Memoir & Reflection Part II

Memoir & Reflection II

John J. Parman

Pallas This book is a joint publication of Pallas, 1111 Geary Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94109, and Snowden & Parman editorial studio.

Text and images © 2021 John J. Parman.

Preface

Part II collects prose pieces blending memoir and reflection, continuing where Part I left off, and then shifts to others that are tipped toward reflection enough to warrant placing them in a separate category. To prepare it, I've drawn on a longer compendium based on Common Place, the personal journal I started in 2009. Each incarnation gets another reading and the editing that results from it—not just selecting something, but revising it to some extent. A degree of repetition runs through prose pieces written over more than a dozen years, inevitably, I think, given that certain themes arise again and again. Some of them also figure in my poems. At the end, of Part II, I comment provisionally on one of these themes, but one reason to collect past work is to consider it in that slow way that works best when the themes are one's own.

Memoir and Reflection

Reflections on E.M. Forster's

Commonplace Book

“Immediate Past is like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generation waste their time trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out, leaving the door open behind them.”— 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 mid-century 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 peoples 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 Commonplace Book, Forster—now 50—considers writing another novel. About what? He lists and then rules out various possibilities, asking himself what would be suitable both to him and to his readers. He notes how Lytton Strachey struggled with his final book, Elizabeth and Essex.

Meanwhile, he writes what he calls his “commonplaces.” In his introduction, the editor wonders if this was really it, the content that might have appeared in fiction. It’s not an idle question. 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. This may have outweighed his need to finish it. Or he may have imagined he had time enough while waiting for the war to end. Compare this with GiuseppeTomasi di Lampedusa, who only wrote his great novel when it was clear he faced a real deadline.

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 Commonplace Book isn’t a diary—he kept one separately. It seems clear that he intended it to be read by others, whereas his diary was private, an artifact that might be read later, but not by anyone who figured in its contents.

The “Immediate Past” Forster mentions is a collective past shared by a cohort with its own loves and hates. The diaries of Anthony Powell rehearse his chronic concern for his 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 self-expression and rumination. It can be independent of that need or that need can be superfluous to it if the driving force is exposure pure and simple, for reasons beyond creativity.

“Creative work” in general aligns with this, with people rising partly on talent and partly on being noticed, but not always or even often because their need to create is their primary motivation. That motive can still be hidden there, of course, waiting for its moment.

“When the music stopped I felt something had arrived in the room: the sense of a world that asks to be noticed rather than explained was again upon me, my restless and feeble brain was at peace for a tick or two.”—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. Dalloway is a universe like Dante's, ethereal and pyrotechnic, held together by a fabric that’s gossamer and relationships that are tenuous, yet both cohere, with a gravity that’s aided by their elective affinities.

My great-grandfather pulled his family into the uppermiddle 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 greatgrandfather 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 self-consciousness.

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 the white butterflies and the neighbor’s

substantial cat, which wandered in, looked around, and left in his slow, deliberate way.

Behind the barn, a neighbor to the west has commissioned an elaborate retaining wall 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 Commonplace Book, Philip Gardner says that Forster wrote to find out what he thought.

Forster remarks that he’s not much good at thinking per se— he gives an example of setting himself that task while waiting for a train, with no success. I make no claim to a good prose style, but I’m never in a hurry to make my point because I’m rarely sure 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 these things are said in a declarative way. “Give up your European self!” is an example. Giving anything up, even a European self, is provisional, but the threshold rises with experience—never so high that we can’t imagine some possible reason to change course, but 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 you to a destination by a route that afforded every kind of unrepeatable experience. When you think back to those directions at a later point, you have to be grateful for them. Life reveals our idealism and folly. If later we hold back from plunging in again, it’s owing to these revelations. Our knowing shifts, with less need to see it proven in the flesh. It’s when we give it up that it comes to find us and drag us back, or so it seems.

