Memoirs & Reflections

Memoirs & Reflections

John J. Parman

This is an expanded version of two shorter books that collected writings rooted in personal experience. I’ve added a few pieces, old and new, that seem pertinent. One looks at Robert Musil’s view of human experience, which I share.

Much of what’s here appeared first in CommonPlace , the personal journal I started in 2009. I’ve edited it considerably. It’s my own work in Aristotle’s sense of “products of leisure.” A few readers, near and far, found it, and I dedicate this book to them.

By way of a biography, let me just note that I wrote before I could read, and that work that draws on life has always figured.

My daughter Elizabeth Snowden, who took the cover photo and two others, co-founded our editorial studio, Snowden & Parman, which produces this and other small books. Her art and cultural project, Pallas, is their principal outlet.

Overleaf: Peiting C. Li's calligraphy and inkbrush in the barn.

I often picture my father in his Jaguar coupe, one hand draped outside the window, holding a cigarette. This would have been in the second half of the 1950s he quit smoking when he was 45. He still has the car and 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 back from Singapore. The walls too attest to his past a childhood in Hanoi, student days in Paris and London, wartime in Malaya, a trader’s life, first in Singapore and then in New York, and all the travel backand-forth to Asia as 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, the end of your own life comes into view, my father notes in his journal. His father died at age 76, so “borrowed time.” He already 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.” 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 someone was me.

Although born in Hanoi, my father is of Chinese descent, the son of a wealthy merchant who traded with France and China. My mother shares this background, 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. They ask no questions of each 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 is the more tangible evidence of this. My father loved her from the moment he first learned of her existence.

“We aren’t very alike,” he told me at lunch. “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. “I was in the Malay highlands, out of reach. There was 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 I had my own life to consider.”

My father’s private papers include letters, poems, and the diaries he’s kept since he was a student. The letters are voluminous. The diaries are difficult to read, written in his tiny script. They and the letters often overlap, but the diaries 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 and says nothing. “When there’s no more reason to head into town” is what he thinks.

Written in 2007, it’s a fragment of something I intended to be longer.

Love & Marriage

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.

PartOne:Summer

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 mid-sentence. 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 in time her grandchildren. 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. Many of the women would soon be pregnant. Then in April or May, the babes. To them too, once. Magnus would spend the rest of the year paying for the real bacchanal six weeks in when Charlotte, ravenous, would keep him up all night. Autumn and in darkness by then, her arms wrapped around him, holding him so close that he felt he could hardly breathe.

And now, another summer. Oda was angry, but his heart was afloat and the ferry approached. Tarot might be the game they all

played. 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, Magnus guessed, lighting a cigar. People gathered men in suits, youngsters and their mothers, the priest and his wife, who nodded at him when he caught her eye. 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 cream 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, several 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 coffee and 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 reversed, with just a bare hint of night.

He wrapped his hands around the varnished railing and looked out at 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 said, 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, all of them friends. Kat was the cause. "Anyone else I could tolerate.” He thought how some painters leave in what others leave out. You'd see one's jealousy and pain, another's loneliness and anger. They spend half their lives unwinding from each other or themselves, the kind of lives you saw played out at the theater.

Sometimes he and Kat sat off by themselves, hidden in markets, in cafés 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 was dropped into, every last attribute of it. A little hedonist, 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. Paintings, plays, and novels spoke to it, but most people were oblivious, even hostile to those who saw and drew attention to it.

The pier was clearly in view, a crowd waiting. He looked for the launch. 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 told her this 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 in, 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 in 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've seen your sons, 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, 30 feet out or so 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 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. "An older man with a red face." Magnus looked at her. “He paints barns.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t look like a worker.” The priest nodded. Magnus laughed. "He's a professor at the academy who paints country scenes, but likes them 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 his full formal regalia, cosmopolitan and the opposite of bucolic. Now here he was, or at least one of him was. 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 midafternoon, 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 contemplating this scene while struggling to loosen Oda’s grip on his heart.

The pilot slowed the launch. The cart driver was at the 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 the way the fiddlers did at solstice, the girls dancing past midnight and falling for the hooks. He’d 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.

There were two horses to pull the cart, one pawing the ground with a hoof as the driver fed it an apple. 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 pier turned and angled up to meet the road that came down the hill. The other way would take them near the rocks, past the white clapboard house with its wide, unfenced lawn.

A swim would be nice, Magnus 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 nodded. "Strange you haven't seen her," he said, "but her garden takes all her attention at first. After that, she'll be round for a visit."

"That's exactly what she wrote! You know her 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 third 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 first and the priest's house after it. The cart stopped and they all got out. "I'll walk from here," Magnus said, paying the driver. "I'll ask Charlotte about a dinner," he added to the priest's wife. "I'm here for a week, so you'll see more of me than you can stand, probably." She smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I can help you rework the wedding piece,” Magnus said to the priest. Later he remembered how once after making love he'd said to Charlotte that it seemed consequential because the couple brought their ancestries along, generations upon 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, looking like a peasant in his straw hat and loose, long sleeved work 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 the road from the field and barn was a long allée of linden trees, the summer house’s back entry. Originally part of the parish, seized and sold off in the Reformation. the land crossed the main road, taking in the woods and fields around the old Romanesque church, now Lutheran, and its jetty. The priest and his wife leased out a remnant of it, which supplemented his stipend. Magnus got some cash and crops from his tenant, but their livelihoods didn't depend on it. The summer house was like a ship anchored in the wood, he thought, its larder below decks, a trapdoor in the kitchen with a ladder, a raised front porch and steps, and a veranda out back surveying all he owned a private joke, as Charlotte ran the house,

chose its yellow color, gave the dinners, oversaw the garden, and the rest. Only the dog was his.

Small tawny birds flitted along the edge of the path. 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-andforth. 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 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 their polarities out and suppressed their native ambiguities. For Charlotte, Leon was the necessary man. Twenty years since he 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 at it approvingly, framed now in the open doorway layers of herbs, flowers, and vegetables that formed squares 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, extending into the woods

like the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea, a second terrace 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 the 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 younger daughter was also a writer, like Charlotte’s sister Astrid. It was a bond between those two and Magnus.

Out in the sun, she surveyed her beds. Informed by advice from all quarters and from her own reading and observations, the garden played out its envisioned possibilities. In the winter, the house in town and her properties 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 furnishings their whole realm, much of it acquired 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, sardonic grin, and unambiguous desire. Every woman needs her wolf, his hunger for her visible on his face. But how many of her friends who'd left their marriages for another had 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 house. He thought of Peter’s small, efficient brushstrokes as the barn took shape on his canvas, every nuance set down.

He'd been 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 declaring 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 you 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 give this to the priest, he thought. Enough of his verities.

Supper was in the air, and he roused himself. He heard Peter's soft voice in the garden and saw him talking with a younger man. Magnus brushed his hair and then went downstairs. He overheard Charlotte in the kitchen talking in English with the other guest. 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 on 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 introduced himself to the other young man and then 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 clarity. Magnus's several desks were always in order, but whatever he was writing reflected his innately discursive 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 the news from England? Surely a new era is upon you." Grant nodded. "Yes, and some aren’t pleased." It was like a door opening onto a new world, he felt. Now here he was, visiting this summer house with a family friend who’d fallen in love with him. How could he stanch the wound he was about to make? All those sketches had reduced his friend to a pair of shoes and his remarkably long legs.

Magnus surveyed the table, with its plates and platters, crystal and silver, and all the linen this heaping up of things that played off the simplicity of the house, modest by the standards of the times and made of wood instead of 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 months before. "They sold their parents’ house," Grant’s friend said. "Gerald's trying to marry off the girls." Magnus thought of their father's long, morose face. The beauty of the women was legendary. “I wouldn’t think they’d lack for suitors,” he said. "They shun society," Grant's friend replied. "They're lucky they can resist the pressure," Charlotte added. Lucky too that the girls' parents were dead, she thought to herself. The mother was just as impossible as the father, pandering to that tyrant while ruining her health trying to help the poor.

Grant thought of his own encouraging parents. The sympathetic Bussy saw his promising future, but the Slade’s dreadful Tonks only saw his own reflection.

"They bought a house in town and are living on their own," Grant’s friend said. Charlotte nodded. "Very sensible. Their brother

must be in a panic.” Magnus reflected how their father lost his belief but, for all his learning and perception, clung doggedly to the habits of his class. His daughters finally cut the cord. Gerald's bewilderment would only grow as the whole edifice the very order of things that kept his world aloft started wobbling. Who knows where it would lead?

"I'll be at the Slade in the autumn," Peter said. Grant looked over. "Tonks is a dead hand there." Peter nodded in agreement He’d been asking himself if painting in the academic style made any sense. "It might be better if I left the barn to the photographers," he said aloud. "As long as they have eyes, that barn will have painters," Magnus said. "As long as they have hearts," Charlotte added. Peter granted them this.

Grant thought about Peter's impending visit. He'd heard that Peter 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. Photographs had their place, like the panorama of the family gathered for their wedding anniversary. They were given as gifts, signs of descent or lateral ties. He and Charlotte had their own collection, most of them in albums and a few displayed, but paintings by real artists mattered. The barn had waited for Peter to examine 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 outside. It was almost eleven, but it felt like late afternoon. From her chair on the terrace, Charlotte looked around her. 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, wearing one of those sweaters that to him were the purest

expressions of her heart. But he knew this picture was idyllic. An idealist, a freethinker, Kat longed for a life without convention's boundaries, free to love whom she chose and be herself, out in the open and unapologetic. It was a dream many shared, the promise of this new century, and sometimes it seemed that it would come true. Yet Kristiana was provincial, barely tolerant of artists and writers, and hostile to deviance, especially from women. As the old century gave way to another, plays, novels, and paintings spoke of resistance. He was torn between wanting to ignore convention and knowing that his hedonism arose from anguish, pure desire, and injured vanity. The need to be cautious for Kat's sake, to avoid scandal and her husband's wrath, forced them into the shadows despite Magnus's intention and her desire.

PartTwo:TheTurningoftheYear

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 dinner. A resistance to this invasion arose in Magnus, as it always did when faced with unavoidable things that he couldn't really live without and yet dreaded.

Charlotte was in her element at these dinners, alive to the throng and festive in its presence. Magnus always hoped that Astrid would sit by him, a co-conspirator in some way, although she steadfastly held up tradition. Even more loosely tethered to time than her sister, her pies were the clock by which these dinners were timed. The two kitchens, thus attached, led some guests to handicap one sister's optimism against the reality of the other's oven-centered reckonings.

Not everyone was at their table. Some had other families to consider. Magnus would give an account of it in his New Year's Day letter, 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.

Christmas was a lot of work, but Charlotte was active by nature, distrustful of slowing down. To find the daybed, read a novel, and drift off into a nap was permissible. but to fail to rally and pursue what she pursued was impossible. That she was tired was

undeniable. but Christmas dinner, like the demands of the midsummer party, was what the season required.

She 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, but now he was in America, likely for good. They went to Paris, a daughter in tow who stayed on to perfect her French, and paint and sculpt.

