrangement take a toll, but memory comes alive in me when invoked. There are occasional glimpses of connection.

A friend raised the topic of human limits, prompting me to write a poem in reply. Off and on, what she wrote comes back to me. In mid-November 2019, I traveled to Melbourne and Singapore. While there, I saw several friends, including two I only knew through social media and correspondence. Correspondence is as a good a way to connect one mind to another as conversation is, although the connections it establishes are different.

When I first met the friend in Melbourne, I felt that difference, but then we met again the next day, first looking at a part of the city I would never have seen otherwise, and then joining up with a friend of hers to walk some more and have dinner at an Italian restaurant we chose by successive intuitions, hers and mine. Conversation at dinner broke the ice, and one reason for this was the presence of a third party who brought us both out of ourselves. In Singapore, another friend organized an excursion that also took me to new places. We’d only corresponded about poetry, so our conversation was focused on our backstories—topics we hadn’t touched on. These friends are sympathetic, I would say—a quality we intuited that's revealed as much by time as proximity.

I was 11 or 12 when the USSR and the USA exchanged expos. I visited the USSR’s at the Coliseum in Manhattan. The catalogue smelled of pine tar. A few years later, as part of an exchange program, we invited a professor of philosophy from Moscow, visiting Columbia University. He came to our house twice, each time accompanied bya minder, Ludmilla.

He told me his father had been a biologist, and that he’d chosen philosophy because it was safer. When we gave them a tour by car, Ludmilla commented about whatever we showed them that they had better examples in the Soviet Union.

The Berlin Crisis took place when my father and I were camping in Superior National Forest in Canada. On my little radio, we heard President Kennedy address the nation on the dangers of the situation. “Will the Russians bomb New York?” I asked. It was always

assumed to be the number one target. “No,” my father said. This continued until it finally didn’t. We were episodically sure we were about to go to war—a form of war unlike any other. Fallout drifted across the country, and we worried about that, too.

The Vietnam War, which Kennedy involved us in and Johnson escalated, marked a transition back to plain old warfare, napalm and Agent Orange substituting for nuclear winter. The marches on Washington led to Johnson’s resignation and Nixon’s ascendancy. He and Henry Kissinger weaseled out of a war we weren’t winning.

Brezhnev took over in the Soviet Union. Competition became more economic and warfare devolved to regional and local conflicts with an overlay of vastly expensive deterrence. It came down to missiles on trains. Then Gorbachev and Reagan negotiated what we imagined was the endgame.

It may not matter how an era ends—what counts is what follows, how the underpinnings of things give way and something else emerges that’s both better and worse that what it replaced. People look back at the Austro-Hungarian Empire now with a certain admiration. Like Yugoslavia, arguably its successor, it convinced a contentious citizenry to cohere and live productively rather than squander it pursuing old quarrels.

We oscillate between eras of concord and divisiveness. Some long for a concord that’s more narrowly drawn, despite the strife this creates, or for an end to strife at whatever cost. My life traces this arc: the end of Empire, America's ascendancy and slow eclipse, and the emergence of other would-be hegemons.

“No bourgeoisie, no democracy,” I read. It may be true. I read that 1848 was a “failed bourgeois revolution.” I hadn’t thought of it as such, but then Marx extolled the bourgeoisie for overthrowing the monarchy and in Central Europe they had to do it again. The bourgeoisie value culture, individuality, private life, and commerce.

The third estate, they're in trades and professions. These are hereditary more than is acknowledged, the families evolving within narrow bands. Individuals break out, but the DNA dogs the line. Trained as an architect, I became an editor and publisher—the family professions. We propitiate our forefathers and gravitate toward what comes naturally to us. Things follow like marriages, houses, children who fill them and depart, furniture and furnishings set off by art, a style that defines us to ourselves, working its way back in time and referencing distant memories of places we visited. We want it to be like this.

The progress others proclaim is an imposition on me of things they really just want for themselves. Appropriating this from me rather than working for it is quite often the demand on the table. But real progress isn't a zero sum, theirs or mine; it's betterment in a public-realm sense: supporting public goods and services that are communally shared to create a greater sum. Parochialism just allows neoliberals to divide and conquer us.

Our lives are subject to replay if not instantaneous tracking. If 15 years ago a husband could break into his wife's email, now he could attach things to her car or just track her mobile phone or watch. Trust is the cover story for these untoward acts, with its call for a near-obligatory, not always mutual acquiescence. The demand for confessions is similar.

If tradition has any bearing on behavior, it's either at the very start, steeling you to resist what you desire, knowing that it's doomed, or much later, when you’re drifting in the wreckage and it suggests a likely port. Tradition can stop you from plunging in, but only if you're armed with experience—your own or a cautionary tale you witnessed.

Anything untoward remains on my conscience, a source of regret. Jesus got it right when he asked the crowd who was without sin. It's enough to live with our regrets, he implies.

Winter is the earth’s necessity. In the midst of it, a small bird landed on the deck's trellis, taking stock of the situation. Safe from cats, it's a vantage point to survey the garden and surrounding yards with their beds, grass, bushes, trees—sources of whatever it is it eats.

Early spring arrives in winter. Things revive and bloom. Gradually my expanse of space and time enlarges, blossoms marking the path with color and the sound of bees. In Tokyo, it snowed on spring's first day. We went out for dinner because my friend’s house was unheated to save money. Heat in winter reflects a bourgeois life. His was tenuous.

Berkeley was at one point a place for San Franciscans to get away from its dreadful summer. Some old houses are shacks, and others are barely insulated. The fog in July and August in San Francisco means that the heat of midday is followed by a 30-minute plunge of 15 or 20 degrees. My house is directly in the fog's path, pushed through the Gate.

We fall in love and commit to another, even if our commitment falls short or we find ourselves deserted because another’s fell short. Love is the main game in life. Blame can attach to it, because love is prone to transgress and ignore fundamental rules. It would be better to absolve everyone so they can get on with their lives. Love has its own integrity.

Love is total. This is its truth. You have to take it on and live it out or it’s not really love.

This is not to say that love is unconditional, but that it demands commitment and “right action.” When a young couple marries, there’s often an effort made by the officiant to look beyond immediate infatuation to depict the realities of what may lie ahead. The language of the Christian ceremony, for instance, reflects this, stressing life’s vicissitudes.

Looking back, it’s obvious that my marriage took precedence. I was bereft when I started out. Poems and novels chart this journey and identify its shoals, but I didn't read them.

Marriage is an on-the-job kind of thing. About six weeks into it, you hit snow on the path and remember that your jacket and sunglasses are back in the car. This continues.

Nothing is as you expected—the lows are often much worse, the highs often totally different than what you expected. Nothing prepares you, for example, for a first child’s birth. The path can be irrevocably altered if someone leaves it, falls off, arrives hobbling.

Nothing is for sure. Yet marriage has its rhythm of days and nights, of work, school, and domesticity. It has its tasks. Its sameness can mask its oddity and pain or make them bearable. It can make its joys seem so ordinary they escape our notice.

Love is crucial to marriage—perhaps the most crucial thing. It's bound up with desire and its sexual expression, but is independent of both things. When we say, “love dies,” what has died is desire for the other as a lover. This forces us to acknowledge the other as “beloved” and, by implication, as our companion in life. It means being attentive to the other. If love falters, it starts with neglect, distraction, reflexive self-assertion—anything that comes between you and your beloved. On the train platform, I saw a couple waiting for a train, he reading his paperback, she trying to get is attention, to engage with him.

What he conveyed was that it was his choice to engage or not. When he chooses to engage, she’d better be there for him. Imagine how he’ll feel when she’s not.

In a dream, I was sentenced to death. The woman who announced this is a human resources person in real life, and she put it as nicely as possible, the way people in that

profession do. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” I pointed out. “Can I apply for a pardon?” No, she said, and her no was conveyed by a look of surprise that I would even ask.

I woke up, realizing that the dream was about life’s innate and unavoidable hazard. I recounted the dream later to a friend, noting how the tech elite approach death like Egyptian pharaohs. First it was cryogenics, but now the fad is to upload your brain to the cloud, as if this were possible. Cloning must also figure, but it shares the same drawback that the successor is something or someone else. The appeal of an immortal soul is its persistence across time, retaining just enough to intuit things in the current life.

Swedenborg wrote that souls are the offspring of married couples in Heaven. “We arrive intact,” he said, and so of course all aspects of our humanity continue. The good grow younger there, whereas those who embrace evil are revealed as their real selves—there’s no dissembling in the afterlife. But as a dispensation, they don’t see each other as such.

Do the evildoers also have offspring? I don’t remember Swedenborg touching on this. He wrote that couples find their intended in Heaven, correcting for the errors of their earthly lives. In Conjugal Love, he argued that adultery is morally justified if the marriage is loveless. Swedenborg believed that relatively few people are actually good; most are selfserving and deluded. In the afterlife, the Lord is merciful, condemning no one and aiding all comers, but people seek out what they love. Hell, he wrote, is a conscious choice.

I could write a novel of fragments. I may be writing it now. Some autobiographers call their works novels. A life provides a handy plot, but mine is as discursive as my writing, A greater sum larger is a possible aim in life, but each part of a life is a microcosm of it. We think of death as ending a narrative, but then there's Walter Benjamin’s idea of reception.

Some poets write first thing. Others hold out as long as possible. Joanne Kyger said she she might get around to writing something late in the day, although her wonderful Japan and India Journals suggests devotedness, which may be more useful than timing. Waking from a nap earlier, I looked at the top shelf of the bookcase, which has several impressive sets of books that I bought intending to educate myself on their topics. Will it happen? I tend to read in sections whenever possible. This seems to relate to my ability to hold on to what I read or, alternatively, to savor it. Since leaving school, I mostly refuse to read at the mandatory school pace. Some writers feel similarly driven. A few days ago, I saw a quote from someone that writers should be focused on their masterpieces. How would they know, I wondered? Writers should just write in whatever way works for them.

Postmodernism and new urbanism sought to get past modernism. The postmodernists were grandiose and funny; the new urbanists, true believers, were never funny, and their work was often simplistic and sterile. The postmodernists drew on art, while the new urbanists drew on kitsch and twee, but without its vernacular spontaneity. Modern architecture rolled on, despite the efforts of academics to declare it an historic category.

Every aspect of modern persists—minimal to maximal, industrially form-begetting to banal—at the behest of its hegemonic backers. We live as if in a catalogue of forms, and anything that deviates is a target now for urban activists and their enablers.

A remnant of 1950s Tokyo Christopher Alexander strikes me as a polemicist whose elaborate rules and theories rest on a single criterion for goodness and an unerring eye for beauty and urbanity. “Does this have life?” he asks, and he knows it when he sees it, which is not the same as being able to produce it. The appeal of tradition for him is that the beauty and urbanity it produces emerges from everyday variations on widely understood patterns and from the actions of ordinary people in dialogue, living communally in an organized, well-understood place.

The heart of urbanity is a variation that reflects small, telling differences traceable to the variety of their owners, builders, and residents. Neighborhoods make urbanity possible by setting the stage for it, especially in terms of scale and interaction with the street.

Inner-city Melbourne shows how porosity makes for urbanity. The side streets are subdivided into even smaller alleys and arcades, all lined with cafés, restaurants, and shops that are open from morning to late afternoon. A few stay open into the evening, so people out walking can find a bar or a restaurant. Trams circle the area and are free. One maddening thing about Singapore, despite its excellent transit and overall walkability, is the lack of obvious passages through walls of buildings. Often there turns out to be a way through, but it’s far from obvious to a stranger.

(From Common Place No. 17, Winter 2017, but reordered to some extent.)

Love and Marriage

Part I: Summer

E benedetto il primo dolce affanno Ch'i' ebbi ad esser con Amor congiunto, E l'arco e la saette ond' i' fui punto, E le piaghe, ch'infino al cor mi vanno.

— Francesco Petrarca The Solstice Damn! Magnus lit a cigar and looked out at the water. Smoke rising, the sun warm for once, children running and yelling, but his eyes were on the ferry. Two rings of smoke— nothing to do but wait— and then a sigh. Hot suddenly and what was all that noise? The whole day had been like this, and now half an hour before the next boat. He leaned against a wall, feeling its heat on his back. Fingering the cigar, looking across the pier, how many summers was it now that he’d headed out there, supper at four, Charlotte in her country attire and him still in his city clothes?

Nothing to do, no runner to cross the fjord like Jesus to tell Charlotte he missed the damn boat. He pulled at the cigar, shifted his back, finally looked for a place to sit, the boat off in the distance now, smoking too. A beer, he thought, or tea, the manuscript. I could give myself a headache, reading it in the sun. Squinting, he leaned against the wall again. Another sigh, two or three more rings, wafting, growing larger. Two children stopped to look. Magnus obliged them with another. “I missed the boat and now I have to stand here and blow rings until the next one comes.” A hell. Oda would like that, an eternity at the pier while small demons surround him demanding rings.

Somewhere out there, one boat was passing another. Young men, probably, were on their way in, while he was trying to abandon the city, his work finished, or parts of

it, the rest stuffed in his satchel. A week, a rare week during which the sun would hardly set and he would sit out on the lawn and read close to midnight, a cigar lit to hold off the nits.

The devil, Oda more or less told him. He pulled on the cigar and let the smoke curl up from his mouth. Well, yes and no. At dinner, she’d cut him off in midsentence. Would it be like this on the Styx—two or three millennia of his anecdotes cut short? More smoke, like a horse in winter. Her anger seemed to bring her to life, but not as she’d been—mouth open, that half-angered look, or was it bliss, up above him, her long hair falling around her head? Or that look of ice she gave him on the road? Everyone adores her, and so had he.

Like layers of the earth with fragments of himself scattered through it, bones with no marrow, and yet he was standing here again—he, Magnus, with his cigar between his fingers—another summer, the ferry slowly coming into view that would take him to Charlotte in her summer clothes, to Charlotte in her element—the garden, her children and her children's children. Still standing, he thought, the green light that Greta said she saw pouring out of him like a lantern—Greta with her sixth sight.

He ground the cigar out in the wall. He could see the other boat off in the distance, with its varnished seats, its smells of food, coal, and human bodies, overdressed and ready to shed it all, find each other in the summer twilight. By August, some women would be pregnant. Like Charlotte, pulling him on her, no sign of night, only the hard knot of her sex. Then in April or May, a child. Maps, books, all this got stoked up, the rest of the year spent paying for that swollen bud and the flood six weeks later when, ravenous, she would keep him up all night. Into autumn by then, in darkness, without a word or a cry from her, arms wrapped around his neck to hold him so close he could hardly breathe or move.

So, another summer, Oda angry, but his heart afloat and the ferry approaching.

Tarot might be the game. The stakes? “There are children, Magnus!” Oda had hissed. You bear down and place your bet. The cards face up and down, but no broken tower for Magnus, only the hanging man. The men falling from the tower don't look happy. There are always two, and now he knew why.

Five minutes left, Magnus guessed, lighting another cigar. People gathered— men in suits, youngsters with their mothers, the priest and his wife, who nodded at him when he caught her eye. Does she know? Will she also cut me off, my anecdote left hanging in midair? He leaned back against the wall, smoke wafting, the smell of it mixing with the summer afternoon, and winter over. ¢ The men slid the wooden walkway from the ferry to the dock and the passengers disembarked, mostly young men, dressed for an evening, but some families, too, heading in for parties, weekends in town. Standing to the side with the others, Magnus nodded to several of them—friends of his children, children of his friends.

He felt for his ticket, hauling it out. It always felt like a race, everyone heading for the same wide portal. Two ticket takers stood guarding it, their blue jackets stained with coffee and grease and God knows what.

He pushed through with all the others and found a seat. Most headed for the upper deck to enjoy the sun, so the cabin was emptier than usual. He put his hand down on the bench and looked at it against the wood. It was all like this, wood planks and strips trapped in amber like leaves or insects. His hand always looked the same, enough hair growing to his knuckles to confirm Darwin. A smell of sausage from the shop between the stairs, and he was tempted—dinner still a long way off.

Children and their mothers crowded around to buy ice and drinks, and the men to get beer to drink out in the sun. Magnus walked over. "Coffee and a sausage, please." The woman nodded, her hair knotted above her head, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up from the heat. Winter and summer, there she was, someone's sister, probably. By now, the boat was some distance out, the castle behind them. Soon they'd pass the lighthouse and, halfway there, the returning ferry, the one he'd missed. He sipped his coffee and ate the sausage, a small feast of salty juice.

Several weeks since Charlotte had quit the town for the summer house. On Saturdays, he left his office at midday and took the boat over there, but today he'd lingered. Company, Charlotte had written. I dread it, he told Kat when he saw her at the park. I dread it, but then I end up having a good time. In his satchel, the afternoon paper, still folded up, a book, manuscripts to be read and acted on, and her letter, handed to him, which he'd sat and read before walking to the boat. His heart would race, going to meet her, so he paused to calm down. She’d given him her conspiratorial look and a quick, almost furtive kiss. Her letters rehearsed her days in all their texture, so that he could feel how they were or would be. He thought how her eyes would sometimes catch his as they walked, her expression warming.

In the spring and summer, Kristiana had its beauty, even its modest glamour.

They’d walk near the castle, into a new district with its cafes, aquavit, smoked salmon, the oysters Kat ate by the half dozen, those times they ventured there. He loved the proportions of the buildings and their spare elegance. Modern, he told her, the rage in cities to the south. Everything will change. Its harbingers were in the theaters and galleries. The frankness of the times will tear away the gilding and free the women to live as they please.

Magnus rose and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. The point and pier were visible, and, distant, the entry to a favorite sailing haunt, with its cottages and summer inns. He longed to take Kat there, a proposal that always drew a sardonic, indulgent smile. Men and women alike had shed their clothes, the sun being generous. The rich chased after it in winter, to Sorrento or the Canaries, but the rest stayed and slogged along, a few hours of sunlight at the solstice, and now it was all reversed, with just a bare hint of night.

He wrapped his hands around the varnished railing and looked out the water.

Sailboats dotted the fjord, along with a steamer headed in to port. Closer in, there would be double-enders and children fishing. He cupped his hands and lit a cigar, the smoke billowing back. Charlotte would be in the kitchen at this point, the doors and windows open, her recipe book open on the table, glanced at once, and the smells of cooking.

They had money now, but Charlotte rarely left things to her helpers. She had many, of course, here and in town, along with the children when she could get their

attention. The older ones were off, especially in the summer. The house in town was their base, but they were hardly ever there now, Magnus knew.

He drew on his cigar, listening as conversations hummed around him. Like bees, he thought. He loved the fat black ones that flew slowly through the garden.

The dog liked to chase them, occasionally suffering for it, his nose swollen like a balloon. As the city warmed up, he and Kat would sometimes sit together near the pier, talking about their day and their families. She’d reach over and take his hand, or hold his eyes. His whole world then was suffused with her, brown and radiant in the summer sun.

At a dinner in town, an argument broke out about a politician, his career eclipsed by scandal. Was he to blame for the deplorable things that followed? No, it was beside the point, Magnus argued, but he felt as he said it that he was defending himself, in reality, with Oda saying in so many words that he wasn’t far from scandal himself. Their world was so small and all of them friends. Kat was the cause.

"Anyone else I could tolerate.”

He thought how some painters left in what others left out. If they portrayed a couple, you’d see his jealousy and pain, and her loneliness and anger—or the other way around--people who spend their half their lives unwinding from each other or from themselves. You could see these lives played out in the theater.

Sometimes he and Kat sat off by themselves, hidden in markets, in cafes filled with a crush of travelers, sailors, students, hidden by such anonymity as the city afforded. Someone in the future might open a drawer to find more than one sheaf of correspondence. In the midst of conversations, that smile of hers. How often did it come to mind? Her letters could take his breath away, the ink aflame. There were bundles of letters to and from Oda, too, that year of comings and goings. A strange life he led, pushed by fate and pulled by intuition.

He thought suddenly of the small and spindly child he'd been, taking the measure of the world he'd been dropped into, every last attribute of it. A little hedonist, admittedly, but there were feuds and quarrels, friendships and crushes, liaisons that were so charged and full of risk. All this before he was 10. And the beauty, and everything alight with it—their meeting point, he knew. Some novels, poems, and paintings spoke to it, but so many were oblivious, and hostile often to those who saw it and drew attention to it.

Now the pier was clearly in view, a crowd waiting. Magnus looked for the launch that would take him to the parish dock. It was tied up, its pilot trying his luck with the fish. People roused themselves, the women’s tanned arms like Kat’s in her light dress. The world renewed: he'd said as much to Kat as she ate an oyster. ¢ The priest and his wife were ahead of him, with several others, but the launch pilot’s back was to them, his attention elsewhere. Soon they would be in earshot, and his mind would be dragged from his imagined fish. The priest cleared his throat, and Magnus could see the sound registering. The pilot reeled his line in, stood up, and faced his tormentor. The priest helped his wife aboard and then stepped on, nodding to the pilot. "No luck?" The pilot stared at him. "Maybe it's too hot," the priest

ventured. The pilot grunted and began feeding the fire. Magnus stepped on and sat down. "How is Charlotte?" the priest's wife asked him. "I've been in town these six days, so you've probably seen her more than I have. How is she?" The priest's wife laughed. "I see your grandsons, but Charlotte I haven't seen." He nodded. "Probably gardening."

The priest lit his pipe. "Two funerals this week. "Any births? Surely these things balance out." "Weddings. It's the season," the wife said. “Right. So, March before we'll see any replacements." She colored slightly. "It's like the theater," Magnus added. "People are always coming on or going off."

The launch rounded the point, forty feet or so out and parallel with the narrow shoreline along the steep hillside. Here and there, roads zigzagged down and a house or cottage jutted out. Small jetties marked these moments of settlement, with children fishing and swimming. Wood smoke and pipe smoke blotted out any other smell. He thought of Oda’s waterside cottage, Christian's easel in one room and their bed in the next.

"Charlotte has company," the priest's wife said. "Two young men and an older one with a red face." Magnus looked at her. “The older one paints barns.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t look like a worker.” The priest nodded. Magnus laughed. "Two visitors from England and a professor at the academy who paints country scenes, but likes them to be close at hand. We're handy and we have a barn. More than that, we have food, drink, and conversation, so he'll be staying for a while, I think." The priest's manner shifted. “I’d be honored to meet him." Magnus looked at him. "He’s a pantheist. Perhaps you can convert him."

A barn and a field with a horse--Magnus could see the painting. Then another came to mind, Peter in evening clothes, and in his cups. It was hard to square the one with the other, and now here they both were. Peter would be chatting Charlotte up, laying siege to her larder and his wine cabinet, but mostly he'd be out walking and sketching. He rose early, working until mid-afternoon, then eating, resting, and carousing.

Magnus admired his energy. He taught his mostly female art students by day and haunted what passed for the city’s demimonde by night. He was courteous and familiar with these women, evasive with their fathers and with men in authority. He hid behind his society face, closeted in his evening clothes, but in the countryside, he was himself amid animals and farm folk. “His pantheism is stronger in the summer,” Magnus said. “Nature brings out the worst in him.” The priest nodded, still angling for an invitation. “I won’t try to convert him.”

By now they could see the priests' dock, not far from the flat rocks where the children swam, where he sometimes went to sit and look out at the fjord, watching the skiffs and double-enders pass. He’d spent most of one summer a few years before contemplating this scene while struggling to loosen Ota’s grip on his heart.

The pilot slowed the launch down. The cart driver was out on dock, waiting for them. "The fish may bite later," Magnus told the pilot. "Maybe," he answered. His mind was still at the pier. A theory had formed, about five minutes back, that the electrical magnetism of his body might flow better if he stripped the cork off his rod.

He could lead the fish on a dance the way the fiddlers did at solstice, the girls dancing past midnight and falling for the hooks. He snagged the priest's wife's maid last

summer, so why not a fish? Picking at the cork with his thumbnail, he thought of looking for his knife, but now the jetty needed his attention. ¢ Two horses to pull the cart, one pawing the ground with a hoof as the driver fed them apples. He averted his eyes as the priest's wife shifted her skirt, then clambered up to take his seat, shaking the reins. The road from the jetty turned and angled up to meet the road that came down the hill. Straight on would take them to the rocks, past the white clapboard house with its wide lawn that looked out at them.

A swim would be nice, he thought, as the cart began its slow ascent. The hillside was thick with trees and ferns. Here and there the edge dropped away so the tips of the trees were at eye level. In early spring, the road still dark and wet, this could be an unnerving half-hour. "Charlotte wrote me a letter, Magnus,” the priest’s wife said.

She waited for him to ask about its contents, but he just nodded. "Strange you haven't seen her, but her garden takes all her attention until she is happy with it. After that, she'll be round for a visit."

"That's exactly what she wrote! You know your wife well!" This reverberated among them for a moment. "What does he say to these couples when he marries them?" he asked. The priest answered for her. “The verities—faith, hope, and charity.

The parents love it.” She nodded. “You may have an opportunity to try it on us,” Magnus said. “Our oldest son is headed for marriage.” Smiles broke out. “Such good news! But surely the wedding will be in town?” He shook his head. “The young woman loves it here. She’s a romantic like our artist friend.” The priest’s wife turned to her husband. “You’ll have to write a new piece for them!”

The priest felt his text slipping out of his grasp. He was proud of it, a theme begun at seminary and then expanded. Like funerals, weddings were a chore, especially if he had no real knowledge of the families. The couples stood there, anxious to be off, yet wanting to hear themselves named and honored. His piece did the job, even if every young person attending found it ludicrous. And he knew it by heart.

At last, the road flattened out, the church on one side and the priest's house on the other. The cart stopped and they all got out. "I'll walk from here," he said, paying the driver. "I'll talk to Charlotte about a dinner," he added. "I'm here for a week, so you'll see more of me than you can stand, probably." The wife smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I can help you rework the wedding piece,” he ventured to the priest.

Later he remembered how, after making love, he said to Charlotte that the act seemed consequential because the couple brought their ancestries, generations piled on generations, "like two colliding constellations." ¢ Magnus glanced sideways at the cemetery wall and its low gate. The long sleep of death, or is it Swedenborg’s nap and then more of the same, stripped of its illusions?

Ten years since his father died, a wall in view. You end up pressed against it, only touch to tell you where you are, crawling or laid out like a corpse, what's left of your hair grazing the footing. When your father dies, your first instinct is to bolt, but that

door has already shut behind you. Yet how life quickens from moment to moment— from your mother's swelling ears right through to that last tinge of orange! And those women! He pictured them in Heaven—Charlotte, Kat, and Oda. They'd laugh at the folly of their quarrels. Charlotte would cook and Magnus would host. Later, he’d retire to his room and Kat would join him, loosening her hair, her eyes meeting his.

The thought aroused him. That will survive death, Swedenborg assured him.

At the rise, the woods opened onto a field, an old barn at the far end of it. Like the woods, the field was his, farmed by a tenant. And there, at the edge of the road, Peter sat, painting the barn. He shifted slightly as he worked, a bucolic figure in a straw hat and a loose, long sleeved shirt. If a subject pleased him, his endurance was remarkable, but it was also penance for a winter of earnest if partial dissolution.