When Forster described his happiness, he was aware of the festering world around him. It’s never unalloyed, never not an irony 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 African-Americans—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. Sideeffects 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 The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 by 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 Commonplace Book is equivalent to a last novel, then Kyger’s Journals have a comparable stature. Gary Snyder and Allan Ginsberg are there, their spiritual pretensions seen through. In one memorable scene, Ginsberg lectures the Dalai Lama on spirituality; Snyder’s blindness to Kyger's emotional life is also recorded.

Diaries and journals are inner-directed, although Forster anticipated readers for the Commonplace Book, bequeathed as a public document. Novels can be audience-deferred.

Forster's Maurice appeared 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, these patterns that appear year after year—harvests that we gather, sort, press, and age that then wait to be uncorked and written out.

"Art is important in itself, even if it does no good.”— 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 "Bratz Dam" isn't, this is because he has an everywoman tell its memorable story and gives her a memorable voice to tell it.

Art is important in itself, as Forster asserts. It licenses a poet to stake out the ground of her art one word, line, stanza, or poem at a time, to disregard whoever came before or immerse herself in an earlier art to rethink it. Criticism is an imposition where poems are concerned, reflecting the critic’s biases. Editors as close readers are more helpful.

The one who really matters is the poet herself. She makes her way, finds her reasons and voices. I was inspired by a painter friend who told me he just paints and then takes stock. Another painter calls these preliminary pieces “studies.”

Forster's prose in his Commonplace Book is like poems struggling to emerge. An editor described my poems as “sentences piled up.” Do they scan? A critic said one felt constricted, but that’s not always true. I take none of this to heart. To me, they are poems beyond a doubt.

“I am asked to give up my advantages so others may have things I don’t want; to help build a world I should find uninhabitable.”—Forster, 1945 His subject is the university city where he’d studied and where he found refuge after his family’s house was taken back by its owner following the death of his mother. Now it 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 Red Desert

captures: 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.

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

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 overlap, but the second category was primarily reputational.

These brief pieces are products of my leisure. I’ve always done things like this, fitting them in amid the work I did for others. Some of that work I loved doing. I was lucky to find relatively good fits between my talents and those activities, and patrons when I developed new things. A few have outlasted my tenure. One of them, Design Book Review, finally has an online archive and may do more than the rest for my reputation, 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 everyday, not caring how it’s spent and yet caring how it’s spent—wanting to fish, wanting the fish, and wanting to be the fish, in succession, and also wanting to be out on the water or beside it, marveling at the sunlight, sounds, the summer’s heat.

The rhythm of leisure is elusive and I feel constantly that I’ve got it wrong. Zen has this contradiction too between advocating a kind of naturalness about the activities of the day and then imposing a schedule on it that no human would adhere to naturally. The workweek has aspects of this, made

worse by commuting. I used to get up at 6 a.m. to hit the train at 7 a.m., before the crush, and then work until 7 p.m. to avoid the crush home, but this 12-hour regime was defeated by the steady stretching out of rush hour, especially in the evening. I was so glad to stop.

What is leisure’s rhythm? Does it even have one, or do the different strands of leisure have their own, like the tuning of instruments to whatever key it will be on a given day? I suspect the latter, and that what’s missing for me is a bit of deliberation about the time ahead, asking what it asks of me: to be used fruitfully. For time is fecund and fecundity has a rhythm of its own. We have a nose for this or an eye, an attentiveness. Leisure threads through our work for others, and we know quite well how to work for ourselves, having done so in childhood. But we have to shed our accumulated resistance.

“Death is the great question,” some Buddhists say.

Leisure's rhythms reflect how death becomes a second, unavoidable telos. As we’re told most of our lives to think of the future, its foreshortening is unnerving. No strategy earns a pardon. Buddha’s ladder, as I call it, lets us savor leisure while savoring is still possible. Life is really the great question. Death has no need for answers. Equanimity without terror is what’s wanted, death being the end of every story. I admired a friend for making jokes just before dying in his sleep.

I wrote a poem with a rhyming pattern borrowed from Rilke.

