Last night I saw The Help, a movie set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, a time when I was a graduate student at two universities -- the University of California and the University of Wisconsin.
I began that period as a classic young naive liberal, blind to the decline of my native Detroit, which had already begun. At Berkeley, I attended some meetings of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but I stepped back when black students became more strident about taking over the movement and leaving whitey on the sidelines.
I became a serious student of the American past during my five years in Madison, mainly interested in popular history. I studied how hair styles and clothing fasteners had changed more than I read about the origins of the Civil War. As a teaching assistant in the English Department, I spent my leisure hours in the library of the State Historical Society, directly across the quad from the main University Library.
All through the Vietnam War, any student walking from one of those buildings to the other was sure to see planning meetings for demonstrations against the university administration or the state government a short walk down the street. Protest was in the air. Student outrage mingled easily with the politeness of youth from Oconomowoc and Wauwatosa.
My students were required to come to class, and I was required to keep track of their attendance. They could not simply show up for exams and expect to pass. Their name was taken off the class roll after they had missed a set number of classes, and they failed the course unless they had officially withdrawn.
I always amazed my students by knowing all of their names by the third or fourth time we met. But I got to know them quickly as I called out the names on my list. In my first year I repeated the name of one student, Paul Soglin, who never withdrew and never showed up, until he reached the limit set by the department for absences. My supervisors just said "Too bad," and they sent the information up the line. (Our passage in the dark does not seem to have affected him seriously. He soon became a member of the city council, and has been elected mayor of Madison three times since then.)
In an effort to know students better, I invited them to meet with me, and I got to know many of their personal details. I can still remember which one played the trombone, which one had a father who sold furniture and had a funeral home in Baraboo. One young man from Chicago would seek me out even at home, once showing up on a Saturday night with his date, the niece of a Green Bay Packer linebacker. This was as close to royalty as Wisconsin got, and he wanted to impress me.
I saw Ed as a typical Wisconsin freshman, polite, even shy, but simmering underneath, obviously interested in the politics of the day. During and after student demonstrations downtown, it was not uncommon for him to miss a class. Other students would tell me he had been arrested, where he was, when he would be back. I recorded all the information on my class roll.
There were times when he would show up five minutes before the class ended, and I would give him credit for having been there. We agreed that nobody should be keeping track of the movements of students at a university, and that what mattered should be whether they knew the required material at the end of the course. But I was assiduous in my records because they were one of the reasons the university was paying me.
In March 1965, Ed told me he wanted to join Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and that he would not be in class for a couple of weeks. I knew that would put him over the edge administratively, and I told him I would have a hard time justifying special treatment for him when I couldn't give it to anybody else. But he just said, "You'll think of something," and off he went. By the time I saw him again, his record was in the red and I had thought of nothing.
That spring, 25,000 people got to Montgomery singing "We Shall Overcome," Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act after promising that American values would overcome residual bigotry across the south, and Ed failed Freshman English because a teaching assistant could not overcome his own bureaucratic timidity, could not evaluate a student solely on the basis of whether he knew the material.
I already knew that Thoreau said we are sold to the institution that pays us. It was not my proudest moment. And I have never told that story until now.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Friday, November 25, 2011
It may be a platitude, but today is all we have
When I first asked Heinrich Knoll who he was and where he came from, he said "I was born in Germany -- during the madness." It was hard for me to believe that this sweet man had sprung from the bloody soil of Hamburg in 1940. But having spent his early years in a war-torn country hellbent on its own destruction did not make him hard or bitter, and we became fast friends.
We saw each other almost every week for years and never groped for subjects of conversation. Even our silences seemed constructive, and he often told me not to apologize for anything. In our relationship there did not seem to be any disappointments, only eagerness to share -- except on the telephone, where he became shy, as if the machine were a third party that would give away secrets.
When we sat in his living room, sipping some new beer he had discovered, the background was often filled with the sounds of Mozart or Haydn, links between him and his university years in Vienna. My own musical tastes are a little less predictable, more modern, more audacious, and we rarely went to concerts together because we could not find anything we would both pay to hear.