He crossed the road. The sun was high up, warmer here than at the dock. He shaded his eyes with his hand. "Peter!" he called out, and his friend turned, nodding in acknowledgement. Reaching him, Magnus put a hand on his shoulder and glanced at the painting. "I’ve painted for hours, only stopping to piss," he said. "Don't tell the farmer!" "It's my land, piss where you want. How do you like my barn?"

Magnus asked him. "It's a revelation. I'll dream about it all winter." ¢ Across from the field and barn was a long pathway through linden trees, the summer house’s back entry. The land had originally been part of the parish, seized and sold off in the Reformation. The land crossed the main road, taking in the woods and fields across from the old Romanesque church, now Lutheran, and its fields and jetty. The priest and his wife lived off their land, supplementing his stipend. Magnus got some cash and crops from his farmer, but the summer house and their livelihoods came from elsewhere. The house was like a ship anchored in the wood, he thought, its larder below decks, a trap door in the kitchen with a ladder, a front porch with steps up from the formal entry and a veranda out back surveying all he owned—a private joke, as Charlotte ran the house and garden, chose the yellow, gave the dinners, did everything. Only the dog was his.

Small, tawny birds flitted along the edge of the road. They made their homes in the trees and bushes, invisible except for their chirping. In town, they’d land boldly on a chair or table, demanding food. Here, there was no need. Once the children found a baby bird in the garden, covered with ants. They brought it inside, raised it in a box and then in a wicker wastebasket turned upside down. When it came of age, they taught it to fly by throwing it gently back-and-forth. Once it got the knack, it moved out to the garden, but sometimes flew through the house, greeting them. Like my grown sons, he thought, rarely seen yet also close at hand, present in brief moments, flashing their smiles, giving Charlotte a kiss. Their outside lives figured now, but the house was still a desired place in summer, and for some of their young women, also.

A week ahead to catch up. In the summer, it was harder to do this kind of work— reading and editing manuscripts. This was what set books in motion, the meetings with authors and printers, planning, exhorting—all the things a publisher did. The success of his school maps was unexpected, and he was made a Knight, with a medal and sash Charlotte made him wear to the grand social events. Her estimation of him

rose. The success of translations and books aimed at the Norwegian diaspora raised his stock still further. He never cut a flamboyant figure the way Leon did when he dazzled Charlotte and they went off together, but he began to fit the part she foresaw for him when they first married. Their life together mended and improved.

There are two poles, and he and Charlotte moved from one to the other, Greta told him. It seemed true. Other partners brought the polarities out and suppressed their native ambiguity. For Charlotte, Leon was the necessary man. Twenty years since Leon captured her heart and upended things. Older and childless, he found Charlotte irresistible. For her, it was an excursion back in time. But here was the house! Her garden hummed with bees. It was pleasure enough just to breathe it in. ¢ Charlotte looked approvingly at her garden, framed in the open doorway—layers of herbs, flowers, and vegetables that formed a square within a square, separated from the house by a terrace, and from the woods by gravel paths and hedges, "like the French," as Peter had put it. She’d nodded exuberantly, pouring him another cup of tea. His comment set her mind wandering. She pictured a conservatory at the back of the garden, its terrace extending into the woods like the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea, a gravel path to tie it to the house, and four beds to make a small park.

"Magnus will take it over," Peter laughed when she told him. "He’ll be out there working, surrounded by your orchids." She considered this. He sometimes wrote in garden, but she rarely read any of it, preferring novels to his essays and poems. For her, writing was a talent like cooking—you were born with it. It had passed through her to their second son, "a writer like his father." But then her youngest daughter was a writer, too, like Charlotte’s sister. It was a bond between her and Magnus. ¢ Out in the sun, Charlotte surveyed her beds. Informed by advice from all quarters and from her own reading and observation, the garden played out its envisioned possibilities. In the winter, the house in town and her buildings occupied her, but a piece of her was always here, picturing how it could be, what could be added or taken away. How eager she was to get here, to work on it and see it flourish.

Only certain things mattered, she felt, and the garden was one. She placed it in the genus family, along with Magnus, the children, the houses, properties, and furniture—their whole realm, much of built up through her efforts. Magnus had risen in her eyes and she had stayed with him despite the pull. She shook her head to dispel the memory. Leon was Leon, with his black eyebrows, his sardonic grin, and his unambiguous desire. Every woman needs her wolf, hunger for her visible on his face.

But how many of her friends who'd left a marriage for another found happiness? The scandal of it led many of them to live abroad. Impractical, she concluded.

Ruthless, she thought as she tore out the weeds—she’d done exactly as she liked.

Although she felt that Magnus had acted similarly, she saw the toll it took on him. So much was left unspoken between them, yet it was all there in plain sight, the souvenirs of her trips with Leon here and there in her rooms, and his diaries,

daybooks, and correspondence, the life he wrote out, there to be read, had she chosen to do so. It was not a surprise to her when Kat's man appeared one morning, waving a sheaf of letters. She recognized the small, hard-to-read script and the paper. Rein him in, Kat's man demanded. Magnus is a poet, she told him, and people get carried away. Don't take it so seriously. He looked at her incredulously. “The devil,” he said.

So, Kat was the heart of this quarrel, Kat who she liked, who also enjoyed her garden and gave her advice and books, with a husband who was the jealous god of his centrality. Did Kat want to marry Magnus? She hoped not. He was married, after all.

And now her garden was taking form, the house and grounds her canvas, the summer her chance to remake them, drawing on all the places she'd visited. It was all there to mull over, try out, see what worked. In between their separate lives was their real life, she felt, and this house and its garden made their contribution to it. It was always her sense that if you made them beautiful, everything else would follow. She said this once to Magnus, at a moment when the full weight of the affair with Leon pressed on their marriage, and it seemed incongruous to her as she said it. Yet it was true: their marriage was bound up in these two places and their family. Her love for Magnus was part and parcel of her love of them, an indissoluble whole. ¢ Magnus was still in his dream when he awoke, the clothes in his closet and the books on his shelves swaying as if a hidden current ran through the room. He struggled to hold on to it, then the room became itself again. He could hear Charlotte talking to herself, among other sounds in the garden. He thought of Peter’s small, efficient brushstrokes as the barn took shape on his canvas, every nuance set down.

Magnus was with Peter when he met Kat, standing on a train platform. They were returning from a lecture. Away, visiting a son, he realized how much he desired her. In his mind, his heart had several chambers. Charlotte had staked her claim early, but others might be admitted. Oda came and went, not without considerable pain, but Kat seemed to have a place there already, as if he’d long expected her.

No such intuition preceded Oda’s announcement of her love. He watched his desire for her uncoil, wondering if Charlotte saw Leon similarly, as a pure type demanding its opposite. Later, incensed, Oda took their time together and threw it in his face. “So soothing,” she mocked. He was reminded how the cremated dead end up as ashes in pots, all their beauty and substance burned away. And which version was true? Perhaps both. Even ashes have value, Charlotte reminded him. We arrive with our inheritance: writing from his father, intuition and devotion from both parents, his love of women from his mother's father. And a compass of a kind to cross the ravines and deserts of midlife, bleak and yet sometimes as radiant as Charlotte in her garden or Kat's face in the setting sun. Is this destiny or just happenstance?

A wedding set-piece came to him: “Life unfolds. You follow the rules until they diverge from life, really diverge, and you understand that it’s just you and your compass. Meanwhile there are children to raise and work to do. What's real persists and what isn't falls away. Life answers so many questions, and you learn to wait and trust your own ways of knowing. Marriage has primacy because so much orbits around it, but how we honor it can’t be prescribed. This is the one truly private thing,

about which no one else can venture an opinion, although of course everyone will.

Ignore them. Now kiss, enjoy the party, go forth and multiply. It will be fine. You're not the first.” I should pass this along the priest, he thought. Enough of his verities. ¢ Supper was in the air, and he roused himself. He saw someone setting the table in the garden, and heard Peter's soft voice, talking with a younger man with dark hair.

Their conversation was in English, so likely one of the expected friends of the son who'd studied there. He brushed his hair, then went downstairs to hear Charlotte in the kitchen talking with the other of the pair, voluble and high-strung.

Light poured in through the windows. He made his way to the garden where Peter sat enraptured by this young and handsome visitor. "Mr. Grant," he said to Magnus. Grant nodded. "Gunnar met us, but he went back into town. Something about a girl." On the table was Peter's open sketchbook. "He’s painting my barn."

Magnus said. " Oh, but in my haste, I forgot the essentials!" He went back into the house, this time to the kitchen where he found the other young man in conversation with Charlotte. Introducing himself, he fetched wine and cigars. Looking out at Charlotte's garden as he descended, he thought how methodically she gave it form.

Writing wasn’t like this. The barest hint of an idea floated in, prompting him to add more and more, with no apparent thread. Yet it would gradually emerge, tying one idea to another. It always amazed him when the piece finally took shape.

Charlotte only expressed satisfaction or dissatisfaction with her garden, never amazement. How she cooked was closer to how he wrote: children and servants scrambled to obtain missing items as the meal emerged, delicious. Like her garden, it displayed her mind's perfect serenity. Magnus's several desks were always in order, but whatever he was writing reflected his outwardly calm, inwardly chaotic nature.

He set the bottle on the table and stepped back to light a cigar. "I'll have one later," Peter said. "So, Grant, what's new in England? Surely a new era is upon you."

Grant nodded. "Yes, and our fathers won’t get over it." It was like a door opening on to a new world, he felt, and the university was its antechamber. Here he was, off at this summer house with a classmate who loved him. How could he stanch the wound he was about to make? Sketching had reduced his friend to gloves and shoes. ¢ Magnus surveyed the table, with its plates and platters, crystal and silver, and linen--a heaping up of things that played off the simplicity of the house, which was modest by the standards of the times, and made of wood as against stone or brick. The painted walls, with their portraits and landscapes, the flowers on the credenza, the old brass sconces with their candles—they were part of this place, bathed now in summer's light. The others made their way to the table. Magnus poured the wine, then sat down at one end, with Charlotte at the other. He remembered suddenly how she'd passed him, her hair tied up, talking softly to herself, and then gave him a meaningful look. It was on the eve of her long trip, a student adventuress in southern Europe.

Soon after her return, they married. "How are his children?" he asked his visitors.

One of his English authors had died of cancer a few years ago. "They're selling the house," Grant’s friend said. "Gerald's trying to find husbands for the girls."

Magnus thought of the father's long, morose face. Beauty descended through the women. “I wouldn’t think they’d lack for suitors,” he said. "They shun society," the friend said. Charlotte thought of their overbearing father. "They're lucky they can resist that pressure." Lucky too that their parents were dead. The mother was just as impossible, she thought, pandering to that tyrant while sacrificing herself to the poor.

Grant thought of his father, the General, ex-India, and the family's expectation he would follow in his footsteps—a commission, colonial duties. Quite a row when he'd announced his plan to study art at the Slade, but old Watts rescued him, praising his talent. Nessa referred to this ironically whenever she encountered him in the studio.

"They bought a townhouse and are living on their own," Grant said. Charlotte nodded. "Very sensible. Their brother must be in a panic.” Magnus remembered how their father abandoned religion but, despite his great learning and perception, clung doggedly to the habits of his class. His daughters would finally cut the cord. Gerald's bewilderment would only grow as the whole edifice—the very order of things that kept his world aloft—began to wobble. Who knows where it would lead? ¢ "I'll be at the Slade in the autumn," Peter said. Grant looked over. "Nessa plans to break Watt’s grip." Peter nodded. "I have the same ambition." He’d been wondering if painting in the old style made any sense. "It might be better if I left the barn to the photographers." Magnus thought of it in its gilded frame. "As long as they have eyes, that barn will have painters," he said. "As long as they have hearts," Charlotte added.

Peter nodded his assent. Grant thought about Peter's visit. He'd heard that he had a harem of young women at the academy; he and Charlotte had an easy familiarity that spoke to his harmlessness. He knew the type, mostly chaste but catching the odd fish, hooked almost incidentally. Or allowing himself to be caught.

Magnus’s mind was on the barn. Photography had its place, like the panorama of the family gathered for their wedding anniversary. These photographs were given as gifts, signs of descent or lateral ties. They had their own collection, most in albums and a few displayed. A painting mattered. The barn had waited for Peter to discover it and capture its grooves and striations. Magnus was well aware of the barn's beauty, but was no painter. His namesake son liked to paint, but architecture was his calling.

Grant, his friend, and Peter went off on a walk. Charlotte and Magnus went out into the garden. It was late, almost eleven, but it felt like late afternoon. From her chair on the terrace, Charlotte looked out at her garden. All that work was paying off.

A low hum of bees persisted, along with the sounds of birds and of distant barking.

Soon they'd hold the summer party that brought out neighbors and town folk, a mix that seemed to work despite the social differences among the guests.

Magnus breathed in the summer's fecundity. Kat might be knitting, her children running around, free of parental restraint. How often she recounted her daily round, with wry observations and the sweaters that were pure expressions of her heart.

Painting by Patricia Sonnino

But he knew this picture was idyllic. Kat was an idealist, a freethinker, longing for a life without convention's boundaries, able to love whom she chose and be herself, unhidden and unapologetic. It was a dream many shared, the promise of this new century, and sometimes it seemed that it would come true.

Yet this was a provincial city, barely free of the hold of the last century, tolerant of a few artists and writers, but otherwise closed to deviance, especially from women. As the last century gave way, plays, novels, and paintings drummed their resistance. He was torn between wanting to ignore convention and recognizing that his hedonism arose from anguish, pure desire, and injured vanity, as Oda said. The need to be cautious for Kat's sake, to sidestep scandal and her husband's wrath, forced them into the shadows despite their intention.

Part 2. The Turning of the Year

And blessed be the first sweet suffering That I felt in being conjoined with Love, And the bow, and the shafts with which I was pierced, And the wounds that run to the depths of my heart.

Christmas The noise and aroma of the kitchen filled the house. Charlotte's sister Astrid was baking, and the comings and goings between the two houses were marked by doors opening and closing. Soon, the two families would gather for Christmas dinner. A resistance to this invasion arose in him, as it always did when faced with unavoidable things that he welcomed, couldn't really live without, and yet dreaded.

Charlotte was in her element, alive to the throng and festive in its presence. He hoped that Astrid would choose to sit by him, a co-conspirator in some way, he

thought, while steadfastly holding up tradition. Even more loosely tethered to time than her sister, her pies were the clock by which Christmas dinner was timed. She could reckon time in that sense. The two kitchens, thus attached, led the guests to handicap one sister's optimism against the harder reality of the other's projections. ¢ Charlotte let herself sink into the heat of the bathwater. Christmas was over, the dinner memorable in the way that such gatherings are, "the best ever" until the next supplants it. Not everyone was at her table; some of them now had other families to consider. Magnus would give an account of it in his New Year's Day letters, summing up the year—its events and travels. Others made resolutions, but he saw the day as a stopping point, taking in what was just crossed before setting out again.

She said aloud that she was tired. Christmas was a lot of work, as was the rest.

But she was active by nature, distrustful of slowing down. To find the daybed, read a novel, drift off into a nap—that was permissible; but to fail to rise and rouse herself, pursue what she pursued, was impossible. That she was tired was undeniable. but Christmas dinner, like the demands of midsummer, was what the season required.

Charlotte liked winter's chill and the way a full moon brought the bare trees alive.

Magnus struggled with it. He longed to flee south, but his business kept him here.

They traveled when she organized it. When his namesake son was in Berlin, they went there. He was now in America, likely for good. They went to Paris, a daughter in tow. She stayed on to perfect her French, and paint and sculpt, but they went back.

Sometimes she went on her own. Their natures and proclivities differed, and she could only follow hers where they took her. It's then that the familiarity of marriage rubs raw, she thought, and the absences that arise from yearning and unhappiness prove abrasive to others, although this isn't the intent. You follow your instinct, but it's more than that—not just your animal nature but also your human imagination.

You have to feed it something new. There were strains, but she viewed it all as part of what you experience in life, sooner or later—or sooner and later, perhaps. ¢ You let the dinner wine burn off. You go upstairs before the last guests depart, drained by their company. This is how it is with you, Magnus, the opposite of Charlotte, although she notes the toll these dinners take. You hear her saying this to herself as she excuses herself, leaving the cleaning up to others.

Two women you loved come back to you, often at the edges of sleep. They were the leitmotif of your unhappiness with Charlotte, and now they surface as fragments.

Grief is like a rogue wave that catches you unaware, and these fragments are their afterlife. Making love, arousal is a bodily perception with its own momentum. You remember all of it, but the conversations are still the most memorable. Looking back at this decade, you see how desire mixed with domesticity, a kind of web women spin unconsciously that's like starting again without exactly leaving off.

Oda needed you and then dispensed with you. Her need, which you shared, was to restore her sense of self in bed, to be actively wanted there. Kat wanted to reclaim

her freedom. Eventually, badgered by her jealous man, she wanted out and wanted you. Possession governs everything, you could say, whether a gift or a demand. Love can't be coerced, a thought that saved your marriage. It applied equally to you.

You saw what you saw, all the signs the gods put there as you acted out this play of their devising. You read into them, but life alone grants you experience. If you forge a different path, it's not for lack of trying to forge others when they arose unexpectedly, plausibly. Charlotte did this, too. You have this unspoken tie.

Boxing Day This English custom was always clear of obligations. Even Charlotte kept society at bay. It was a good day to consider the year as experienced and its reflections. The latter were often memories of what was said or done, pertinent again. His reverie the night before came back to him—how these women figured despite time passing.

They each seemed foreordained, but the meaning of their connection had to be worked out—endlessly, with constant revision. He longed for a correspondent like himself who would write unhesitatingly about her emotional life to give his replies a context, valuing what he might write in reply. A man who desires women can only be a sage when a mind that speaks its heart is desired for itself. A sage is what a man becomes when he finally takes up his real work, whatever it may be.

When the body is desirous, the mind follows along, improvising and observing.

All of it comes back, but as scenes, vivid as paintings but of course in motion, unfolding not as they happened but as in dreams, taking liberties with time and space to serve the fragment's reason for being, seen in a brought-back-to-mind state. A glimpse of it opens other doorways, giving out to scenes that feeling etches onto memory. The mind goes there involuntarily, prompted by some spark.

He saw in retrospect how he craved a domesticity that was bound up in the telos of expectations, a source of hope and betrayal when it proved impossible. But this was like his need for and difficulty sustaining a social life. His marriage kept it all in rough balance. It took two forays to show him the futility of adding to its complexity.

¢ "The telos of expectations"—the phrase was germane. How you, Magnus, sought to reconcile material success and its tangible signs with the pull of your inner life. Not unique in this, of course. Along the pier in the summer, you see the survivors of winter's bitter destitution, older men who live on luck and charity, but perhaps have notebooks of poetry, sketches, novellas that slip from grasp or are brought with them to be found by relatives, landlords, or the police. Many are mad, of course, or too sapped by their lives to do much. What if their lives had been different? How much money does it really take to be sheltered? Not as much as you've spent on bourgeois life, the summer house and house in town, the children sent abroad for school.

You look over at your notebooks and manuscripts, products of your inner life.

Even the letters, gathered and tied with string, could be said to have more reality than what your outside work generated. In a generation or two, the houses will be

sold off and the family dispersed. What will persist? A lineage of Charlotte's beauty and your instinct for it, of the words that flow from you, facile but undisciplined? To the authors, you're midwife to their creativity. If work is a marriage, you're the wife.

They'll break into your rooms and find you've been unfaithful to your station.

What will they make of it? You long sometimes to declaim it or hand out pamphlets, but this would be ridiculous. You could publish with a pseudonym, but whiffs of vanity attach to this. Only your writer daughter has any sense of how much is there— a long shelf that you described to her as an archipelago.

Your late London friend produced a book for his family that one of his daughters likened to the houses of the prominent dead. Such books are the ephemera that life sloughs off, mistaking for an anchorage a buoy loose in a storm. The long shelf invites destruction. Only a truly archival spirit would hang on to it, and that seems unlikely.

A boat took you and Oda to her island, Christian elsewhere to make room for you, the cottage along the channel, a fishing village where he'd gone to paint, sick of town and his grand metaphors of its hypocrisy, with Oda in residence, and fallen in love with Tine, a young widow with children. Expectations were in the air.

You made her a gift of a dark blue housecoat to propitiate the household gods.

You helped prepare the food, sharing her domain. Her bed was another, in a room facing the water, the curtain blowing outward whenever the wind caught it.

Lack of imagination, lack of courage—this is the charge sheet. Did you ever truly believe that time could expand to meet the demands you put on it? The radical proximity of lovemaking slows time down, but that elasticity doesn't carry over.

Kat figures in your poems, a phenomenon like weather if weather had a heart and desired. And now she's elsewhere, although sometimes a loose spirit, the way a shaman, unsure of powers that are mostly unconscious, might manifest herself. You know a bit about that, how the everyday opens and you glimpse something else. You stake your life on it, but there's too much else in the picture, and not just for you.

You were at the market when she struck you, not hard but hard enough. It was then that you might have called a halt, but even then, it would probably be resented.

With Oda, you kept your own hopes alive in the face of everything falling apart. She needed a partner, not an unreliable fellow-sufferer.

Close observation gives you their unforgettable natures and occasionally something revives this. They laugh despite themselves, and you're surprised by feelings you thought were gone, triggered when they let down their guard. ¢ In the heat of it, Charlotte thought, there's nothing you won't do. You're afraid, but your fear makes you brave and you brazen it out at home and abroad. You let yourself get swept up in the world of this other, with its occasions, galleries, dealers, and studios. An outsider in Kristiana, Leon was its emissary from the perspective of his local clientele and those he visited, a go-between or arranger. In Berlin, Paris, or Milan, you were an exotic from the far north, but they soon realized you were revisiting their cities, had studied there when young, owing to parents whose emulation of their continental peers took in their daughters.

Painting by Patricia Sonnino You were fearless then, traveling alone to the Levant, evading the predators. So much seen, and then you saw it again with an insider who was there for business. His days were taken up with it, but at night there were lavish dinners where he showed you off. It made you happy, those displays, but it was a relief to come home even if life was arduous with Magnus rattled and unhappy. You could no longer abide him close, which threatened the marriage and eventually didn't. You left him alone as he worked his way through it, gloomy, elated, and wary in turns.

Unlike art, a property can be tended like a garden, with regular harvests to show for it. A portfolio of them gives you constant fodder for dinner-table conversation as you rehearse your interactions with the managers, the help, and all those tenants, many of them visitors to this provincial outpost. You've gained a web of connections from them, with letters beginning, "I heard from my cousin that you can help us find a

place to live when my husband takes up his post. We have three girls, two, four, and nine." The King should pay you a stipend, Magnus jokes. Young and insecure, these women rely on you to find their footing. Some become friends, invited over, but they all treat you with deference. Not like the local tenants—bachelors, spinsters, and widows are a complaining bunch. Professors are different—their work takes them elsewhere and they become emissaries to colleagues in need of temporary quarters.

Several are regulars, coming north to avoid the oppressive heat of their summers.

Your oldest son takes on more of it. He doesn't always heed your advice, but he understands you better and has some feeling for it. You have good managers. It's possible to detach yourself, but then you miss it. You made this life consciously. You argue against yourself sometimes and Magnus always replies, "No, Charlotte, you've accomplished a great deal." Not that you believe him, but in the end, you do.

New Year's Day The social round was over. The new year staggered toward the light. Once past the solstice, Magnus awaited spring, but the dead of winter lay between. Some thrive on it, but he didn't. He turned now to the task at hand—a summing up at the cusp, that brief belvedere between two terrains, the past clearer and the future the point of the exercise. He opened his diary. When he looked back at his entries, he noted what was missing. What we expect or demand of ourselves, what we resolve, comes with an awareness that we're unlikely to do things that go against our nature. A specific resolution, made at any point for a pressing reason, may be carried out, but this is rare enough that others note it. What's desired more often comes to pass, and then we live it out, learning what the gods had in mind.

The omissions weren't as glaring as before. Life no longer tore at him, but stretched beyond its previous limits—an opening out that's lawful to our species, respecting time's gravity, its narrowness and endlessness, the fecundity of what seems arid and lifeless. In spring, this was most evident. When his firstborn arrived in May, a friend said he was the result of Saturnalia, when license was granted and taken.

How much more so here at midsummer—drunken evenings and rutting universal. It once tortured him, those sounds of lovers in the fields and woods, and he alone and bereft. Grief's double, he saw later, although it took a layer of skin from him.

What if he'd married Oda in the wake of Christian's abdication or married Kat? He'd never thought about these outcomes, believing that it was impossible. More children, no doubt, and the unfolding of another marriage. This summer house might have gone unbuilt. His success that produced the money for it, but Charlotte's legacy that made possible the extravagance. Oda had no children, but Kat's brood would have to be absorbed, her tyrant appeased. Or not, the children a bone of contention.

Losing Oda made him wary of passion and aware that Kat was immersed in it.

These displaced symmetries run through life, despite our efforts to do no harm. We make grievous errors, always imagining that what catches out the rest will exempt us.

Marriage makes you hunger for the knowledge of another. It's clear that women shared this, but their fecundity makes it riskier, not just because of pregnancy but because everything is freighted by it. Accounts of other cultures, like the Tahitians, suggest this isn't inevitable, but then here we are in the once-pagan, ever-patriarchic north. Nonetheless, you hunger.

What made his marriage to Charlotte possible was the autonomy they allowed themselves. There's a school of marriage that seeks confessions and sees conduct as so many rules, infractions, and penalties--a lawyer's brief of indiscretions. But their life together was the sort of partnership that builds an enterprise. They were like two business partners who meet regularly with a loose agenda and the affection of deep familiarity. Their quarrels were soon forgotten and they discussed what mattered.

We think of ourselves as adepts, even alchemists, but experience is the only thing life gives us. More and more aware of life's perils, we're cautious, but having survived our mishaps, we find ourselves exchanging known perils for unknown ones. It's our nature to experiment, and yet we're walled in by a culture that condemns us for it.. ¢ Charlotte opened her notebook and wrote the date. Then she drew an outline of her garden and its beds, picturing them as she did so. It brought to mind her resolutions for it as the summer waned. With her pencil, she sketched some changes, mapped out what might be planted where. She saw herself in the midst of it, clearing and planting, adding a path or a terrace, trimming before things came alive.

In high summer, she spent six weeks there, never going into town. She'd made a practice of it ever since Magnus built the house, testing the mettle of her managers and her own tendency to intervene. It was a controlled experiment, like the garden itself, with much hands-on preparation. Six weeks would pass and then, without fanfare, she'd go back for a week to see how things stood. If they stood well, then back for another three.

She liked the bracing cold of winter, but daily life was slowed by it. The world outside was harsh, and many suffered who lacked shelter. She supported a school for indigent girls. The boys, she felt, had more options. God help the old and alcoholic, those ruined by their own folly. She gave money for their relief.

Summer was a release from this—she felt it in the streets. Those who survived were out carousing, first from gratitude and later from the panic that penury induces. It was a release, but temporary. She thought of Ceres. If her garden had a temple, it would honor her. She knew women who fled south, but she'd been in Venice one February when the cold, damp air was matched by buildings that were never heated. That trip, cutting her teeth on difference, stayed with her. Something of it is in the garden, she realized—herbs, bits of color and light and texture. Bits of elsewhere were here, fragments seen, memories.