It riffs on Natalia Ginzburg’s essay, “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 I Ching says, “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 I Ching what to emphasize. It gave me hexagram 33, “retreat” and hexagram 53, “development (gradual progress).” I consult two versions, and the older one noted that we remain attached to what we love, what’s habitual, habits being both vices and virtues. But the main message was to proceed in a slow and friendly manner. The older version also noted that a tree on a mountainside takes forever to root, but—once rooted—is visible. Success in small things, the first hexagram declared.

Two questions are raised: Retreat from what? What’s habitual? (What are my small, potentially harmful loves?) The hexagram distinguishes between strategic withdrawal, giving way in order to return later, and panic. But still, retreat from what? Holdovers from working life came to mind—the risk of repeating what I’ve done already. A dream I had compared

this to a river that meanders so that you cross it again and again. Make the crossing of it a theme, the dream said. It may have aimed at life itself, crossings as Zen barriers, always into new territory. Michael Nylan’s version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War discusses terrain. Retreating or advancing, terrain is a variable—familiar but different, unfamiliar but like others.

We bring what we know, and the dangers of knowing are hubris and assumption. Terrain is best regarded as new, an encountered river as new.

As for habits, they consume disposable time. Thinking of it as a resource reminds us that our leisure, finite in any case, will be a stranded asset if age or illness impairs our capacity to use it effectively. It follows that we can judge the benefit or harm of our habits by considering if they’re consuming or prolonging our capacity for leisure's effective use.

Much of our effectiveness is enabled by others. Human interaction constantly prompts thoughts, ideas, and actions that wouldn’t have occurred to us or taken the form they took without another’s involvement. My writing partner Richard Bender has been on one end or the other of this process for almost 50 years. More recently, I've worked with poetry editors. One is the editor of a press 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 yin and qualitative is yang, in so many words.)

My library surrounds and admonishes me. I read a reference to Thoreau’s Walden just now, remembering again that I started an annotated edition, marveling at the contemporary feel of the writing, but then set it down. Since then, I’ve read from his journals, finished a spiritual biography of him, and started a more conventional one. I also read Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden, the book that first attracted me to him. So, not entirely a bust. But the main book remains where I left it on the shelf. Other books—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 Orphic Paris. Its black-and-white photo illustrations are reminiscent of W.G. Sebald. Cole sets his prose narrative loosely on the arc of time spent living in a city. His mind roams back in time and to other places, like Marseilles. A rooted cosmopolitan is the self that Cole depicts, someone whose view is here and now, a microcosm of the time and space we move through and temporarily occupy, and of the now-time Walter Benjamin

described, an unfolding present in touch with the 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 everyone, she told me. It killed the painter Egon Schiele, his wife, and their unborn child—a death he seems to have anticipated, painting a portrait of the three of them before his child’s birth. My mother was three. She lived to be 75, dying slowly of a stroke—not as quickly as my father did, four years later, felled by his failing guts before leukemia got him.

At my father’s suggestion, I found a good doctor, but I follow her advice based on my interpretation of its priority.

When I first met with her, my blood pressure was high. I knew it was, and dealt with it immediately. Maintaining it is harder—it’s easy to let things slide. This is an aspect of the larger question of how to organize my life. It’s a regime that I put in place and then adjust episodically, with the doctor assisting in the recalibration. After my last visit, I increased the dosage of the medicine I take for high blood pressure by 50 percent. While in Singapore in November 2019, I told myself to get in better shape. I’ve done this at different points

because I was in love. (A friend told me she knew a colleague was having an affair because he was too fit for his age.)

Separating the impulse to be fit from desire is yet another of the adjustments one makes, growing older.

Like a time-capsule, a story I'd started resurfaced. Written in the mid-2000s, 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 mid-50s, judging from a title mentioning 40 years and a parenthetical proviso, “Ever the optimist.” It mentions an ambition to learn Latin and its offshoots, and to find “a second root,” a second place that feels like home.