He combined science and the arts, and he would show me technical articles in German magazines or newspapers, challenging my pitiful ability to pierce the arcane language of his youth. A scientific editor, he had come into my life when I had hired him to edit a research article on the effects of winter salt on parking structures.
Ten years ago he began mysteriously losing weight and he had shrunk by forty pounds, weight I did not think he could afford to lose, before a thyroid condition was discovered. When he weakened again more recently, doctors tried vainly to discover why. At last, he told me a tumor had been discovered wrapped around the base of his spine.
After scans showed that various outpatient treatments were doing nothing to get rid of it, he was finally hospitalized. During the lengthy run of radiation and chemotherapy, I was glad the hospital was only a ten-minute walk from my home. I went to visit him as often as I could, sometimes just sitting in his room looking at his shriveled body as he slept.
His wife once called during that stay to offer me tickets to a concert they had bought. Mozart and Brahms and John Estacio, a contemporary Canadian composer. How ironic that he would have to miss this musical experience that we could finally have shared.
There's a joke about the woman who wanted to get her elderly husband's attention again, so she told him she had just bought a new dress and could she model it for him. When she returned to the room, nude, he said, "I think your new dress needs ironing."
That came into my mind more than once when I saw Henry's arm, the skin as wrinkled as an old elephant, the muscle gone, looking like nothing else I could recall so much as pictures from his native land when he was a boy, emaciated and shriveled adult bodies in children's striped pajamas.
Henry's voice strengthened after his chemo treatments began and I was encouraged. Monday night he asked me about my recent musical experiences, and he indulgently listened to my account of an opera I saw over the weekend: Satyagraha, by Philip Glass, an impressionistic account showing how the young Gandhi in South Africa came to embrace truth and justice in dispute, rather than victory.
And then Cynthia called yesterday to tell me there was nothing more the doctors could do for Henry. Still alive, but no point in visiting him again, she said. He is sedated to lessen his pain, unconscious, gone. I immediately thought of Annie Dillard's reaction to the loss of a young friend killed in an airplane crash:
The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other . . . is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit here. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother, when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
It is not the right time to write a story, when it is still happening. But I cannot sit silent. This morning I am already reeling out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire.
We saw each other almost every week for years and never groped for subjects of conversation. Even our silences seemed constructive, and he often told me not to apologize for anything. In our relationship there did not seem to be any disappointments, only eagerness to share -- except on the telephone, where he became shy, as if the machine were a third party that would give away secrets.
When we sat in his living room, sipping some new beer he had discovered, the background was often filled with the sounds of Mozart or Haydn, links between him and his university years in Vienna. My own musical tastes are a little less predictable, more modern, more audacious, and we rarely went to concerts together because we could not find anything we would both pay to hear.
He combined science and the arts, and he would show me technical articles in German magazines or newspapers, challenging my pitiful ability to pierce the arcane language of his youth. A scientific editor, he had come into my life when I had hired him to edit a research article on the effects of winter salt on parking structures.
Ten years ago he began mysteriously losing weight and he had shrunk by forty pounds, weight I did not think he could afford to lose, before a thyroid condition was discovered. When he weakened again more recently, doctors tried vainly to discover why. At last, he told me a tumor had been discovered wrapped around the base of his spine.
After scans showed that various outpatient treatments were doing nothing to get rid of it, he was finally hospitalized. During the lengthy run of radiation and chemotherapy, I was glad the hospital was only a ten-minute walk from my home. I went to visit him as often as I could, sometimes just sitting in his room looking at his shriveled body as he slept.
His wife once called during that stay to offer me tickets to a concert they had bought. Mozart and Brahms and John Estacio, a contemporary Canadian composer. How ironic that he would have to miss this musical experience that we could finally have shared.
There's a joke about the woman who wanted to get her elderly husband's attention again, so she told him she had just bought a new dress and could she model it for him. When she returned to the room, nude, he said, "I think your new dress needs ironing."
That came into my mind more than once when I saw Henry's arm, the skin as wrinkled as an old elephant, the muscle gone, looking like nothing else I could recall so much as pictures from his native land when he was a boy, emaciated and shriveled adult bodies in children's striped pajamas.