It didn't take much to bring them to mind. Like Magnus, from what she could glean from his writing, but her garden made them tangible. Did Ceres spend the winter mapping out the beds her daughter would sleep on, free of the grip of another? And what was her daughter's life like in Hell? Not as bad as people said, Charlotte guessed.

(This first appeared in Common Place No. 18, Winter and Summer 2020. The epigrams are from Petrarch's Canzoniere, sonnet 61, stanza 2, trans. A.S. Kline.)

An Ordinary Life Considered

A measure of bourgeois working life is the flow of shirts to and from the cleaners. Mine also tracked how formal work attire gave way to casual and then ultimately to the current tendency of men to dress like boys. When my daily round became irregular, the pace of cleaning slowed and I shifted to work shirts and workmen’s jackets, sourced cheaply.

I’m still making a transition from working life to leisure, which is, per Aristotle, “my own work” as distinguished from work done for others from childhood forward. I’d separate the latter into two broad categories: done for money; and done at other’s suggestion. The two overlap, but the second category was primarily reputational.

These brief pieces are products of my leisure. I’ve always done things like this, fitting them in amid the work I did for others. Some of that work I loved doing. I was lucky to find relatively good fits between my talents and those activities, and patrons when I developed new things. A few have outlasted my tenure. One of them, Design Book Review, finally has an online archive and may do more than the rest for my reputation.

The main challenge of transitioning to leisure is how to give it a reasonable structure; allow for the apparent wastes of time that are in fact crucial to its productive use; and deal with death as a leitmotif that requires you to relearn a child’s trick of getting caught up in the everyday, not caring how it’s spent and yet caring how it’s spent—wanting to fish, wanting the fish, and wanting to be the fish, in succession, and also wanting to be out on the water or beside it, marveling at the sunlight, sounds, the summer’s heat.

The rhythm of leisure is elusive and I feel constantly that I’ve got it wrong. Zen has this contradiction, too, between advocating a kind of naturalness about the activities of the day and then imposing a schedule on it that no human would adhere to naturally. The workweek has aspects of this, made worse by commuting. I used to get up at 6 a.m. to hit the train at 7 a.m., before the crush, and then work until 7 p.m. to avoid the crush home, but this 12-hour regime was defeated by the steady stretching out of rush hour, especially in the evening. I was so glad to stop.

What is leisure’s rhythm? Does it even have one, or do the different strands of leisure have their own, like the tuning of instruments to whatever key it will be on a given day? I suspect the latter, and that what’s missing for me is a bit of deliberation about the time ahead, asking what it asks of me, to be used fruitfully. For time is fecund and fecundity has a rhythm of its own. We have a nose for this or an eye, an attentiveness. Leisure threads through our work for others, and we know quite well how to work for ourselves, having done so in childhood. But we have to shed our accumulated resistance.

“Death is the great question,” some Buddhists say. Leisure's rhythms reflect how death becomes a second, unavoidable telos. As we’re told most of our lives to think of the future, its foreshortening is unnerving. No strategy earns a pardon. Buddha’s ladder, as I call it, lets us savor leisure while savoring is still possible. Life is really the great question.

Death has no need for answers. Equanimity without terror is what’s wanted, death being the end of every story. I admired a friend for making jokes just before dying in his sleep.

I wrote a poem with a rhyming pattern borrowed from Rilke. It riffs on Natalia Ginzburg’s essay, “The Little Virtues,” brought to mind by something a friend wrote recently about translating Ginzburg in a beginning Italian class because her writing is so “ordinary” in the sense that the architect Joseph Esherick used it—a simplicity that’s given meaning because it’s imbued with resonance. Here’s the poem:

Simple language, much emotion figure in Natalia’s oeuvre.

It reached me here, an ocean and two land masses distant.

A familiar city seems a redoubt compared to exile in a village.

The vows made when we marry lead us to an unseen ledge.

To write is all that behooves her, she reports, a point consistent with prose that makes no claim to be more than it is. Ordinary.

Like a diary, the everyday; like alleyways we overlook that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm.

As the I Ching says, “No blame.”

We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry.

Looking back, the time it took; how it came anyway, the harm.

Ginzburg’s “ordinary” uses everyday words and phrases to build a human narrative.

The best of Esherick’s houses do this materially and spatially, “making a place” for lives to unfold. The landscape and view figure, with the openings connecting indoors and outdoors. He followed William Wurster in letting windows frame views, not worrying about the façade as viewed externally. Not that this was ignored, but views took prominence, being integral to the experience.

Writing an autobiographical novel in the wake of marital difficulties, Elizabeth Hardwick solved the problem of her husband, Robert Lowell, by omitting him. In “The Little Virtues,” Ginzburg describes a hiatus that looked different when she lived it than in retrospect. She tracks these two "ordinaries"— how their familiarity led her to misjudge them, devaluing one and overvaluing the other, and how longing to return undid her. The main event, also involving a husband, is deferred, not omitted, but the effect is similar.

A friend’s wife asked how to rework her life. She invited suggestions. This is a chronic issue, I wrote. Think back to other times when it’s come up, because how you dealt with it then is likely to be relevant to how you’ll resolve it now. “Resolve” is the right word. Life demands episodic reworking, up until the end. “New facts,” as Maynard Keynes called them, force us to revisit our assumptions. Resisting them is symptomatic of a mind that’s lost its timbre. I also have wondered lately how to rework my life. Reworking it is a freedom granted us, implicit in the time we genuinely have at our disposal. Disposable time is like disposable income, capital that we can invest or squander.

In my previous working life, a certain amount of time was needed to recover. Now, relatively free from obligation, investing time requires structure. It no longer plays off obligations but becomes the main event. Reversing the field would make the obligations subsidiary, each a hillock in a landscape of fallow time, undifferentiated on first view.

These less important things draw attention, but for someone husbanding a field, the view is different. Obligations shift to serve the husbandry, not distract from it.

Following up on this, I asked the I Ching what to emphasize. It gave me hexagram 33, “retreat” and hexagram 53, “development (gradual progress).” I consult two versions, and the older one noted that we remain attached to what we love, what’s habitual, habits being both vices and virtues. But the main message was to proceed in a slow and friendly manner. The older version also noted that a tree on a mountainside takes forever to root, but—once rooted—is visible. Success in small things, the first hexagram declared.

Two questions are raised: Retreat from what? What’s habitual? (What are my small, potentially harmful loves?) The hexagram distinguishes between strategic withdrawal, giving way in order to return later, and panic. But still, retreat from what? Holdovers from working life came to mind—the risk of repeating what I’ve done already. A dream I had compared this to a river that meanders so that you cross it again and again. Make the crossing of it a theme, the dream said. It may have aimed at life itself, crossings as Zen barriers, always into new territory. Michael Nylan’s version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War discusses terrain. Retreating or advancing, terrain is a variable—familiar but different, unfamiliar but like others. We bring what we know, and the dangers of knowing are hubris and assumption. Terrain is best regarded as new, an encountered river as new.

As for habits, they consume disposable time. Thinking of it as a resource reminds us that our leisure, finite in any case, will be a stranded asset if age or illness impairs our capacity to use it effectively. It follows that we can judge the benefit or harm of our habits by considering if they’re consuming or prolonging our capacity for leisure's effective use.

Much of our effectiveness is enabled by others. Human interaction constantly prompts thoughts, ideas, and actions that wouldn’t have occurred to us, or taken the form they took, without another’s involvement. My writing partner, Richard Bender, has been on one end or the other of this process for almost 50 years. More recently, I've worked with poetry editors. One is the editor of a press specializing in experimental poetry. My poems don’t fall into that category, but I learned what she looks for in a poem and how, as a poet herself, she revises. The third time we met, two years later, I finally understood comments that I know she made at our first meeting. The other editor reads poetry and speaks up for her desire to read my poems straight up. I value her sense of a line's resonance.

The poems in a journal I like tend to be about one thing. The second poetry editor made this point. My poems tend to wander discursively, only returning to the opening theme later. There’s a discursive quality to everything I write. My letters often have postscripts, which may or may not help clarify things. Is my life like this? My days unfold as “rounds” that are prompted by whatever is formally scheduled, the weather, and what’s at hand.

There are various books I'm reading when I encounter them. Discursive is a note to self.

Digitization allows for endless tweaks. I made a selection of my work and had some copies printed. Each order differed slightly from the last. I mailed them out to friends, an impulse related to passing manuscripts around, as Diderot did. (Printing things was hazardous in mid-18th century Paris.) Normally, print solidifies the text, and the editorial team’s responsibility is to ensure that the text is as solid as possible. That quest, grueling in the face of deadlines, is a big part of the fun. It’s enjoyable, although rarely leisurely.

“Passing manuscripts around” is a different tradition: word of mouth and bespoke in terms of its audience. I don’t really know who reads the online versions of what I write.

Agoraphobia seems reasonable. It’s a desire to detach from one’s circle, as the desire not to offend is like Virginia Woolf’s angel in the house. Writing for the drawer and only handing things around are symptoms of the caution this induces. My beliefs are contradictory—I'm sympathetic to others but loyal to myself. What others believe, their sympathies, are sometimes contradicted by my personal history. Aging is problematic.

Aging has two risks: to ossify or to know too much. Both make one wary of change.

The ossified are intolerant of it, while those soaked in experience have a heightened sense of where things might be headed. They often feel they’ve been here before, which makes them skeptical of the nostrums and opinions put forward. This looks like reaction, but is tempered by agreement on what’s problematic, given that the problems are chronic.

In Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Innocence, the character Cesare tends the family’s vineyard, bordering the Chianti region but not part of it. His main aim in life is to get the definers of the region to include his family's property. But coincidentally, according to some reviewers of the novel, he's always been in love with Chiara, his cousin. I missed this, despite having read the novel twice—the reviewers say it’s indicated by small details.

Is it accidental that Cesare tends his vineyard? Metaphorically, per Isaiah, this stands for courtship—a big detail. The idea is to attract a wife, but Chiara is attracted by a Sicilian medical doctor, a visceral man of action whose turn to medicine reflects an abhorrence of his father’s blind worship of the ailing Gramsci. Salvatore is a material man.

When, at the end of the novel, Cesare encounters him, Salvatore is in a midlife crisis, looking to borrow a gun to kill himself. Cesare is ready, even eager, to lend him one, but then Chiara phones, bringing him to his senses. The agoraphobia of Cesare may be a third kind, walling off the outer world to diminish his own suffering, but answering his phone and leaving his door open to these others, choosing in the end to nudge a life in one direction because a loved one asks it. How lucky Salvatore is, Cesare may think as he tends a vineyard for a family that includes them both. Yet he may understand finally that he’s also won Chiara’s heart, her love rooted in the familial anchorage he provides her.

What’s the metric behind your claim? I was asked this on Twitter. Fifty years of observation, I replied. The issue was the inner core of the Bay Area, which I argued is overcrowded because its transit network has long been starved of funds. But the question points to a problem with current regional debates: their tendency to push a reductive set

of numbers, like density targets or blanket maximum heights, to get around delays to developing new housing. That there are delays is true, a fact of life in the region's inner core. This could be resolved if by-right development to existing zoning were possible, but the process is mired in politics and every last thing is case by case, a crap shoot between owners and neighbors at the smaller scale, and a war of attrition at the larger.

That the average Millennial would like an affordable place to live is understandable.

That desire is expressed as “Build at all costs,” but I doubt that the boxy crap that results is where that cohort will end up living. It’s an interim fix while they look for something better. Some of the new housing is good enough that others will move in as they move out. but more of it is badly built and generic. Spot rezoning in existing neighborhoods disrupts their fabric with buildings that are out of scale, a move justified by the scale of a putative “better future.” Opposition to growth starts there—a legitimate fear that some outsize monster will land next door. The latest legislation makes this more likely.

“Let’s sell the house before we lose our view,” my wife said at dinner. It takes in the Bay, Angel Island, and the coastal range from the Gate to Mt. Tamalpais. A region can be undermined over time by ignoring the qualities that make it what it is. (As a friend tweeted. quantitative is yin and qualitative is yang, in so many words.)

My library surrounds and admonishes me. I read a reference to Thoreau’s Walden just now, remembering again that I started an annotated edition, marveling at the contemporary feel of the writing, but then set it down. Since then, I’ve read from his journals, finished a spiritual biography of him, and started a more conventional one. I also read Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden, the book that first attracted me to him. So, not entirely a bust. But the main book remains where I left it on the shelf. Other books, authors or topics that I sought to open, are untouched.

I’m not the only reader faced with this dilemma. Some argue that assembling a library doesn’t commit you to reading all of it. Sometimes, looking at it, I have an urge to cull it in the Marie Kondo manner. There are certainly some titles that could go, but others—an example is a collection of books on structuralism—retain their hold on me. To organize them would also be a good idea, as many are buried behind others in doubled rows. This could be a project, to reacquaint myself with my books, organize them, and skim off anything that that can be safely skimmed. Or I could commit myself to a reading program. I did this two summers ago, but then stopped instead of forging on to read the main works of my subject, Walter Benjamin. I read a few things, but not systematically.

In activities of this sort, time is the crucial dimension. This is the model of pedagogy, but I found it trying to jam a syllabus into a semester. I don’t read that way. So, I need to set out a syllabus and set the right pace.

The literary reviews and cultural supplements do their part of whet my appetite, but often the book disappoints. Many books are adequately conveyed in articles and reviews.

It’s probably best to acknowledge this. And books are hyped as brilliant that prove otherwise. Virginia Woolf found contemporary fiction problematic, preferring the work of writers of earlier generations. This distance makes it easier to recognize generational tics and then consider what else is there. If writing is an experiment and/or a need, then some distance in time makes it clearer what worked and/or what was worth the effort.

Buying books is analogous to the way we always look around us, wondering what we’re missing, adding goals and ambitions to to-do lists and New Year's resolutions. A library reflects this. That mine is overgrown and disorganized also says something.

I’ve always had a strong imagination. I relate it to poetry, the slimmest form by which something imagined is brought into the world. It’s odd that I sometimes dream of entire cities, including the City of God that Augustine described, a place of uncanny beauty.

Beauty strikes me as the main reason for being—something that arises in countless guises.

As a child, I was fascinated by the colors of gasoline floating on water, and also by the way pooled water animated small landscapes. I could extrapolate nature from its smallest instances, and beauty was their common feature.

Beauty is tangible. So much hinges on this. It runs across the senses, and words run after it; the arts, also. It gets us in trouble and drives life forward. There are no norms for it, as we’re born into myriad individual relations with it that we replicate, vary, and extend. Words are primary for me, but my mind is suffused with a beauty that I can only hint at by that means. Experimenting with words reflects a need: to set down a life amid so much beauty, even when it's pained or painful. I've tried to live this way. I can’t speak for others, but I want to convey the whole of it. It's as if beauty demanded that we hark back to its indelible moment, etched in memory, and represent it convincingly for others.

Death is one of God’s gifts to us, a dispensation. We tend to dread it, but this attitude is conditioned by our instinct for survival and our fear of pain. I share it, but I also see that longevity is wearing, and not simply in a physical sense. We feel its debilitating effects, and the previews of them that the everyday discloses tear at our spirit. We accept this stoically as the price of living, but what finally undermines us may be sheer distaste. At a certain point, there’s no relief except that dark night, like a backyard in summer, crickets audible, stars visible—a space of emptiness amid intergenerational provocation.

Tradition is more malleable than we think. Often, it’s just what we accepted as givens and carried along unquestioned. Gender pronouns are a good example, and their proliferation and the insistence on an individual’s right to specify them to agree with inner feelings is disconcerting when this is a considerable distance from one's own verities. Yet these shades of difference are real and meaningful, part of our inner experience. It never occurred to me to vary how I present myself, but this is relatively common now and pronouns are a sign of it. What they announce is possibility. Mere pronouns don’t do full justice to our mix. We’re multivariant, with gender handed us along with its clothing and sanctioned behaviors. We grow up with it, learning if it fits or not.

“What would Jesus do?” Indeed. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” tradition answers.

On a whim, I bought Henri Cole’s book Orphic Paris. Its black-and-white photo illustrations are reminiscent of W.G. Sebald. Cole sets his prose narrative loosely on the arc of time spent living in a city. His mind roams back in time and to other places, like Marseilles. A rooted cosmopolitan is the self that Cole depicts, someone whose view is here and now, a microcosm of the time and space we move through and temporarily occupy, and of the now-time Walter Benjamin described, an unfolding present in touch with the wellspring of memory and anticipation that it animates. But the transmissions are sporadic and piecemeal, often falling short of a narrative. Cole constructs one, herding these memories and impressions in order to say something more about where he’s been.

A theme of the book is love between men, especially older and younger men, and the pain associated with having to hide it, in the past and live with the problems this entailed.

It's also about terror of AIDS. Cole is nine years younger than me, in the cohort of several male friends who married the men they loved. A strength of the book is the way he

conveys what he feels. He quotes a passage from Hemingway on Gertrude Stein comparing male homosexual love unfavorably to the love of women for each other, and wonders if she really said it. What he depicts is how close friendships are for me, a series of impressions and memories that accrue and come forward when we encounter each other. Observation says that they don’t accrue for everyone. I’m not able to turn away from another, once befriended. That thread is always there, waiting to be picked up again even if decades have passed. Is this an oddity? Cole shares this tendency—a strong memory for the impressions people made on him, even in passing, even when their flaws and faults are unmistakable. Family is where this starts, where our affections form and are kept like saints’ days in the calendar of repetition that is mostly daily life.

Going through old letters, I found some from two women—one remembered and the other not. The remembered one married her high school classmate. She was Irish and good looking. They later divorced. She lived in Woodstock, died young of brain cancer, and left a daughter. Her letters are colorful and funny. The other woman's letters display an effort like artwork, carefully put together. I wonder if she’s still alive?

Desire reflects the chemistry of attraction and its expression. I had a slow fuse on this score, my natural reticence only overcome by a friend’s death and later by the desire for children. The love desire inspires is real. It’s tempting to dismiss it as intoxication, but this is untrue to its nature, which is transient but enduringly, experientially memorable, like snippets of film if films were sensory. If we write while in love, it's as a propellant.

This “real thing” desire spurs arises spontaneously, with a distinct meaning or resonance.

Signs that invoke it also vary in their meaning, even as they unerringly point to her. I once noted that the love we shared was real, despite everything else. She seemed to agree.

An odd thing about such connections is that they can revive in conversation the easy affection that intimacy enabled. It’s a brief glimpse that speaks to the tendrils love establishes, which never die out altogether. The fragments that surface also affirm that what one experienced put down roots sufficiently to bloom again when two minds happen upon them. No one sets out on Horace’s glittering sea with these remnants in mind, but they compensate for so much else by granting our voyages some meaning.

My mother survived the Spanish flu. It immobilized everyone, she told me. It killed the painter Egon Schiele, his wife, and their unborn child—a death he seems to have anticipated, painting a portrait of the three of them before his child’s birth. My mother was three. She lived to be 75, dying slowly of a stroke—not as quickly as my father did, four years later, felled by his failing guts before leukemia got him.

At my father’s suggestion, I found a good doctor, but I follow her advice based on my interpretation of its priority. When I first met with her, my blood pressure was high. I knew it was, and dealt with it immediately. Maintaining it is harder—it’s easy to let things slide. This is an aspect of the larger question of how to organize my life. It’s a regime that I put in place and then adjust episodically, with the doctor assisting in the recalibration.

After my last visit, I increased the dosage of the medicine I take for high blood pressure by 50 percent. While in Singapore in November 2019, I told myself to get in better shape.

I’ve done this at different points because I was in love. (A friend told me she knew a colleague was having an affair because he was too fit for his age.) Separating the impulse to be fit from desire is yet another of the adjustments one makes, growing older.

Like a time-capsule, a story I'd started resurfaced. I wrote it in the mid-2000s, seeking to apply a maxim of Nikos Kazantzakis that Lawrence Durrell quoted: “The great artist looks beneath the flux of everyday reality and sees the eternal, unchanging symbols. He takes ephemeral events and relocates them in an undying atmosphere.” (Good luck.)

Other things surfaced—a letter and two things related to the correspondent; a paper my daughter wrote and two notes from her; and a one-page note-to-self that includes the Kazantzakis quote as an admonition and gives a prescription to my future self. I’m unsure exactly when it was written, but possibly in my mid-50s, judging from a title mentioning 40 years and a parenthetical proviso, “Ever the optimist.” It mentions an ambition to learn Latin and its offshoots, and to find “a second root,” a second place that feels like home.

The note has its own maxims. “Perseverance in true things; openness to everything else.” (I agree. Only life itself reveals the truth of things, but as a constant subject of internal debate.) “To fulfill what was given me.” (It's all I have, plus the desire make full use of it, whatever “full” or “use” might mean.) Sometimes you have to come back to something to see that more is possible than you imagined. In a talk I heard at Stanford on a Tesla windshield—a feat of glass manufacture—one of the team said that the main thing about innovation is not make decisions prematurely. The longer you can delay deciding, while madly working on the problem in question, the better. Life tips toward decisions, but bucking that tide ups the odds of producing something extraordinary, he argued.

Rebecca Solnit wrote how much she learned from younger women. It prompted me to write a note of thanks to a younger woman friend who patiently brought me along with her cohort. But Solnit’s article also made me think of people older than me, still on the planet, who have things to teach. In ordinary life, people are reference points. It’s often unwitting, but we observe them and take notes out of admiration or dismay. One human dilemma is how to weigh what we observe. Some are comfortable judging others absolutely, but not much is absolute. One game isn’t a season. A season, though, is a season. It takes a while to clear the air. More than one, and I think all bets are off. But what does this imply for the best of such people’s acts and works? Art, literature, and philanthropy are minefields of taint. Looking back, all history is subject to alternate readings, often done with relish to overthrow an earlier generation’s canon or order.

Think of all those statues without heads or with heads lacking noses. Reputation is judged by scholars and by crowds, but talent has a way of outlasting its deprecators.

Room is made for others deemed more worthy, but they end up subject to the same scrutiny. No one really knows whose work will last. The cries of youth signal changes in taste and mores. Each generation is convinced it has it right, but how could it? Life extends backward and forward, barely anchored in a wobbly and contested present.

Twitter exemplifies what happens when each instant can be expressed, threads of competing views devolving into spats. Even from these we can learn something: just as we sense another’s mood in the intimacy of a household, we sense the mood of the crowd.

A long life sees much unraveled that seemed secure. The confusion and even anger reflects the scattered disorder that results, inducing dismay or panic. The decades of practice at the heart of expertise are pointless when the objects of their application change. A case can be made for their place in the new order or a nostalgia for coherence can resist it as half-baked, but these are just delaying tactics. Unraveling is the rule.

Life seldom provides a denouement as films and stories do. But in French it means “to untie.” One may want to use that ribbon again, it implies, not tie all the strands together.

“Unravel” is in the spirit of denouement. Among the difficulties of a sharp break with another is the abrupt end of a narrative we constructed in which we both featured.

Narrative is what we shared or thought we shared, and how it buoyed us up. When it dissipates, life goes flat. Unraveling is denouement in the sense that it marks a transition.

Heartache can cause us to renounce love and sometimes abandon life itself, but it can also free us just to be within ordinary life. Unraveling gets us there, but it takes time to understand the contradictions we pushed aside. We explain, condemn, or exonerate, but the correctives unfolding life provides us invite us constantly to untie that tidy package.

A death opened up an archive of associations. I picture her long, straight, blonde hair and horizontally striped, black and white sweater. We were so out of sync while together that I couldn’t match her expectations. She was good company. We slept together, which was a mistake. I was only at ease with her as a close friend. I always hoped to meet her again, pick up where we left off when the static of our youth caused interference.

A friend would go off to class. I'd stop by just before, then sleep until noon in her bed.

The late poet and diarist Joanne Kyger described her life in Bolinas, making no great haste to write whatever she was going to write. Most of her days were spent doing what “whatever,” but for a poet, this is arguably the main source. Her wonderful Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 captures how she fit work and life together, setting down what she observed. My own abilities are observational and synthetic: what I’ve absorbed, ambling through my life, with a purpose more intuited than premeditated. I plunge in, if resonance or declaration attract. In her journals, Kyger records how her marriage with Gary Snyder, prompted by his Zendo, led her to desire a real marriage and a baby, but she couldn’t get pregnant. The marriage subsequently fell apart. That kind of plunge.

Walking is crucial to my ordinary life. It’s how I gain impressions of a place, whether it’s familiar or not. Some of it involves transit. To attend a meeting, I took a local bus after figuring out that it stopped near where I was going. In fact, it stopped right out front.

The route cuts diagonally through neighborhoods in a south-westerly direction—more south than west. Buses give more of a sense of the streetscape and terrain than cars do, especially on local routes that stop frequently and are often on secondary streets.

In Singapore, I took buses often once I realized that my debit card worked like a pass. (It didn’t work on the metro.) Traveling to my several destinations, I’d get off and then try to figure out the walking route. Google Maps helped, but I still had to connect what it denoted with actual buildings. Singapore drivers sit on the right and the roads are the reverse of here, which made locating bus stops harder because counterintuitive. My mind constructed a map from all this walking and bus-taking—an inexact map, but each new journey made it more useful.

In Melbourne, part of the process of familiarization was to understand the time needed to walk from A to B. I had a map of the immediate area that the hotel gave me, and Google maps gave an estimate. Given the choice, I’d rather walk at my own pace. I typically build in a margin for error, though, which means that I sometimes arrive early.

The Paris Review has a Billy Collins poem on death. A risk of aging is that it's the topic.

I once heard Billy Collins talk at a literary festival in Key West. He proved better than expected. I knew of his popularity, but wasn’t familiar with his work. He winters in the town, sharing it with aging gay men with drinking problems. Not a good place to wash up, I thought. In the rectilinear cemetery, the graves are raised above the ground, New Orleans-style, as I saw in the film Easy Rider. Key West is an island, but in my part of it, the ocean was a rumor, although Havana was said to be only 90 miles away. The festival was opened by an advocate of Cuba’s freedom from Fidel Castro. Its break from Spain was plotted in the very hall where we sat, he explained. The audience was so taken with this fact that glided over his call to defeat the tyrant. He then played the former national anthem, now suppressed, meaningful to aging, exiled Cubans like himself.

When I was five, I saw a cortège honoring the newly-dead King George VI. Traditionally decorated, it was accompanied by what sounded like the Cantonese operas I heard on the kitchen radio in our house. When my parents built a house in New Jersey, I joined the choir as a boy soprano. Sopranos carry the melody, hit the high notes, and know nothing of harmony. I still can’t read the bass clef and harmony eludes me. When my voice broke, my range fell and shrank. I could still carry a tune, but no longer in the context of a choir.

In the second half of the 2000s, I often went to concerts, hearing a wider range of classical music and some new music. I still go to concerts, but mainly to early music in smaller venues. I prefer small halls where the performers are right there, the audience not simply a mass obscured by the spotlighting. In my concert-going half decade, I heard U.C. Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney perform several times. He would accompany his performances with commentary or give a talk at the start, and I learned a lot from them. He tackled whole works, like J.S. Bach’s harpsichord partitas. A partisan of this plucking instrument, he saw it as the better vehicle for Bach’s intent.