The note has its own maxims. “Perseverance in true things; openness to everything else.” (I agree. Only life itself reveals the truth of things, but as a constant subject of internal debate.) “To fulfill what was given me.” (It's all I have, plus the desire make full use of it, whatever “full” or “use” might mean.) Sometimes you have to come back to something to see that more is possible than you imagined. In a talk I heard at Stanford on a Tesla windshield—a feat of glass manufacture—one of the team said that the main thing about innovation is not 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 half-baked, but these are just delaying tactics. Life seldom provides a denouement as films and stories do. But in French denouement means “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 Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 capture 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 Paris Review has 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 Easy Rider. Key West is an island, but in my part of it, the ocean was a rumor, although Havana was said to be only 90 miles away. The festival was opened by an advocate of Cuba’s freedom from Fidel Castro. Its break from Spain was plotted in the very hall where we sat, he explained. The audience was so taken with this fact that 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 newly-dead King George VI. Traditionally decorated, it was accompanied by what sounded like the Cantonese operas I heard on the kitchen radio in our house. 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 U.C. Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney perform several times.

He would accompany his performances with commentary or give a talk at the start, and I learned a lot from 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.)

Notes in the Midst of a Pandemic The nature of friendship We entertained in small groups when the weather was good.

As cold weather set in, a few close friends ate with us indoors. At Thanksgiving, two households shared food but split the guests. Christmas is likely to be similar. My wife walks with her friends, but I've used Zoom to have conversations with 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 telos into the friendship, expectation. This is only an issue in close friendships between the sexes at a certain age.

When you reach mine, experience should have finally led 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 telos becomes steadily more open-ended as mutual acceptance grows.

There are certain formalities related to marriage's dynastic nature, but as you age, the known unknowns take the edge off expectation. "God 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 started collecting art when were in Paris in 1977. We stayed with our oldest son, then two, at the Hotel Louisiana and there were galleries nearby. We bought a signed Zodiacal calendar spread by Eugene Grasset, and several posters. We have older work—Austrian, Japanese, and Italian prints, and a pastel by Jenny Michels, a relative by marriage and a model for and the last student of Matisse; and newer work by Patricia Sonnino, Vivienne Flesher, Ward Schumaker, Lisa Esherick, Sue Bender, Richard Bender, Russell Case, Robert Newhall, and Karen Legault. Upstairs, there's work by Sonnino, Newhall, Leigh Wells, Schumaker, 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.

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 (with art by Peiting Li and Elizabeth Snowden on the walls, and by Constanza Blondet, Rocky Hanish, and Apt on the shelves), the back garden, and the neighborhood. Almost to the end of his life, the painter Duncan Grant painted what he saw—the rooms at Charleston, for example, that he shared with Vanessa Bell.

And these rooms are filled with the art they made together.

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 balancing acts I have an upper limit past which solitude gets to me. When I'm deprived of it, I get cranky and even immobile. I need solitude to recover from society and 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 with others or another who keep an eye out. It is therefore a partial solitude, even if the rower feels she's apart from it, not part of it. Or feels she's both. Gender involves a similar sleight of hand.

Everyone plays along, as it's a crowdsourced deception, but some fail to see the complexity of the other or discount it, taking seriously the various conventions and reacting if someone mixes them up. They want to go with the dominant pattern. If the man wears a dress, that decision can be controversial. Women can wear men's clothes without incident but their demeanor can raise questions. It's true that gender is constructed. It's when we're most human— overcome with grief or fear or with desire—that we set our armor down and are our naked, original, complex selves.

I haven't missed traveling and yet it still figures 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 In the Mood for Love, the most bittersweet film I know. I thought at the time, and said to her later, that if I'd been her, I couldn't have sat through it. She did, though, and perhaps it had homeopathic qualities.

When I think of "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 Commonplace Book, which alludes to his mother's house's grounds. He took a role in it, working with the the man who looked after them. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel Lolly Willowes, the grounds of the protagonist's family's house, of the church and cemetery where her family 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 terroir are 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 zerosum 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.

Reflection

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

My polemical goals are several. I want to lift the improbable weight that has been placed on marriage by the demand that it 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 (or others) with whom to share an intimate tension. Family may be both the cause and consequence of this. We do so despite the inconveniences, the unhappiness, and even the dangers that come with it.