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 you hear her saying aloud how tired she is as she quits the table and heads upstairs, 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 in 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, one 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 knowledge. If you forged a particular path, it wasn't for lack of trying to forge others as they arose unexpectedly, plausibly. Charlotte did so, 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.

It 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, providing a context and valuing what he might write in reply. A man who desires a woman can only be a sage when the mind that speaks from her heart is desired for itself. A sage is what a man becomes when he finally takes up his real work. When his body is desirous, his 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 that give out to other scenes that feelings etched onto memory. His mind goes there involuntarily, prompted by some spark.

Magnus saw in retrospect how he craved a domesticity that was bound up in the télos of expectations, a source of hope and then of 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.

How you, Magnus, try to reconcile your 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 along 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, 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 copies, 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 the long, full shelf she calls your archipelago.

Your late London friend produced a book for his family that his daughters likened to the houses of the 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 an archival spirit would hang on to it, and that seems unlikely.

Once a boat took you, Magnus, to Oda's island, Christian elsewhere to make room for you, their cottage overlooking the harbor of the fishing village where he'd gone to paint, sick of town and his grand depictions of its hypocrisy. With Oda in residence, Christian had fallen in love with Tine, a young widow with children. Expectations were in the air. You brought Oda a gift, a dark blue housecoat to propitiate their household gods. You helped prepare the food, sharing her domain. Your also shared her bed in a room that faced the water, its curtains blowing outward whenever the wind caught them.

Lack of imagination and courage this is the charge sheet. Did you really think that time could expand to meet the demands you put on it? Love's radical proximity slows time down, but that elasticity doesn't carry over.

Kat figures in your poems. She was a phenomenon like weather if weather had a heart and desired. Now she's vanished, yet

sometimes a loose spirit, the way a shaman, unsure of her powers, 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 hopes alive as everything fell apart. She needed a partner, not an unreliable fellow-sufferer.

Close observation gives you their unforgettable natures and occasionally you see it. They laugh despite themselves, prompting 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.

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 review 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. Some of them come 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 have to 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 they were impossible. More children, no doubt, and the unfolding of another marriage. The summer house would have gone unbuilt. His unexpected success provided the money for it, but Charlotte's legacy made that extravagance possible. Oda had no children, but Kat's brood would have had 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 shifted 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 share this, but their fecundity makes it riskier, not just because of pregnancy but that everything is freighted by it. Accounts of other cultures suggest this isn't inevitable, but here we are in the once-pagan, long-patriarchic north. We hunger nonetheless.

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. Any quarrels would soon be forgotten as they discussed what mattered to them both.

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 things back before they all revived.

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 Demeter. 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 time, cutting her teeth on difference, stayed with her. Remnants of it are in the garden, she realized herbs, bits of color and light and texture. Bits of elsewhere are here, too 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 Demeter spend the winter mapping out the beds Persephone would use, free of her consort's grip? And what was her life like with him in Hell? Not as bad as people made out, Charlotte guessed.

The first part was written in 2005 and the second in 2020. The opening lines are Petrarch's Canzoniere , sonnet 61, stanza 2, translated by A.S. Kline. I owe thanks to Clare Wigfall of Bard College Berlin for a suggestion, unrelated to the text, that led me to revise and expand the second part.

A Sort of a Memoir

3 January 2014

Stendhal uses three different memoir-writing strategies: inmediares , 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 Memoirsof anEgotistand HenriBrulard , and the third in the opening chapter of his great last novel, TheCharterhouseofParma . Stendhal wrote MemoirsofanEgotist10 years after meeting the object of his fixation. 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 is 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 B.A., 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 colleagues, 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.

I learned from this that I could write quickly on any topic handed me. My method was straightforward. I found a general source that gave me the basic plot. Volumes of the 1920s-era EncyclopediaBritannica , on which Wikipediais 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 others' expectations, so it seems reasonable to push this 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 this 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. This persists.

Separately

My daughter came over this evening after writing me a long note in answer to a question about travel that I’d posed: How does it affect us? I said that placeto 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.

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're as endangered as the elephants and rhinos that roam Africa's savanna.

5 January 2014

While an element of bossiness floats through life, mandatoryis 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 prevalent 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, crossing 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. These days I float in and out of parties, departing as quietly and quickly as I can. This is not to slight these parties, all of which seem perfectly fine.

Separately

Each person’s nature is distinct from every other, yet we generalize constantly about how people fall into categories, as if only the categories really differ. We chalk a lot of behavior up to them, believing in their truth as part of our social-navigating apparatus, a heuristic that keeps us from stopping every few 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, the “great matter” of the Buddhists. How we come to grips with mortality is a dance that began for me when I first realized that I would die. How we contend with the unavoidable fact of it varies with age. Later in life, the imagined perils of getting older seem

worse than death itself, which can start to look like a relief. Borges notes 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 Soto Zen, explained what "mind" means from that 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. We 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 ours. 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: humanity 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-temperedClavier , 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.

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. If 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, as Borges asserts, quoting a poet, then 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 several relationships I had, I both wish they’d been friendships solely and 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 EnneagramStructures , 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 are to want to live in the future, not the present; to be dependent on personal charm to dodge the bullets of interpersonal relationships; and (a related trait) to try to avoid anything remotely painful.

6 January 2014

Some time ago, I dreamt I was walking in the middle of a curving, residential 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 pulled it out. 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 onto a subject as Penelope Fitzgerald did with TheBlueFlower . 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 Bildungsromanfalters 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’s 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.

Not long ago, I read for the first time and with astonishment the poems of Wallace Stevens. (See photo below.) This was in a 16thcentury house 30 minutes by car from Bayonne in France the house where I started “The Barn Partitas,” a sonnet series. The poem that particularly caught my eye was “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” On that same trip, at Daunt’s in London, I bought a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel with its remarkable opening poem, the first line of which made me wonder how her suicidal impulse could possibly have overridden the everyday reality of her two young children. It could, clearly.

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 the 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!

Separately

My topics 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.”)

Again 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 1640.” 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, “Hi, 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 Andalusia or North Africa, elongated by generations of intermarriage with the natives.

When I visited my daughter in the Alpujarra, I had an impulse to settle there. Madrid's a more likely destination, but something about her valley 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,Memoryafter his sisters complained about certain “facts.” (“We weretooin Nice!” they insisted.) 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 who was seriously ill. He's gradually recovering. Noting that his life is now 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.

I'm 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, apparently docile but springing into action when inspiration finally strikes.

Later

I read an article about long-lived Japanese and their doctors. The goal is a good quality of life. They cited a phrase, “Live life to the fullest and then die fast.” When I sum my life 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. The everyday is supposed to have less resonance 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 1991, I saw an aquarium 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 impending doom. What’s especially inhumane about capital punishment is the terror that attaches to it. Death as part of ordinary life seems different, part of its warp and weft the final part, inevitable and long-anticipated, 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 Dögen 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 of 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 it leaves a marker: “I made it here.”

A Visit to Granada and Alpujarra

In April 2008, I met my daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, in Granada, Spain, where we stayed for several days and then drove to the valley, not far from Órgiva in Alpujarra a region that extends along the south slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where she had been living since the fall of 2007. She ended up living there until November 2008, nearly two years. Although my stay was brief, I came away with an impression that has deepened over time as we corresponded and then conversed. Like equivalent places in California, the valley is a kind of litmus test of civilization’s ability to leave well enough alone and, equally, of the constant, seductive, even crazy-making pull that civilization exercises no matter how far off the grid you think you’ve gone. Yet Alpujarra has a real history, both a place of refuge after the fall of Granada and a region originally terraced for agriculture by the Hispano-Latin citizens of the Roman Empire who also put in place its elaborate fresh water channels. What follows are excerpts from the notes I made at the time, along with a brief postscript.

Saturday, 26 April 2008

Granada is a bigger city than I imagined. 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, Elizabeth tells me. He and his family live below her. Her house, which she shares with Julia, a woman 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, she 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 beside Julia 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). The man at the café told us 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 Albaycin, 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 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 Napa Valley was 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 laid 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 set and mortared all the rocks 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 have a “studio” downstairs with 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 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 and 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, Elizabeth’s housemate, 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, for example, 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 reike , 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 animals that are the least untoward are the coyotes that roam the hills. She sometimes hears them howling when the moon is 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 first lunging at him. Let coiled snakes alone is my motto.

Saturday, 3 May 2008

Slowing down is a way of recharging, and perhaps the real meaning of Slowis 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, and that resistance 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 topsy-turvy 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 a repetitive act, saying the rosary, a daily ritual of a cyclic nature, focused on the mother, on women, as the channel of God, “mother of God.” In this view, the importance of Jesus is that he “was made flesh,” that God immersed Himself in the world and used a woman as his vehicle, a woman being the only way He could do it. This is true of the old gods, too. Like men, they hungered for women and begot various semi-divinities with them. Jesus is one, “half-man, half-God” and when he shed his body, God entirely, they say.

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 has 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 reikesession lasted 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. 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 reike , 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, 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? Etching, 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 an 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 wondered aloud why he didn’t sell his mixtures on the Internet, 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 a piece. 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 that he teaches classes locally to small groups. He’d be an interesting visitor to our region. His book, too, would find an audience. It’s a model that other regions could profitably emulate.1

I brought over a bottle of red wine, so Julio invited Julia and Pedro to come over and we had a supper that was the exact 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 knows the path better than I do.

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 HispanoLatin population that fell on hard times in the fifth century A.D., as I learned during my visit to the Archaeology Museum in Madrid. The channels work well, so they're still in use, centuries later.

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 said that he studied psychology at the university in Madrid, but then came to the valley a bit before Nuriel 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 done what I did choosing to make a life there instead of pursuing work as a psychologist.” He’s acquired all his knowledge of plants since then.

Postscript: Citizens of the Cosmos

In his InnerWorkings 2 J.M. Coetzee describes how Italo Svevo, a native of Trieste, benefited from the cosmopolitan nature of the AustroHungarian Empire. Ivan Illich, exiled from it, absorbed it. Reading this gave me a new appreciation for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is often dismissed as impotent in the face of everything that confronted it. Yes, probably so, but then that “everything” has proven diabolic. Life was manifestly better for citizens of the cosmos. It being dead, we’ll have to reinvent it not as an Empire so much as a state of mind.

The valley where Elizabeth lived is in the orbit of the market and tourist towns that surround it, 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 without an outside income raises their own vegetables. It’s the same kind of life Elizabeth’s grandfather lived on the outskirts of Miami in the 1930s. He and his brothers made what cash the family had delivering newspapers; everything else was raised, hunted, or fished.

At a conference on future metropolitan regions held at UC 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 the generational rift, regionallybeneficent changes to the fabric of a neighborhood 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 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 it in front of him and understanding and documenting its value. This happens here, too, of course, but the connection between nature and naturalist is more tenuous. To put it another way, we don’t think of someone consciously coming to a place in order to master its secrets and then put them to work in a pragmatic manner. There are people who do this, but how often do we encounter them? Thoreau is the great American example, set in Concord but

without provincialism, the world 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 Asia.