Henry's voice strengthened after his chemo treatments began and I was encouraged. Monday night he asked me about my recent musical experiences, and he indulgently listened to my account of an opera I saw over the weekend: Satyagraha, by Philip Glass, an impressionistic account showing how the young Gandhi in South Africa came to embrace truth and justice in dispute, rather than victory.
And then Cynthia called yesterday to tell me there was nothing more the doctors could do for Henry. Still alive, but no point in visiting him again, she said. He is sedated to lessen his pain, unconscious, gone. I immediately thought of Annie Dillard's reaction to the loss of a young friend killed in an airplane crash:
The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other . . . is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit here. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother, when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
It is not the right time to write a story, when it is still happening. But I cannot sit silent. This morning I am already reeling out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Music, perception, realism, mood
A number of years ago I noticed that I would listen to baroque music when I was feeling happy and to more modern, introspective, brooding compositions when I myself was introspective and brooding (though not necessarily when I was feeling modern.) In recent weeks, even months, I notice that I have been listening almost exclusively to modern -- read relatively tune-free -- music.
If my earlier observation holds, this should indicate that I have been toying with gloom and depression. It has been difficult for me to find meaning or purpose in much that I do, and I spent the end of the summer in much more of a funk than usual. In fact, that is a big part of the reason I started this blog.
My wife has told me recently that a number of friends think I should see an analyst. These are all people I have not seen or talked to for months, people she has told about how (she thinks) I feel. In other words, their advice is based on her perception of my psychological state. I tell her that I would be a different person if I could live with all the pollyannish formulas she thinks I lack, not a writer, not the person she wanted to live with in the first place.
I have always thought I needed some tension in my mind between the world I live in and the world I want to live in. I would not be the person I want to be if I could attain the Buddha-like acceptance to go through life with a smile on my face. In fact, I tend to distrust permanently smiling faces. They seem to me to serve as filters, repelling a large part of the universal human condition, including pain, disappointment, loss, and change.
I believe we create our own heaven and hell on earth. I also recognize that my lot is probably the envy of 99% of the human race. I have never lacked the freedom to choose my own way in life; I have never been homeless, impoverished, unclothed, hungry, imprisoned, oppressed, or maimed. Nevertheless, I remain in counterpoint to my surrogate father, who, as he lay dying, described himself as a cheerful realist.
I do not so easily put myself into a box like that. I would not describe myself as a cheerless cynic, and I cannot imagine that anybody who knew me would use those words to describe me.While I am no more inoculated against denial than the next person, it does not remain my refuge for long. On most days, I am grateful for the privileged life I have led.
Nobody's life is perfect. It is part of our psychological make-up to be aware of something we do not have. We can always find somebody to envy, some other condition that seems better than our own. For most of my life I have been in touch with people who thought they did not have enough friends. I have few friends and little sense of community with any group of people. In that respect I am analogous to Herman Melville as described by his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne: neither believing nor comfortable in his unbelief. I am not a joiner, though I sometimes feel that close friends could add a rich dimension to my life.
Family and community keep many people from focusing on themselves and becoming morose. Professional grandparents and incurable do-gooders are insulated from the effects of large-scale disasters by focusing their attention on the grandchildren or the latest local cause. When I think of these people, my image of them has a permanently smiling face.
My general attitude about the human condition -- economic, political, and environmental -- is something I have chosen. I did not move toward pessimism years ago and then find myself drawn into it whirlpool-like. I am not a pessimist. (The image of Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook" just passed through my mind.) I would love to listen again to The Magic Flute with the enthusiasm I now give to Mahler songs and Shostakovich symphonies. I would love to find myself dancing to music again instead of using it to move back into myself. But I trust in myself, and I have recovered from even deeper gloom in the past without an analyst, so I believe it will happen again.
If my earlier observation holds, this should indicate that I have been toying with gloom and depression. It has been difficult for me to find meaning or purpose in much that I do, and I spent the end of the summer in much more of a funk than usual. In fact, that is a big part of the reason I started this blog.
My wife has told me recently that a number of friends think I should see an analyst. These are all people I have not seen or talked to for months, people she has told about how (she thinks) I feel. In other words, their advice is based on her perception of my psychological state. I tell her that I would be a different person if I could live with all the pollyannish formulas she thinks I lack, not a writer, not the person she wanted to live with in the first place.