For my purposes here, I'm going to set the untoward aside.

Marriage in one form or another is a common feature of life, so it exhibits the full range of human behavior. There are sociopaths and psychopaths out there. A lot of family life is toxic in one way or another. This is not about that toxicity.

Its sense of family is more benign than not.

Yet the inconveniences and unhappiness are real. And there are dangers, even among the benign. You can be messed with without anyone laying a hand on you, often with the best of intentions. Misunderstandings abound. We bring our natures with us, on arrival. Parents do their best to deal with us, and then friends, lovers, and partners take their turns. Yet we invite this, throwing our ill-suited natures into unlikely combinations that nonetheless attract us. This too is like a family, which despite the bond of blood is a genetic menagerie. Perhaps instinctively, we want to mix it up.

(Personally, I give destiny some 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’ selfcenteredness 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 riverlike 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 Tao Te Ching and the I Ching put 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 I Ching says, it seeks "an end that endures." These ends can’t be foreseen in any detail, but they reflect a hope for the family that is like that of the gardener who considers not just the next season but the future of the garden itself. There's an element of cultivation to it. That this hope may be pointless in the grander scheme of things, life's ephemeral nature, means little to families of cultivators.

There's an element of stewardship to them, a sense of connection to an enterprise that predates them, often by a considerable amount, and on this basis alone posits their future. I can trace 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, duc de La Rochefoucauld, what the French call amour-propre. Love

between two individuals dances around their singularity, which is to say their self-love and self-regard.

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

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

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

together, and their closeness seems only to have grown stronger.

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

I recount these episodes in one extended family to agree with the I Ching that affection underlies all close human relationships. Marriage, family, and friendship alike are either grounded in affection or risk becoming a sea of unhappiness.

In asserting this, I recognize that I'm projecting my own nature, which is more affectionate than not.

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

If we are lucky, our growing older grants us a greater openness to others, a clearer sense of who they are beneath their foibles and grievances. It's as if we can feel their hearts beating, sense the humanity that connects us. We no longer think of them as part of our circle or orbit, revolving around us. They take on a different hue. We're finally on better terms with our past and more willing to let life surprise us with its possibilities. It's at this point that close friendships take center stage.

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

This is why he emphasized "Just sit!" To sit is to find the ground again by whatever means.

"The ground" as a metaphor points to the moment we let go of whatever carried us away and place ourselves again in the unfolding life that we've been undividedly part of all along. Place is not quite right, since everything is in flux.

Usually, we're somewhere when we find our ground again. It becomes our vantage point, the shore to which we venture, with others or on our own. Although we cannot know the ground or the path of others, these metaphors help us describe what we share with them, which is to be present in a world that, although we see it and respond to it individually, unfolds for all of us.

Close friendships are rare, in my experience. Like light, it's one thing at one moment, something else at another. The quantum nature of life governs it, so we have to accept that it isn't wholly bound by time or space. A close friend is often in our thoughts, but our encounters reflect our individuality.

We accept each other's individuality because we value it in ourselves. We leave it to her to shape her own life. We accept each other's nature. If advice is sought, we give it, but we try not to make a habit of it.

This in itself is bucking the tide. We live in an era when perfectibility is on a lot of lips. There's a lot of complaining, too, since life doesn't really work that way. Self-cultivation shouldn't aim at perfection, but at sustaining and enlivening one's existence. Close friends accept that this is one point of their friendship. There's an inherent element of playfulness to it. We are a mix of animal spirits and various higher callings.

What Dōgen saw, his insistence that it all shades together, is what true friends accept of each other; they do their level best to live at the higher end, but they know it doesn't always happen. They may have to go off and lick their wounds in consequence, but they know 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, discussed previously, who stayed married while they went their mostly separate ways. Formally, there's marriage and there's divorce. More recently, there are also domestic partnerships, a halfway house toward marriage. Meant to extend some of marriage's rights to those excluded from it, the category could disappear 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 black-and-white rendition of a landscape that we know full well is resplendently colorful, textured, messy, and in flux.