In his memoir, Reflexions , 3 the American-born chef and food writer Richard Olney ends up living on a hillside in the French countryside, “letting the world come to him.” His tendrils extended across the Atlantic, an admiring network of friends, colleagues, and readers. Planted in the country, he remained cosmopolitan. This is also true of Julio Donat. Born and educated in Madrid, he’s comfortable enough in both places to move between them easily, although he chooses to live in one place, not the other. Being a citizen of the cosmos, as Illich and Olney were, demands this.

Notes

1. Julio Donat and Anabel Sandoval: Atusplantas,Alpujarra , Asoc. de Mujeres Órgiva, 2006.

2. J.M. Coetzee: “Italo Svevo,” InnerWorkings,Penguin, 2007, pages 1–14.

3. Richard Olney: Reflexions , Brick Tower Press, 2005

1.

A woman cries at the pier, thinking of the contrast between her unhappiness and the happiness of her ex-husband. In the moment, nothing can really be said or done. She feigns the loss of a contact lens, and the conversation shifts. We've all been here, comparing our unhappy fates with the presumed happiness of others. Perhaps she experienced the peculiar double vision of longing, which sees reality and then layers memory over it. The unreachable aspect wrenches your heart and you feel tom from it by this disrupted past. I thought later of the Buddha's comment, "When I was enlightened, I saw that everything was enlightened, even the rocks and grasses."

2.

Walking down the road earlier, the evening sun shone through a vast canopy of leaves, the whole scene made golden with its light. How often have I seen this? Yet I'm always struck anew by it. Beauty is never static. It constantly reveals something else.

3.

Beauty is animate, living in every expression and gesture. A photograph cannot capture it, but I remember all of it, down to the taste of an earring.

4.

"People will start asking you your secrets," a friend said when I noted on its anniversary the duration of my marriage. What would I tell them? I suppose the first secret is that a marriage should persist and not be daunted by things that tradition frowns on. Tradition is generality, while marriage is all about the particulars.

5.

Standing in the moonlight on the still-warm terrace this is the image her letter sets down. Walking earlier along the harbor, memories came pouring back. Every sense of her was alive again with their recollection.

6.

The eve of a long weekend, the traditional gateway separating summer and fall, I walked home, noticing that many leaves had fallen. Still more were yellow with the late summer's heat. I regret this progression into winter.

Soon my grown children will marry and, if the gods favor them, children will follow another gateway, one that marks the rise of a new generation. As that gate opens, a bell should sound. My parents were 31 when I was conceived, resettled outside New York City after the long separation of wartime. By the time I was six, I had circumnavigated the planet. We mostly traveled by ship, and my sense of geography was formed in real time by our progress from port to port, traversing from east to west. The postwar world we passed through was shaking itself loose from the old colonial powers.

This took place decades ago. Sometimes I shock people by mentioning things from my childhood. A man's life spans three generations, roughly. Beyond that is borrowed time, my father used to say. My mother's grandfather lived into his late 90s, gardening year-in and year-out, unfazed by the heat. Something about that life of purposeful toil pulled him along.

7.

Not toil more like a steward's relationship to nature, whether it's the raising of children or the cultivation of a garden or a few acres. The work is cyclical rather than repetitive. Children grow; a garden or a small farm evolves from season to season.

8.

I stood on my friends' deck last night, under the stars, at this place with its redwood columns and the river, a world all its own. I swam twice, that delicious feeling you only get from being in a river amid small boats and the occasional bobbing head of another swimmer. The others sat on the small pier, tucked away between branches, hardly visible, the sun blazing to warm the water's surface. At dusk, the insects swarmed and the fish came up to eat them, their long, dark forms visible and the rings of water visible, too, wherever they emerged, ever so briefly, to feast on this or that flitting bug. Across the river there were tents pitched along the edge of a huge, rambling thicket that descends the bank. A heron flew just above the water, and then the crickets started in. This Sunday morning, the birds vie to be heard over the racket of the cars, already out in force. The others have gone to church, but I'm sitting here writing this.

11.

Marriage goes through many adjustments, which makes it necessary to grant each other an independence that flouts the conventional view of marriage as hermetic and self-sufficient. Can it ever be those things? I have no idea.

12.

"Can it ever be these things?" One hears tales of married couples with legendary devotion. Were they hermetic and self-sufficient, or were they just themselves?

13.

"You've been here before," a friend said several years ago. Am I here again? I don't think so.

14.

What I learned is that ego suffers from separation. "Don't cut me off!" This speaks to one of ego's specific fears. Cut off, it can become obsessed, depressed, incensed.

15,

The notes to TheConferenceoftheBirdssay that the Sufis distinguished two souls, larger and smaller. The latter is called "the body of desire."

16.

The first rain is always so welcome, even though it meant getting out of bed, throwing some clothes on, and rushing to the back to lean boards in front of two parts of the barn wall that hadn't yet been closed in. Luckily there are eaves to this small building, and I found it still dry. The rain is welcome because everything is dry as a bone and the risk of fire is high. Everything a block east of here and up burned to the ground in 1923. A house at the next corner was designed by Bernard Maybeck. All that remained after the fire were his chimneys, and a new house was built around them.

17.

Marriage is the primary but not the only relationship. There are others, the IChingsays, "of personal inclination, that depend in the long run entirely on tactful reserve." It adds, "Fix your mind on an end that endures, and you will succeed in avoiding the reefs that confront the closer relationships." And then it notes, "Spontaneous affection is the all-inclusive principle of union." It arises in the moment, in other words. (The hedging here is worthy of La Rochefoucauld.)

18.

When privacy isn't respected, secrecy follows by necessity.

19.

Cats in the garden: a white one with a bobbed tail and an odd gait, saunters by. The other two are, respectively, gray and slim, and yellow and bobcat-like. The latter could pass for a mountain lion at quarter scale.

20.

A good marriage is more capacious than we realize. The privacy we afford ourselves is a recognition that our life together is made richer by the rest, and that what we owe each other, in the end, is to live well. We can put our trust in this and make it our vow.

21.

An astonishingly beautiful day unfolds in the rain's wake, the sky as blue as blue can be.

22,

The love of Eros is incompatible with suspicion, I read.

23.

Only by experiencing life can you make sense of it. Mistakes of all kinds accompany this, but through exploration I know no other word for it you find out who you are, who others are in relation to you, what matters to you, and what's true for you. And you discover that these things have very little to do with what tradition or convention suggests that you or they should be.

24. Friendship with layers: marriage also has this possibility.

25. The IChinggave me "Splitting Apart," with two moving lines that are the worst that hexagram has to offer. How to live through this? Look to the attributes, it said the earth (devotion) and the mountain (stillness).

26.

Time's arrow can be imperceptibly small and still find its mark, and still carry the thread.

27.

A marriage has its priority. You share a life, and this brings its responsibilities. There's work involved, but not in the sense of sacrificing yourself to it. Like the Zen cook, there's a kind of liberation from ego in doing it well.

28.

The irony is that every so-called transgression has proved in time to be otherwise. Life kneads us, I would say, and our nature provides the yeast.

29.

If we're made to tend the garden, as children often are, it can lose a great deal of its pleasure. If we see another's love for it, we approach it differently. Eventually we learn to love it for its own sake.

Written in August and September 2005.

Friday, 18 March 2022

Eugene’s oldest cemetery is a wooded hillside setting. Some of us gathered at the entry, then walked up to an Egyptian-looking building that serves as a chapel. After we waited there for a while, the younger pallbearers brought Jane’s casket down from somewhere uphill. Made by a local woodcrafter, it had rails along its sides and was roped closed beautiful in its simplicity. At her mother Rachael’s request, the women grandmothers and mothers gathered around Jane’s casket, mourning her. Then the casket was brought up to a clearing. Some of us waited at the gravesite while others met uphill. We heard sounds of crying. Then her parents came down and rang a bell to summon us back to the clearing. Some others arrived who had been waiting below.

Poems were read, including several by Jane. Her father Ben played Bach on his cello something he played for Jane before she was born. A family friend, Scotty, sang the Cowboy Junkies’ version of “Sweet Jane” and everyone joined in on the chorus. Rachael recounted a dream in which Jane told her, “Look up!” We did, looking at a ring of trees.

Led by Jane’s grandmothers, the pallbearers carried the casket to the grave. Someone read Jane’s translation of a Baudelaire poem. We formed a circle while the casket was lowered, set on ground we’d covered earlier with fresh pine boughs. Everyone was crying. A few were overcome. We threw flowers and loam to cover the casket.

Back at the cemetery entry, Rachael’s cousin noticed that a moth had landed on my sweater. I put my hand up and she walked onto my finger, finding a resting place in the crevice between two fingers where she sat, a soft green little thing, refusing to move until I finally coaxed her onto the leaf of a bush nearby.

My grandniece Jane Marin Brinkley died in late February 2022. I wrote this in late March 2022, taking Dorothy Wordsworth’s GrasmereJournalas a model.

Jane Marin Brinkley: An Appreciation

A writer of plays, poems, and prose, a translator, scholar, and actor, Jane Brinkley ended her life at Smith College, where she was a secondyear undergraduate. She left a body of work that includes a prizewinning play, a translation of Baudelaire's FleursduMal ; articles and opinion pieces written for TheSophian , Smith's student journal; and poems posted online. Other work will appear with time, but there’s enough of it in the world to have some sense of her accomplishment.

I knew Jane as a correspondent we began to exchange letters when she was six, and my most recent one from her was sent from Brooklyn early in 2022.1 Jane's life there in the summer of 2021 and early in the winter of 2022 reclaimed the city of her birth as the setting for a life of her own making. It was a life she shared with Grant Conversano (who took the photo above) and his brother Adam, two filmmakers originally from North Carolina.

To make a life or not is one of the choices life hands us. A decision can unleash an ocean of grief, but it reflects how the one leading it reads her life her debates and reasons. Our correspondence never touched on this, so I was unprepared.

"Nothing is hidden," the Zen philosopher Dōgen Eihei maintained, but the Buddhist notion of mind as the totality of all we've experienced makes clear how relatively little of it we can share. This is our human condition, and writers and artists work bravely to push back its limits. Jane Brinkley died in late February 2022. She had turned 20 earlier that month, a young woman "with her life in front of her" a truism that invites us to view her death as a tragedy. But hers was a writer's life, as her biographer Lyndall Gordon said of Virginia Woolf's, and writers’ lives are uncharted territories. The best advice I've read for those who trek them comes from Rilke: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."

Note

1. I wrote a poem that reflects on our unfinished correspondence. You've gone without replying. How is this? Or is it your reply, this grave silence, an opposite to all that was lively, vivacious? It's my fault that I'm annoyed, self-absorbed as I always am, amid the family's surging grief, but I am: left here unrequited, expected wit, expected news left hanging, left submerged by your departure's mystery, the one thing we didn't see.

Written in April 2022.

“Painters and poets always had equal opportunities to venture.” Horace

License is traditionally granted to artists and poets, Horace notes, passing over the perils they face from power and the crowd. The boundaries each sets out are inexact and fluid. Sudden, unexpected shifts are prompted by offense taken, displeasure felt, if an artist or poet oversteps the bounds deliberately, by flouting convention, or as the byproduct of her creativity, unaware that she’s trespassing on the sensibilities and good will of others.