I attended my friends’ wedding party on the lake in Zurich. A small ensemble played, and I saw at once that the violinist and cellist were in love. The violinist was flamboyant.

Such music was once contemporary and popular, I thought; here it is again. My friends are amateur musicians—he's an architect and she's a psychoanalyst. I saw music on stands in their apartment. I don’t play, I only listen. Singing was my only musical talent.

I went to concerts with another who was overcome by the music. Music prompts my thoughts, and I try to carry a pen and a notebook with me to write them down. At points, with luck, the musicians catch fire. This is the thrill of live performance, spontaneous and unexpected. I once heard a famous violinist demonstrate his mastery, but there was no spark and I came away with no desire to hear him again.

Ordinary life is filled with incidents of veiled significance. I went to a lecture at a nearby museum and intuited that another who was present regarded the space and time I found there as mine. Similarly, I gave up some concerts because it felt unfair to occupy the space and time I'd once shared. Estrangement makes this seem almost natural. As in a Noh play, a ghost crosses the stage at a glacial pace, her every gesture speaking of the remnants of past fires. Cede her these altars, I felt.

(From Common Place No. 19, Winter 2020 and originally entitled, "We can go on like this for the rest of our lives," said by a character in Penelope Fitzgerald's Innocence.)

Objects and Subjects

Our 1902 house in Berkeley.

Childhood animism endows objects with feelings and places them within emotional life.

These attachments spill out into the world as subjective objects that we imagine to be coherent wholes, not disparate parts. That we see others as simultaneously whole and in fragments is consistent with this, even if often lamentable in practice. What interests me here are objects, mostly, laden with subjectivity—and sometimes, of course, the reverse.

Watches are functional objects, but they say something about those who wear them.

What they say varies with the watch. Some are handed down as they were made to endure. Periodically, someone trained to do it takes them apart, cleans and repairs them, and reseals their crystals. Then they tick on for another cycle, untethered from Atomic Clock or whatever it is that sets the time on my mobile phone. I set my watch to my phone, but in a day or two the watch has wandered. This is part of its subjectivity. I'm fairly punctual, but several of the women in my life are famously not. Theirs is an Irish time distant from Greenwich. But punctuality is overrated. I never want to keep women waiting. I don’t mind waiting for them. Women's time is the moon and the tides. They take their sweet time and it’s best to take off your watch and enjoy it.

Prophylactics are galoshes compared to bare feet, but an impediment to nature’s effects.

We cleave to the brand we first encountered, like our loyalty to a cigarette or cola, imagining it’s better, although this "better" evolves as our fears outweigh potential pleasures. We learn to discount all claims to be anything but kitchen gloves. Keep us out of hot water, we think, buying another dozen.

I kept one in my wallet, where it sat unused, an object in my imaginary life. Our new era of border scrutiny would rule it out, but back then we traveled unmolested. Twice I was accosted by prostitutes, in Santa Monica and Shanghai. No, I said, but thanks for asking. The two women in Santa Monica laughed; the woman in Shanghai, dressed as one more urban office worker walking home, drifted back into the crowd.

Our house is a container of familiar settings. Viewed from the street, it sits squarely, an articulated cube with a roof and an offset, indented entrance. Built in 1902, it updated a late-Victorian pattern, clothing it in the Shingle Style then in vogue. It's a modest house, but the plan is formal. The house is unaltered, but a previous owner pushed out the back of the kitchen, adding a half-bath and a deck. Every time we work on it, we beef up the insulation, because—like most older houses in Berkeley—it was built without any.

Houses are subjective objects. Reading about Walter Benjamin, it’s striking how he set up each of his numerous dwellings to honor and replicate the bourgeois setting of his childhood. The rooms of our house reflect our tastes and pasts, tipping toward the classical downstairs and divided between two aesthetics upstairs. In reality, there’s a mix, the mutual influence of 45 years of marriage plus a renaissance of domesticity when the children left, enhanced by a spike in disposable income as they became independent.

In an act of genius and compassion, my wife renovated a shed in the backyard as my library and studio. It was partly to get my books out of the house. It became a haven our children dubbed the Fortress of Solitude. An upstairs room is now “the Winter Palace,” the barn tracking the garden’s warmer seasons. Both sit downhill from the Hayward Fault, which last gave way in the 1860s and is overdue for another jolt. We get them— previews of the expected bigger one. The last sharp jolt led us to rebuild the foundation.

Every morning, I thank God we made it to another day without this disruption, the consequences of which are hard to gauge. We also have a seasonal threat of wildfire—one in 1923 burned down most of the houses uphill to the east. As I write this, we have the pandemic, precautions for which we're taking. In 1905, a previous owner died in the house. I hope to die in it, too, but not immediately, God willing.

The house was built by Charmian Kittredge, who married Jack London. She built the house to its south in 1904. Her father has a street in Berkeley named after him. It was a "spec house" that we've beefed up, rebuilding the foundation and laying down an attic floor to create a diaphragm so the house no longer shakes when you rush downstairs.

We found, at our oldest son's suggestion, that we could host 20 people for big dinners by clearing out the living room and arranging two tables diagonally. This led us to switch the two rooms. The former dining room is cozier in the winter. The kitchen's trestle table is the centerpiece of former living room. A shorter, wider table, once in the dining room, fits perfectly in the kitchen. It only took us 35 years to figure this out.

People think of a house as an investment, but what you actually invest is that part of you that becomes attached to it. There are a few other houses to which I'm attached, even if they’ve slipped out of view. This one will, too, but with any luck at all, I'll be the one slipping from view, leaving it to others to decide how much attachment they feel for it.

BMW built my car in May 1981. A 320i, a 1980 model, I've kept it running at some expense because: I don’t drive that much; the car is one of the last that’s screwed together and thus easily repaired; it has proper bumpers and a lack of gadgetry; I like its looks; and it’s wonderful to drive on winding roads. Once, driving from Olema toward Stinson Beach, I entered that winding, wooded roadway with an SUV on my tail, its driver glaring impatiently. Soon, I was far ahead of him, as my car is built for roads like that. It’s not fast, but, like an aging athlete, it makes up for its deficits with a surfeit of cunning.

The car has “had more work than Joan Rivers,” I joke, and the dashboard is held together with black duct tape, a suede-like thing on top covering a landscape of deep fissures. I had the seats repaired. The mechanic keeps it tuned and (thus far) legal. My wife bought it used from a mechanic she knew. My brother-in-law told me he once rode with her across the Bay Bridge and she never shifted out of second. Somehow it survived.

I gave a friend a ride and she said, “You still have this car!” Like the house and barn, it’s an object to which I'm attached, that merits my affection and the cost of its upkeep.

I hesitate to call works of art objects. They're really portals for the imagination. I started buying them in early 1990s. They joined others, including a lithograph of St. Stephen’s in

Vienna that I found on the sidewalk. We bought posters in Paris and, for $1.00, I bought another from the Soviet Union, circa 1923, at a gallery in San Francisco that was closing.

Of the new work I've bought, I know the artists personally and bought the work in question from their gallery shows or from them directly. There's something about these personal ties that creates the affinity. I bought one artwork at a gallery without knowing the artist and it didn’t take. I liked it, but I ended up giving it away. When I buy art, I make the decision to do so quickly. Recently, I bought the largest painting I own. I bought a smaller one, but I felt the larger one was a masterpiece, despite being unsure where to hang it. Most of what I buy is scaled to the house.

The barn has two calligraphic pieces and an ink-brush drawing given to me by a close friend. One of them riffs on writing, tracing the same thought across successive Chinese calligraphic scripts. When my friend returned from Shanghai, she brought me a fragment of a poem written by her calligraphy teacher. When I wake up, I see it. It’s set vertically against a wall, being too big to hang, but from the bed, I can read it sideways.

Technically, the coronavirus is an organism. We see it enlarged, a ball with grasping things protruding from it. It’s as contagion that it’s entered our world and consciousness.

A friend in Shanghai noted that what she sees here and in Europe is what she saw there a few weeks ago—the panic, the response, the gradual regaining of ordinary life as the everyday feels less and less perilous. Of course, it may be perilous. We attend to that.

My mother went through the Spanish Flu pandemic when she was three. She told me that her entire Iowa town appeared to be prostrate—this was her childhood memory.

It’s the reference point for those paid to think about it. At the store yesterday, I bought a disinfectant, wiping down the packages I bought before putting them in the fridge. We do things like this, not knowing what else to do, and hope it will make a difference.

We are in some sense objects and collections of attributes. It’s unsurprising that we relate to each other based on visible cues we provide accidentally and on purpose. (We seriously underestimate the gap between us. This may reflect purposes’ specificity: when they’re lost on others or misinterpreted by them, ambiguities arise. People act on what they see.)

Subject and object merge in close, besotted relationships. A slender neck may invoke a memory of another, a chain of association. Part of the wonder of love is how desire unfolds, hastening the merger. But delusion is endless, as the Buddhists say, especially as a rationale for unwanted advances. Ambiguity plays into this. In Coimbra, the oldest university city in Portugal, the students all wear gowns. This gives them a certain standing within civil life that exempts them from the usual typecasting of gender.

Men and women today shade into each other, adopting each other’s clothes, jewelry, mannerisms, and, through miracles of chemistry and surgery, their genders. Marriage lifts its limits and these unions can be blessed with children if they’re wanted. Those who are discomfited by this read it as visual incongruity. Simply going with it eludes them.

As robots gain human attributes, questions arise about the ethics of abusing them.

Instead of a Turing test, we may need one that measures our possession of sufficient empathy to check our native inhumanity. Swedenborg anticipated this: humanity is generally bad, even as it takes pride in its goodness; the afterlife has no dissembling; and the test is self-administered—those who fail make their way voluntarily to a predatory Hell. “On earth as it is in Heaven,” the Lord’s Prayer says. As it is in Hell, also, clearly.

A chair is a chair is a chair, but it’s not true. Sofas similarly vary. Eclecticism holds that one can mix and match, while partisans for a given style insist on a consistency they regard as authentic. I grew up in a midcentury modern household. When I was 12, my parents made a substantial purchase of Scandinavian modern furniture—two chairs and a sofa. This ensemble lived harmoniously with furniture my father built—of teak recycled from Singapore shipping crates—and various objects of decorative art they inherited or acquired from family and their extensive travels. It was eclectic, despite a larger theme of modernity that was almost unconsciously adopted, my parents being actual moderns.

Our living room has two traditional chairs that would have been at home in my father’s club in Manhattan, and a sofa that my cousin thinks is from before 1900, simple and elegant. There are two cabinets, a low cherrywood table, paintings, and vases. In the next room is a cherrywood trestle table with six bentwood armchairs.

This theme extends to the kitchen, renovated over five months. My wife addressed each part only when it came time to decide. The cabinetmaker helped with the planning and also intuited the exact look my wife wanted. She and the designer developed the plan and colors together. A renovation in place reflects careful, thoughtful choices modified by unfolding direct experience. It moved slowly, by necessity, but is worthwhile. (The kitchen has another cherrywood table with six bentwood café chairs.)

According to my writing partner Richard Bender, John Habraken felt that housing falsely made a noun of the verb "dwell." Houses and their furniture should be spoken of in a slowly active tense. You do the work, and then you live with it. In time, you do more work—sometimes questioning and revamping what exists. This is dwelling, in his view.

I spent four months at Habraken's institute at the Technical University in Eindhoven. His aim was to let people adapt their dwellings to their evolving needs. He saw communities and neighborhoods as a continuous fabric of different scales, each with its own rules and necessities, and all interacting, “nested together” so that one didn’t unnecessarily impinge on another. At one end of this spectrum is the inner world of dwelling. At the other end is the city and region, with all of the infrastructure needed to support dwellings and the enterprises needed to sustain their occupants. We are the measure, as they say, but even at the neighborhood scale this is sometimes forgotten.

Cities and regions, caught up in larger issues, readily overlook the human conditions of individual dwellers. Not everyone today finds a place to dwell. I’m lucky to live the kind of life my parents would recognize, even if the aesthetic differs from their own. Others aren’t as lucky, and solutions for them are elusive. Walking around, I sometimes see sofas and armchairs set out on the sidewalk, perhaps with the thought that these items of furniture can seed a room or even a house. This is wishful thinking, of course. It’s also a disgrace in light of the region’s wealth. We don’t lack for money but we don't apply it equitably. No place to dwell means you're dispossessed, and those in this bind are visibly among us.

“Light fuse and retire quickly,” the instruction read. These were firecrackers my father and I bought in Canada and set off in a chain of lakes north of Ely, Minnesota. When they went off, they echoed, enhancing the effect. When I was younger, a friend tried to make a bomb. He lit the fuse and waited. The fuse set fire to some backyard scrub. His mother started yelling and we put the fire out. We didn’t mention the bomb. When my oldest son was young, I set off a Roman candle on the street. It hovered at the height of my head, then went down the neighbor’s driveway, spitting sparks. It was unnerving. Except for a few cones that spewed sparkles of color, I've left pyrotechnics alone ever since.

Georgette Chen's Hermes portable.

The painter Georgette Chen and I owned the same model Hermes. I no longer have mine. I gave my daughter my Olivetti portable, which she had repaired. They were wellmade and durable, like my German car and my Swiss watch—a comparable aesthetic.

I learned to type when I was 13. I took a summer course, proving to be a fast and accurate typist. My handwriting is small and close to illegible. Despite my mother’s efforts, I never unlearned the way I hold pens and pencils, a manner that gives me the control to write or draw with tiny strokes, but makes a lot of handwriting painful.

(Stendhal complains about his aching hand. Did he have the same issue?) In high school, I talked my teachers into letting me type out tests—they couldn't read my writing, either.

The sight of typed copy pulled my writing together. I still write longhand in my diary and when taking notes. (Many do this on their laptops, but I find it distracting. I can prompt my memory with relatively sparse notes.)

A laptop is a typewriter’s analogue, although an iPad with a keyboard feels like a portable with the paper held up by a metal thing that backed it. The Hermes’ flaw was that the paper slipped and the rows of text weren’t always even at the bottom of the page.

The Olivetti didn’t have this flaw. I shifted to electric typewriters—a Smith-Corona and an Olympus. At work, I had an IBM Selectric, with its gorgeous evenness. Now all of this is standard and then some. Typewriters are just the objects of our nostalgic affection.

A typewriter is purely mechanical. When you showed up at a border, they'd look for notebooks or manuscripts, but a portable’s only interest was that forensically it could be tied to you, should you send a ransom note or letters making threats. Now we leave a digital trail that links us to an array of things, were they to move on us. We may as well put our names and addresses on everything, to save them the bother.

A garden isn’t an object, the landscape architect Linda Jewell explained to me. Plants are alive and in flux. We put in a new garden, front and back, and found gardeners to tend it.

They come once a month, and I’m learning a good deal from them. It's like working with copy editors. I can’t garden, but it’s helpful to have a sense of how gardeners work.

One school of garden design creates “outdoor rooms.” Smaller and larger terraces do this in the back. The front garden is a gesture to the street. The back garden beds define a small lawn and a walkway that goes back behind the barn. The barn has a small deck and a pear tree in front of it. An apple tree extends over its roof. A lemon tree, visible from the barn, has recovered from the drought. There’s a mix of function and ornament—fruit, vegetables, and herbs along with roses and other flowering plants.

The garden's wildlife includes birds, squirrels, and cats. The deer are finally fenced out. Hummingbirds, small seed eaters, and jays elude the cats. The crows stick to the roofs. The jays land with a thump, surveying the scene as if they own it. The squirrels steal the apples and pears, eating bits of them only. The cats pass through, occasionally find a place to sun themselves. A family of skunks once passed through but didn’t linger, Inside the house is the amaryllis my father gave me. I've kept it alive as a memorial to him. A grave is also an object. My cousins' graves are the only ones I visit with any regularity. Some part of me is always with this star-crossed part of my father's family.

The house on Inverness Ridge my son bought and is restoring has an extensive, terraced garden. There are remnants—plants, an irrigation system, and wire netting to support vines. The climate is ideal for a vineyard. My daughter and I discuss starting a tiny domain, a micro-appellation. The ashes of the architect, Daniel Liebermann, may be scattered there, but the dead are soon away unless held here by some attachment.

When my father finished building his sailboat, he told me he felt his late father standing near him. It was a “baby Lightning,” a Blue Jay, that he raced on the largest of our town’s seven lakes. Later, he chartered a sloop out of Falmouth and we sailed to Edgartown and, at my mother’s urging, to Nantucket despite small craft warnings. We sailed into a gale, reaching Nantucket in five hours or so. The chart said there was a lightship, but it wasn’t there. “We’re turning,” my father said. We came onto Nantucket’s narrow harbor entry dead on. I was always impressed by his abilities as a navigator. This was before sailboats had GPS and radar. He used a compass, the buoys, and a stopwatch.

Still later, he bought a 30-foot Canadian sloop. We sailed it to Edgartown from a town near Annapolis, where they kept it. It had a crossbeam to hold the mast and I cracked my head on it many times, running forward to pass the sails up. I was good crew, but I never got the hang of sailing. I enjoyed it, but not enough to master it.

The only boat I loved to sail was a Sunfish, bone-simple with a dagger-board and one sail. A a friend had one and I used to sail it with him. Once it capsized and the sail fell on me, disorienting me. My friend pulled me out by the arm. A few years after this, walking with him in London, he grabbed my arm and kept me from being hit by a cab I didn’t see.

I flew in a version of the Yankee Clipper when I was two. It had bunk beds. It was a converted bomber—a military plane redesigned for civil aviation. We flew from London to Shannon to Gander to New York. This was so long ago that some planes weren’t pressurized and had to fly through rather than above storms, sometimes memorably.

My first year at university, I flew two-engine Martins that made the “milk run” from New York City to Utica, Ithaca, and Rochester. At Ithaca, the plane flew through the gorge to find the runway. Landing at the old Hong Kong airport in 1991, I looked out and saw people eating dinner in the apartment blocks. It was like landing in a train.

The 707 gave long-haul a reliable plane. I flew it a lot. It introduced mass tourism. I flew Air France with a throng of tourists from Baltimore and was struck by the distaste the stewardesses felt for them. In November 2019, I flew the double-decker Airbus from Melbourne to Singapore. It’s huge, but the 787, a genuinely good plane, is more spatially pleasing—the only plane I’ve ever flown in with a modicum of grandeur.

I've never quite lost my anticipatory dread of flying. In my 30s, I took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles instead of flying, which overcame my resistance. Once I’m under way, I continue on without trepidation. This is how dread works. Of course, I’d feel differently if the plane crashed. The odds favor the passengers, but it’s a long way down.

Women's clothes are odd things and our relationship to them is odder. They draw attention to the body, often animated by the wearer’s movements. Caught looking is their hazard, but looking has a long history, starting in infancy. Life is initially experienced in parts, the whole sensed but elusive, a cloud of flesh and cloth that coos and warms. We never lose these attachments, and certain sights can bring them back.

Clothes can be beautiful in themselves, but the wearer pays them off, especially if everything is as it should be, what my wife calls “well turned out.” There’s no formula for this. Fashion brands do their best to package it for mass consumption, but well turned out is very much a personal thing. Men sometimes accomplish it. For them, there has be a nonchalance about it, a sense that they gave some thought to it, but not very much.

Mirrors present their subjects as objects, or is it the reverse? From very early on, we're captivated by our reflected image, this other who lives in an inverted, flattened universe, yet is subject to time’s effects. We become aware of mirrors that distort us—for fun and sometimes for enhancement. In hotels, our torsos are fully reflected, a sometimes-brutal reckoning. We resolve to pull ourselves together, but these resolutions are like New Year’s mornings, often. Occasionally, we act on them and take pleasure in our progress: thinner, tauter faces and a narrower profile. Our clothes fit again, but the mirror tells all.

Which is to say that we trust it more than our clothes alone. More than feeling the change, we want to see it. Our long relationship with our mirrored self has a kind of implicit trust, despite our subjectivity. It’s here that we reconcile ourselves to who we are, to the limits of sprucing up, the realities of what nature gives us. A friend joked about her adolescent daughter’s fixation, but her body’s transformation demands attention. The transition from boys to men is in contrast more gradual and less visually jarring.

Vampires are said to have no reflections. It’s hard to imagine living with this, even in exchange for immortality. Of course, blind mortals live this way, and some of them once knew their reflection. With vampires, it indicates the loss of their souls. Their immortality requires reinvention to fit in with new contemporaries. It’s hard to picture the mental strain of doing this. The Casanova-like need to seduce in order to feed also feels difficult to sustain. The turnover nature planned for us, our ticket of admission, is clearly better for us on a personal level, despite our misgivings. (See “dread," above.)

Everything that once supported print has largely fallen away. At my old college, the library no longer has stacks filled with bound volumes of relevant journals. As a visiting scholar, I find the current method of researching cumbersome and unsatisfactory. If collections are going to be stored remotely, then digitize them thoroughly—make the effort, however massive. There’s JSTOR, but it’s incomplete and off limits to independent scholars. This may be one case where knowledge absolutely should be free, but it will take public investment beyond any single university or institution to make it happen.

The Seattle bookseller Peter Miller said that he thought that books of quality would still be printed and the rest would be digital. Another speaker took books as art to task, arguing for their functionality. I rose to defend such books as collaborative works. Print has a tradition of being done well, and successive generations still rise to it. It benefits editorially from this same tradition, spanning centuries. Digital will get there, I feel sure.

Can we think of cities as objects? They can appear as such—skylines of towers or walls of buildings. Even as they scale down and we understand their component parts, the effect is still one of objects on display, united in the way they speak of access or separation.

Whether it's a city, a district, a neighborhood, or a particular avenue or street, it has a character that's assigned popularly and then confirmed or denied by personal experience.

Character can be done and undone across a lifetime, even if parts remain untouched.

Robet Musil's The Man Without Qualities takes place in Vienna in 1913, but the city he describes is largely interior, stage sets for what could readily be a made-for-streaming series. Reading it, I picture these places in my mind. Ulrich moves between them, but the city is there as polis, the body politic. Settings are what such a body needs, suited for each small part of Musil's unfolding narrative.

We say "metropolis," but polis may be sufficient. It unfolds unevenly, rich and poor alike pursuing the individual thoughts that generate action or inaction. The city is less an object than the totality of these subjects, so many points on a four-dimensional map.

Some of my poems and many of my random thoughts address the motion and stasis that desire prompts. How is it that stopping off at a non-descript café several times and talking with the same Russian barista so often comes to mind? It’s the kind of detail that Musil liked to add, a backstory of small talk and pausing, a rehearsal for the main event.

I started smoking when I was 12. Where I lived, we all smoked. I gravitated to the strongest cigarettes I could find, unfiltered French ones in light-blue packs. One summer, drinking Scotch and smoking more than usual, I dreamt I was forced to eat crushed ice and ashes. Then I got a bad sore throat. I quit at 21. It was easy. My father, who smoked five packs a day at one point, quit at 45. It was an ordeal. He was yellow, but in months he wasn't. My second son has had the same difficulty, finding cigarettes habitual.

The big temple in Tokyo's Asakusa sells talismans. The price varies. Is this a measure of their efficacy or their duration? The temple is associated with success in business and exams. I went with a friend to another temple that accepted personal wishes written on rolled up pieces of paper. She picked one out at random, read it aloud, then made a face.

"No religious person should make such a request!" (I forget what it was.).

A scaled-down world always appealed to me. A memorable scene in Bergman’s film Hour of the Wolf has the protagonist looking at a miniature performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute. In childhood, puppet and marionette shows provided versions of this, but otherwise my imagination populated it. When I was six, I saw the Queen’s Dollhouse at Windsor Castle, a Georgian townhouse replete with tiny working replicas of motorcars and lawnmowers. The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago are comparable— settings that appear to open out onto a garden, a farm, a wilderness, or a city street. I owned the catalogue of the Windsor dollhouse, although I no longer have it; those of the Thorne Rooms are on my shelves, and as a kid I had an issue of National Geographic that featured them. All of this was a prod to my imagination. At six, I visited a miniature town in England. I irritated my sister by taking up our adult host’s offer to see it again, walking back in the rain to absorb it in memory. This is how I work. It’s the same with art. I have a powerful memory for experiences of certain types. I went to Paris to see a Pierre Bonnard retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo. I had two days and wanted to visit another museum, so I went soon after arriving. I was so tired that had to sit or lean against a wall at points, but I saw everything and was surprised how much I remembered, including the palais itself, built it the late 1930s with long, curving walls. It seems incongruous for an art gallery, but it works.

A few years ago, I saw a retrospective of the paintings of Vanessa Bell at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. They were displayed in the long set of connected galleries in the original building designed by John Soane. Her paintings, surprisingly small, are meant for rooms this size. Another time, I saw an exhibit of cubist art given to the Metropolitan Museum by Louis Lauder. The paintings came from his house---photos showed how they’d been arranged. The galleries had an intimacy that suited them. At MoMA I saw an exhibit of Cindy Sherman’s photos, some of which are gigantic. They felt like billboards. Later, I saw it again at the Broad, mounted in its European-size galleries on its ground floor. Those "billboards" now resembled the heroic 19th-century paintings I saw at the Louvre. They could be seen in their entirety and absorbed.

What gives spirit to a place, genius loci, is the play of scale. The Broad impressed me because it makes brilliant use of spatial variation and light—from above, from outside, and from in between as you descend. Light helps define space and bring out its character.

Like human movement through a space, light is a dynamic element. The Broad, almost classically simple in plan, has a stately coherence. I like that in a museum.

Spending time in Zurich in the second half of the 1990s, I noted a housing type that wraps a perimeter of dwelling around a rectangular and parklike courtyard. The result is a uniform street frontage with entries that look across these openings, sometimes permitting entry, sometimes not, but always with a bit of transparency. Friends here design housing with entry sequences and midblock walkthroughs that open larger buildings up to subdivide them. The larger masses are often quite simple, whereas the entries and walkthroughs occasion gestures to the eye on two scales—distinctively visible, to mark them for passersby, and more subtly variegated with plants and stoops to give a rhythm to movement through them and a sense, as one moves, that thought was given to the experience. In 1994, I spent two days in Venice, mostly walking around. Coming through what was clearly a back street, I was struck how it curved—not unlike the Palais de Tokyo—so that the quite ordinary, attached dwellings were set off. Our obsession with grids makes these curving streets and lanes exceptional, but they unfold as you walk.

In 1991, in Venice, I first met my friend Marta, whose family has lived in the city and its environs for centuries. We walked from San Marco’s plaza to the Accademia Bridge.

In the square with a 1960s addition to The Bauer is a Baroque church, San Moisè. “Too bad about that hotel,” I said, remembering it from when I was 12. “Yes,” Marta said, “and too bad about the church.” Expanded in the second half of the 17th century, its hogging of the limelight is still resented, some five centuries later. For a Venetian, scale matters.