When you look back in history, especially across cultures, you see a lot of variation. Looking across a table sometimes, you see former partners breaking bread. I realize that time is a factor here, but when you consider both the tumult and the reconciliation, life can prove bigger than the partners imagined. Certain ties still bind them.

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

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

Our wisdom, though hard-won, can be gone in a flash.

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

Quotes & Thoughts Michael Wood, London Review of Books, 22 May 2008, page 12 In people, in families, in nations and in war, the unintended, the inexplicable, the groundless is for Tolstoy what instigates action and produces results; and we understand these results, if we understand them at all, only long after they are achieved and over. The unconscious rules Tolstoy’s world, but it is not Freud’s zone of repression: it is the realm of everything we don’t know about ourselves, about all the real, multifarious and inaccessible causes and effects we childishly simplify and pretend to understand, as if a plan could decide a battle, or a mere promise of virtue protect us from the ambush of desire.

The ambush of desire Each person has her own destiny, fundamentally different from my own. We fall through time, but it seems to me that when we land, we’re among a cohort of time travelers, some 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, London Review of Books, 22 May 2008, page 26 He would take the idea of economy to a radical extreme, and it is this, along with the scrambling of syntax and confusion of parts of speech, that makes for most of the difficulty in his work—this attempt to fold the universe into a matchbox, as Kenner somewhere puts it.

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

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

Barbara Everett, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet,” London Review of Books, 8 May 2008, page 14 As in a private journal (and his Sonnets do speak of journals, given and received as gifts), the poems allude to time lived through. Thus comes this extraordinary writing:

Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, Since I saw you fresh

These effects are almost cinematic, the product of a modern awareness of the feeling of life, the way external change alters or fails to alter the internal mind.

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

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

In process of the seasons have I seen The truism suggests that time passes faster as we grow older.

Yet time still slows down when events pull us off to the side.

The world outside flows at its usual pace and we fall behind.

That falling behind is part of the pleasure of these events, to take a brief vacation from the march. Mostly, we move distractedly through time, aware of the seasons but only briefly open to their particular beauty. When we’re present in time, beauty is called forth from everything. (If someone objects that beauty is ephemeral, I can point to this.)

The Pillow Book is the record of a woman who lived within and wrote about the “process of the seasons” and noted beauty whenever or wherever she saw it. When you read it, you live in it at her pace. The notes of the translator, Ivan Morris, fill in the blanks: how the empress she serves is supplanted by a younger favorite and then dies tragically in childbirth, age 24. How the author admires the brother of the empress, even as he betrays her, seeing something grand

about him and understanding his motives in putting her younger sister forward. In the peculiar society of that era, when the power of the dominant family depended on marrying daughters to the emperors, his feelings for his sister were necessarily down the list. The author’s capacious mind accepts this, even as she deplores their effects on the empress she loves. All of this plays out against the seasons of the court.

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 Odes have memorable lines about a half-drowned sailor hanging his soaked clothes up to dry in a temple, having again risked that glittering sea. Shakespeare is writing from another angle, but both poems are as much about now as then. Despite centuries passing, there’s no actual distance.

The lover—present, absent, or gone—is still with us, as is the one who loves, waits, or is betrayed.

Clare Wigfall, interview, Good Books Guide blog, 18 May 2008 Writing a short story presents its own specific challenges.

One aspect I appreciate is the economy of the form; the story must create a world, a mood, a plot, wholly real characters, an exploration of life and its complexities, and all within the space of only a few pages. There’s something beautifully mathematical and precise about it, and what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. For that reason, your safety net is taken away, because when you write a short story you’re relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps, with a short story you’re forced to leave these for your reader to complete—the difficulty for the author is getting the balance perfectly right, creating something that will satisfy. This is probably what makes short stories—when

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

It demands and relies upon personal investment Joseph Esherick's Cary House 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.” Houses are the short stories of architecture, and the best ones are intellectually demanding—not by forcing dwellers to come to terms with an overlay of theory, but by acknowledging their participation in the house’s unfolding as settings within settings whose meaning shifts constantly as they are inhabited and experienced. The house is deliberately spare and open-ended, making what it looks out on (the setting) as important as what it is (the building) and what it contains (the rooms and furnishings). The house is about particular things, the larger setting most of all, yet that setting also changes. The design acknowledges that one moment gives way to the next, yet we stitch these moments together to make a world and live in it. We are still the measure of all things, still the ones who endow them with meaning—an ongoing process.