Despite the imbalance between power or the crowd and the individual artist or poet, the pretense of license is kept up lest a desired stasis slips into actual stagnation the rot that sets in when time is called on progress and anything that isn’t top-down is immediately suspect as lèse-majesté. Art and poetry are patronized by power and the crowd, but official artists and poets are rarely innovators and almost never provocateurs. Apostasy is their one exit, opening frequently onto a blind alley from which rescue is often posthumous. This being so, an early choice for artists and poets in times and places of oppression is to embrace apostasy wholeheartedly. In the wake of a revolution, dilemmas can arise around such choices.

Following the Russian Revolution, artists and poets sought to lend their support. In the 1930s, Stalin had many of them murdered, and those he kept alive were regularly made aware of the cat-and-mouse nature of their survival. In such situations, opprobrium rather than neglect is the flip side of patronage. Neglect can be fatal once an artist

or poet has experienced fame, but others work on, buoyed by a small circle of admirers or by their own faith in themselves and their work. Opprobrium actively seeks to suppress them and their work. This gets you Osip Mandelstam, for example, writing for a small circle but more specifically for a Russia in which creative license is restored and broadened a Russia not just without Stalin, but without Putin, also.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rilke

Here, Rilke gives support to Mandelstam’s willingness to work on regardless, putting his own feelings aside as unreliably transient. In discussing the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, Seamus Deane notes a similar wariness in Tone of his own emotions, giving precedence to the cause for which he worked and, in the end, gave his life. Deane also records Tone’s desire to be executed by a firing squad in order to hasten his death. Unable to work, his life was untenable. His apparent suicide in prison was criticized by some Catholic contemporaries as paganly Greek or Roman in its stoicism, Deane writes a Christian would presumably prefer to be martyred for his beliefs.

“Let the poet be permitted to perish; he who saves her against her will does the same as the slayer.” Horace

According to Jennifer Ferriss-Hill, Horace warns his readers that the license granted to artists and poets, et al, can lead them to be carried away owing to their human nature. They experience what he calls facundiapraecops , “rushing fluency” in her translation, which brings the risk of endangering themselves and others. He argues against this, she says, but is aware that it is inevitably part of the creative process when humans embark on it. Inevitable, but at the same time unlawful for those insufficiently experienced to know their limits or constitutionally incapable of doing so. Robert Lowell at full tilt, in bipolarity’s manic phase, comes to mind, along with the many suicides. And yet Horace condones this, arguing that it is as much a transgression to try to save such poets as it is for them to be carried away. License is license and when it comes to human creativity, there is no natural limit.

For a poet like Sylvia Plath, for whom suicide was something of a leitmotif, or an artist like Francesca Woodman, who took her life at 22, her work prolific but even less securely in the world, Horace’s critique of taking license too far is pertinent. Even Lyndall Gordon, considering

Virginia Woolf as a writer, was moved to ask how her work might have evolved had she lived on. As readers, we fall invariably on the side of longevity. Katherine Mansfield dies young and Woolf, honest about envying her talent, misses the spur her presence provided.

What then do artists and poets owe? The younger their departure, the more it pains us, robbed of work “on our behalf” that we foresaw. Horace’s license admits the hermetic nature of creativity how concern for its reception taints it, even as a sense of its effect on others is an intrinsic part of its making. Yet making a full stop is also a creative act, and we deprive it of meaning by relegating it to madness, even when madness figures. If we take an artist or poet seriously, then finding meaning however elusive in their acts is a necessity.

We draw the outer boundaries of license very liberally with regard to gender, for example, yet we categorize suicide as out of bounds, a sign of madness. This is understandable in human terms, as such deaths are often devastating for the immediate survivors, surfacing all sorts of psychic undergrowth but seeming to give it no place to go except to the grave. It takes real courage to read it otherwise, expose the work in process, and take from the act itself meanings that unfold in light of what can be known and intuited from the life and works.

We owe this to them, Horace says, or we will kill as surely as the artist or poet herself. Granting her license is to grant her an afterlife future reception, empathy, and admiration that sees past her excesses.

Sources

Deane: “Imperialism and Nationalism,” SmallWorld:Ireland1798–2018 , Cambridge, 2021, pp. 74–93.

Ferris-Hill: Horace’sArs Poetica, Princeton, 2019, p. 54 and following.

Gordon: VirginiaWoolf:AWriter’sLife , Norton, 2001.

Written in early May 2022. In the photo above, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht play chess at Brecht’s house in Denmark in the late 1930s.

Taking the Bus

“He took the bus,” a friend said, quoting his grandmother’s euphemism. In a voicemail, he noted the tests he was about to undergo, assuring me that nothing was life-threatening, then adding, “It’s circling.”

In Eliot’s century-old “The Waste Land,” the question is posed: “Who is the third who walks beside you?”1 Castaneda’s Don Juan Mateus calls him a companion to whom we can turn to ask if this is death’s hour or eye-blink (as the widow of my grandfather’s cousin put it).

In his first Duino elegy, Rilke writes2 , Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are among, or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

He continues,

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit’s growth could we exist without them?

The first part is like Benjamin’s Angel of History4 (above).

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The “great matter” the Buddhists note is not merely death itself or even its constancy as an inevitable ending and steady remover of others whose presence we took for granted. We can more readily accept the loss of others at some points in their lives than in others. The late queen dies officially “of old age” and we agree, but we decline to grant our actual human condition explanatory power in most other cases, wanting both a cause and a reckoning of some sort associated with it. We could as well say that someone died of youth or of middle age.

Rilke and Benjamin both describe angels that are confronted with and overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of the living and dead, but my sense, drawn from my own life, is that we each have an angel personal to us, aware of us. (Klee’s angel doesn’t look impersonal.)

Our arrival places us in life with its rhythms and momentum, its wildly varying situations, and its essential randomness. Our social conditioning makes us risk-adverse while minimizing our sense of danger sufficiently that we accept the risks our daily lives involve or require. We grasp (at points) that this is our human condition, shared universally. Despite our natural desire to shield others, we mostly understand that it’s unnatural to do so past certain points that these others in their turn have to deal with life as it is, however perilous it proves for them. This is our “great matter.”

Although utterly mundane, “Took the bus” captures the mystery of our leaving. Are we headed for Paradise, Hell, Oblivion, or another turn of the wheel? The angel our angel may have some sense of this. However, as the Buddha said of whatever awaits us, “Who knows? And this is not our concern.”

To me, this companion of ours is really an angel of our present, an angel of the ground of our being “present” in Benjamin’s sense of “tied unpredictably to the past and the future,” and also in the Buddhist sense of unfolding contingently with life rather than separate from it.

In her essay4 on Fleur Jaeggy, Meeka Walsh suggests that our companion is also an angel of self-sufficiency or personal integrity, present when no one else is and able to bring us back to the everyday that, however precarious, is the gift handed us. This companion, who may or may not be our own creation, personifies our place in the world and our sense of being seen and heard, if only by them (as they say now).

Notes:

1. T.S. Eliot, TheWasteLandandOtherPoems , Harvest, 1962, p. 43.

2. Stephen Mitchell, ed./trans., AheadofAllParting , Modern Library, 1995, p. 335.

3. Walter Benjamin, Section IX, OntheConceptofHistory .

4. Meeka Walsh, “Fleur Jaeggy’s Gift of Detachment,” BorderCrossings , March 2018, collected in Walsh’s MalleableForms , ARB Books, 2022.

Written in late September 2022.

At the beginning of 2022, I reached the three-quarter point in a trajectory that, if you’re remembered, provides a marker, your centenary. In 2019, Richard Bender and I contributed to a book, edited by Paolo Ceccarelli, marking that of Giancarlo de Carlo, the late Italian architect and planner. As few people get to celebrate the event themselves, it’s reasonable to take an event like turning 75 as a comparable, still-available occasion.

Bender’s death in October 2022 led me to write his obituary. During the pandemic, I wrote another for my neighbor, Sally B. Woodbridge. These exercises in summarizing a long life surfaced the fact that people tend not to leave such a summary behind. The famous are written up beforehand, those accounts filed away and then brought up to date as their deaths loom or occur. The rest of us don’t get this treatment, although in Bender’s case, I gave a talk at his 90th birthday on which his obituary drew liberally.

This led me to draft a “self-obituary” that I sent to my daughter. “To be updated,” I noted optimistically. Writing it placed me in a kind of past conditional, a retrospective view that lacks a solid vantage point. I think this is true of obituaries in general, that their attempts to sum up are hemmed in by the constraints of length and immediacy. Even if I return to mine episodically, this problem persists. And, of course, my summary is skewed by subjectivity and delicacy. I downplay my faults and tics, likely missing some, and fail to name names. (While I could get

down to the bone, descriptively, this is better left to poetry or autofiction.)

Instead of an obituary, I decided to write a Walter Benjamin-style look back and ahead. By coincidence, I had a tutorial on Alfred North Whitehead from the writer/actor/filmmaker Ashley Elizabeth Chambers As she pointed out, Whitehead argues that our present is always in conversation with our own and everyone else’s unfolding. What I think of as “me” and “my life” contains this interrelatedness. This is also the Buddhist take. Both are germane to questions like, “What does my life mean to me?” and “Where does it point?” I pose these questions to myself offering provisional responses set out in the past/present/future conditional tense.

What does a life mean?

What’s already unfolded is this question’s object, according to the obituary writers, biographers, and critics. They distinguish early, middle, and late styles or attributes in their subjects’ sensibilities and works. With Whitehead, I agree that my own history figures and, as I also learned from Chambers, the decisions made, at any point, serve to create life (and its meaning) anew. Meaning too unfolds.

Another point that Chambers makes is the fluidity of who we are within our lives. In her book-length poem, TheExquisiteBuoyancies , she calls its subject “baby baby,” a doubling echoed in her term “body body” to renounce the Cartesian split. Dögen, writing in the 1200s, also insists on what Hee-Jin Kim calls “radical nonduality,” anticipating Whitehead When I look at my own life, this fluidity stands out. Like water, my nature flows into every available empty space (per the I Ching).

Buddhism views “emptiness” as Creativity’s ever-fecund vessel. Whitehead saw God emerging from Creativity, Chambers says, serving it as a cosmic uterus, barren and yet an engine of generation. All the interrelated, generated elements support God in this function, rather than the reverse, so nothing is predetermined: life in its novelty unfolds in endless, inherently random relatedness and each unfolding is a decision that mediates, consciously or unconsciously, between our past and future.

(Everything here about Whitehead draws on two of Chambers’ papers, which place her poem TheExquisiteBuoyanciesand Hildegard of Bingen’s sung play OrdoVirtutumin conversation with Whitehead’s metaphysics. See the notes for details.)

Decisions you make along the way help keep the game going. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains, the fact of surviving shapes a false narrative that you knew what you were doing. I agree. Luck plays a role, but you also learn that failing, however painful, often occasions something better. I tend to try things twice before admitting that they aren’t going to happen. Yet something happens and very little is wasted. (“Nothing is lost,” the IChingsays. It may seem that something has, but then later you have the novel or the poems.)