James Lovelock calls the earth as Gaia, an organic whole. The resource overlords who rule the planet treat it like an object to be used and disposed, ideally somewhere else. In his book, Why Only Art Can Save Us, Santiago Zabala argues that civilization has set things up so that the emergency we face is “hidden in plain sight,” as they say, overlaid by genuinely fake news that denies there’s an emergency at all. The pandemic is a vivid reminder that planetary emergencies exist and require concerted action across humanity to address. The witless strife among hegemons around the virus’s containment and the parallel difficulties managing its economic fallout show both how interlocked we are in reality and how the basic fact of planetary life is unaccounted for in the calculations of our so-called leaders. As we face a vastly bigger emergency, we need to treat this smaller one as a wake-up call. What we awakened to do is learn to live in harmony with the Gaia.

We have to see ourselves as planetary, with the responsibilities that come with this.

We can't pretend to exempt ourselves from it, living as if the externalities are another's problem. There is no exemption. We either act in concert or we will fall to pieces. The pandemic was a global emergency and we failed to meet it. We have to learn.

A revived animistic spirit would treat Gaia with appreciative reverence. Four "nothings" apply: Nothing taken without returning it in a benign and reusable form; nothing made that can’t be readily reused or repaired; nothing without staying power, however we define that; and nothing human that's an object. No human can be possessed except by momentary, mutual gift. There is no having, only being and unfolding with the rest.

We're all subject to the planet’s rules, its gravity, its points of stress. How we lost sight of this is a mystery. Hunters and gatherers surely knew their patch of earth like the back of their hand. The insight of the bourgeoisie was that the aristocracy had no clothes. That insight is broadly applicable. We are clothed, sheltered, and fed owing to cooperative effort. We either take collective responsibility or we're again an aristocracy, nakedly parasitical. Something like the bodhisattva vow applies: not to sacrifice ourselves, but to see that saving all gives us a common salvation; and saving none, destruction.

At the Broad Museum.

(This first appeared in Common Place No. 20, Spring 2020. I've edited it considerably.)

Diverse Observations

A friend writes from Tokyo that he’s about to retire. I reply that it took me 18 months to make the transition from fulltime work to leisure. What threw me was the falling away of the structure implicit in most outwardly organized activities. Not all of it falls away, but what was there in school and at work disappears suddenly. The closest equivalent was undergraduate life, which continued the familiar structure of school but depended on selfdiscipline. That was fine until distractions arose.

Instead of retiring fully, I worked two days a week. This was initially interesting, but the assignments diminished and eventually I felt I was drawing a sinecure that required me to keep up with the entirety of my firm in case something arose. But this transition was helpful in revealing the paradox retirement presents. On the one hand, I was aware of the foreshortening and uncertain nature of my future. On the other hand, I had quantities of time at my disposal in the everyday. My first impulse was to try to fill it with activities that continued or resembled what I did before. Occasions appeared, each presenting its own issues. I had a valuable lunch with a friend, simply talking about the kind of work that interested me, and then I tried it. In one case, the change in scale—the last three decades of my career were spent with large, multi-office design firms—was telling. While firms of any size may be equally sophisticated, their assumptions are likely to vary unless people are involved who have experience in larger firms and are interested scaling up or applying their practices and insights. Otherwise, there's incomprehension. Scale is relative and scaling up requires quantum leaps that involve much more stress than people realize. I was lucky to work with a rare genius at this process, who grasped that you have to upgrade leadership consciously to make these transitions successfully. This isn’t Jack Welch’s “lose the bottom 10 percent" or the “up or out” McKinsey mantra. Scaling up means finding a core of new leadership that can run organizations a quantum leap larger.

There are times when organizations are breaking new ground, but every level of scale has more in common with its peers at that size than it has differences.

(A long aside.) Part of the transition I made was done by elimination. Leisure—the pursuit of activities for which I’m answerable only to myself—looked better and better in comparison. But leisure has its own demands and rhythm, which I had to learn.

One spectrum of our humanness ranges between two poles. The first is a sense of life’s continuity; the second is a sense of life’s discontinuity. We vary between them. Another, possibly related spectrum runs between a sense of life’s innate reciprocity and a sense that favors are obligations we grant or call in. A third spectrum, also potentially connected to the others, rarely turns queries down flat, seeing their possibilities, or often turns queries down flat, denying they could offer any possibility. The shading between these several opposites gives rise to indecision and second thoughts.

I find it helpful to keep these polarities in mind. I came to understand them by experiencing behaviors I found baffling and even unnatural. But my own behaviors may baffle or be misinterpreted by others. Many conventions wrapped up in manners and etiquette seem to be aimed at keeping peace across these divides. Politeness is a device for social distancing that tries to achieve its ends without angering others. It's part and parcel of working life, especially in professions that deliver unwelcome news. Entire cultures, like Japan's, have elaborate ways to finesse the delivery and decline or parry it indirectly.

This only gets you so far, especially in close relationships and their afterlives.

In close relationships, polar opposites sometimes mix with neither party grasping the basic differences in their worldviews. It follows that ruptures are made worse by these differences if they exist. Part of “worse” is the mutual disbelief that the other fails to see what the situation requires. The stronger the disbelief, the more that emotions like anger and anxiety are triggered, clouding judgement and overriding buffers like empathy.

We may be unaware of this while the rupture is occurring, but it can be useful later, reconciling it to the implacable resentment of another or getting past resentment by seeing how underlying differences, unrecognized, shaped the way things unraveled. That we were beastly to each other in our different ways can be forgiven on grounds of duress and self-preservation. That we are all beasts in these states goes without saying, as we learn as children and again if we raise any. Only sages and saints appear to get free of it, but that’s likely hard won. They were monsters once, assuredly.

It follows that enduring closeness relies on what we share. We can be connected by fate and possibly by destiny, but despite this freighted, even cosmic provenance, our ability to find common ground on an ordinary plane is more predictive of the connection's survival.

I try to “work out loud,” sharing what I’m doing and not worrying about its reception.

Many organizations resist openness, even within their own walls. I was struck by how the gods would argue among themselves, finally reach a decision, and then announce it as an afterthought, forgetting that no one else had been party to their discussions so the decision lacked context for them and could seem unreasonable, even lunatic.

“Nothing is hidden," Dōgen Eihei said. As we tradeoff privacy for the benefits of digital connectedness, openness is a preemptive strategy. How we use it is up to us. Not every tic is worth belaboring. Much can be said indirectly; candor has its drawbacks.

Life reveals who and what mattered to us, and—only as hints—how we and our works resonate with others. As I learned from Walter Benjamin, resonance has a tail. The record is never closed. Every day, something resurfaces and something else sinks beneath our notice. We work on regardless, for our own sake and against the possibility that others will find and appreciate it. Openly sharing work exposes it to others whose active reception makes them the most valuable sort of audience for a creative person.

We fall in love, it ends badly, and we deal with the aftermath. It takes longer than it would if we were rational beings, but then would we have fallen in love in the first place?

Desire ignites everything it touches, and then our flimsy boats burn out from under us.

We deal with this without any real preparation, despite signs visible from the outset. We lose ourselves and then have to find ourselves again. It takes inordinate time. Something is lost if we guard ourselves against this. We do so out of self-preservation. We inoculate ourselves (or gain the antibodies) to resist love’s infection, but the asymmetry divides us.

What’s most remarkable is how desire gains force exponentially once sparked and fanned a little, even as you know its transient nature. How tangible, these bodies alive with passion, coupling and exchange their larger sum, whole afternoons shading into evening.

This can’t be sustained, although it has its running text, its unspoken prayers for dispensation. The gods are unreceptive. Only Hestia is loyal; her loyalty is to the household, the children, breakfast on the table. Love to her has one purpose.

Attributing love to the gods is to say that it’s out of our hands or is in their hands entirely. We're sport for them, wagering as they will on each small event, the larger one being a foregone conclusion. Will she come five times or six? Will he curse as his frayed torso sinks into the bath? They place their bets; we’re as blameless as thoroughbreds.

Looking for something else, I found two folders, each pointing to a past relationship. In one, it’s beginning; in the other, it’s over. The folders' contents span the space of two years. There's another, related to them, that triggers memories of that time. When I look back at it, what strikes me is how much is bound up in a life if we leave everything in. This is my nature, of course, to leave everything in. It expresses a hope about others.

Self-confidence is a narrow path that passes through doubt, self-sabotage, delusion, and grandiosity. Remembering it, finding it again (and again), and staying on it more often than not are daily, even hourly tasks. Equanimity is enough faith to carry on. We learn to persist even as we falter, recognizing faltering as a passing thing, like a cold or the flu.

Age shifts the frame. Less wisdom, it's a perspective and enough distance from my humiliations to see them as inescapably bound up in life. Yes, I was an idiot, self-deluded again, and again, but it drew on such clues as I had about why I’m here, what I supposed to do, and with whom. That's a big presumption, what a writer might elaborate from slim evidence, but the signs were compelling. Not much of it worked out except my enduring, seemingly foreordained marriage. Life isn’t capacious enough for what we desire from it, and learning this is the only way to free ourselves from our childhood's body armor.

Most of what’s memorable is transitory. Memory is a fallible archive. In reference to close relationships, the archives overlap and arguments break out among the curators. Poets roam them, looking for the right image, and at night, dreams take over. Experience is aware that the camera’s running, but each scenario is improvised. We sketch it out and live it, then crawl home to look at the rushes. Memory spins it according to our personal chemistry. We are rarely reliable witnesses. Distance fogs the film, yet a window seen from a bed is still visible, as is another. There are associative hallways of such rooms.

There is something parallel to human life. I say this based on my experience of the uncanny. It leads me to two theories. The first is that while most of the dead move on to their next destination, some linger due to unresolved events. (Related to this is the observation that such dead don’t haunt us as we imagine, but pass through us in a way that convinces us they’ve done so to enlist us in a specific errand. When this happens, we’re briefly clairvoyant.) The second is that the significant people in our lives are a cohort that moves through time. We recognize each other mostly through intuition, but there are also direct signs. We take different parts and exchange places, roles, and attributes. When we encounter each other, some remnant of our pasts together comes to mind. There’s not much else to go on, and even a sign doesn't count for much. My experience suggests that our fear of death is misplaced as in reality we're all just passing through.

The cloud of space-time that a marriage represents can be stormy at times and even threatened with dissolution, but its nature is enduring owing to the bonds that hold both together despite everything. The marriage ceremony tries to list everything that might threaten it, but it’s far from exhaustive. Children leaven the marriage, giving it a broader territory with responsibilities that henceforth will always figure. It may be set aside at points if desires take priority, but when push comes to shove, this territory regains its primacy. Seeing it as a cloud speaks to its expansiveness, but the protagonists experience it as a stage. All is improvised and the actors do their best with what's in front of them.

Sylvia Plath seems to have seen death as close by, a door half open, her children and unwritten work notwithstanding. Some writers fear dry periods. They experience blocks and self-medicate. Others, like Malcolm Lowry, wrote in the periods of lucidity between heroic benders. He was only sane when writing, I read, but sanity can be exhausting.

Poets throw things against walls as people wander by, glancing at them, if at all.

(Excerpted and edited from Common Place No. 21, Spring 2020.)

Buddha's Ladder

Sightglass Café, San Francisco 11 August 2003 Having and Being Having is the way of the world and since we live in the world, it has a certain inevitability.

Thus, we have attachments, things, and even our own, finite life, once as big as the world seemed to be, a boundless expanse like the ocean or the evening sky, and then gradually smaller, more bounded, less full of possibilities. This is Having and, given the world we live in, it has its necessity.

Being is the other way of the world, the way that somehow transcends the categories and boundaries that having makes so explicit. Of the world because we are inescapably in the world, right up to the moment when, from our viewpoint, we are no longer—cease to be. We are in the world, which unfolds constantly. We stake our claims to Having in or on or among its unfolding: my house, my marriage, my children, my friends, my books— all and everything that figures as mine, my territory within the world. Our tendency is to use them to fix our bearings, to delimit our being: this is me, a person of a certain description, defined less by who I am than what I have, what I have heaped up.

There is some justice in being so judged, even in judging ourselves by our works, by the fruits of our labors, the opportunities life gives us to have, to love, to befriend, to create and procreate. Emanuel Swedenborg argues that life consists of these works—that such work is its purpose. We labor on into eternity, he says, doing the work of the Lord.

Life in the world is an opportunity to embrace the good and see evil for what it is. We are what we love, he says. The Lord always coaxes us to do good and to shun evil, but in the world, we are left free to decide for one or the other. In Heaven, too, but Hell is marked by suppression, he says, the kind of state in which an excess of evil is persistently put down by force.

In his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake takes Swedenborg on, arguing that his view of Hell is too mechanistic, and seeing Hell instead as Heaven’s natural counterpart—man to its woman, you might say, or the reverse. He parodies Swedenborg’s reportorial style: “I heard two angels talking…”

A bit more When love breaks off, the ego is exposed with unignorable clarity. In retrospect, seeing ego so clearly, experiencing its folly, can be as valuable as being in love. Love has two

opposed aspects, and one sees the other as a possession rather than seeing possession as a momentary gift. Marriage tries to have it both ways, turning Having into a mutual sharing of an expanded life. But marriage has its seasons and disjunctions. The sight of men in their fifties with toddlers born of younger wives is a version of this phenomenon.

How then does Being fit with this? Living with whatever life throws at us deliberately and with equanimity, deciding what to act on and persevere with despite everything—this is the Way of Being in a marriage.

Being is unfolding. The path is the Buddhist metaphor for it, but that word should be understood in a navigational sense, requiring continual adjustment. The Buddhist idea that being isn’t progress reflects its contingency. As with Cavafy’s poem Ithaka, the destination is a placeholder for the whole arc of life. The path is trackless, in reality. It can seem like a road or a path through the woods, but then it can turn treacherous—ravines or whirlpools when a crisis is in full force. It may or may not be of our own making, but our attitude toward it is ours to choose. This is why Being is a better refuge than Having.

A crisis puts everything we have in jeopardy, whereas Being has no stake in its absence.

We either are or we aren’t.

Still more Not-being is of no concern to Being, while gain and loss are all that matter to Having.

We’re conditioned in the everyday to count much as gains that in reality are ephemeral.

Traditions bring them into view. We briefly assemble family and friends to mark and celebrate the bounty that our gains make possible, but the losses too are visible—our dead, absent friends, the heap of empty plates, pots, and pans at the feast’s end. When we experience a loss as final, it can be terrible. We’re left numb and raw, yet we usually live on. Being doesn’t cease because we have more or less. Memory brings moments of being into view. At first, they’re wrapped up in having. We remember a lover’s cries, all the attributes that made her what she was. We remember the places where she was and the gap she left, leaving. Any wrenching loss leaves us bereft.

12 August 2003 On paths George Gurdjieff, the Sufi dancing master, called it “intentional suffering.” For the Taoists, the Way is an attribute of the Zeitgeist or prevailing mood—the situation, and the attitude and approach it warrants. The idea of a path is true in one sense and misleading in another. The closeness between two people can feel like Being, but to imagine this is to fail to appreciate its transience. The path is changing life itself; every change asks us to respond, but we make a fetish of the parts of it that, once gone, we intensely miss.

It can take a long time to reach the point when life’s unfolding is bearable again. In this state, we can act in ways that are self-destructive and destructive to love and friendship both. We return often to our previous condition, but everything about it takes on a phantom existence that contrasts more and more with actual, unfolding life around us. Our lives are haunted; we seem like ghosts, with a doubled vision. What is happening is that two competing narratives are tearing us apart. One is fiction, the other reality. We struggle to resolve this, and there’s only one way—simply to be, abandoning our desire to have. Only then does the world assume its actual form, unfolding with us in tandem. The phantoms finally vanish.

Behind all of this is the notion of practice. I’m thinking of a painter friend who perseveres with her work no matter what. This is a practice that refuses to bend to personal reversals, to the hindrances that come with life in the world. We could say it’s habitual, but a practice like this is really intentional. But it’s a particular type of intention that, even when it pictures an outcome, is willing to let it arrive. We may push, but we see quickly if this is a mistake. The arrival comes when it comes and is always a surprise.

Sought out It was a gap in her otherwise orderly life. I was the honorable one among her would-be suitors. In the background was her Odysseus, although his Penelope was the one out exploring. We had an intimate friendship that wasn’t. It was momentary, a bridge. She resumed her orderly life and while we were friends, her life became a closed book, as if our conversations never happened.

An episode like this seems stillborn, but it wasn't meant to last, only to be experienced. You feel let down and yet, when you look back, it has a kind of luminosity.

Other friendships never lose their source. Something about the other enables us to find the thread despite gaps in conversation or correspondence. If they’re lucky, families also have an innate familiarity that carries things along.

13 August 2003 On my nature Charlatans is Claudio Naranjo’s summary of sevens, one of enneagram’s nine types.

Sevens, of which I’m one, are caught up in planning and the avoidance of conflict and pain. They’re said to use charm to hold at a distance any situation that promises to be awkward, sticky, or worse. But why or how does this make them charlatans, I wondered?

Oscar Ichazo, who taught the enneagram to Naranjo, says that they aren’t who they seem—that they deceive others. But often the one they seek is to deceive is themselves.

Preferring to live in the future, they’re not altogether here in the present. This distances them from authentic life.

There are several ways to evade the present. Daydreaming is one—I was prone to this when younger. Making lists, while a valid exercise, are an evasion if the activities they describe never get done. But some sevens produce for others in order to gain the autonomy to have some choice about the others’ presence. They seek to be “creatively employed” to evade the real task of doing their own work.

14 August 2003 On marriage Marriage is a construct that doesn’t begin to account for what it throws at you. Love is wrapped up in it. The two together have proved to be an enduring topic. In light of it, I’ve developed a theory of marriage, although “theory” is too grand a word for some thoughts about it I’ve strung together. Nevertheless, here goes: Marriage is really the extension of family, perpetuating into adulthood a condition that we experience in childhood. To some extent we reverse roles, but it’s familiar territory. Passion and desire figure—they are needed if you hope to get a family going.

But marriage evolves to something else. Property, children, and grandchildren figure, but behind them is a tie. Not all marriages have this inexplicable connection, but those that

do have a better chance of surviving and even prospering. Marriage is rooted in Having.

You marry and have children. You acquire a household to support the family and earn a living for its sake. Marriage is dynastic to the extent that each generation draws on the last and leaves something to the next.

Marriage has to find a way to get from passion and desire to something else. Let’s call it “mutuality.” It isn’t just the tie between the founding couple that matters, but also the ties among the family, the sense of being “the same family” and able on this basis to love and support one another. We have a human need to feel supported by life, and an enduring marriage has this aim at its heart. It creates a small, overlapping world that those born or married into it inhabit. So, one task of marriage is stewardship, the tending and cultivating that gives it life.

Back to Being What drives you to Being is the sheer futility of Having as a viable position when it comes to other people. Families too face the underlying reality that each one has her own trajectory. What we look for is what we have in common—hoping that what we share will make our lives together meaningful. Being asks us to attend closely to evolving life and accept rather than resist its unfolding. Paradoxically, it gives us the broader horizon that marriages and close friendships require.

We acknowledge the big events and overlook the smaller ones that are far more prevalent. Moving through life in a rush, we miss opportunities to engage one another, and remake connection. Ironically, we’re much more careful about this with clients and colleagues. At work, we see the need to engage with them and the high price of failing to do so. Yet we pay that penalty everywhere else.

16 August 2003 Throwing hexagrams The results cluster around hexagram 20, “Contemplation.” The second line, moving, is about experiencing the outer world through a crack in the door—a narrow, possibly hidden and even voyeuristic viewpoint. This is humiliating. The changing line points to hexagram 59, “Dispersion or Dissolution,” which is about how gentleness dissolves rigidity. Life can be like trying to swim while wearing heavy clothes, I wrote in a poem.

We have to shed them quickly to save ourselves. We can be situation-blind. This too is a narrow viewpoint. Hexagram 20 can be looked at through the lens of domesticity, the language suggests. My own outlook is domestic: I’m happiest living within the boundaries of the local.

17 August 2003 On simplifying Bourgeois married life involves near-constant accumulation, so paring down is helpful.

Household things were once handed down. Appliances and vehicles were built to be repaired, and were. Recycling reveals the carnage our disposable culture leaves. To pare down is to let it go. The impulse to simplify also reflects a desire to limit what we have to what is essential or beautiful. We consider how things perform, seeking resilience. But what about our relationships? Do others need to be useful and beautiful? Is this how we form friendships and marriages, and perpetuate them?

18 August 2003 On stability A marriage’s persistence owes something to the expectations of these others. Children are a crucial factor, adding a future tense to the whole proceeding. In some sense, marriage is a conspiracy between the generations that bracket the married couple, inducing them to be the bridge that enables the family to continue. Although childless, Virginia Woolf was not without children. Those of her sister Vanessa Bell benefited from her presence. Her sister sought to give desire a better domestic arrangement, and she came as close as one can. If it was problematic for her daughter by Duncan Grant, this was because her parentage wasn’t openly acknowledged. That was a step too far for her mother (shown at Charleston, her country house in East Sussex, in Duncan Grant’s painting, above).

19 August 2003 On practice In the past few days, I’ve recorded my activities—the time they take, for example—and been deliberate about doing them. At work, I was able to do exactly one thing by this method, and that took much more energy, I found, than comparable activities took at home. The weekend showed how relatively easy it was to get things done if I set my mind to it—how the main obstacles to doing are resistance and distraction. Compared to a household, once the children are self-organizing, the workplace is a hotbed of distraction.

Self-expression is said to arise spontaneously, which I find true of some things but not others. Poems can appear out of the air, and prose pieces sometimes write themselves, but writing in general requires a commitment to practice to get things started and completed. Once established, there’s a certain pleasure to be had simply in practicing the art and craft, gaining the facility on which accomplishment depends.

On encounter Life invites us to explore space and time in a deliberate and curious way. This is the real possibility of encounter. We only realize its potential if, though our efforts, it opens up to us. That happens if it attracts us and resonates for us, by design or by accident. Life unfolds, but we can grease the skids a little. Getting out and about is hardest in periods of heartache or ennui. “Don’t get around much anymore,” as Louis Armstrong sang.

23 August 2003 What one can do The I Ching advises me to focus on doing good in small ways—that the accumulation of these acts is what matters. We sometimes say, in relation to a setback, that “nothing seems to help.” This doesn’t mean giving up and really doing nothing, but rather that if we leave off searching for a breakthrough that will somehow clear the air or remove the obstacle, then myriad small acts will appear, better suited to the actual circumstances we confront here and now. Our objective shifts from breaking through in some larger sense to doing some good in the present. And the best one can do sometimes is to do nothing.

27 August 2003 Speculation When (and if) I’m 80, what then? I stake out in advance my small territory of regrets.

(This was written in August 2003. I found the notebook it was in and edited from it—it's edited again in this version. It first appeared in Common Place No. 22, Spring 2020.)

The Self that Writing Explains

Society is a conundrum. I was happiest in it as a small child, making my way through a forest of adults at my parents’ Singapore garden parties. The image of a child hanging unseen at the edge of the grownups captures my lifelong sense of not belonging with these others, though intrigued by their goings-on. Recently my daughter and I went to party organized to benefit a locally edited literary review. To cope with my inevitable sense of discomfort, I suggested to my daughter that we stay in one place and talk until someone joined us. She agreed and we had a wonderful conversation. After a while, two friends came up to us, relieved to find others they knew amid the luminaries. We talked with them, and a stranger also came up and asked if she could be part of our small circle.

At some point the hostess—the editor of the review—came by, recognizing the other couple, and we had a brief, pleasant exchange. Then we left. I could have written, “then we fled,” but our departure was more orderly than usual. Left to my own devices, I often head off precipitously, drained by the need to talk. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy myself. I’ve met interesting people and stayed in touch with them. But the energy drains right out of me.

At work, where I was required along with everyone else to meet the extroverted expectations of the gods, I couldn’t flee as readily. But work differs than more purely social events—the conversations tend to be task-related. Society is like a group process workshop—you interact with others in a continually improvisational way. That's fine, one-to-one, but exponentially harder the more people are in the room. The child on the sidelines can eavesdrop on conversations or just enjoy the chatter as chatter, but as an adult I always feel awkward if not engaged. There’s an element of feeling passed over, others getting the attention. All this surfaces because society brings our egos out.

Writing this in the midst of the pandemic, I note how the absence of social and work obligations makes it bearable. I don't miss them. A friend sends me strings of audio snippets, a kind of spoken letter to which I reply in writing. This is my kind of society.

Love too is a conundrum. It has its context or its contingent nature, arising from one’s own nature interacting with another’s. This brings out specific aspects of the two natures in response to each other—possible attributes, perhaps, that love occasions. It’s often a surprise to find them, and this is part of what makes love so heady in the midst of it.

In periods of stasis, most of this potential is out of sight, out of mind. In our native state, we’re more aware of the broader affects, the moods that typify us and color our days.

But love brings out the nuances. It also makes us expose ourselves, take risks, plunge in as

we have, far from our native ground. This is why I think it’s impossible to sustain. But another way to look at it is that it’s closer to performance art. There is a measure of artifice to it in the care we take to set the stage, despite the truths exchanged in its heat. But a performance that’s desired and bespoke—it takes the sting out its ending, put like this, but love brings so much along with it, has so much chemistry, that its aftereffects are deleterious. Depending on how it ends, it can take years to be totally free of them.

Marriage aims to domesticate this dangerous thing in order to sustain the relationship and allow it to evolve as children appear, if they do, as life kicks in with its implacable demands, and as we age. Our appetites remain and we only appreciate the perils after experiencing them first hand. This is the aim and the vow, and we do our best, being human. To which we could add that, being human, we're at our worst when things fray. Where this leaves us, if we’re lucky, is with a renewed appreciation of friendships that stay clear of desire while enabling affection and the attachment it permits. We love our friends as friends; sympathy rather than chemistry governs.

Early in the morning, a coda comes to me. We are the catalysts of each other’s pleasure in love, which sets us up for acts of cruelty if we fall out of love or if the weight of it is too difficult to support. Possession is a momentary and necessarily mutual giving of gifts, despite our vows and desires. Barthes, de Beauvoir, Stendhal, Duras, and others form a possible syllabus—not that it will be absorbed until experienced once or twice.

I owe a great deal to luck, but you can't depend on it. Like a psychic sense, it doesn’t tolerate abuse. When help wasn't forthcoming, this has always seemed justified in retrospect. In some places and situations, you’re on your own. You make your own luck, they say. What seems true is that effort reveals talent, and others notice. I found this to be a slow process. If I tried to leapfrog it, my luck deserted me. No skipping steps, it said.

I'm bourgeois in a Walter Benjamin sense—the way of life appeals more than any other.

Despite sympathy for experiments in living differently, I would never do so voluntarily.

“Family is so important to me!” I woke up with this thought. My family has had a gyroscopic effect on my life, keeping it from toppling over and preserving its forward momentum. Looking back in time, I wonder what we were thinking, those times when we thought to go our separate ways, as if that were even possible.

It's in relation to family that my life is at its most bourgeois. A family is an enterprise.