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

What you leave out is as important as what you leave in In Stendhal’s Life of Henri Brulard, he says plainly that waiting for genius to strike is a waste of time for a writer. He spent his adult life writing novels, memoirs, and traveler’s journals. Like Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, The

Charterhouse of Parma was written late in life. He wrote at a

fast clip, drawing on experience. Tomasi di Lampedusa, 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 then-prevailing 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 The Leopard, 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.

The Charterhouse of Parma was meant to remind his contemporaries that he, Stendhal, mattered much more than his station in life suggested. Assigned to a peripheral Italian city by a French government that saw him as a has-been, he took immense license with the terms of his employment, absenting himself to better climes to write a life for the drawer and a valedictory novel for publication that drew renewed attention. Tomasi di Lampedusa, writing in the shadow of his ancestor, was more like 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 Memoirs of Hadrian ran much longer than her book, and Tomasi di Lampedusa also worried about leaving in or taking out certain chapters, decisions he left to his editor. Imagine The Leopard without the chapter focusing on the priest who attends the prince: given its large canvas, the omission would be less crucial than in a story. Tomasi di Lampedusa pared it down, whereas Stendhal wrote what he 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 War and Peace,” Threepenny Review, Summer 2008, page 21 When I recall this scene—myself in the throes of childbirth reading about Tolstoy’s little princess in the throes of childbirth—the memory has a play-within-a-play quality.

What remains tangible is a sensation of profound mutual sympathy. I was, at that instant, enduring with this familiar yet imaginary woman the dance of torment and reprieve, torment and reprieve. We were, at each paroxysm, in the

talons of death; at each release seized again by life. It was an accident and strange miracle to read it and suffer it simultaneously.

A sensation of profound mutual sympathy When my oldest son was in high school, he was assigned The Odyssey. Finding it lying around, I read it again and found a completely different book. A long prologue stood out for me because it described the son’s search for his father, which I'd forgotten, and also laid out, as a preface to the fantastic tales that Odysseus tells a king about his journey, a true-to-life account of the care with which he handled his initial encounter with the Princess Nausicaä—honoring her on every level, thus ensuring that he will live to tell those tales to her and her father, and also preserving himself as a potential lover by respecting her privacy and remaining hidden. The passage makes it clear that while Odysseus appreciates her striking beauty, there’s no lechery. He encounters her and intuits her nature, as we learn. We also grasp his nuanced response—his sensitivity to a woman who caught his interest without knowing it. Yet he also savors what he senses. None of this meant anything to me when I first read the book.

Twenty-four years later, reading it again, I knew the territory it describes, 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 U.S. 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—U.S. society—gets off easily. Instead, the money is spent waging pointless wars and building bridges to nowhere. The things that are fundamental to society’s wellbeing—like raising and educating children—are starved for funds. Women and children bear the burden of this disproportionately. Perhaps, as in Lysistrata, it’s time for the women to go on strike.

Charles Simic, London Review of Books, 20 March 2008, page 33 For someone whose preoccupation in much of what he wrote was with the erotic, Cavafy is a strangely chaste poet. He was a sensualist who left unmentioned what he was most excited about. His descriptions of lovemaking never get specific. It is up to the reader’s imagination to supply the missing body parts. He used words in their

primary meaning and was perfectly satisfied in calling a naked body young and beautiful and leaving it at that. In his view, this is not an issue. Art doesn’t represent reality, imitate life or copy nature. Experience is primarily an aesthetic matter. It imposes its own will on the subject, removing it from the contingencies of the natural and social worlds.