I have always thought I needed some tension in my mind between the world I live in and the world I want to live in. I would not be the person I want to be if I could attain the Buddha-like acceptance to go through life with a smile on my face. In fact, I tend to distrust permanently smiling faces. They seem to me to serve as filters, repelling a large part of the universal human condition, including pain, disappointment, loss, and change.
I believe we create our own heaven and hell on earth. I also recognize that my lot is probably the envy of 99% of the human race. I have never lacked the freedom to choose my own way in life; I have never been homeless, impoverished, unclothed, hungry, imprisoned, oppressed, or maimed. Nevertheless, I remain in counterpoint to my surrogate father, who, as he lay dying, described himself as a cheerful realist.
I do not so easily put myself into a box like that. I would not describe myself as a cheerless cynic, and I cannot imagine that anybody who knew me would use those words to describe me.While I am no more inoculated against denial than the next person, it does not remain my refuge for long. On most days, I am grateful for the privileged life I have led.
Nobody's life is perfect. It is part of our psychological make-up to be aware of something we do not have. We can always find somebody to envy, some other condition that seems better than our own. For most of my life I have been in touch with people who thought they did not have enough friends. I have few friends and little sense of community with any group of people. In that respect I am analogous to Herman Melville as described by his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne: neither believing nor comfortable in his unbelief. I am not a joiner, though I sometimes feel that close friends could add a rich dimension to my life.
Family and community keep many people from focusing on themselves and becoming morose. Professional grandparents and incurable do-gooders are insulated from the effects of large-scale disasters by focusing their attention on the grandchildren or the latest local cause. When I think of these people, my image of them has a permanently smiling face.
My general attitude about the human condition -- economic, political, and environmental -- is something I have chosen. I did not move toward pessimism years ago and then find myself drawn into it whirlpool-like. I am not a pessimist. (The image of Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook" just passed through my mind.) I would love to listen again to The Magic Flute with the enthusiasm I now give to Mahler songs and Shostakovich symphonies. I would love to find myself dancing to music again instead of using it to move back into myself. But I trust in myself, and I have recovered from even deeper gloom in the past without an analyst, so I believe it will happen again.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
As good as your word
One of the earliest life lessons that has continued to mean the most to me is to be reliable and trustworthy when I open my mouth. Once my father promised to do something, I never doubted that it would happen. If there was ever any doubt in his mind that he would do something, he would hedge his promise in terms that would give him an out. And he would be sure to send out a warning as soon as it looked as if there might be a change of plans.
I have a friend, a holy man -- I will call him Vincent -- who has one trait I find infuriating. I can make arrangements to meet him a week in advance, and then not hear from him again until the minute we are scheduled to get together, when he calls to tell me that something else has come up. This is not uncommon. He is very popular, for good reason: he is clear-sighted, soothing and persuasive, and I appreciate that our social arrangements must get pushed aside when people in crisis call on him for healing or prayer.
When I tell him that it would help me live my own life if he would call with a change of plans soon after he knows about it, he tells me that other people's demands sometimes interfere with his focus. I disagree. In my father's mind, a commitment made for, say Thursday night, would tint his view of the future, so that anything else that threatened to fill the spot would set off a conflict mechanism, resulting in an immediate call that there had been a change of plans. No waiting for the last minute, no host waiting with a fine meal prepared in anticipation, no need for people to sit alone when they thought they were going to spend the evening with Vincent.
People excuse him for breaking appointments because he sometimes has to respond to unexpected demands. For my part, I forgive him but do not excuse him. Different standards may apply to etiquette and sin, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept this flaw in the armor of his holiness. I have tried to tell Vincent that I consider it unholy to set people up for disappointment by breaking his word, but it does not seem to matter to him.
Vincent may sometimes be as exasperated with me as I am with him. I do not embrace some of his values just as he is reckless about keeping his word. But it takes all kinds, and he obviously had a different father.