There's a tradition of focusing each new generation on those that follow. The adults seem to be working for themselves, but they have the family in mind, too. This attachment to family is leavened by a broad sense of family connection. Honorary cousins and old family friends abound, with events that occasion their presence. There's a network of friendships the parents maintain, often crossing generations so the children form their own links.

Families want the next to do well, see their way through reversals and find happiness and fulfillment on their own terms. This is the ideal; those who follow vary around it.

I have no talent as a cook. My children once begged me not to make their breakfast. My wife is a remarkable cook. She worked in a café and we met over the breakfast she made me. She was, as my friend Eva Della Lana exclaimed, seeing her photo, “a stunner.” Early on, she and her sister came to my apartment and made dinner. It was wonderful, but what a mess the kitchen was. Cleaning it, which I do every evening, is a small price to pay.

I can cook basic things. When my wife is away, I try to broaden my horizons, but what I make is a pale shadow of anything she makes. I follow recipes, but my wife’s approach differs when it comes to oatmeal or lentils. Hers are better than mine. Mine are better than they were. My only criterion is that I can eat it, not toss it.

Cooking well is genetic. There are courses you can take, etc., but to cook as well as my wife does is a native talent. Mine is to know how good it is, to appreciate it every time.

In the winter, she often makes soups. We eat them for several days at a stretch, and invariably she apologizes for serving it again, but it only gets better with age—soup is much better the second or third day, when everything has absorbed the flavor of everything else. Why would I want anything else? When that appears, my wife saying she couldn’t take another day of soup, I’m also grateful, as I should be.

My life bridges the remnants of British colonialism as experienced in Southeast Asia and the eclipse of U.S. hegemony in the wake of regional parity and U.S. miscalculation. I tend to see life in geopolitical terms, a reflection of my well-traveled childhood and my father’s blend of realism and optimism, gained in World War II. Geopolitical, but also culturally and ethnically diverse, despite being set among British and American expats and then raised in a Republican enclave in which Italians and Jews were exotic. My sense of the planet’s diversity arose because I experienced it directly.

The era that resonates are the postwar decades when colonialism was supplanted by globalization. Trump tried to kick away the idea that the world is the more interesting project, but it has regularly surfaced as the positive aspect of these recent years that are otherwise tainted or undermined by chauvinism and willful, destructive interventions.

After we returned to New Jersey from Singapore in 1953, my parents bought a television so my mother could watch the McCarthy hearings. She ironed as she watched, and I sat with her. She admired Edward R. Murrow, the television news broadcaster, but it was also obvious that McCarthy and his cohort were bad guys. Television does this.

Later on, I used to watch Nixon address the nation and think how he came across as an amateur actor whose model was Bela Lugosi. Our current, far more partisan media lets the bad guys rave on. It should expose them, but there's no Murrow to note the fact.

A wasteland of regional wars fought over “system differences” and then over access to energy bring us to a juncture: either perpetuate this wasteland, ignoring all the warning signs and making the planet dangerously worse, or to revive the modern project we set aside—self-actualizing, cosmopolitan, cooperative, and attuned to nature.

Make no mistake: the second would be a different way of life. It will combine reliable knowledge with a good deal of heuristic—local and individual practices that mediate regional and global guidance. Let's call this local cosmopolitanism. The skill the future demands to revive the modern project effectively is network savvy. Despite drawbacks, social media is the precedent. Despite determined efforts to stop it, word gets through.

In “To the Planetarium,” Walter Benjamin notes that our relationship with the cosmos, a communal commonplace in antiquity, is left to poets in their reverie. This is a tragic error.

Benjamin saw leftwing intellectuals as sympathetic to the proletariat but separated from it by their bourgeois upbringing and their unwillingness to be activists and commit their writing to the proletariat’s cause. His talk, "The Artist as Producer," criticizes this stance.

I saw an exhibit of Russian avant-garde art at LACMA in the 1980s. The work was notably better before the October Revolution than after. By the end of the 1930s, most of the artists exhibited had died in Stalin’s purges. The stairway of the exhibit hall displayed their photos and their fates. It was sobering. Benjamin visited Moscow and considered staying, but didn’t. Perhaps he wondered if he could be who he was in that regime. Being himself was what kept Benjamin going. He never joined the Communist Party.

(Excerpted from Common Place No. 24, Spring 2020, and substantially edited.)

"Sketch of What the Writer Knows"

Musil argues that our minds are loosely tethered to the rational, with the irrational as a leitmotif. This mirrors life with its sometimes baleful, sometimes gorgeous randomness, or both, like a meteor we see coming at a great distance, impossible to avoid, its embrace glancing, leaving scars; or we are that meteor, unwittingly. He is the patron saint of this.

Musil set out his argument as a pair of complements, realms that he called “the ratiod” and “the nonratiod.” The Buddhists converge them by declaring the necessity of living as if the world is not contingent—the need to “put breakfast on the table”—and accepting what arises randomly as the world with which one deals—one ordinary world.

In Musil’s Diaries, he writes down scenes from life. They’re almost reportorial, but they blur into stories and parts of novels, or the stories and novels assimilate them. In my diaries, certain things stand out in a landscape of sameness: all those times I gave up, feeling condemned to it, and in the end found value in an ordinary life that extraordinary life tried and failed to supplant. None of this would have happened if ordinary life hadn’t had its own upheavals. It’s as if there are border conditions and each side shades into the other. I crossed back and forth, and each crossing was harder than the last.

One would think the writer would know at once, but it takes time to grasp that it’s a pattern. The realm is extraordinary, after all, and each instance has aspects that make it different from others. Viewed in retrospect, they form a set. Let’s call it the realm of impossibility, from which the writer crossed back. Had he stayed, then “ordinary” might take on new aspects, a progression with its own signs, crossing the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary, or perhaps colonizing the latter in the name of the former.

What the writer didn't know is if this was even possible. It seemed to have rules and there were signs. Some of them were explicit, but of what value were they?

A quantum sense of life is what the writer knows by experience. Gravity is supposedly off to the side, majestically apart from quantum mechanics and its speculations. Gravity is

a stand in for the limits we encounter as we try to escape convention’s pull. Life is quantum in its chronic instability. We live “as if,” and life turns these words back at us.

This is especially difficult for those who crave proofs. Convention is the sum of any proofs we agree on, but they too are provisional. They may gain from acquired gravity, but its currency is strictly limited. Proof against what? Which is to ask, who agrees? What are the limits of their agreement? So, gravity isn’t really off to the side, but is the abiding context in which life operates, a limiting factor but also how we ground ourselves.

Life alone lets us deduce from our personal experiences of it. It only reveals the truth of things in the very narrow sense that we can say meaningful things about our nature.

Even this is merely indicative, a place to start.

If we accept Musil’s realms, could we choose to live an extraordinary life? This misses their inseparability: the realms bleed into each other; we emerge with blood on our hands.

Musil illustrates the intermingling of the two realms within unfolding reality. He draws a distinction between them, but then shows us that in everyday life each haunts the other.

They are inseparable, yet we experience their singularities. Their unfolding can be crushing. We heal but the wounds remain tender. It gives us poetry, dreams, melancholy, and other human things. We make art with it, we relive it, and we act in spite of it.

(What follows are some digressions from the thoughts above about Musil's two realms—an assertion confirmed by my own experience. "Sketch of What the Writer Knows," is borrowed from one of Musil's autobiographical essays.)

If Musil is the saint of unfinished projects, then Witold Gombrowicz is the saint of all projects taken up for their own sake and humanity’s, projects that commend themselves only to their instigators. In this sense, Gombrowicz is the saint of blind faith. He writes like the holder of a self-endowed chair. He grants his authority to himself and holds an office only he can fulfill. The Diary isn’t literature, but it’s well-suited to him, just as Musil found it easier to write philosophic novels than to write academic treatises on philosophy.

In a diary entry, Gombrowicz writes that he is his main problem, his only worthwhile protagonist. We are, he adds, the body in question. I agree. Our bodies are at the root of everything. As writers, we know that only we can write what we know and knew, who we love and loved. We are our problem. We are the projects that our parents instigated.

I appear to live contemporaneously, seeming to latch onto things quickly, but in truth I only do so if they perfect older things that I value. In some ways I’m an 18th-century man, despite the influence of modernism in its 19th- and 20th-century guises.

Art is the only tangible form play takes. The rest is afterlife—a gallery in our heads. We seek it in discursive journeys that are best described after we arrive. Will another boat be there, ready to take us out on that glittering sea once again? Play's journeys are like this.

There's a tendency to narrow things down. Capacious admires nature in its profusion. It takes us as we arrive and applauds our efforts to become more fully human.

(Radically condensed and reordered from Common Place No. 25, Spring 2020.)

Reflections on E.M. Forster's Commonplace Book

Paintings by Elizabeth Snowden “Immediate Past is like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generation waste their time trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out, leaving the door open behind them.”—E.M. Forster, 1926 What I can remember of what I’ve experienced goes back to the late 1940s. As the child of expatriates, I lived for three formative years in a milieu still largely colonial, although on the cusp of changing—a world that has vanished and yet lives on in certain aspects of postcolonial life. I was my granddaughter’s age when I set out for Norway, living with my father’s family in the company of my grandfather. A year later, by train and ship, I went to Singapore. I bring this past along, an image of the mid-20th century at odds with its American version, which I lived in later.

My mid-century may have been closer to the prewar first half than it would have been growing up on the American mid-Atlantic coast. It was notably diverse—I came away from it with a clear sense that the planet was filled with peoples whose existence and ways of life I didn’t question. God’s command to Noah had clearly been carried out. But something else stayed with me: how lives were led happily in widely varying circumstances. That they varied was obvious, but what happiness required was not much.

This may have reflected how World War II was like an extended pandemic: bringing death closer; causing deprivations that were more equally shared than usual; and even creating opportunities for those excluded—women and people of color, for example. The memory of this, as well as the need to repair the damage the war had done, carried over, holding back the consumerism that took over later in the 1950s. America, which suffered the least damage, boomed, influencing others and prompting competition with the Soviet Union and the inward turn of China, for which American consumerism was a contagion.

The “Immediate Past” Forster describes is more likely to be the sum of each cohort’s assumptions about its own value in relation to those who preceded it. In some eras, it’s claimed, the long shadow of a singular genius stunted his successors or led them to take up unsuitable careers. I read that Schopenhauer should have written novels but was put off a literary career by Goethe’s preexistence. Such a situation doesn’t seem possible now.

Is it that genius isn’t what it used to be or that our world is too big and complex to encompass a "genius of the age"? And yet the successors of a cohort routinely rubbish the self-elected canon of its predecessors—them and those its predecessors saw as important.

There’s a desire to reorder everything. This seems understandable. It also sparks debate.

At a suitable interval, some reputations are salvaged. The intervals vary, though, and people can simply disappear.

In his Commonplace Book, Forster—now 50—considers writing another novel.

About what? He lists and then rules out various possibilities, asking himself what would be suitable both to him and to his readers. He notes how Lytton Strachey struggled with his final book, Elizabeth and Essex. Meanwhile, he writes what he calls his “commonplaces.” In his introduction, the editor wonders if this was really it, the content that might have appeared in fiction. It’s not an idle question. Musil delayed and delayed his long and discursive novel because, although he kept a diary, the novel was a better vehicle for working out his ideas. And this outweighed his need to finish it, it seems. (This is my impression. He may have thought he had the time, waiting for the war to end.

Compare with Tomasi di Lampedusa, who only wrapped up his great novel when finally handed a real deadline.)

The need simply to set it down has precedence over any desire for visibility. The latter follows from a conviction that what you write has value beyond oneself, without worrying too much about who will value it or when. It has precedence because you bring to writing the entirety of your own experience, always starting where you are. The Commonplace Book Forster wrote isn’t a diary—he kept one separately. It seems clear that he intended it to be read by others, whereas his diary was private, an artifact that might be read later, but not by anyone who figured in its contents.

The “Immediate Past” Forster mentions is a collective past shared by a cohort with its own loves and hates. The diaries of Anthony Powell rehearse his chronic concern for his reputation, particularly in reference to Evelyn Waugh—love and hate being closely linked.

Forster compares himself to Eliot, a comparison that looks odd from here, given that we see them as very different writers. We compare him now to Virginia Woolf and remember Katherine Mansfield’s comment that his novels lacked heat. But they’re still read, still filmed. He has a reputation.

I'm not putting down visibility. With certain territories it's almost a requirement. It should probably be placed in a separate category from the need for self-expression and rumination. It can be independent of that need or that need can be superfluous to it if the driving force is exposure pure and simple, for reasons beyond creativity. “Creative work” in general aligns with this, with people rising partly on talent and partly on being noticed, but not always or even often because their need to create is their primary motivation. That motive can still be hidden there, of course, waiting for its moment.

“When the music stopped I felt something had arrived in the room: the sense of a world that asks to be noticed rather than explained was again upon me, my restless and feeble brain was at peace for a tick or two.”—E.M. Forster, 1927.

Another side of visibility is to be noticed in order to find love and sustenance. It's like every other thing in nature that tries to keep the game going on an individual or hive level.

Gardeners meddle, but bees ply their trade methodically, homing in. A vast if precarious trade, I think, reading Poets & Writers, trying to explain so much that's unexplainable.

Does it come down to finding a teacher? It may. Or finding a tradition, something to hold on to while you gather your forces, find your voice or recover it.

A friend recently published a set of brilliant poems—not simply remarkable to read, but novel and fitting in the way she put them together. They came at the end of a hiatus.

In the beginning, her need was to work with a residue of something at the border of good and evil. We wander back and forth amid the tarpits and smooth patches of quicksand.

Part of the need to write is to explain the world we noticed, that made us notice it.

We made others notice us, as well, hence a hesitation about the narrative and our role.

One way we recognize monsters is by their conviction. We waver, because we know the breadth of our motives, how desire undoes us, how we never learn yet grow slowly wiser.

“The social fabric, personal relationships, and our place in the universe … are the three subjects for serious literature.”—Dante, circa 1309, quoted by E.M. Forster in 1930.

In E.M. Forster’s 1941 Rede Lecture on Virginia Woolf, he says that being upper middleclass defined who she was and what she wrote. She related to others as individuals, but only catered to them as “crowds.” She saw writing as activism, sometimes polemically so, but also by challenging preconceptions about outsiders, whether lesbian or shell-shocked.

Forster says that her best novels open out from poetry. She found it hard to sketch characters well and yet was capable of making them come memorably alive. Her characters don’t live on, as some novelists accomplish—he cites Jane Austen’s Emma as an example—but they pervade the senses. To me, they’re like films, unfolding visually.

The London of Mrs. Dalloway is a universe like Dante's, ethereal and pyrotechnic, held together by a fabric that’s gossamer and relationships that are tenuous, yet both cohere, with a gravity that’s aided by their elective affinities.

My great-grandfather pulled his family into the upper middle-class; his son was a product of that milieu, but moved to America. His granddaughter married into a family of industrial entrepreneurs. German and well-to-do, while his grandson married the daughter of Scotch-Irish engineer. This is my lineage. My father lived in Oslo as a child, meeting his father’s family, so they stayed in the picture. My parents expected us to have a university education and a profession. They valued writing and culture. They were middle class—that’s how they defined themselves. My father belonged to the professional class, a different one from Sir Leslie Stephen. (Woolf was a Lady, Forster notes. My great-grandfather was also knighted by the Danes, but my grandfather was a younger son. His daughter told me that her Ohio relatives considered him courtly. He studied in Berlin, not just in Oslo, and lived twice in New York City before finally settling there.)

While I become attached to a place, I live in it as if I’m still a visitor. This is comical, of course—I’ve lived in Berkeley for 50 years—but the things that stir up the locals don’t stir me up as much. I'm as concerned as anyone about our deplorable national government, but every locality has some version of it. This is what it means to be local, this mad urge to scratch the itches that the local creates, the sheer irritation. It's then projected upward. It leads people to disrupt, overthrow, and wreck what exists, reading it as exclusionary, old, tiresome, an obstacle to progress—any number of reasons. To see that the results are appalling, you live with them over the decades, as I have. Appalling to me, in short, and. I’ll be dead soon enough. Yet much of it is worth preserving, not in a museum sense, but as qualities on which a social fabric, personal relationships, and a local universe depend.

“Today 29-9-34 in the garden, rockery side, looking up to the house where Bone was working, sky bluish, light gentle, I looked without theories or self-consciousness.

This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.”—E.M. Forster

The back garden accompanies my writing if it isn’t too cold or too hot to work in the barn that looks out onto it. The sun moves seasonally around, so I sometimes begin upstairs and then come down. There’s usually a point of emptiness that can be a prelude to a nap or the beginning of something new. Reading especially, which I often do in the barn, is a source of ideas, but there’s an awareness of the rest, particularly when something within it moves. Today, among other things, there were the white butterflies and the neighbor’s substantial cat, which wandered in, looked around, and left in his slow, deliberate way.

Behind the barn, a neighbor to the west has commissioned an elaborate retaining wall cum fence, part of a complicated scheme that includes a hot tub and meditation area.

Her project, which takes form day by day, prompts me to consider how the very back of our garden might be developed. Currently, it’s more or less a dumping ground, but it could be a contained sort of place, elongated and hidden away.

What I picture is a terrace with a bench or a table and chairs, or both, and beds of plants, perhaps a series of trellises set out from the neighbor’s fence. It would be better if the barn opened out at both ends, but this is impractical given its many bookshelves. I’ll have to content myself with looking out on it and walking around the barn to enjoy it.

A garden is a reasonable metaphor for my writing: attentive to conditions, loosely planned, and slow and appreciative of small things and to the way a garden unfolds and folds back into itself. A garden is like a cosmos in that it’s always becoming.

“A good prose style doesn’t hurry to make its point straight away and it’s difficult to say where it does make its point.”—E.M. Forster, 1934 or so.

In his introduction to Forster’s Commonplace Book, Philip Gardner says that Forster wrote to find out what he thought. Forster remarks that he’s not much good at thinking per se—he gives an example of setting himself that task while waiting for a train, with no success. I make no claim to a good prose style, but I’m never in a hurry to make my point because I’m rarely sure what it is.

A while ago, going back through old papers, I found an early draft of an essay and comments on it from someone with whom I'd once been in love. Attachment figures in the draft, but less so than I feared at the time. The draft also stands on its own, although her comments led me to rewrite it completely. Both versions have their validity, I saw.

Forster also finds fragments of himself here and there—things written on scraps, in the manner of Emily Dickinson. He also remembers things on waking that he said in dreams. In my dreams these things are said in a declarative way. “Give up your European self!” is an example. Giving anything up, even a European self, is provisional, but the threshold rises with experience—never so high that we can’t imagine some possible reason to change course, but something plausible gets harder and harder to picture.

“From 51 to 53 I have been happy, and would like to remind others that their turns can come too. It is the only message worth giving.”—E.M. Forster, 1932.

I was 54 when I plunged in again, trying to cure my unhappiness without making it worse. Another explained it as recovering from wounds received. I felt I was pursuing an intuition that events seemed to confirm. It was like a set of directions that bring you to a destination by a route that afforded every kind of unrepeatable experience. When you think back to those directions at a later point, you have to be grateful for them. Life reveals our idealism and folly. If later we hold back from plunging in again, it’s owing to

these revelations. Our knowing shifts, with less need to see it proven in the flesh. It’s when we give it up that it comes to find us and drag us back, or so it seems.

When Forster described his happiness, he was aware of the festering world around him. It’s never unalloyed, never not an irony that you happen to be at this fraught moment, yet you are, unavoidably. He knew that pain ruins the party. We're stalked by our bad habits and by every kind of ailment or contagion, biding its sweet, inevitable time.

“Dryden has no personal standpoint, nor yet is detached: a series of attachments is all he provides. If he regrets anything he has said he apologizes in a rapid manly way and passes on. Good smoking room style.”—E.M. Forster, 1930 An analogy can be made between the way we treat the past in cities and our exit strategies from human relationships. We treat others affectionately until life loosens our attachment.

We are notoriously prone to choosing expedience. We make ourselves scarce when the truck comes to haul off the wreckage. Sometimes we are the wreckage.

Life can be seen as a series of attachments that we pass through, some celebrated by rituals and others viewed with nostalgia or regret, depending. If life in transient, as the Buddhists suggest, then our attachments are delusive, our comings and goings so much froth. It's sure to go anyway, so why bother beyond a certain point? Better to face the facts. “Don’t give it a second thought” is Harold Ross in his best smoking-room style.

It’s odd how life ends up as a collection of ruins, a dumping ground of memories tinged with regret. If delusive, they remain an Inquisition-worthy bonfire. We’ll burn with it, we tell ourselves, but this is too dramatic. We stagger on. A city's cohort wonders why one district looks like six others, even as these absurd things remain. It's local, usually, with concerns for which the city is a backdrop. Memorable is a song that, heard later, has the flavor of some excitement that defined an era or an afternoon. We briefly recall what came along with it, then it’s gone again or we put it on repeat to wear off the effect.

“And what do I believe? That sainthood is ineffective against diabolism but that diabolism will lead to exhaustion, and a tired harmless generation will arise and begin to look around them. Date? 1980 at the earliest.”—E.M. Forster, 1941.

My sister and I were born in the 1940s. Our father was away in between, fighting the Nazis. He was effective against those devils. I don’t think our cohort was tired. We had our parents as examples, a generation that was happy to run the planet. When I came of age, I never doubted I would run it, too, in some fashion. They were liberal owing to their experience of the Depression and the War. It set their outlook, but others here sought to undo what the New Deal and especially the War had done to liberate women and African-Americans—giving them real places in the economy and showing clearly how they much they could contribute to it. That effort to undo explains a great deal.

Seeing unjust conditions through another’s eyes clarifies why they can’t continue. It’s sometimes argued that relieving one injustice creates others, but these are side-effects, not the systemic failure that fundamental injustice reflects. Side-effects can be dealt with. The big changes are resisted, but they come down to Keynes's "When the facts change": you see the point. It may take some elaboration to get there. This is what leadership is about.

On societal issues, my hope is always to raise all boats. This was the ethos I was raised on.

Ideas like the Green New Deal speak to it in the same way that the New Deal spoke to my parents.

If there are systemic problems, then let’s change the system. That's the essence of any New Deal.

“After Tobruk Sebastopol and the search for something small enough to do, such as the arranging of a vase of flowers.”—E.M. Forster, 1942.

It’s early July, 2020. My granddaughter is a month old. The election that may push Trump out of office is less than four months away. His departure, if it occurs, is two months later. Half a year, that is, until we are possibly relieved of this autocrat, his minions, and their enablers. Writing this, I’m aware that every day sees a new effort to force through some baleful measure. Some are checked in the courts. The latest, which would expel foreign students attending classes online, was challenged by universities, including my own. Meanwhile, China clamps down on Hong Kong, ripping up its 1997 agreement, and makes noises about Taiwan. Hong Kong is lost, as was foreseen. The action reveals a CCP that feels beholden to no one.

That a free and democratic city like Hong Kong is snuffed out is a tragedy, but we have also brushed up against such wanton disregard, only checked because our defenses from autocracy are better grounded. Or so we hope. When Biden asks openly if Trump will try to keep power by force, we have reason to be concerned. It has too many echoes of other autocrats who slid into power and then remained there, unmoving and unbending.

My garden is like a painting by Bonnard, especially in the early evening when the western sun slants across parts of it, setting up a shifting contrast of light and dusk. The bees and white butterflies are the leitmotif, but all of it is in motion. The gardeners gave us bouquets of roses and lavender, but the garden itself is the real source of pleasure, the “something small enough” that is a refuge from the looming, all-too-large rest.

“Floating above the depths of myself and unable to sink into them. All the opinions I can arrive at, arrived at. Sense of my own smallness, and I must preserve it or lose touch with reality. Sense of my own greatness and I must preserve it or cease to act.

Wisdom, when acquired, proves incommunicable and useless and goes with our learning into the grave. The edges of it occasionally impinge on people, though and strike a little awe into them.”—E.M. Forster, 1943 Much that I do is done from necessity. Lately, inner necessity has replaced outer in terms of my writing, and this has three aspects. The first is to write as a practice, to exercise a skill. The second is address an audience, for which faith is required. The third is to make sense of my thoughts, to bring them out so I can look at them and share them with others.

When we take up own creative work, whatever it is, it will inevitably reflect who we are, and the more specifically it does so, the more likely it is to be interesting to others. In an interview Robert Duncan said he borrowed from other poets to make progress in his own work—their influence flowed through him. Reading The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 of Joanne Kyger, I was struck by the way her writing arises from everyday life closely observed—not resisting influence, but never imitating it, and with a sharp eye for self-delusion. She’s so much more obviously enlightened than her husband!

Small and great are like self and Self, one unfolding with life and the other wanting to be visible to others as a proof of existence. Between them is the inner necessity I see in Kyger: to discover what she’s about and how this may be all on which she can rely.

Forster’s Commonplace Book is described by its editor as equivalent to a last novel.

Kyger’s Journals have a comparable stature. Gary Snyder and Allan Ginsberg are there, their spiritual pretensions seen through. (In one memorable scene, Ginsberg lectures the Dalai Lama on spirituality; Snyder’s blindness to her emotional life is also recorded.)

Peiting Li's work in the barn Diaries and journals are inner-directed, although Forster’s anticipated readers for the Commonplace Book, given over as a public document. Novels can be audience-optional.

Forster's Maurice appeared after his death. He wrote whenever the great outweighed the small. The Commonplace Book lay in between, neither a diary nor a finished work.

A poem … likes to remember, … takes pleasure in resemblances and echoes. … Now and always, many big things, chaos, intelligence, sentiment, seek to smother the little poem and prevent it from playing with its memories.—Charles Marron, Forster’s French translator, in a letter to him, 11 June 1929.

Our back garden is a source of poems in which its flora, fauna, and atmosphere figure.

Sitting in or looking out at it, I’m often aware of life moving in and through it, lavender stems bending when bees land on them. A variety of birdsongs are audible across the day, with a pattern of their arriving and departing. Butterflies flit in twos and threes, playing in between their beelike errands. A jay thumps down, stakes out a neighbor’s tree in search of insects. These small poems make no claims, but then very few poems I write do so.

Nature includes us, another species with comparable variety. In some seasons we’re decked out or intentionally naked; in others, we’re all purpose, serious and annoyed to be disturbed. All this is grist for memory, these patterns that appear year after year—harvests that we gather, sort, press, and age that then wait to be uncorked and written out.

"Art is important in itself, even if it does no good.”—E.M. Forster, 1945 The phrase “art for art’s sake” is condemned as superseded by the political uses of art.

Their tendency to repeat as memes is striking. Poets jump on this bandwagon, as the pages of Poetry show. Events demand to be noticed, but a poem like Yeats's “Easter Sunday” is caught in its moment. Yevtushenko’s Bratz Dam is not because he has an everywoman tell its memorable story and gives her a memorable voice to tell it.

Art is important in itself, as Forster asserts. It licenses a poet to stake out the ground of her art one word, line, stanza, or poem at a time, to disregard whoever came before or immerse herself in an earlier art to rethink it. Criticism is an imposition where poems are concerned, reflecting the critic’s biases. Editors as close readers are more helpful.