I always wrote (and sometimes wove) in the spirit of what Aristotle called “leisure,” by which he meant the work one does purely for oneself, unprompted by necessity. When I retired, just before the pandemic, I began to do my own work in earnest. I also went back and looked at the work I’d done in the past, collecting and revising it. What resonates with others, and perhaps especially what resonates with me, ebbs and flows. Creativity’s “lure,” to use Whitehead’s word, is a glimmer of what Benjamin called reception: how our works are seen when they’re in the world. Archives also figure, letting scholars access such contemporary accounts as letters, diaries, and commonplace books.

This is a long way of saying that what my life means to me currently is wrapped up in the leisure it affords me to do my own work. What constitutes my own work is a separate question, yet it seems related. From the perspective of the late period of life I’m in now, the work/life split quandary of the middle period seems akin to the Cartesian mind/body split that Whitehead and Dögen saw as fallacious. What seems true is how the nature of our everyday shifts depending on where we are along life’s continuum. (This is Dögen’s big point; he notes for example that enlightenment is a transient state, not a permanent attainment, and shouldn’t be privileged.)

We could call this “continuum of self” mind–body . What we think of as “balance” or as “the ground” from which we can make clearheaded decisions about our unfolding “next” feels constant in being familiar, but varies in that we redefine “familiarity” subtly, sometimes dramatically, within our “circus of contingency.”

In the late period of life, the mind–body continuum overtakes what we thought of as work/life (but was really work–leisure). We’re freed to put the second continuum in conversation with the first. They have a parallel, interdependent relationship with its own constant-yet-varying balance or ground. As the body (in a somatic sense especially) declines, the work–leisure continuum becomes superfluous. (It relies on holistic well-being; a primary task then is to maintain it within or despite the aforementioned circus’s growing pandemonium.)

Where does it point?

The question can have a carpe-diemurgency. This is the late period’s paradox: while you have time at last to do your own work, the actual time available is shrinking at an unknown pace. Questions of capacity arise. We deny and adjust, shrinking the boundaries of our lives to compensate, to avoid disillusion and indignity.

The pandemic made it almost universally clear that at certain points in life, we come to resent the arbitrary requirement that, for example, we commute to a central location to work with others, or meet them individually unless such meetings are truly desired. In the course of it, I took two online writing classes with a dozen other people, several of whom became friends. I also took classes on poets and specific poems led by two professors who are both poets. These classes were helpful. I finished a short story and began a novella. I read poets I hadn’t read, and was prompted to learn more about them and their work. I heard poets reading poems, which echoed my experience of hearing Chambers recite her long poem, live-streamed from a distant stage. This is our contemporary moment, alive with possibility.

Life exposes us to other people’s judgements, for better and for worse. Maturation prompts us to take them in and decide how best to respond with increasing discernment. We’re also confronted with the consequences of our decisions. (We’re back to Whitehead here.) Our personal discretion varies as we make them, but cause-and-effect governs and Karma rides the range, regardless of which period of life we’re in. (The IChing‘s broad suggestion, its “law of least resistance,” is to go with whatever resonates for us.)

A sage is the important role of life’s late period. It grows out of the middle period, especially toward the end of it, when the ambitions of a career give way to others. My friend Yukiko Bowman noted that ambition often separates real architecture from mere buildings. This seems true for all creative output, reflecting a desire to take yourself seriously and to be taken seriously by others.

The late period also affords experimentation in the sense of doing much more with what comes readily. The constraints the period imposes seem to make this a better route than taking up things that don’t, but I’m not sure. In my own case, it’s meant taking my personal essays, poems, and photo-collages in new directions, and making books and pamphlets that collect them, using this occasion to curate, edit, reconsider, and inform “next.”

The IChingalso speaks of “carrying the outer world” (I paraphrase) to which (per Whitehead via Chambers) we’re inextricably interrelated.

I take from this interrelatedness that an ambition to be seen should ideally serve this world-carrying. Since Creativity unfolds, making the decision path more evident helps annotate that process hence my tendency to “work out loud.” (By “annotate,” I don’t mean post-facto explication, but rather an unfolding progression [by whatever means] that reveals how a given work is developing.) This points to writing. I write to find meaning in my own experiences what they meant then, what they mean now, and how and why the meaning has changed, if it has. Hovering over this are the art and craft of writing poesis and techne. It raises a work in our estimation if it strikes us as persuasive, serious, meaningful, evocative.

Writing is also how I repay life for my experiences. Even the ordinary in life accrues to surface meaning, I find, and form a leitmotif that makes the extraordinary or uncanny stand out more. Receptivity gives form to the germs of ideas, and this is closely connected to observation. Viewed from within, I see myself as a kind of “observation engine” that takes experience in and then works with it to derive its meaning personal and otherwise. In forecasting, you work with what draws your attention, a signal-and-noise kind of noticing that’s akin to the way ordinary vies with extraordinary as sources of meaning. Even noise has patterns, while the extraordinary is singular, as Robert Musil pointed out, although (drawing on Chambers again) Whitehead would add that it’s in conversation with the rest, and so, apparently singular or “singular.”

My friend Rocky Hanish wrote to me recently about the place of narrative in making architecture. I replied that some people appear to lack a narrative sense, seeing life as “one damn thing after another.” Galen Strawson argues that narratives aren’t determinative. While I see my life as a narrative, I agree with Strawson that while my past is present for me in a sense that Whitehead calls its relatedness (if I read Chambers correctly), that takes the form of an ongoing conversation with it, mostly an inner one but sometimes involving others. If I write about my past, it’s partly to engage these others and give the dialogue itself a conditional future that I may influence but ultimately cannot shape directly. (Chambers’ Whitehead and my Walter Benjamin both speak of reception, which brings us back to ambition as the lure of any creative process: this desire that the narrative continue. We set out our stand in this afterlife, offering fragments that we hope are pregnant with meaning.)

We arrive at life’s late period with a boatload of experiences. Ordinary things like names may elude us, but all those rooms and terraces, time

alone or with others, are still vivid. Writing in its different forms conveys how they were and what they meant. We’re also aware that whatever we fail to convey will be lost. I think it’s a universal motive, to want to convey what we’ve experienced to others in some manner, to plant ourselves in conversations we won’t live to hear.

This is what I make of Stendhal or Tomasi de Lampedusa, honoring what life gave them by creating windows into minds that experienced what they knew to be remarkable, aiming to capture it in order to reflect on it, and then share this with others. These aren’t monumentsto-self, but there’s a certain ruthlessness about this fidelity to experiences and their meaning, because it’s done also to enhance the experiences themselves, make them stand out vividly again from ordinary life. With Dorothy Wordsworth, two of whose journals I read last winter, it’s unclear if she meant to show them to others, but she was William Wordsworth’s sister, part of a writers’ circle. She’s reportorial, but then you hear the observation engine whirring, evocative in what it produces. The root of ruthlessness may lie in the fact that such minds observe and experience, then draw on the entirety of what they sensed. “Minds” here is a stand-in for post-facto exposition, since they’re otherwise engaged as the seats of emotion, even crocodiles in heat. “To know,” we say, and we mean body and soul, or really what’s the point? My life’s meaning is wrapped up in this desire to know. I’ve lost the need to know by touch. Perhaps this is because I knew too much, at points, or discovered the limits of knowing in this sense. It only gets you so far, that horizontal life you craved. Craving fell away, I noticed, but perhaps trying to understand and convey is also a craving, like having a cigarette in bed, talking as we do after fucking across an afternoon, our minds open in post-coital bliss, a clarity amid haze, somehow sharper as our bodies cool down, loosen their grip. I experienced this along with the rest, this taking of what can’t be said, then saying it. It’s why I write.

Sources

Giancarlo de Carlo: Paolo Ceccarelli, GiancarlodeCarloandILAUD:A MovableFrontier , ILAUD and Fondazione OAMi, 2019.

Whitehead: Two papers by Ashley Elizabeth Chambers, read in manuscript: “A Process-Relational Exploration of Uterine Knowledge: TheExquisite Buoyanciesin conversation with Alfred Whitehead,” 2019; and her revision and expansion of it, “A Process-Relational Exploration of OrdoVirtutumand The ExquisiteBuoyancies : Considerations for Future Work at the Intersections of

Performance Studies and Theology,” 2022. Also, Chambers’ book-length poem, TheExquisiteBuoyancies , New Michigan Press, University of Arizona, 2021.

Dögen: Hee-Jin Kim, DögenonMeditationandThinking:AReflectiononhis ViewofZen , SUNY, 2006.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, FooledbyRandomness , Random House, 2005.

Benjamin: Uwe Steiner and Michael Winkler (trans.), WalterBenjamin:An IntroductiontoHisWorkandThought , Chicago, 2012, and Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, WalterBenjamin:ACriticalLife , Belknap Harvard, 2016.

Musil: Bence Nanay, “The Dethroning of Ideocracy,” TheMonist , January 2014, p. 7. (The entire issue is devoted to Musil as a philosopher.)

Galen Strawson, ThingsThatBotherMe , New York Review Books, 2018.

Dorothy Wordsworth, TheGrasmereandAlfoxdenJournals , Oxford, 2008.

Written in November 2022.

11 August 2003

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 lives, 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 in 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. We are inescapably in the world, right up to the moment when, from our viewpoint, we cease to be. It unfolds constantly, but we stake our claims to having despite this: my house, my marriage, my children, my friends, my books all that figures as mine within the world. Our tendency is to use them to fix our bearings, to delimit our lives: this is me, a person of a certain description, defined less by who I am than by what I have, what I have heaped up.

There is some justice to being so judged, even to judging ourselves by our works, by the fruits of our labors, the opportunities life gives us to have, love, befriend, create, and procreate. Emanuel Swedenborg argues that life consists of these works that such works are 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 MarriageofHeavenandHell , 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…”

When love breaks off, the sham of having is revealed with unignorable clarity. We saw the loved one as a possession when possession is 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 deliberately and with equanimity with whatever life throws at us, deciding what to act on and persevere with despite everything this is the way of being in a marriage. Being unfolds. The path is the Buddhist metaphor for it, but 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 trail through the woods, but 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 real stake in this. We either are or we aren’t.

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 life back into view. At first, they may still be wrapped up in having. We remember a lover’s cries, all the attributes that made her what she was, and recall the places where we went together, and the gap she left, leaving. Any wrenching loss like this leaves us bereft.

12 August 2003

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 depend on it is to fail to acknowledge its transience. The path is 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. 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 in fact 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 something of a surprise.

It was a gap in a friend's otherwise orderly life. I was the honorable one among many 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 stayed friends, her life became a closed book, as if these 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

"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, wrote that they aren’t who they seem that they deceive others. But often, Naranjo added, the ones they seek to deceive are themselves. Preferring to live in the future, they’re not altogether here in the present. This distances them from authentic life.

There are various ways to evade the present. To daydream is one I was prone to this when younger. Making lists, while a valid exercise, is 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. Perhaps too they seek to be so “creatively employed” that they manage to evade the more important task of doing their own work.