I have a friend, a holy man -- I will call him Vincent -- who has one trait I find infuriating. I can make arrangements to meet him a week in advance, and then not hear from him again until the minute we are scheduled to get together, when he calls to tell me that something else has come up. This is not uncommon. He is very popular, for good reason: he is clear-sighted, soothing and persuasive, and I appreciate that our social arrangements must get pushed aside when people in crisis call on him for healing or prayer.
When I tell him that it would help me live my own life if he would call with a change of plans soon after he knows about it, he tells me that other people's demands sometimes interfere with his focus. I disagree. In my father's mind, a commitment made for, say Thursday night, would tint his view of the future, so that anything else that threatened to fill the spot would set off a conflict mechanism, resulting in an immediate call that there had been a change of plans. No waiting for the last minute, no host waiting with a fine meal prepared in anticipation, no need for people to sit alone when they thought they were going to spend the evening with Vincent.
People excuse him for breaking appointments because he sometimes has to respond to unexpected demands. For my part, I forgive him but do not excuse him. Different standards may apply to etiquette and sin, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept this flaw in the armor of his holiness. I have tried to tell Vincent that I consider it unholy to set people up for disappointment by breaking his word, but it does not seem to matter to him.
Vincent may sometimes be as exasperated with me as I am with him. I do not embrace some of his values just as he is reckless about keeping his word. But it takes all kinds, and he obviously had a different father.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Only a game
Early in September, a Russian hockey team was killed in the crash of a jetliner. The reaction from all over the sports world was the same: personal relations, friends, family, are the really important things in life; this is only a game. The same response happens every time an athlete suffers a career-ending or life threatening injury.
As I write this, on a Saturday morning in mid-November, a football game is set to be played later in the day in State College, Pennsylvania. But the hoopla surrounding the game has been overshadowed this week by the revelation that a former assistant coach abused his trust for a number of years in sexual activities with boys attending a camp. He has been forever disgraced, a long-standing and revered coach has been fired for failing to report what he knew, the university president has been fired in the scandal, and the town has been in turmoil all week.
Enough words have been poured out in this affair already. I need not add mine. I used to have a fantasy, of living out my days in a college town, looking forward to those five or six Saturday afternoons in the fall when I could cheer on the local football team. I remember my first university apartment, across the street from the field where the marching band practiced. Most people could see it only on Saturday, but I saw it and heard it every other day of the week. It is one of my most pleasant memories of that lonely time.
The devotion to sports teams is a phenomenon I have tried to understand for most of my life. I lost my voice more than once cheering on my local heroes when I was young, but I became more subdued after I read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (especially statements like "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.") Now I wonder about the thousands of people who rioted when Joe Paterno was fired on Thursday: what have they read? Where is their faith? Where are their values? Who are the real losers in this drama?
I do feel sorry for the players who have spent three or four years of energy trying to make Penn State a football powerhouse and who thought that today would be their last chance for glory in front of a friendly crowd, but what am I to think of the abused children, now ten years older and working their way through a painful path away from their experience at the Penn State football camp?
It's an emotional morass. I imagine that very few of the more than 100,000 people expected to attend today's game, and even fewer of the people who see today only as Senior Day at Happy Valley, are pure ostrich-like deniers of reality. But deep moral issues are complex.
Penn State's colors may seem black and white at first glance, but they are not.
As I write this, on a Saturday morning in mid-November, a football game is set to be played later in the day in State College, Pennsylvania. But the hoopla surrounding the game has been overshadowed this week by the revelation that a former assistant coach abused his trust for a number of years in sexual activities with boys attending a camp. He has been forever disgraced, a long-standing and revered coach has been fired for failing to report what he knew, the university president has been fired in the scandal, and the town has been in turmoil all week.
Enough words have been poured out in this affair already. I need not add mine. I used to have a fantasy, of living out my days in a college town, looking forward to those five or six Saturday afternoons in the fall when I could cheer on the local football team. I remember my first university apartment, across the street from the field where the marching band practiced. Most people could see it only on Saturday, but I saw it and heard it every other day of the week. It is one of my most pleasant memories of that lonely time.
The devotion to sports teams is a phenomenon I have tried to understand for most of my life. I lost my voice more than once cheering on my local heroes when I was young, but I became more subdued after I read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (especially statements like "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.") Now I wonder about the thousands of people who rioted when Joe Paterno was fired on Thursday: what have they read? Where is their faith? Where are their values? Who are the real losers in this drama?