The one who really matters is the poet herself. She makes her way, finds her reasons and voices. I was inspired by a painter friend who told me he just paints and then takes stock. Another painter calls these preliminary pieces “studies.” Forster's prose in his Commonplace Book is like poems struggling to emerge. An editor described my poems as “sentences piled up.” Do they scan? A critic said one felt constricted, but that’s not always true. I take none of this to heart. To me, they are poems beyond a doubt.

“I am asked to give up my advantages so others may have things I don’t want; to help build a world I should find uninhabitable.”—E.M. Forster, 1945 His subject is Cambridge, the English university city where he’d studied and where he found refuge there after his family’s house was taken back by its owner following the death of his mother. Now Cambridge was under siege, but Forster’s sense of the future as an onslaught looks back: “Shelley and the Liberals assumed that, once the chains had

fallen, art, scenery, passionate personal love, would become popular.” In place of his beloved Cambridge, he infers, we'll get what Antonioni’s Red Desert records: drab modernity filled with young people whose alienation reflects the latest styles.

“The night is again dark, unbothered by stars or thoughts of light years. The earth and all that lives and has lived on it is enclosed in a capsule of clouds. Man, excellent man, unpuny man, sees a few yards around himself and tries to think.”

—E.M. Forster, 1961.

Even as I was spatially constrained by the pandemic, my daily life opened it up in time and drew me to media that compensate for people’s physical absence. Much of what fell away I didn’t miss. In its place are the one-to-one talks in which my upstairs writing desk joins another, and our rooms become attached. The very portability of these conversations makes distance less daunting. Correspondence and much else will continue, but these writing places may still merge, even as their respective orbits widen.

A friend came by and gave me a brushwork she made that I placed next to her calligraphy in the barn where I write. It's filled with light, so I don’t have much art in it, but these pieces can resist it. I used drafting tape to put them up, to honor their handedover-ness. The barn is an archive of meaningful things, from my diaries to letters and gestures from close friends. There are folders of old poems, a disorderly library, and other prompts. The overall effect is ruminative and slow, the latter word invoked by Italians tired of contemporary life. The idea is never to rush, yet arrive in unexpected places.

(From Common Place No. 26, Summer 2020, and largely intact owing to its coherence.)

Pessoa, Wittgenstein, and Other Prompts

Singapore circa 1952: a funeral "And sometimes, in the middle of the road---unobserved, after all—I stop and hesitate, seeking a sudden new dimension, a door onto the interior of space, onto the other side of space, where without delay I might flee my awareness of other people, my too-objective intuition of the reality of other people’s living souls."—Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions, 2017, p. 89 For my birthday, I was given a Hopalong Cassidy outfit with two pistols. This was in Singapore in mid-January, 1952. The Mary Poppins series, among my favorite books of this period, depicts the governess and her charges passing into a painting and even into a cracked plate. The idea of entering another world appealed to me. I was already able to project an imaginary life onto the everyday, giving it portals that I regarded as portable— not the fixed wardrobe of C.S. Lewis that I encountered much later, but any number of doorways that would transform a room into others that opened out into a variety of places. In the Mary Poppins books, she governs every scene that takes leave of the everyday. I took from this a sense that any world I might enter was in my control—a control I exercised like a benign monarch.

The analogy might be to the duchy around Weimar that Goethe served, also encountered much later. I once saw a photo of Goethe's summer house. It reminded me of the Europe I saw when I was six, when it was still recovering from the War. Eight years of peace had restored agriculture, but London still bore the damage bombing had inflicted on it. It was not yet fully "postwar" nor transformed by the jet age and the prosperity that put cars on its roads. We drove around in my parents' Vauxhall, but traffic was sparse. Those five or so months were the end of the expatriate years of my childhood, and my wanting to cross into another world was in part a desire to get back to it.

This other world I envisioned looked back at and forward from my childhood. The setting remained same, but the one living in it was transformed. It included a country house and gardens, access to which bridged a gap I felt from a life I'd imagined early on.

"The true reality of an object lies only in a part of it; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to the material world in exchange for its existence in space." --Pessoa, p. 76 Buildings fall into two broad categories—those that aim for this pared-down essence and those that make a display of the tribute paid. Bucky Fuller idealized the former, seeking lightness in the manner of Zeno's paradox. His self-proclaimed disciple Norman Foster makes a fetish of the tribute, structure rendered as ornament. At a certain point, Fuller added time to his concept of lightness. Four-dimensional houses were as physically light as he could make them, but they were also meant to be lived in as needed. We can imagine a service economy in which fresh sets of clothes follow us from place to place, arriving in the night. Even our shoes might change—espadrilles, sandals, clogs, or boots.

But this lightness involves a sleight of hand, an apparatus no less weighty for being external to the houses it serves. The burden of it is carried by others. The warehouse trade gives us a clearer sense of the weight of the tribute. "Object" as Pessoa saw it should be applied to anything that trades on essence and keeps the rest hidden or unmentioned.

"The rest" is now too huge to be ignored. We have to reckon with the size of the tribute. "...All of life is metaphysics in the dark, with, in the background, the murmuring gods and our complete ignorance of the way ahead as the only possible way ahead." — Pessoa, p. 157 My life confirms Pessoa's assertion. Not so much murmurings as signs, occasionally explicit and uncanny, and an expectation of someone arriving. It must be odd to await someone long overdue, like the Messiah, sorting out the different claims of arrival. In my case, no one announced herself—the speculation was my own, kicked off with the first, most enduring instance. The second lasted about a year; the third close to seven. "Lasted" is misleading. It refers to what some might call "the main event," but each instance has an afterlife that's specific to itself. This is to say that no instance is of greater or less value than any other, although they vary in sequence. The sequence seems to matter.

What's certain is that we arrive with only our intuitions. We're instructed in life, but not about this, which may be a reason to write about it as Pessoa did. Homer's Odysseus hears directly from his protectress. We look for instructions, but most of them deal with aftermaths. If we add it up, we get the current sum of our experience. Others arrived to find us in our different states. It takes a long time just to let our lives unfold with all else, to pray for our loved ones' safety and one more morning, the gifts of which are enough.

"Each one of us is two, and whenever two people meet, get close or join forces, it’s rare for those four to agree."—Pessoa, p. 155 Whenever two people get close, as Pessoa says, their several natures come forward or recede. This is especially true at the beginning, when improvisation is inevitable. Each one considers how to spark the other's pleasure, but the question of who leads is set by their natures as they play off of one another. At least four natures are involved, possibly more. We may suppress one of them to meet another's desire, but that suppression may come back to haunt us, boxing us in when what's needed is to be open. Admirable are those who live devotedly to their own natures, who see them clearly enough to do so.

"You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are.

This is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don’t stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet."—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans.

Peter Winch, Chicago, 1984, p. 33e I write from my own depth. As with Wittgenstein's bare feet, I'm naked behind various scrims, there both to hold aspects of myself back and protect others who were present.

Depth measures what I acknowledge of what I know, although writing or saying it sometimes forces me to confront my deeper selves. They can seize our tongues and animate our bodies. When this happens, we have to account for it.

"The edifice of pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work."— Wittgenstein, p. 26e Pride has a destructive or toxic aspect. It can turn a situation into a fixed narrative that helps you forget whatever injured you, so you can move on from it. In the process, love and affection can become hate or indifference. It's as if this aspect of your past is dead.

Dismantling the edifice of pride is worth doing because walling off your past removes you from the life you lived, an unfolding present in which love and affection may persist and take new forms. Revising the narrative is hard because the demands that pride makes on life are often very specific. If they go unmet, what was desired is over and done. But the narrative pride writes may differ from what others felt and shared. It gives no weight to this, but it's the yeast for something new, the ink with which the text extends.

"Space is not distance, Pissarro says, not a journey to the horizon: it is here where we are, an immense proximity, a total intuition of ‘place’ and 'extent.’ And Time is not becoming, not endless contingency: it is a Now that goes on being Now as we live it, a unique kind of permanence, one we know we have only for an instant but which is not for that reason experienced as fleeting, or even transitory. Every instant deserves to be monumentalized. It is not a 'moment’ fizzing by."—T.J. Clark, "Strange Apprentice," London Review of Books, 8 October 2020, p. 16 Much fizzes by, which may be why what lives on in memory is so often what slowed us down, like lovemaking or a child's birth in all of its particulars—everything we took in.

The limits to exchange are the heart of creativity. Whatever another might recognize and find resonant speaks to her own experience.

Landscapes are part of this, sometimes attached to the family that is our first love.

There are places we know through them, and others to which we fled to find ourselves.

We remember the houses we inhabited as children, the rocks we clambered on and swam out from. Life distances us from them, but we carry them along nonetheless.

In lovemaking we notice not only the attributes of our beloved but also such things as the way light strikes a building or a wall opposite, and its composition. Nothing eludes us when our senses are heightened. Love ends, but in reality, it persists, uniquely, indelibly itself. Whoever occasioned it is intrinsic to it. It needs no monument, because what could it be? This is the futility of any gravestone that goes beyond a name and the birth and end.

And even that is futile. Better to paint a painting or write a poem or a story—to use such artistry as you have to give a kind of life to what one experienced and leave it for others.

"Realistic fiction, such as Flaubert’s or Kafka’s, is a form of human natural history, and human natural history in the Wittgensteinian sense is something distinct from social or psychological science. The realism of such writing consists in attention to overlooked general facts of human nature—to such things as our experience of time, our capacity to draw rules from instances as also to know when instances do not suggest rules, our abilities to aspire and to concede, our thwartedness."—Eric Griffiths, If Not Critical, Oxford, 2018, p. 183 My sense of my life emphasizes these "overlooked general facts" of my oh-so-human nature. "One continuous mistake" is Zen's take on a life led within contexts we only partly understand. I try to make sense of my quirks, inconsistencies, shortcomings, virtues, and talents. I accept it all without casting it in concrete. I accept the good and the bad, and try for a balance that spares me and others of my worst aspects. I see clearly how I defeat myself, sink into lethargy, fail to attend to life's basics, act in short like a child. I also see how I snap out of this and how readily this is accomplished.

I make lists—I hesitate to call them plans—of my intentions and obligations. Some of it gets done, some of it is deferred. I take my weight and blood pressure, noting their variation and telling myself, yet again, to eat more carefully and exercise as suggested.

The evidence, those general facts, is always right there, regarded by my several selves.

"An action, event, thing, or being was not chosen dualistically as an action among actions, and event among events, and so forth, in a causal, hierarchical, evolutionary, or means-end model, but rather nondualistically as the ultimate action or the ultimate event, abiding in the Dharma-position of the realized now that was discrete before and after. There was nothing but that particular event, which consumed the whole universe, and ultimately even the universe was emptied."—Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dögen, Wisdom, 2004, p. 66 A writer friend wrote to me that a love affair can have a beginning and an end. It is certainly true that if a love affair ends badly, life can feel entirely emptied. It's hard, when this happens, to remember the nondual nature of emptiness, which is at once the source of every beginning and the repository of every ending. In Dögen's philosophy of radical nonduality, life constantly looks around the corner of one state toward all the others.

My friend writes sometimes about a particular affair that hover unresolved in her mind. Life has aspects, often around love, that are significant and incomplete. In the James Joyce story, "The Dead," the first passion of a now middle-aged woman returns unbidden as a memory because his early death left her bereft and with no suitable ending.

"Only a madman would soberly demand that a man not occupy himself with himself."–Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, Yale, 2012, p. 140 That we are our own project spares others the necessity of making us do so, because only we can attend to ourselves and attract those who have a reciprocal need for our attention.

"In our eagerness to understand reality, we forget that we are not here to understand reality, but only to express it. We, art, are reality. Art is a fact and not commentary attached to a fact. It is not our job to explain, elucidate, systematize, prove."—Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, Yale, 2012, p. 104

When I write, I try to be accurate about what I saw, felt, heard, think—my responses to things may possibly be useful to others, but what they will experience is specific to them.

Simply writing about them suggests that whatever happened didn't kill me, although others have died for less. I noted that the idea of a parallel life is false, and what keeps it alive is our human need to honor possibilities that might otherwise gnaw at us and are only relieved by living them out, despite the knowledge—the foreknowledge—of its futility. We learn to accept our limits, but it usually comes after one or more disasters, however heady they were in recompense, however much the stuff of poetry.

"Nothing throughout the entire universe is concealed."—the answer given to Eihei Dögen when he asked, "What is the practice of the Way?" Hee-Jin Kim, p. 28 At birth, our nature is briefly apparent in an almost flamboyant way, as if the shock of being in the world unleashes everything we brought along. At the outset of love, we see it for what it is, but this foreknowledge is of little use or consolation. We see reality and turn away from it, unwilling to take even modest steps that would increase the odds of dealing with it. Occasionally, though, we act on what we see with a conviction that surprises us.

Most of life is lived with only a half-awareness of what's happening around us. We're oblivious, which is corrosive to those who need us to be aware of them. The close relationships hinge on unforced affection, and part of living with another is to make room for solitude so intimacy is possible. This is as hard for the one needing solitude as for the other needing proximity and interaction. They conjoin, each valuing the other's trait.

Awareness aims for a response commensurate with what's revealed, able to run with it. This can involve defying our natures in the interest not just of greater harmony but also of greater possibility. The only thing harder than this is to live entirely within the confines of our nature, even if it condemns us to a narrow existence or a shallow one.

The Way is the line of least resistance associated with a situation—what is natural or innate to it. Awareness means that we see this and act accordingly. Practicing awareness means consciously being with what we see, moving with that revelation rather than resisting or opposing or denying it. We learn to trust things as revealed—trust in that unfolding, sensing it on the hillside above the beach rather than below in the undertow.

"The Fall of Man must have been like the end of an affair, as a result of which the newly sobered-up lover 'doubtless sees the whole truth, but something greater has been torn to shreds, and truth is everywhere no more than a fragment that has been left over and patched together again.'"—Catherine Wilson quoting Robert Musil in "Mach, Musil, and Modernism," The Monist, January 2014, p. 148 True or false is inapplicable to love, whether it arises in an affair or in a marriage. Honesty is also useless, in that to insist on it is to assume that right and wrong apply. It's possible, however, to declare that one's own love for another was real at its height, even if its reality is just a mark we make on time's wall, like the red handprints left by the Neanderthals.

If I write out the love I felt, its reality is in front of me. This is no fragment, but a story we wrote together even if I alone am remembering it. What pains us when love ends is the uprooting of tendrils, everything that connects you to the other. If the question of truth arises, it's here. As the I Ching says, "Nothing is lost." We have to wait for it, so poignant when it resonates again, like a favorite painting we come upon by accident, decades later.

"Ulrich understands that the contingency of the construction of our world allows us to have the freedom not to be bound by any human situation; but at the same time it also means ‘never knowing what one wants to be bound by.’"—Barbara Sattler, quoting Robert Musil, in "Contingency and Necessity," The Monist, p. 94 The parallel lives that experience tells me are ruled out by a life lived "as given" serve nonetheless to rub our faces in the moral strictures that tradition imposes on us. We're aware, for instance, of the workarounds that other cultures have tried out, yet we find ourselves marooned in ours. It surprises us to find how they can vary, granting license in one situation and taking it away in another. Despite all of this, we plunge in.

The only honesty that may be valuable in love is the honesty to admit that the world to which our desires run parallel has its virtues, or, more simply, that we can't take the pace that the two parallel worlds require. I can honestly say that the pace is unsustainable.

"In fact the beginnings of good originality are already there if you do not want to be something you are not."—Wittgenstein, p. 60e What is "bad originality?" Does it stem from wanting to be something you are not? Does it lead you to things that are all glittering façade or too close an imitation of a model?

Basil Bunting only broke through when T.S. Eliot died—a gatekeeper who saw Bunting as an imitator of Ezra Pound. His supposed overidentification made him too close to the real thing, Eliot thought (wrongly). Or does it mean a malevolent originality? The great figures of malevolence vary a few themes. Their actions seem self-coerced, unreflective, and banal. They grant themselves license, but this isn't the same as self-acceptance.

Originality accepts the self that knows who it is and is interested in learning more. It values this trait in others and ignores the self-coerced, unreflective, banal rest.

Wittgenstein demands that the self be true to itself, so that its originality is always a declaration. Consider Jan Morris, whose recasting of self is part of her originality. If I could move between genders easily, without chemistry or surgery, I would do so, but that's not possible. My nature though is receptive, a midwife to the procreators.

Originality accepts its particular, sometimes peculiar forms, always curious about the next chapter and how certain issues that dog a life drop away or matter less and less.

"Perhaps one day this civilization will produce a culture. When that happens there will be a real history of the discoveries of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which will be deeply interesting." —Wittgenstein, p. 64e Reading Walter Benjamin reinforced my sense that time's boundaries are arbitrary and that we're less a product of our epoch than we imagine. The arts exemplify this, giving us an aural, textual, and visual sense of anticipation and continuity. Perhaps it's just the way things unexpectedly persist, finding new champions and interpreters. The history that Wittgenstein imagines pries time open and puts less emphasis on provenance turns out to be about siblings and cousins, their shared traits making nonsense of any timeline. It's not that provenance doesn't count, but it counts less than the way the traits evolve and are reshaped by viewpoints that were overlooked and then rediscovered. Benjamin's method, his talent for synthesis and his conviction that widely dispersed phenomena are fragments of buried mountains of ideas, may be what Wittgenstein meant by "produce a culture."

"Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. And Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony."—Victor Shklovsky, quoted by Bruce Nanay, "The Dethroning of Ideocracy," The Monist, p. 10, note 2 A steady diet of political manipulation and pandemic exigency can make daily life seem baleful. Emerging from it invites us to revive the arts of living—to restore what we share as human beings, stewards of the tightknit planet we've been pushing into imbalance.

The pandemic brought home this tightknit aspect—our mutual dependence and how our collective actions affect larger phenomena, from pandemic spikes to the quality of the air.

We speak of climate science and epidemiology, but our impact on each other and the world around us is more a question of arts and skills we practice with a new awareness—a consciousness that breaks the grip of our habituation to situations that work against us.

There is ample peril in the world today, but the opportunity for defusing it and shifting things to a more stable and beneficent condition is right in front of us. We are artists of our own lives and the larger contexts that support them and the lives of others.

We sense their health as much as we measure it. Measurements are important, of course, but we don't have to track them closely to know we're headed in a better direction.

We got in the habit of a spur-of-the-moment gratification that stripped us of agency, making us consumers of life rather than artists within it. When mass is applied to culture, education, food, goods, healthcare, housing, transit, and tourism, the results are varied. It is possible to have an art of living at that scale, but there has to be a desire for it. That desire is the essence and the spark of urbanity, which wants the public realm to be robust and universal—a human right to a life that's more than subsistence or worse.

Jane Jacobs wrote that city and countryside are one, the latter an extension of the former. Elaborating on this, the idea their rigid separation is misguided. They should shade together, a symbiosis in which each finds its proper place within a resilient whole, an interdependent ecosystem that has to be approached as such. The art of its cultivation is the most subtle art there is. Defining a region by its watershed and weather patterns may be a useful way to proceed. Both speak directly to the idea of interconnectedness and how imbalances appear as floods, droughts, freezes, and excessive heat and aridity.

This is an essential part of urbanity, overlapping the Slow Movement's insistence on an awareness that's hyperlocal in its attentive to terroir, the unfolding sum of what defines a region. This is neither provincialism nor elitism masking as preservation, but rather a recognition of reality. From neighborhoods to the watershed, a region consists of nested scales—some manmade, some cultivated, and others nature at an inhuman scale.

Regions benefit from an imagination loosened from the grip of neoliberal assumptions, especially when they're presented as progressive. Markets cater to the highest bidders and pay lip service to their self-distracting causes. It leaves us with what the market now rarely delivers: a region in tune with itself, respectful of and creative with its terroir at every level; an ecosystem around which we organize our lives to be capable of shifting as it shifts. The arts of living urbanely are necessarily dynamic and responsive.

They are necessarily creative and receptive, attentive to the ebbs and flows that typify the whole of nature from tiny organisms to the planet, Gaia, on which all lives depend. She will rebalance, one way or another. Urbanity pays minute attention to the fact.

(This first appeared in Common Place 28, Autumn 2020. Parts of it are omitted here.)

Thoughts About a New Midcentury

Thirty years seem like no distance. Where we are now, 2020, is what people tried to foresee in 1990. And yet 30 years is a real distance. The Institute for the Future, when it tries to illustrate how things will be in 10 years, limits the changes to 15 percent of the present. That suggests that in 30 years, almost half of what we accept today may have changed. Looking back to 1990, I wonder if it's true—is 2020 that different? Then I look around. How would we depict what's changed? It's subtle, much of it. In the next 30 years, some of the more visible elements may catch up.

The Bay Region is squeezed by a tax regime that exempts the main source of its wealth from paying adequately for the public realm. We're more or less a colony of the tech oligarchs, and the public goods and services found in equivalently large economies— the region's is comparable to the Netherlands—are badly frayed in consequence. Public education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and transit are substandard. The market delivers world-class quality to those who can afford it. Workarounds abound, but there's a threshold below which people fall off the map. The pandemic showed both the extent of the precariat and the possibilities of addressing their plight. But the tech oligarchs resist the public sector because they see it as bloated, ineffective, technologically backward, and unsustainably, unjustly overpaid. To the extent that this is true, reforms are needed.

The public realm is an ecosystem. This is relevant to the Bay Region, which today has some 110 separate jurisdictions and relatively little regional leadership or governance. This magnifies the power of the state's executive and legislature. The balkanized nature of the region makes it harder to chart its own course and resist top-down overreach. It cuts into individual cities' ability to deal with issues that benefit from or require regional and local cooperation. It leads cities to try to solve regional problems unilaterally or, worse, to push problems onto neighboring cities without contributing to their solution. In the absence of regional leadership, no one can step in to adjudicate or allocate funding equitably and strategically. The mechanisms for that are lacking, but necessity may force their invention.

These are our realities. Thirty years will leave many of them in place. The tendency of any look ahead is to speculate, an activity that pokes at current borders and sometimes breaks through to realms of desire. I can imagine how intransigence at one level might whet appetites elsewhere for the extension of diktat. Intercity transit might arrive as a Chinaorganized package, priced to sell at the state level and imposed top-down the way BART was, decades ago. Housing could be a similar story—a Singapore-style embrace of towers for those the market doesn't serve, with a revival of housing authorities under state control. In short, a top-down scenario that partly supplants local control to solve a problem quickly and cheaply. This assumes that California will continue to be strapped for funds, despite its wealth, and any of that wealth that's tapped will insist on such wholesale solutions. Affluence will dictate how local communities are impacted, despite efforts to level things.

This is one scenario of speculation. It could be otherwise—a workers' paradise or continued hell for those below one threshold or another: circles of hell that get progressively, precariously worse. I think hell is more likely than paradise, despite California being imagined often in terms of the latter. What's possible is to lean more toward one than the other.

Paradise is how it felt to me on arrival. And despite everything, there's a persistent honoring of the basic elements that make the region what it is: the ring of hills that are still identifiably hills, not Hong Kong's Peak; the importance of the bay itself as a unifying presence; the drama of the Gate and the coast as it fans out to meet the Pacific; the way nature appears suddenly, like the canyon you encounter coming down from Twin Peaks toward Glen Park or the way arterials in the East Bay end in hilly parkland. The balance of settlement and nature is in rough balance.

This balance is less well understood at the level of fabric—the pattern of neighborhoods and districts. The fine grain that arose before World War II gives way to different townscapes and cityscapes. Some of it works—I was surprised by the lower Folsom Street corridor, west of Spear Street, an urbane stretch that attracted young families. Whether they stayed after the pandemic hit is another question, but initially the area had real street life and interesting buildings, an improvement on earlier redevelopment there.

Urbanity in the Bay Region is a fits-and-starts affair. Dogpatch, which was redeveloped extensively after the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan was adopted, is okay, but missing the community-serving parts the district was promised: a school and a library, for example. The balance is tipped in favor of the market—what the market delivers. This suggests that unless the city acts as a countervailing force, the market will resist being held to account. And cities tend to lack memory or perhaps consciously forget.

In a conversation in 2019, the San Francisco architect David Baker noted that what the market produces in San Francisco is getting steadily better, because both city staff and would-be buyers and renters absorb the lessons the best development offers.

Ironically, subsidized housing is often a model because it's planned and designed with the involvement of the community around it. Usable open space is prioritized along with facilities that support communal use. Market-rate housing takes its cues from the "global" marketplace rather than from the best of the locals. Even the lower Folsom Street corridor is really just a collection of buildings by name architects who drew on their own precedents elsewhere. Transbay, Rincon, and Mission Bay do the same. With a few exceptions, there's no originality.

What's depressing is how originality goes unrecognized. When Stanley Saitowitz, one of the best architects in the Bay Region, designed an early modular housing project for RAD Urban in Berkeley, the Zoning Adjustment Board, failing to grasp how good it was—and what a miracle this was—rejected it. Urbanity doesn't require originality—the older residential neighborhoods here mostly drew on pattern books—but it benefits from it. The fabric that arose from pattern books drew on artisan creativity, while architects set the tone with larger houses and important buildings. Urbanity results from this dialogue; the more generic buildings here have little to say to each other or to us, a baleful influence.

Austerity amid abundance: We underinvest in childcare and education, below-market and threshold-of-market housing, transit, healthcare (including mental health issues), and managing the commons, whether it's in town or in the country. This despite the affluence of the Bay Region. The discrepancies get worse. By 2050, will this reverse? Doing so means prioritizing public goods and services to increase their quality and accessibility.

Social mobility depends on this. In 2020, our poorer communities are being set adrift.

We need a regional government. As it stands, the region is caught between its cities and counties, which only loosely cooperate, and the state and federal governments, which disregard it. Regional government risks being elite and unaccountable to voters, another layer of bureaucracy, expensive and ineffective. But without it, the region is invisible.

Horst Rittel's observation. The problems that vex us—"wicked," as he styled them—are symptoms of larger problems. If our region finds itself caught between adjoining layers of government, empowering it may not accomplish much. By thinking of the region as an ecosystem, we may be able to temper the interactions of these layers so they stay within their natural boundaries and yet collaborate as they tackle these vexing problems. It may free us to move beyond the solution space that our current political process imposes.

That space doesn't lend itself to the resolution of our vexing problems. In Berkeley, elected officials are enjoined by a state law from speaking informally in group settings.

Formality is the rule, in the name of transparency, but it stifles conversation and collaboration. One reason for the rule is that too much rides on the elected officials to whom we delegate authority. The rule reflects past abuses, but—as always in politics— the cure seems worse than the disease. Ceding power might help loosen things without inviting corruption. (It seems clear that tightening things hasn't stopped it.)

Governance is problematic. Berkeley's City Council meetings last into the night, with the controversial issues only taken up when most citizens have gone home. The Legislature takes up bills its members don't understand, with cities, towns, and citizens struggling both to decipher them and make their opinions known. Yet these bills cut through local prerogatives in the name of affordability, equity, and other catchwords. They free the marketplace to bypass local review and mandate local actions without any state funding.