14 August 2003

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 into something else. Property and progeny 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 have children and soon have a household to support, earning 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. One of its tasks is stewardship, the tending and cultivating that gives it life. What leads 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 often much better 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, individually and collectively, we pay the penalty of our negligence everywhere else.

16 August 2003

The results of my querying the IChingclustered 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

Bourgeois married life involves a 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 of our relationships? Should we also find our loved one essential or beautiful? Is this why we perpetuate relationships or, if these traits are lacking, fail to do so?

18 August 2003

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.

19 August 2003

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.

23 August 2003

The IChingadvises 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

When (and if) I’m 80, what then? I stake out in advance my small territory of regret.

Written across that August. Stephen Batchelor’s AlonewithOthers , A.H. Almaas’s ThePointofExistenceand FacetsofUnity , and Claudio Naranjo’s EnneagramStructureswere helpful to writing this “guide for the perplexed.” I’ve relied on the Bollingen Wilhelm–Baynes IChingmy entire adult life.

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 others' suggestion. The two categories overlapped but the second 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, DesignBookReview , finally has an online archive and may do more than the rest for my reputation, although in this case I was the patron.

The main challenges of transitioning to leisure are 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

"We can go on like this for the rest of our lives."

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 since 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 télos. 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, “Winter in the Abruzzi,” 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. 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.

As the IChingsays, “No blame.” We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry.

A familiar city seems a redoubt compared to exile in a village. The vows made when we marry lead us to an unseen ledge.

Like a diary, the everyday; like alleyways we overlook that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm.

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 her "Abruzzi," Ginzburg describes a hiatus that looked different when she lived it than in retrospect. She describes two "ordinaries" and how she misjudged them, undervaluing one and overvaluing the other, and how her longing to return to the familiar one undid her. Her husband isn't omitted, but we only learn certain facts at the end, just as she did as they unfolded.

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 makes these obligations subsidiary, each one 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 IChingwhat 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 TheArtof Wardiscusses 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 that specializes 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 asserts her desire to read my poems without prior explanation. I value her recognition of a line's resonance.

The poems in a journal I admire tend to be about one thing, the second poetry editor noted. My poems tend to wander discursively from their opening themes. There’s a discursive quality to everything I write, in reality. 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 a complication. If the mind stays sound, it has two main 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 can look like reaction but is tempered by agreement with others on what’s problematic given that many of our problems are old ones arising in new forms.

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 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 wants 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 yang and qualitative is yin, in so many words.)

My library surrounds and admonishes me. I read a reference to Thoreau’s Waldenjust 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 TheSensesofWalden , 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 and their authors and topics with which I hoped to engage sit 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'm unwilling to jam a syllabus into a semester. I don’t read that way. I need a syllabus that's set at the right pace.

The literary reviews and cultural supplements do their part to 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.

Poetry is among the slightest forms by which something I imagine 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 moments, etched in memory, and then represent them convincingly to 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 longevity is also wearing, and not just in a physical sense. We feel its debilitating effects and the previews of them 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. Their proliferation and the insistence on an individual’s right to specify them to agree with inner feelings are disconcerting if this is at odds with one's own verities. Yet these shades of difference are real and meaningful, part of our inner experience. It didn't occur to me to vary how I present myself, but this is more common now and the pronouns are one sign of it. What they point to is possibility. Yet pronouns don’t do full justice to our mix. We’re multivariant, gender handed us along with clothing and sanctioned behaviors. We grow up with it, learning if it fits or not. “What would Jesus do?” we ask. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” He presciently said.

On a whim, I bought Henri Cole’s book OrphicParis . Its black-andwhite 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 wellsprings 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 the 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 in which Gertrude Stein compares male homosexual love unfavorably to that 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 her whole town, 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. Written in the mid2000s, it aimed 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 early 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 to 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 unraveled much that seemed secure. The confusion and anger reflect 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 the nostalgia for coherence can resist it as halfbaked, but these are just delaying tactics. Life seldom provides a denouement as films and stories do. But in French denouementmeans “untie.” One may want to use that ribbon again, 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, but I wasn't ready to make love to her. 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. Another friend from school would go off to class. I'd stop by her place just before. We'd talk, and then I'd 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 that “whatever,” but for a poet, this is arguably the main source. Her wonderful JapanandIndiaJournals, 1960–1964capture how she fit work and life together, setting down what she observed. My own abilities are observational and synthetic, drawing on 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, demanded by his Zendo, led her to desire both a real marriage and a baby, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Their 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 ParisReviewhas a Billy Collins poem on death. I heard him 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 EasyRider . 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 it glided over his call to defeat the tyrant. He then played the former national anthem, now suppressed, meaningful to aging, exiled Cubans like himself.

In Singapore when I was five, I saw a cortège honoring the newlydead King George VI. Traditionally decorated, it was accompanied by what sounded like the Cantonese operas I heard on the kitchen radio in our house. After my parents resettled in suburban New Jersey, I joined our church's 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 UC 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 him. 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.

In 1998, 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 she found there as mine. Similarly, I gave up some concerts because it felt unfair to occupy the space and time we'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.

The title quotes the character Cesare in Penelope Fitzgerald's novel Innocence , one of my favorite novels. I wrote this at some point in 2021.

Quotes and Thoughts

In the spring of 2008, I visited my daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, in rural Andalusia, in a valley of the Sierra Nevada range, south of Granada. I brought along copies of literary reviews. They sparked a lot of thoughts (and notes). Back in Berkeley, I put them together in this form. (The photo above is the view from my daughter’s front terrace.)

Michael Wood, LondonReviewofBooks , 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 clearer than others about the tumbling-dice nature of this process. Something accumulated arrives with us, like luggage 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 all finally meet up. Yet there’s a kind of clustering of the cohort. Or perhaps the

cluster we encounter makes certain threads of time more important than others.

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.” We may discover 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 that they pursued and believed in together 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, LondonReviewofBooks , 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 Odesof 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 "Black and white" is too radical an economy, a matchbox with the heads left off.

Barbara Everett, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet,” London ReviewofBooks , 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: Threewinterscold

Havefromtheforestsshookthreesummers’pride, Threebeauteousspringstoyellowautumnturned InprocessoftheseasonshaveIseen, ThreeAprilperfumesinthreehotJunesburned, SinceIsawyoufresh

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.)

ThePillowBookis 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. 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.

In three hot Junes burned, since I saw you fresh

The Odeshave memorable lines about a half-drowned sailor hanging his soaked clothes up to dry in a temple, having again risked that glittering sea. 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, GoodBooksGuideblog, 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 demands and relies upon personal investment Joseph Esherick's Cary House (above) is “intentionally anti-material and anti-focal.” It “exposes people to the passing of the day, with 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.”1 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're still the measure of all things, still the ones who endow them with meaning an ongoing process.

What you leave out is as important as what you leave in

In Stendhal’s LifeofHenriBrulard , 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 travel journals. Like Tomasi di Lampedusa's TheLeopard , TheCharterhouseofParmawas written late in life. He wrote at a fast clip, drawing on experience. Tomasi di Lampedusa, in contrast, waited until the eleventh hour before at last writing his one 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. Finally, he set them aside and wrote, but then he died before the book found a publisher. For all he knew, it might not. At odds with the thenprevailing sense of the novel, it was rejected by one publisher after another until one editor read it and realized that it was a masterpiece.

Tomasi di Lampedusa’s article of faith was that the story he recounts, the world of TheLeopard , was sufficiently interesting to find readers. Stendhal had the same faith in his memoirs a sense of his life being of future interest, both because he wrote about it compellingly and because his own character was proto-modern, anticipating a world in which he would again be 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.

TheCharterhouseofParmawas meant to remind Stendhal’s contemporaries that he mattered much more than his station in life suggested. Assigned to a peripheral Italian city by a French government that viewed 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 that drew renewed attention. Tomasi di Lampedusa, writing in the shadow of his ancestor, was more like an anthropologist in his desire to convey to his readers the specific and ephemeral texture of a man, a family, and a place.

What to leave in or out is also a problem for novels Marguerite Yourcenar’s manuscript of MemoirsofHadrianran 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. Imagine The Leopardwithout 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 had to say, a manuscript of his memoir suggests. For Tomasi di Lampedusa, novels had to stop in time, avoiding the extraneous. For Stendhal, they had to give these stories the room they needed to be told fully no more, no less. And he was the judge of that.

Something beautifully mathematical and precise about it Architects turn to methods to up the odds of firmness, 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. Perhaps Palladio saw something similar, “like mathematics,” and then sat down to write his treatise. But a treatise is to architecture as a cookbook is to a feast.

Dawn Potter, “Self-Portrait with WarandPeace,” ThreepennyReview , 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 playwithin-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.

A sensation of profound mutual sympathy

My oldest son read TheOdysseyin high school. 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, stripped 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 roles 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 and women 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, LondonReviewofBooks , 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.

Experience is primarily an aesthetic matter

Simic quotes Cavafy’s “Has Come to Rest” (translated by Stratis Haviaras in TheCanon). 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 may 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 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, LondonReviewofBooks , 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.)

An attempt to reintegrate himself

Hee-Jin Kim writes that the 13th-century 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.”2

Svevo disparaged Triestine as a petty dialect or sub-language, 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 to write in Italian. With every Tuscan word of ours, we lie!” Here Svevo treats the step from the Triestine in which he thought to the Italian in which he wrote as inherently treacherous. Only in Triestine could he tell the truth. The question to ponder is whether there might have been Triestine truths that Svevo felt he could never get down on the Italian page.

J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, InnerWorkings , Penguin, 2008, pages 5-6

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 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 (above) 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.

J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, InnerWorkings , 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'd 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 self-regard, we rarely take our lives seriously. We're less than 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.

Notes

1. Joseph Esherick and John Parman, “The Pursuit of the Ordinary,” Space& Society , June 1983, page 52.

2. Hee-Jin Kim, Dōgenonmeditationandthinking , SUNY, 2006, pp. 62-63

Written mostly in the Alpujarra in April and May 2008. Wondering what to do with this led me to launch CommonPlace , my personal journal. A friend felt this name was a poor one for a publication featuring my own work, but my sister’s comment that this piece “was like a commonplace book” suggested it.

Reflections on E.M. Forster's CommonplaceBook

In 1940, in the commonplace book that E.M. Forster kept from 1925 through 1968, he wrote,

My duty is plain enough: to talk this late nineteenth century stuff civilization as being greater than “the ancestral wisdom of the barbarians" in a twentieth century voice, and not be shoved out of believing in intellectual honesty and the individual.

When I read this, I thought that, transposed to today, this is my duty too. Hence these notes. (The photo above is of two paintings my daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, made in rural Crete late in 2018.)