I do feel sorry for the players who have spent three or four years of energy trying to make Penn State a football powerhouse and who thought that today would be their last chance for glory in front of a friendly crowd, but what am I to think of the abused children, now ten years older and working their way through a painful path away from their experience at the Penn State football camp?
It's an emotional morass. I imagine that very few of the more than 100,000 people expected to attend today's game, and even fewer of the people who see today only as Senior Day at Happy Valley, are pure ostrich-like deniers of reality. But deep moral issues are complex.
Penn State's colors may seem black and white at first glance, but they are not.
Sometimes they remember even things you have already forgotten
When I moved to Massachusetts briefly in 1979, I found that the only ID recognized by some businesses was a driver's license or a card issued by the Department of Transportation. I applied by giving my name and date of birth, and within ten minutes I had picture ID showing my current address. At the top of the card was my US social security number.
This was long before most people had any idea of how much personal information was being stored in sophisticated, interconnected data bases. I had not worked in the US for more than ten years at that time, and I had not had a permanent residence there for a number of years before that. Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had no trouble retrieving my social security number. It was my introduction to the technological intrusiveness of the all-seeing Them.
When I threw my name into the grinding gears of Facebook two weeks ago, I was given the option to connect with a number of people. Some of them drew a blank in my memory -- they were graduates of the same university or high school, or lived in the same city -- and some were people whose names had come up in letters I had written.
That seemed scary enough, the thought that this program could delve into the bowels of my computer and come up with the names of people I knew. But more frightening was the name of a man I have never met and have never written. He is the nephew of a friend of mine, a woman who graduated from high school with me. Her nephew's name has never been mentioned explicitly in all the years she and I have corresponded, though she has referred to him obliquely on a few occasions.
I do not know what this means. I am not afraid to express opinions, or even to expose other aspects of myself, on line, though I am careful not to say more than I have to about myself in this blog. I know that anything I put on line becomes what used to be called public property. The concept of private property seems to have been lost in the gears of the great technological revolution so often praised.
On Google, my name is still associated with things I wrote thirty years ago, things I long ago left behind and would have forgotten except for the electronic detritus still available to anybody in the world. If I want privacy, I must keep my name to myself. No driver's license, no social security number, anonymous or pseudonymous blogs only. Like this one
This was long before most people had any idea of how much personal information was being stored in sophisticated, interconnected data bases. I had not worked in the US for more than ten years at that time, and I had not had a permanent residence there for a number of years before that. Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had no trouble retrieving my social security number. It was my introduction to the technological intrusiveness of the all-seeing Them.
When I threw my name into the grinding gears of Facebook two weeks ago, I was given the option to connect with a number of people. Some of them drew a blank in my memory -- they were graduates of the same university or high school, or lived in the same city -- and some were people whose names had come up in letters I had written.
That seemed scary enough, the thought that this program could delve into the bowels of my computer and come up with the names of people I knew. But more frightening was the name of a man I have never met and have never written. He is the nephew of a friend of mine, a woman who graduated from high school with me. Her nephew's name has never been mentioned explicitly in all the years she and I have corresponded, though she has referred to him obliquely on a few occasions.
I do not know what this means. I am not afraid to express opinions, or even to expose other aspects of myself, on line, though I am careful not to say more than I have to about myself in this blog. I know that anything I put on line becomes what used to be called public property. The concept of private property seems to have been lost in the gears of the great technological revolution so often praised.
On Google, my name is still associated with things I wrote thirty years ago, things I long ago left behind and would have forgotten except for the electronic detritus still available to anybody in the world. If I want privacy, I must keep my name to myself. No driver's license, no social security number, anonymous or pseudonymous blogs only. Like this one
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Babies
Before I had children, I did not know I wanted any. Now I know how valuable having them was for me, and for for the world. But I still get impatient with people who want to show me pictures of their children at less than, say, two years old.
Am I the only person who thinks all babies look the same? See one, you've seen them all, like any mile of desert between Ely and Winnemucca.