Experience is primarily an aesthetic matter Simic quotes Cavafy’s “Has Come to Rest” (translated by Stratis Haviaras in The Canon). An excerpt goes,

No one could actually see us, but we’d already provoked ourselves so thoroughly that we were incapable of restraint.

Our clothing half-opened—not much to begin with, that month of July being so divinely sultry.

This transcends gender. I’m not sure I agree with Simic that the poem is detached from reality or from the contingencies of the larger world. We know the month, the weather, how they might have dressed, and the state of their arousal. What the poet found is left to us.

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

When lovemaking is memorable, everything about where it happened also figures. As love dissipates, lovers 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 about these poems—that the reader has to supply what Cavafy leaves out—relates to Clare Wigfall's comment about short stories. He is asking us to draw on our own experience and find our own equivalents to what he leaves to imagination, not wanting to preclude any possible interpretation by imposing his own.

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

An attempt to reintegrate himself In his 2006 book, Dōgen on meditation and thinking, HeeJin 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.” (The quotes are from pages 62-63.)

J.M. Coetzee, “Italo Svevo”, Inner Workings, Penguin, 2008, pages 5-6 Svevo disparaged Triestine as a dialettaccio, a petty dialect, or a linguetta, a 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 (il dialetto) to write in Italian. With every Tuscan word of ours, we lie!’ Here Svevo treats the step from the one dialect to the other, from the Triestine in which he thought to the Italian in which he wrote, as inherently treacherous (traditore traduttore). Only in Triestine could he tell the truth. The question for non-Italians as well as Italians to ponder is whether there might have been Triestine truths that Svevo felt he could never get down on the Italian page.

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

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

elementary schools in that city as a building type. It manages to combine this with a great sensitivity to a streetscape that is mainly residential in scale and nature. Because of these choices, the voice in which the new school speaks is idiomatic, of that place, and tied to a larger history that’s unique to the city.

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

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

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

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

What is it that we desire to be cured of?

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

Is it necessarily a good thing to be cured?

One summer, I ran into a neighbor who was suffering from a serious illness. Steadied by his wife, he was out walking on a shopping street near my house. I greeted them—surprised actually to see him walking, as I’d heard he was wheelchairbound. “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.

Afterword

Robert Musil divided life's territory into the ordinary and the extraordinary, noting that the latter events are unrepeatable.

This coincides with my own sense of life. Running through mine is a persistent thread of predestination. I use the word advisedly because it had no obvious impact on what followed yet it occasioned my own crossings into this uncharted territory. Aspects of ordinary life also reflect it. Is this something cosmic or is it genetic? I don't know.

What's clear is that we make our way but in a crucial sense lack instruction when we find ourselves with another whose presence we intuited. The first instance of this may be when we meet and marry the one who is both uncannily familiar and someone else entirely. We then spend a lifetime sorting out who we are, separately and together, this time out. The instances that follow seem to be subsidiary to this opening revelation, and yet just as necessary to be lived through.

Within ordinary life, we do what we do, observe what we observe, and put our works and views forward knowing they're ephemeral and that what persists are the unrepeatable events that resurface in us as thoughts and in dreams. Not infrequently, we feel again parts of what we experienced, but in a concentrated and unsettling way that leaves us manic with elation or sleepless after being roused awake at night.

Beauty and terror haunt memory and dreamlife, vying with a present that may feature reconciliation, modus vivendi, indifference, or disdain. We still sense a tie, unexplainable in ordinary terms but constantly reconsidered as our vantage points shift, always on the cusp of explicability.

John J. Parman was born in 1947 in Westchester County, New York, and grew up in Singapore and New Jersey. He attended Washington University (B.A., 1970) and U.C. Berkeley (M.Arch. 1975), working in architecture and planning for 40 years. In 1983, he and Laurie Snowden founded and published Design Book Review, an awardwinning quarterly. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden started Snowden & Parman, an editorial studio. He is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, the Seattle design magazine, The Architect's Newspaper, AR+D, an imprint of ORO Editions, and Room One Thousand, the annual of U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is currently a Visiting Scholar. He lives in Berkeley.