Notes on Forster’s commonplaces

“ImmediatePastis like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generations waste their time trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out, leaving the door open behind them.” 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 two when I set out for Norway, living with my father’s family in the company of my mother, my sister, and 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 midcentury would have been very different had I grown up on the American mid-Atlantic coast. It was notably diverse and I came away from it with a clear sense that the planet was filled with people whose existence and ways of life I didn’t question. God’s command to Noah had clearly been carried out. What else stayed with me was how lives could be led happily amid widely varying circumstances. That they varied was obvious, but what happiness required was clearly not that 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 from the war, 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"? Yet every cohort routinely rubbishes the canon its predecessors established. There’s a desire to reorder everything. This is understandable. It also sparks debate. At a suitable interval, some reputations are salvaged. The intervals vary, though, and people can simply disappear.

In his CommonplaceBook , 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, ElizabethandEssex . 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. Robert 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. The need simply to set it down has precedence over any desire for visibility. It reflects 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. Forster's CommonplaceBookisn’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 standing, 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 an enduring reputation.

Not to put down visibility. In certain territories it's almost a requirement. It falls in a separate category from the need for selfexpression 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.” Forster, 1927

Another side of visibility is the need 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, trying to explain so much that's unexplainable. Does it come down to finding a teacher 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 fitting and novel 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. If we're lucky, we emerge from this with something good.

Part of the need to write is to record 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 Forster in 1930

In his 1941 Rede Lecture on Virginia Woolf, Forster says that being upper-middle class 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, 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, her novels are like films, unfolding visually.

The London of Mrs.Dallowayis 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 a 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 politics, 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, live with them over the decades as I have. Appalling to me at least, as this implies, and I’ll be dead soon enough. Yet much of what exists 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 selfconsciousness. This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.” 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 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 and 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 rethought. It's now more or less a dumping ground, but it could be a contained yet elongated sort of place, partly 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 how I approach my writing: attentive to conditions, loosely planned, and slow and appreciative of small things and to the way it 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.” Forster, 1934 or so

In his introduction to Forster’s CommonplaceBook , 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 initially 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 things are said to me 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 a plausible alternative 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.” Forster, 1932

I was 54 when I plunged in again, hoping to cure my unhappiness without making it worse. Another explained it as recovering from wounds received. I was pursuing an intuition that events seemed to confirm. It was like a set of directions that brought me to a destination by a route that afforded every kind of unrepeatable experience. When I think back to those directions at a later point, I have to be grateful for them. Life revealed my idealism and folly. If later I held back from plunging in again, it’s owing to these revelations. My knowing shifted, with less need to see it proven in the flesh. (But it's when you try to give it up that it comes to find you and drag you back, or so it seemed.)

When Forster described his happiness, he was aware of the festering world around him. It’s never unalloyed, never not an irony to find yourself happy 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.”

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. Given life's transience, the Buddhists suggest that our attachments are delusive, our comings and goings so much froth. It will all disappear, so why bother beyond a certain point? Better to face the facts. “Don’t give it a second thought,” as Harold Ross often remarked 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 still would make 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. They're 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.” 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 AfricanAmericans giving them real places in the economy and showing clearly how 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 a 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 me 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.” 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 the 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 Bonnard painting, especially in the early evening when the western sun slants across parts of it, setting up a shifting contrast of light and dark. 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 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.”

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 our 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. Robert Duncan borrowed from other poets to make progress in his own work their influence flowed through him, he said. Reading TheJapanandIndiaJournals, 1960–1964by 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 unfolds with life and the other wants 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.

If Forster’s CommonplaceBookis equivalent to a last novel, then Kyger’s Journalshave 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 Kyger's emotional life is also recorded.

Diaries and journals are inner-directed, although Forster anticipated readers for the CommonplaceBook , bequeathed as a public document. Novels can be audience-deferred. Forster's Mauriceappeared after his death. It seems that he wrote them whenever the great outweighed the small. This falls 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. Forster’s French translator Charles Marron in a letter, 11 June 1929

The back garden leads to 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 to 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, 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.” Forster, 1945

The phrase “art for art’s sake” is condemned as superseded by the political uses of art. (Political art's tendency now to repeat as memes is striking.) Some poets jump on this bandwagon. Events demand to be noticed, but a poem like Yeats's “Easter Sunday” is caught in its moment. If Yevtushenko’s "Bratsk Dam" isn't, this is because he has an everywoman tell its memorable story and gives her a memorable voice to tell it.

Art isimportant 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 CommonplaceBook 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.” Forster, 1945

His subject is the university city where he’d studied and later found refuge after his family’s house was reclaimed after Forster’s mother died.

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, all he'll get is what Antonioni’s RedDesertcaptures: drab modernity filled with young people whose alienation is dressed up in 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.” Forster, 1961

Although spatially constrained by the pandemic, my daily life opened up in time in ways that compensated 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 handed-over-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.

Written in the summer of 2020. Forster’s CommonplaceBookexists in facsimile (Scolar 1978) and paperback editions (Stanford 1985).

Notes in the Midst of a Pandemic

In Berkeley, the pandemic began in earnest in the first half of March 2020. My oldest son underscored its presence by insisting that I stop going to the grocery store, which he saw as a hotbed of contagion. I was following the blog posts of a friend in Shanghai, Vickie Wang, who had flown back there from Taipei after the holidays, quarantined herself, and then was caught in that city's lockdown. Taipei did better than Shanghai, but Shanghai did better than us, and we did better than many other parts of the country.

The pandemic unfolded in slow motion. The incompetence of the Trump administration an incompetence centered in its handling of communications arguably led to its defeat in November. Despite ongoing deprecation, federal expertise held and delivered. As one who was vulnerable to it, I lay low and got a lot of writing done. These notes reflect on what arose for me in the course of it, written in media res.

(The painting above is by the San Francisco artist Patricia Sonnino, whose work I've collected since the early 1990s.)

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 mine. 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, art and artifacts, and books 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 forms 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 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 télos into the friendship, raising expectations. This is an issue in close friendships between the sexes at a certain age. When you reach mine, experience should finally lead you not to act on desire. The reality of being older makes the idea seem ridiculous, yet there are men who ignore this and father children in their 70s and later. The British politician Alan Clark made "starting again" something of a leitmotif of his political diary, despite affirming often as part of the same thought that he was happily married. 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 télos 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 willing" 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’ve collected art since 1977. In Paris with our oldest son, then two, we bought a signed Zodiacal calendar spread by Eugene Grasset and several posters. Art in the house: European and Japanese prints; a pastel by Jenny Michels, Matisse’s last student; Patricia Sonnino, Vivienne Flesher, Ward Schumaker, Lisa Esherick, Sue and Richard Bender, Russell Case, Robert Newhall, Karen Legault. Leigh Wells, Henrik Drescher, Wu Wing Yee, Nellie King Solomon, Patricia Bruning, James Monday, Diane Apt, Laura Hartman, Peiti Chia, Karen Fiene, Elizabeth Snowden, Biliana Stremska, Georg Parmann II, and Geir Nymark. Art in the barn: Peiting Li, Snowden, Constanza Blondet, Rocky Hanish, and Apt.

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 barn, the back garden, and the neighborhood. Duncan Grant painted what he saw like the rooms at Charleston that he shared with Vanessa Bell, which are filled with the art they made together. (Above: Sonnino, top left and bottom right; Leigh Wells, top right.)

The several versions of social media That it would supplant email was predicted, but it's texting that's done that, at least with the young. My daughter confessed that she reads email infrequently, so I text her now if I send her one. She posts occasionally on 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 micro-issues results in abbreviated, inside-baseball tweets, replete with assertions believed to be self-evident. Anything seen as questioning these positions gets a hair-trigger response. Facebook is less prone to this 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 or mine. 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 most 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.

Social media's most pandemically important function is to keep people in touch. It notes birthdays, anniversaries, and other life events, and enables the tacked-on comments that let others know you're still here and interested in their lives, as perhaps they are of yours. As with social life in general, it depends on reciprocity.

Solitude is one of one of my several balanci ng 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 absorb my impressions. Creativity and receptivity, routinely (and wrongly) 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 overall process is nonlinear.)

A solitary individual is still attached to a shore and a pier, a landing place in sight probably of a house where someone keeps 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

Before I set out on a trip, I invariably dread going, wishing I could call it off. Once I launch myself into it, though, 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, but my dreams are redolent with an elsewhere that is sometimes flamboyant and even beautiful, but more often just an amalgam of things I've taken in.

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 IntheMoodforLove , 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 "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 "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

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 next two weeks, hung from a book on a bookshelf. 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 a buoy ringing in the fog.

On the desire to organize and cull Dependent on my 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's shed was renovated, I had a sense of the books it housed, but this was lost, even as the memory of it misleads me when I look for a book. 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 my 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. But then they're rediscovered, set aside long enough to seem new again.

Having a garden or two proves 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 CommonplaceBook , which alludes to his mother's house's grounds. He took a role in it, working with 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 was 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 my oldest son's ridge house, which has an extensive terraced garden waiting to be revived, we might plant grapes and then make wine. The coastal air and local terroirare 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 in these terms speaks 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? Corso, a favorite local restaurant, was shuttered. (The word is it will reopen.) 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 again be more of a haven than a world. Rely on it.

Nearer my God: how a pandemic is like a plane

Whenever I flew and the plane encountered something untoward, I was not above asking to be spared. I've prayed similarly in the worst of the pandemic, for myself and others. The nearby Hayward Fault prompts the same plea. What use will I make of my spared life? 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 sprang 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 it's 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 has been worse for all of 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. To me, this is the real lesson of the pandemic.

Written late in 2021. APandemicJournal(2022) continues the story. I finally caught the local variant in the wake of my niece Roz Smith’s wedding in midJuly 2022: three days of flu and then four days of a head cold. I read that it’s a mashup of the Covid and common cold viruses, so this makes sense.

Marriage, Family & Friendship

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 has been placed on marriage by the demand that it should meet so many human needs. 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 continue to relate to our mother physically, an intimacy, part of the realm of childhood, that's only put aside as our hormones stir and our bodies change. Soon after, we may seek it again from 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 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 credit.)

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 our exploration of specific phenomena. Love, marriage, and friendship are also practices, and 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 lover bringing a unique but overlapping genetic ancestry, conjoined at the heart.

Marriage exists in everyday time and evolutionary time. The family is both a socio-economic 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 TaoTeChingand the IChingput it. This continual modest effort may get us further than repeated acts of "reinvention." Evolutionary 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, most 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 real property and other assets to be considered. If a family is like a business, then the elders will 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 IChingsays, 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 my father's family by their names back to the 17th century, and the family's previous history can be inferred to its arrival in Parma in the 1500s.

Within any family history 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 family, but modern marriage accepts that they're worth taking and even necessary.

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. These days, the dynastic purpose of marriage may no longer be on the minds of every family that considers itself to be one, but I would guess that cultivators are still prevalent among the vast majority of them.

Thesis 4: Marriage needs a new tradition

A marriage needs to accept that the partners are individuals whose lives unfold independently. A marriage evolves and the couple gets older. In the childbearing years, if relevant, the couple is more mutually dependent. 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 that 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 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. 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 if 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 also applies to the marriage, 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 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 it's also the territory of François 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 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 are left to deal with the diverse realities 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. They have responsibilities to each other and to their issue, if any, but 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 resolutions 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 first-person narratives and the individual histories they recount.