If we have 110 jurisdictions in the Bay Region, it's partly because so many activities are tied to public entities accountable for their direction and running. This is the essence of the ecosystem, and sometimes the sheer gravity of a vexing problem forces jurisdictions to come together, to converse and collaborate. Does it have to be a pandemic, an earthquake, wildfires—a catastrophe no one can ignore—to prompt this?

The last midcentury gave us a modern world. What the modernists envisioned 30 years before came to be. Some still look back at it nostalgically, furnishing apartments and houses with its minimal aesthetic. Two friends are restoring a midcentury modern house with willful purity. "Like rebuilding the Ise Shrine," I told another friend. Now even the word modern is tainted by its history, losing sight of its original meaning as contemporary. As a child of the midcentury, I've had trouble with this shift.

Modernism in 1920 fought free of the stylistic wars fought across the 19th century.

Pugin's polemic for Gothic over the neo-classicism he saw around him struck me when I read it as being like the polemics against the stagnant modernism of the 1970s lobbed by postmodernists, but dissent predates this, All the movements had the same idea: to breathe some life back into modernity by getting past it—post-it.

Modernity was attached to objects, including machines. Buckminster Fuller saw through them, first to lightness and ultimately to a shift in space-time toward time— objects that time can inhabit; objects that long to be ephemeral, weigh nothing.

What do we call this impulse, this era? We still need the world the moderns envisioned, and their minimalism is still pertinent. Can we take it further? One aspect of it unexplored by our predecessors is the move away from the petroleum-based economy.

It's implicit in nuclear energy, which at the last midcentury emerged as a peaceful use for this thing our scientists worked so hard to develop as a trump card within existing warfare. But the side effects of that option—calamities and waste that are sufficiently untoward that even despots have blinked—make other approaches more sensible. Now that we see conclusively the rising cost of dithering, revamping looks unavoidable. Coal, oil, and natural gas will fade away. The shift will accelerate. Life will reorganize itself.

Modernism had 19th-century antecedents. This was Walter Benjamin's argument, and it makes me think about the roots of the dominant themes of 2050. In 2020, along with our benighted politics, covid-19, and the growing havoc of global warming, our focus is on artificial intelligence as our animating engine. Individually and collectively, we make "tech convergence" happen by using it within the everyday, stretching it beyond whatever its inventors and proponents foresaw. We make tech work for us, bend it to our will even as it tries to nudge us, snitch on us, or actively oppress us. We will connive and survive.

The Anthropocene is under attack. We need an everyday compatible with planetary life.

This impulse has deep roots. Some who we think of as modern, like Thoreau, were attuned to our actual context and how such actions as building railroads, for example, impose commercial priorities on natural and social orders we disregard. Disrupted, that order responds in ways that can disregard us at a massive, inhuman, and annihilating scale. We experience this scale in any case—the planet's order unfolds oblivious—but our actions can make things worse. In traditional societies, the response was often to live minimally. The countervailing responses were to erect signs of our dominance and transcendence, and link our fate to higher powers, accepting the world as transient while ensuring that we ruled over others meanwhile. Some became postmodern first and then began to shift to another era. Others are barely modern. All are contemporary, living more or less similarly even as the differences between us we insist upon grow shriller, backed up by threatened or real violence. Is this like so many other eras, muddling along even as so much divides us? We struggle now to act the parts. The most expensive and the least expensive looks are indistinguishable now. This seems to be by design.

Thirty years isn't a typical horizon. But it's an interesting one, distant enough that some things will visibly differ, but close enough that vast differences—like colonies on Mars—aren't likely.

We measure time in terms of life and death. Once we realize our mortality, diminishing returns attach to our sense of self. Once we asked impatiently, "Are we there yet?" Now we wonder how much time is left. Life's end is like a brick wall terminating a steadily narrowing passage—vast when we began. We pictured heaven to retain expansiveness.

Viewed 30 years away, a midcentury is another kind of Heaven, a marker on which to project hopes and dreams. They're important even if unrealized. They set an agenda.

Urbanity is an innately human response. The example of communal housing in Vienna, going back to the 1920s, and more contemporary models in Western Europe and here, too—enlightened work by architects who value urbanity—may yet save cities from being ravaged by reductive buildings. William Morris set himself against this same problem, manifested as Victorian era tenements. This tension will persist, I imagine.

It takes time to make a life. Life rarely falls into your lap, despite the fairytales the media reports. The Buddhist idea of "start where you are" should be the premise. Raise the floor and don't hinder or attack those who climb higher. Privilege counts for much less than people imagine. The only legacies that really stick are the examples elders make and their commitment to raise and educate their children to carry it forward as best they can.

There are societal obstacles to communal and personal progress, worth fighting to overcome and eliminate. They never entirely go away—someone is always getting the short end of the stick. Working to address this is the duty of governments, institutions, and businesses. The public realm exists to give that someone a leg up. But it also exists to give society as a whole a strong underpinning, to "raise all boats." These purposes are closely linked, complementary. You can't have one with the other, we've learned again.

Envy grabs inequality by the wrong end. The focus should be on a strong public realm.

Everyone has to give something up to realize it, but it's not a substitute for achievement nor is it a leveling carried out for political reasons. Leveling is just envy if it keeps people from achieving whatever their capabilities allow. Society needs their achievements.

The public realm should be a life companion. It should aid young parents, get their children started well, make sure their primary and secondary education is good, help them recover from mistakes they or their parents made, provide ways into adult society that recognize that they may not have a worked-out entry, and provide supports so they have roofs over their heads, access to healthcare, can afford to get to work, and are protected from ruinous calamity. They will still need to work on their own and their families' behalf, paying their fair share of taxes to support the commonweal. Enterprise needs to pay its fair share, taxes commensurate with its regional impacts. Pursue this agenda for 30 years and things will look different in 2050. It won't be perfect, but it will be much better than it is now, when our public realm is frayed, neglected, and underfunded.

(This is from Common Place No. 29, Winter 2021, edited and substantially condensed.)

Notes in the Midst of Pandemic

The nature of friendship We entertained in small groups when the weather was good. As cold weather set in, a few close friends ate with us indoors. At Thanksgiving, two households shared food but split the guests. Christmas is likely to be similar. My wife walks with her friends, but I've used Zoom to have conversations with them. I referred to it as conjoined rooms, because one friend and I both talk in our respective writing rooms and they pair naturally. Some people shield their private space with digital backdrops or real ones that reveal little, but others are content to share real places that speak to the range of their interests. I learned that one friend plays the bass viol, the electric bass (of which she has several), and the piano (electronic). Another friend lives in a small apartment that, conjoined, feels expansive. Calligraphy and artwork surround her.

This friend and I correspond. She also leaves strings of brief recorded messages when the screen gets to her. These strings can be 20 or 30 minutes long by the time I hear them all. I save them, but I haven't gone back to them, as they stay with me and I write one or two replies, sometimes more, in response to things she raises or mentions. On Zoom, I recently read her three poems that I sent in to Poetry Birmingham, a regional journal in the English Midlands. I rarely read my poems aloud. Later, I sent them along.

Correspondence has long been how friendships are maintained and nurtured. Some friendships are marked by exchanges of Christmas letters, usually with a cover note or something jotted on the card. But others get real letters, written at wildly different paces.

As a correspondent, my tendency is to reply at once and sometimes send postscripts or appended thoughts. I treat email like the post, with the exception of the Christmas letters I just mailed out, feeling that something tangible was warranted in this season. My correspondents reply slowly and some invariably apologize for this, although I assure them each time that I'm grateful for their letters when they come. My sense of time in its undisturbed state benefits from my associative memory, which makes it easy for me to pick up the thread. In its disturbed state, a symptom of ego tearing, it was quite the other way. That happened once, a drawn-out process that I regret. It taught me something about friendship, though—that you can't mix it with some other states of interaction.

I proposed to my wife by letter. When I say this, the reactions suggest that I'm seen as a romantic or from another era (or planet, maybe). In reality, it was the simplest way to ask. And I was urged to write the letter by my wife's middle sister, who believed—rightly, as it proved—that she'd accept me. So, in this sense, an arranged marriage, but this is more about the nature of correspondence than of friendship. I raise it though to make the point that a letter can sustain a friendship across considerable distance in time and/or space, and also across the local divisions that a pandemic creates, shifting what would

have been conversations over lunch to other media, including words on a page or screen.

Friendships cross media. That's part of their interest. They make room for each one's favored means of expression. If there's a boundary, it's the one mentioned before—the mixing that brings telos into the friendship, expectation.

This is only an issue in close friendships between the sexes. When you reach my age, experience has finally taught you not to act on desire. The reality of my age makes the idea ridiculous, but there are men who ignore this and father children in their seventies and later. Alan Clark, the political diarist, made it almost a leitmotif, despite being, by his own admission, happily married. "Starting again" was the impulse.

Close friendships and marriages start where they are. They share a connection that accrues. My sense is that accrual varies significantly or perhaps it just gets derailed when expectations aren't met. I think that marriage's telos becomes steadily more open-ended as mutual acceptance grows. There are certain formalities related to marriage's dynastic nature, but as you age, the known unknowns take the edge off expectation. "God wiling" is more often on your lips. It's not exactly starting where you are, but accommodating what unfolds. Close friendships do this, but differently. They accommodate other sorts of changes that shift the ebb and flow of interaction. Correspondence is ideal for this.

The house as gallery We started collecting art when were in Paris in 1977. We stayed at the Hotel Louisiana and there were galleries nearby. We bought a signed Zodiacal calendar spread by Eugene Grasset, and several posters. We have a mix of older work, Austrian, Japanese, and Italian prints, a pastel by Jenny Michels, a relative by marriage who was a model for and the last student of Matisse, and work in several media by Patricia Sonnino, Vivienne Flesher and her husband, Ward Schumaker, Lisa Esherick, Sue Bender and her husband Richard, Russell Case, and Karen Legault. There are other Legault paintings in the kitchen and, upstairs, work by Sonnino, Leigh Wells, Schumaker, Henrk Drescher, Wu Wing Yee, Nellie King Solomon, Patricia Bruning, James Monday, Laura Hartman, Biliana Stremska, my grandfather, and another Norwegian whose name I can't read.

Museums have admirably sought to stay connected. I've taken less advantage of this than I should, but I've steeped myself in my own collection in a way that's analogous to how I've experienced the house, the writing shed (three pieces in ink brush by Peiting Li on one of its walls), the back garden, the neighborhood, and the several walks I take uphill and down. Late in life, the painter Duncan Grant, living at the country house, Charleston, he and Vanessa Bell shared, painted it close up. I've always loved these paintings, which reflect in the truest sense what a painter sees.

Trump deflates, as my wife predicted "He won't win," my wife said, several months before the election. I held my breath. After Biden won by a considerable plurality, the raging Trump initially raised my doubts— could he possibly pull it off? It is a tribute to the endless barrage of headlines (and the parallel campaign to raise money for politicians) that I worried. But then it unfolded: the risible lawyers, the unfounded lawsuits, the would-be brownshirts—it all came to nothing. As this happened, Trump began deflating. He raves on, but fewer pay heed.

The several versions of social media That it would supplant email was predicted, but texting has done that, at least with the young. My daughter confessed that she reads email less frequently, so I text her now if I send her something. She posts occasionally to Instagram—photos and artwork.

Instagram is useful to keep visual track of family, friends, and acquaintances—their marriages, children, pets, households, trips. I started an account when I realized my younger cousins in Norway were off Facebook—to me, a small town shared with certain friends and many journalists. Some of the latter are on LinkedIn, which is increasingly Facebook-like. Lately, I post things on it aimed at liberal artists. Professionals are often interested in cultural topics, but there's not much on LinkedIn that caters to it.

Tumblr draws an unusual number of poets. Visual posts there were fodder for my photo-collages, but Instagram is now a better source. Medium is another site that straddles the social media line. I like both because they're easy to use and readily accept visual media. But I follow people on Tumblr more than I follow them on Medium.

Twitter is political, but the politics are often local or grounded in micro-issues, positions about which those tweeting can be inordinately convinced. This leads to spats.

If I reply calmly, things sometimes calm down. Immersion in their micro-issues results in abbreviated, inside-baseball tweets, replete with assertions they believe are self-evident.

Anything seen as questioning their positions gets a hair-trigger response. Facebook is less prone to this, often because the parties posting know each other or share friends. One of my cousins can be politically incorrect and others have wondered aloud why I put up with him. "He's family," I explain, defending his right to express views that aren't theirs.

Social media draws attention to content I would likely miss. I imagine some of what I post has this benefit for others. I read fairly widely, but the extent of content now makes it impossible to keep up. And I'm a generalist at heart, whereas some of the journalists and writers I follow are specialists. I don't read all of what they post, but I'm glad to have the possibility. They also introduce me to sources that I wouldn't encounter otherwise.

Academia and ResearchGate aren't really social media sites, but are slowly developing those attributes to foster discussion and networking. Both would benefit from more of this. I've used them to find scholarly articles that reside on academic journal websites.

(These sites, extortionary for non-academics, are ripe for disruption.)

In the pandemic, social media's most important attribute is to keep people in touch. It prompts birthday and anniversary greetings, notes career and life events, and enables the tacked-on comments that let others know you're still on the planet and interested in their lives, as perhaps they are of yours. As with social life in general, it depends on reciprocity.

Publishing and self-publishing: their merits When you publish a print journal, copies of it accrue. My friend Bill Stout, who went into book publishing at one point, has a warehouse in Richmond, California, to contend with the output (along with other books he sells). In 2008, visiting my daughter in rural Spain, I wrote something that drew on reviews I was reading in the issues of the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement I brought along. When I got back to Berkeley, I turned it into a first number of Common Place. In 2019, I discovered that Blurb.com, a short-run digital printer, had a magazine format that accepted Common Place numbers as PDFs. I've printed a few numbers in small batches to give to friends.

There's something nice about print—its tangibility, especially this year, when everything has felt more ephemeral than usual. But the numbers are digital documents, easy to revise, correct, and expand. A new hosting site makes this simple.

Common Place (complace.j2parman.com) alludes to Denis Diderot's habit of circulating manuscripts, but my impulse to self-publish also emulates Virginia Woolf's desire to shepherd her own writing. I've worked with some very good editors, but my own writing is intentionally a work in progress, working out loud.

From time to time, I go back through it. I sometimes gather a year's worth of poems as a compendium number that's more or less unedited. The prose pieces are harder to excerpt---a combination of memoir, quasi-essay, sets of thematic pieces, published articles, and miscellany. As at least one online journal to which I contributed vanished entirely, it's good that I saved some of what I wrote for it. It's why I have record copies printed.

Solitude is one of one of my several balancing acts I have an upper limit past which solitude gets to me. When I'm deprived of it, I get cranky and even immobile. I need solitude to recover from society and secondly to absorb my impressions. Creativity and receptivity, routinely and oppositely gendered, also require balance. I lean heavily toward the receptive, but my receptivity is tied to solitude as gestation. (The analogy is imprecise as the process is nonlinear.)

A solitary individual is still attached to a shore and a pier, a landing place in sight probably of a house with others or another who keep an eye out. It is therefore a partial solitude, even if the rower feels she's apart from it, not part of it. Or feels she's both.

Gender involves a similar sleight of hand. Everyone plays along, as it's a crowdsourced deception, but some fail to see the complexity of the other or discount it, taking seriously the various conventions and reacting if someone mixes them up. They want to go with the dominant pattern. If the man wears a dress, that decision can be controversial. Women can wear men's clothes without incident but their demeanor can raise questions. It's true that gender is constructed. It's when we're most human—overcome with grief or fear or with desire—that we set our armor down and are our naked, original, complex selves.

I haven't missed traveling and yet it still figures Whenever I traveled, I invariably dreaded going, wishing I could call the trip off. I've done this on occasion for the sheer pleasure of giving in to the impulse. Once I launch myself into it, however, the dread falls away, although I'm prone to depression on the road and have to organize things to avoid it. The pandemic took all of this off the table.

The farthest I've gone is out to the coast on daytrips, visiting the ridge house my oldest son is restoring. My dreams, though, are redolent with elsewhere. And my dreamt elsewhere is sometimes flamboyant and even beautiful, but more often just an amalgam.

Community and Privacy revisited (and a text) During the summer, I went back to Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander. I read it when it came out, but found it differed from my memory of it. I reread it because I want to write about density and its contexts. A text my daughter sent me reminded me of the tension that has always existed between self and others, especially when the self is categorized by others and then judged fallaciously. Both the categorization and the judgement aim to close off discussion. Especially on social media, raising questions, even about data and assumptions, is dismissed as apostasy. Narratives are cited to bat away any criticism. The consensus views on most issues are items of faith.

All prejudice seems rooted in these collisions between selves and others, and our tendency to categorize those who aren't us and form a hierarchy. I asked a Tokyo friend to describe the local pecking order. Tokyo natives came first, followed by the Japanese in general, and then the Jews. They rank high. There are also untouchables associated with trades that were taboo to Shinto. My friend has told me several times that this prejudice persists, and that there are artists from that class who achieved fame abroad and were exempted when they came back. Needless to say, we have our own versions of this.

Identity is part of the dichotomy of privacy and community. Identity is imposition, self-expression, belonging, rejection, and transcendence, among other things. It's both an innately personal thing and a communal source of controversy. Identifying as something can draw criticism from others who identify similarly and decline to accept you as a member of the club. I watched a colleague come out as gay late in his career, divorcing his wife at great personal expense, only to find little acceptance from his gay colleagues, despite the real anguish he'd experienced making the transition. They might argue that he was deluded to expect a change in their attitude, grounded as it was in their disdain for him as their designer peer. Professional identity outweighs personal—an argument that is raised to defend architects and film producers, et al, if their behavior taints their work.

What strikes me about "community" in this sense is that often proves to be the false party for individuals who are trying to work out who they are. They're really group identities, gangs or cliques that get off on their power to lord it over others, to decide who gets to be them, to hurl insults, to talk their patois and breathe in their own shit. Lord help us when they seize the mic or make laws. "Privacy" can be a cover for untoward behavior, of course, but don't throw the eccentric baby out with the malevolent bathwater. The balance should always lean toward self-expression (and self-possession) and the freedom individuals claim to change their minds, and then change them again.

The recurring word "bittersweet" A friend bought a postcard in Shanghai, where she was living, and wrote a note on the back of it. She put a stamp on it, but it was never mailed, as my address wasn't at hand.

Last week, it arrived, left by her on my front porch. Seeing and reading it made me think about that time. She visited Berkeley at one point and my daughter and I went with her to In the Mood for Love, the most bittersweet film I know. I thought at the time, and said to her later, that if I'd been her, I couldn't have sat through it. She did, though, and perhaps it had homeopathic qualities.

When I think of the word "bittersweet," what comes to mind is herbal, a remedy of some kind. In a letter I wrote long before this, I used the word as an adjective to describe the year previous. The recipient took umbrage. That year was terrible for me. Its terrors spilled over. I was the author of my misery, though, and "bittersweet" may have suggested to her that she had something to do with it. But I used the word to suggest that it had medicinal qualities. Homeopathy asserts that minute quantities of a healing substance can effect a cure. What was the substance? The film the postcard's writer watched with us is about stillborn love—not unrequited, but insufficient to find the life it needs. She suffered from a version of it, an alchemical imbalance. My letter's recipient and I suffered from this, too. As the word "imbalance" suggests, the effect is unequal. A dream I had balanced things by providing a proper farewell. This must have been part of the cure.

Life is as long as it needs to be When another correspondent used the phrase "life is short," I countered. Our default preference is to live indefinitely, but we discount the wear and tear. Once, waiting for Monday with an abscessed tooth, I grasped how people could have their teeth pulled with only a shot of whiskey, blowing their brains out the other option. More conscious that every day is a gift, I've felt that something should be done with it to justify being given another. This necessitates an accounting: things done or neglected, and the actual value of the time spent. Plans are made and abandoned in favor of something else. Was this justified? And what if time runs out? The question is no longer trivial.

On Sundays, I make a plan for the coming week. I hang it from a book on a bookshelf and sometimes glance at it to confirm a call. My life has slowed—the calls are few and the things to do less pressing. The evening reckoning is like a bell rung to bring me back to myself, a temple bell, perhaps, or the sort of buoy you hear and then encounter in the fog.

On the desire to organize and cull Thrown back on my extensive library, I'm constantly reminded of its disorganization, its limited capacity for growth, and the futile nature of adding to it when subtracting from it would be far more appropriate. Earlier, before the back garden shed was renovated, I had a sense of the books it houses, but this was lost, even as the memory of it misleads me when I look for books. This leads me to consider inventorying what books are on what shelves and if they're in or out, as most of my shelves have two rows of books to fit them all in. I imagine that some would go. If I glance at a shelf, I see possible candidates. But disposing of books is harder than it was. I occasionally put books out for passersby, but others add their own discards. I could just toss them into recycling, but any book that's found its way into my library has earned some affection.

The main thing is to give some order to the library so I can make better use of it. I was asked recently to write an introduction to a collection of drawings by an old friend. I have most of his books, but my first pass at finding them was unsuccessful. I also thought to write an appreciation of another friend who died. I found one of his books, but not the others. These forays are frustrating. But an inventory is no small task. Still, it's an ideal task for a pandemic. Living intimately with the rooms we inhabit makes us more aware of them, which then leads to changes. Like Mr. Barnes and his collection, we consider and reconsider things, working in new acquisitions. However much I tell myself my library is complete, new books are bought. Ironically, these books are often read ahead of others that were bought earlier with an eye toward their priority. Life is unfair, the books could justifiably think. Yet sometimes they are rediscovered, set aside long enough to be new again. (Related to this, I have famously bought the same book twice and even thrice.)

Why my daughter should have my cameras When my sister was sorting out our parents' house, she noted that our father left 10,000 slides. This may overstate the case, but he was an inveterate photographer. Luckily, the University of Oregon felt his slides were of anthropological interest, so they have them. A high point of my own photographic life was when I bought a 35-mm Japanese knock-off with a fast lens. I had a steady hand and shot long exposures without a tripod. But I only followed my father's example when I realized that my tiny iPod had a camera.

Across a series of iPhones with successively better cameras, I revived my interest in photography. I recognize the superiority of real cameras, whether film or digital, and I own several of both, but the iPhone slips into a pocket and can be used unobtrusively.

When I questioned the validity of using it to a friend who's a professional photographer, he said, "The best camera is the one you have with you." I agree. My daughter is a film photographer and very good at it. It's time she took these cameras over.

Having a garden or two proves to be essential In the spring, my wife planted beans and tomatoes in a small garden behind her late mother's apartment building across the street. She planted the raised vegetable boxes in our back garden with two kinds of tomatoes and various greens. She's a gardener; I'm not. I water the plants, inside and out, do some of the harvesting, and eat the produce.

A friend who lives nearby makes a point of visiting her parents to help harvest their persimmons. She's attached to her parents and also to their garden. Gardens, whatever their size, have a gravitational pull. In the summer, I read E.M. Forster's Commonplace Book, which alludes his mother's house's grounds. He took a role in it, working with the the man who looked after them. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel Lolly Willowes, the grounds of the protagonist's family's house, of the church and cemetery where her family is buried, and other grounds, cultivated and less cultivated, are lovingly described. I have a book that describes a garden as one or more outdoor rooms. This is why a balcony or a porch with plants is a garden. In good weather, with our need to socialize out of doors, gardens give their households breathing room. But they also produce food. For much of the summer into early autumn, we ate our own vegetables and fruit exclusively. We even had grapes—planted along the south fence the year before, they gave us bunches of them.

At the ridge house, which has an extensive terraced garden waiting to be revived, we discuss planting grapes and making wine. The coastal air and local terroir is ideal for whites. We speculate about a micro-appellation. The first step is to repair or replace the irrigation system and then decide how much to water across the long arid season.

That I'm even thinking about this is a tribute to the attention I've paid to the garden in which I've spent inordinate time since it warmed up in the spring. My writing shed looks out on it, and sitting at its round glass table to have afternoon tea or a glass of wine in the early evening makes it a room indeed.

The everyday shrank. Will it ever expand again?

A local restaurant, Corso, a family favorite, shut down recently. Chez Panisse, closer and more venerable, looks safe, but the neighborhood benefited from having several of quality, along with cafés and other meeting places that were part of the warp and woof of its street life. As the pandemic gripped, particularly for my cohort, walking became an exercise in polite avoidance. Going to old haunts meant encountering men, mostly, without masks, so I avoid them. Detached from these destinations, walking is something to be done rather than part of normal life. There's less of it, in consequence. The house is magnified by living with it so closely. The urge to photograph it arises as a kind of painterly impulse, struck again by the pleasure of experiencing it. When the pandemic ends, the places we visited will return and the house will be more of a haven than a world. Rely on it.

Whatever I write, I have the desire to send it out In my head, there's a short list of possible readers. The impulse to share is similar to if not part of correspondence. (Everyone on my list is also a correspondent.) Not all of them are interested in what else I might write. Asking if I can send something written is to note that it's not a letter. A letter can be answered with barely any reference to it. Some people scrupulously mention the points raised, but most don't. They write about what's happening to them. When I reply, I set a letter next to me and start writing. There's usually some connection. With poems or brief essays, I don't expect a reply, but one sometimes comes and they're always of interest. If I have a list at all, it's because of this.

Nearer my God: how a pandemic is like a plane When I wrote my Christmas letter, the phrase "God willing" appeared at least twice.

When I flew and hit something untoward, I was not above asking to be spared. What use will I make of it? This rehearses the Last Judgement, asking us to decide for ourselves yet again what has life and what doesn't—and then conduct our lives accordingly.

Upheaval changes things, and the task is to respond On the individual and family end, the pandemic gave us a quick, comparative course in the pluses and minuses of given locales—the places where we live and the availability of supports and services to balance work needs and individual/family needs. As with the workplace, things sprung up to fill in gaps, but gaps also appeared for which there was no obvious filler. The way supports and services are divided among different providers caused problems that were often exacerbated by regulations closing some down while letting others continue. This may be unavoidable, but what we've learned should be kept in mind as we come out of it. The word "resilience" is applicable. The pandemic forced us to confront what exactly keeps life going and what, if missing, really impedes it.

The problems we see so visibly reflect what we shortchange, leave to the market, or treat as externalities. We're a tiered society. Some tiers compete for ascendancy; others struggle to subsist. Those on top often see it as a zero-sum game. The pandemic is worse for us because of this. "We either hang together or hang separately," Ben Franklin told his fellow revolutionaries. We're at that point again. We need to take it seriously. Resilience isn't just global warming, it's everything. This is the real lesson of the pandemic.

(This first appeared in Common Place No. 31, Winter 2021. It's edited and condensed.)

John J. Parman was born in 1947 in Westchester County, New York, and grew up in Singapore and New Jersey. He attended Washington University (B.A., 1970) and U.C. Berkeley (M.Arch. 1975). For two decades, he was the editorial director at Gensler, a global design consultancy. Before this, he and Laurie Snowden founded and published Design Book Review, an award-winning quarterly. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden started Snowden & Parman, an editorial studio. He is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, the Seattle design magazine, to The Architect's Newspaper, to AR+D, an imprint of ORO Editions, and to Room One Thousand, the annual of U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is currently a Visiting Scholar. He lives in Berkeley.

Common Place No. 32 | © 2021 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com