All this points to the need to set aside whatever properly belongs to the past. Most of the grudges we hold, the slights and betrayals we count against others, are our baggage, our artifacts of memory. They can become caught up in our sense of self, but this can interfere with our life's unfolding. We owe it ourselves, to 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. Otherwise, we become the captives of our past. Experience suggests that this fails to account for the possibility of change, also part of life's unpredictability (and often its dispensation).

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. Their

daughter’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 noted that 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.

These episodes in one extended family confirm the view of the I Chingthat 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 ParisReview , the poet Frederick Seidel said that you reach a point in life where you write what you write and if people don't like it, that's their problem. I agree, but feel it has to be tempered when one is together with others. I've observed that some people take pleasure in constant strife. 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.

If we’re lucky, growing older grants us a greater openness, a clearer sense of others beyond 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 "Just sit!" To sit is to find the ground again by whatever means.

"The ground" as 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, since life doesn't really work that way. Self-cultivation shouldn't aim at perfection but at sustaining and enlivening one's life. 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 that the other also suffers. 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.

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 too 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 extend its boundaries and enable the members of the expanded family to identify themselves as such. It would recognize that this expanded family also has indelible ties to each other. 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.

Because this discussion overlaps the legal apparatus that's grown up around the family, I run the risk of seeming idealistic and unrealistic. From 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.

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 granting 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 (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 familial 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, 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 as marriage grows more inclusive. But its existence sets up the possibility that a married person, living separately with a different partner, might embrace it in order to afford the second relationship more rights and standing without giving up the marriage.

Marriage and divorce are usually seen as a binary pairing, a blackand-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 sometimes we're just as impossible ourselves.

Begun in 2001 and finally finished in 2011. The illustrations center on the circle of Vanessa Bell, including Duncan Grant, their daughter Angelica Bell, her and Clive Bell’s older son Julian, and her sister, Virginia Woolf.

The routes one takes in life can be (and are) generalized, often to make rhetorical or political points about their unevenness. Luck plays a big part, but some argue that the dice are loaded. Social movements aim often to end situations that are tipped for or against categories of humanity, yet they exist. Other situations arise that are, in retrospect, what Robert Musil saw as singular, unrepeatable experiences, separate from ordinary life yet attached to it, consequential for it. Poems and fiction draw on them. Rilke’s “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final,” also speaks to this.

The Decalogue sets out rules and Zen Buddhism has others. Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He was also known for expelling devils so people could be our neighbors again, which seems significant. The maxims of François de La Rochefoucauld “There are few cures for love, and none of them are sure” is one are pertinent to experiences of that nature.

Retrospect, the belvedere later life affords, looks out over vistas as hazy as any Renaissance painting. Specific memories are clearer in a film-like way, yet also fragments to be assembled and reassembled as they well up. Was there a route? It’s more like the Zen idea of barriers. Confronted by life’s oxymoronic nature and its tendency to feed our delusions, we finally, often painfully, get through them. “Beauty and terror” are apt and even paired.

There’s no instruction manual, rules and maxims notwithstanding. We’re like inexperienced drivers approaching a curve and seeing a sign. We slow down, but it feels like we could go faster. And maybe we can. Or can’t. We never quite lose the immunity we felt as toddlers within time and space. We make our way pragmatically, that dispensation evolution gives us if we’re lucky. Honesty forces us to acknowledge how

much luck plays a part. But pragmatism injects realism, enabling us to do the math, to look ahead and weigh our present options in light of those possible futures. We learn how to live in the present yet, as E.M. Forster put it, “work as if immortal.”

Tradition is helpful as a generality, but it’s also the accumulation of living, a process to which every living person contributes as an actor and exemplar. Commedia dell’arte’s stock characters, like the traits of the enneagram. are a catalogue of our potential to go right, wrong, or off the rails. At crucial moments, life asks us to choose among conflicting aims and desires, and how we choose reflects everything we’ve managed to learn to that point. Then we live with our choices, admired or vilified in turn depending on who’s asked. This appears to be true of saints, as well, possibly uniquely so.

Last summer, I wrote a novella that’s become a family saga that goes back a century in time. Fiction makes possible a displacement that real life doesn’t afford. Retrospect gives us distance from events. While we can reinterpret them, especially as they involved others, they’re still grounded in the reality of our experiences. In fiction, events like them happen to someone(s) else, and this frees us to reconsider them. Whether it’s worth reading or not, it’s better than memoir or straight autobiography for sorting things out. It also leaves a record of the sorting. I think this is what La Rochefoucauld had in mind when he wrote his ambiguous, worldly-wise maxims.

Written on 1 August 2023.

On Human Experience

Robert Musil distinguished between two territories of human experience the ratiod and nonratiod. Of the ratiod, he writes, “Above all the chief characteristic is that in it, facts can be unambiguously described and communicated.” Of the nonratiod, he wrote, “In this region facts do not submit, laws are sieves, events do not repeat themselves, but are infinitely variable and individual.”

Musil argues that we are nominally tethered to the ratiod, which perhaps could be characterized as “everyday existence,” while the nonratiod serves not just as a leitmotif, but as an opening onto the infinitely larger and more complex universe that we actually inhabit life’s sometimes baleful, sometimes gorgeous randomness, like a meteor we see coming at a great distance, impossible to avoid, its embrace glancing us and leaving scars; or we prove to be that meteor, despite our intention.

Musil writes down scenes from life in his diaries. Almost reportorial, they blur into stories and parts of novels, or his stories and novels assimilate them. Certain episodes stand out for me within a landscape of sameness. They seem to follow upheaval, as if border conditions create a space or rupture through which this other landscape opens out. Crossing carries risks. One way or another, we find an everyday again different and possibly more valued than the one we left.

I wrote a poem that riffs on Musil’s take.

Rational life has doors, gates in hedges, shadows behind columns, other rooms. Irrational wraps her hair up, then slips. Time and space alter on both sides. Back’s another place, the child minutely older, one touch different from another, lips and much else ache with memory. Later the ink’s a slightly different hue, words and lines colored, darkened, lightened. There’s no way to know. Each side’s a mystery to the other, but she bleeds in both, bears signs of crossing. Bears perhaps another, minutely sparked.

The poem suggests that the space or rupture is present and sought for in the everyday, but that our decision to pass through it is almost accidental and yet central to experience one way that we gain a knowledge of another in the most direct and intimate sense.

We live in the everyday “as if” much that we take on faith is true. Then life turns this back at us. This is especially difficult for those who crave proofs. Convention is the sum of what we agree on, but it too is provisional. It may gain from acquired gravity, but its currency is strictly limited. Proofs against what? Who agrees and what are the limits of their agreement? “As if” is the abiding context of everyday life, a self-limiting factor that is, an article of faith but also how we try to ground ourselves and prevent further mishaps.

Could we choose to live a purely ordinary or extraordinary life? Musil suggests that this misses both life’s contingency and their inseparability: they bleed into each other and, as my poem asserts, we bleed in both.

Written in April 2021. The Musil quotes are from Bence Nanay, “The Dethroning of Ideocracy,” TheMonist , January 2014, p. 7.

That I exist is a consequence of my father’s survival. When he took the photo above, I wonder if he thought of this. He always had the optimism of a survivor, the happiness you feel when you get through something that was touch and go. He was in the Army from the mid-1930s, when he joined ROTC at Iowa State, until the mid1940s, when he was demobilized as a major 12 years. “We could see the war coming,” he said once. Despite the relative safety of his wartime work, he narrowly escaped death when his building was destroyed by a bomb a famous story in the family, from which I got an early sense of the transient, luck-dependent nature of human life.

A few years ago, I wrote a sonnet series, “Omaha Beach,” that drew on memories of a trip my family made to Normandy to see the scenes of the D-Day landing the beach itself and the vast cemeteries of the dead. My father spent part of World War II in London, helping plan the invasion. He landed in Normandy the next day. From what I can tell, the only action he saw in the war was during the Battle of the Bulge. “The front came to me,” he told me. “I had to organize resistance.” Later, he and a German colleague figured out that they were within a mile of each other in that battle. Luckily, they didn’t kill each other. (My father won a bronze star.)

“You and my father are both mysteries to me,” my father confessed. I barely knew my paternal grandfather, but I have a photo of him with me before we left for Singapore, when I was two or three. We resemble each other, although I also resemble my mother’s father. Evelyn, my

father’s sister, said he was charming, but this was true of both my grandfathers. My father also had charm, but was more direct. I have the sense that he would have written more if he’d thought he was a writer. Yet he was a writer.

I learned this in several ways. My sister read my parents’ letters, noting that my father told stories to her through that medium, for my mother to read her. I remember those stories vaguely they were based on Norwegian folk tales, but he had a vivid imagination and told them with relish. Then he stopped. A few years ago, I put his name in search and the first page of a technical paper he wrote came up. Reading it, I found that the way we put paragraphs together and the words we chose were remarkably similar. It was uncanny. Our topics were of course entirely different.

Occasionally my father would comment on my lack of what he called “mechanical ability.” In an all-too-brief memoir he started but didn’t finish, he noted that he planned to become a radio repairman, assuming because of the Great Depression that his father couldn’t afford university tuition. (His father was a bridge engineer at the Union Pacific; his salary was cut in half.) “I made a little money on the stock market,” his father told him, so he became a chemical engineer and saw the world, literally, as did we. A few years after the photo above was taken, we returned to New Jersey, completing our circumnavigation of the planet by ship. My father was 37, wrapping up four years of work in Southeast Asia, putting thiamine (Vitamin B1) back in rice.

I have the notebook (left) that he and his father put together: how to build a pilot plant for enriching rice. I have the raw material of the film he made to show how it was done. Editing that film is one of the karmic debts I owe him.

As I get older, I seem to draw closer to my father. Old people remark that life passes meteorically. I went to a memorial for a landscape architect who I got to know, finally, talking with him for 30 minutes or so at a dinner at his house. It sometimes happens that the sea parts and you briefly find the time to have a real conversation, get a sense of the other. He died at 71, quickly, so there was no follow up. In a way, my relationship with my father was like this vignettes or episodes I’ll always remember because they stood out against the background of life. We may have been mysteries to each other, yet, every once in a while, we connected. It was also clear that we shared certain things, between the mysteries, that put us on common ground. Father and son: less perhaps about that, other than in the sense of proof that he’d survived, and more about a continuity of viewpoint that flowed across three generations. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to articulate, but you know it when you see it.

Written in January 2015. The opening photo, taken by my father, shows me with my mother and sister in Paris in 1949 Along with his instruction manual, I also have his father’s plans for the pilot plants to put Vitamin B1 in rice that he set up across Southeast Asia. I wrote this in my father’s centenary year. He died at 79.

(Photo left: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas.)

Memoirs&Reflectionscollects essays and fiction that draw on lived experience. The author went around the world by ship and train as a child, living in Singapore just long enough to bear the stamp of colonial indoctrination. Coming of age in the suburbs of New York City, he moved steadily west, drawn by Berkeley's benign climate. "Like Montaigne" his sister wrote to him after reading an earlier version of this book. Is it true? Both tend to be discursive, but beyond that, you'll have to decide for yourself.