Am I the only person who thinks all babies look the same? See one, you've seen them all, like any mile of desert between Ely and Winnemucca.
Impacts
Although both my parents had to learn English as teen-aged immigrants, they were fastidious in the use of the language. They would not let me get away with using the word "never" if there had ever been a single instance to the contrary. (They are the reason I did not begin that last sentence with the words "They would never.") They made me conscious of linguistic nuance and precision, though they did not succeed in making me a grammar maven or a tight-assed usage freak.
I would rather appeal to logic and ease of understanding than to logic and grammar rules. I do not hesitate to end a sentence with a preposition, and I often begin a sentence (even a paragraph, like the next one) with a coordinating conjunction. I know the rules, but I'd rather be understood than conventionally correct.
But one thing that infuriates me is the weakening of the language. About twenty years ago, when I first heard the word "impact" used as a verb (along with the neologisms "impact on" and "impactly"), I was opposed to the change of usage mainly because the word had always implied some dramatic effect. I thought it was ridiculous to speak of the impact of a feather falling into your nose as you slept, but not to refer to the impact of a bomb dropping.
Later I saw that the usage of the noun was changing as well. It was taking over as an all-purpose term from such words as effect, implication, consequence, ramification, and repercussion -- all of which had their own uses.
I am not opposed to language change per se, but I am unhappy with the mindless appropriation of a powerful word and with the weakening of nuance through the use of an all-purpose term. Such terms make thinking fuzzy; eventually they make thinking unnecessary. If everything becomes an impact, there is no way to know if the effect is to deteriorate or to strengthen or to develop or to kill. As a result, I have changed the word to something more precise every time I have encountered it.
I have worked with government writers long enough to understand the function, even the value, of weasel terms in the hands of a skilled propagandist. But the English language has enough of them already. The last thing we need is another. weakening of nuance,
I would rather appeal to logic and ease of understanding than to logic and grammar rules. I do not hesitate to end a sentence with a preposition, and I often begin a sentence (even a paragraph, like the next one) with a coordinating conjunction. I know the rules, but I'd rather be understood than conventionally correct.
But one thing that infuriates me is the weakening of the language. About twenty years ago, when I first heard the word "impact" used as a verb (along with the neologisms "impact on" and "impactly"), I was opposed to the change of usage mainly because the word had always implied some dramatic effect. I thought it was ridiculous to speak of the impact of a feather falling into your nose as you slept, but not to refer to the impact of a bomb dropping.
Later I saw that the usage of the noun was changing as well. It was taking over as an all-purpose term from such words as effect, implication, consequence, ramification, and repercussion -- all of which had their own uses.
I am not opposed to language change per se, but I am unhappy with the mindless appropriation of a powerful word and with the weakening of nuance through the use of an all-purpose term. Such terms make thinking fuzzy; eventually they make thinking unnecessary. If everything becomes an impact, there is no way to know if the effect is to deteriorate or to strengthen or to develop or to kill. As a result, I have changed the word to something more precise every time I have encountered it.
I have worked with government writers long enough to understand the function, even the value, of weasel terms in the hands of a skilled propagandist. But the English language has enough of them already. The last thing we need is another. weakening of nuance,
Humanizing personal history
Some of my earliest memories are of my mother's mother. She took care of us often at the beginning, and I retain an ancient memory of her racing to close the kitchen cabinet doors before I got there as I wheeled around her house in search of pots to rattle. Oddly, I remember little of my grandfather in those years, though he later embodied some of the qualities I wanted to emulate: toughness, determination, capability, imperturbability.
When you are young, grandparents just come with the territory. You never think much about them. They are not as stern as parents, and they often represent the gateway to exotic treasures that do not exist at home. It was not until I was a teen-ager that I thought about where my mother's family had come from, and what they had experienced on the way to their new home across the ocean.
For a long time I had no interest in what they might have experienced in that unknown place in those far-off days. The past becomes important only when the child's horizon explodes in an endless range of questions: Where did I come from? Why was I born into this family and not another? Why are the lives of my parents and grandparents so different? Why do some of my grandparents speak decent English while some others act as if they still lived in the Old Country?
If my father's parents seemed not to have recovered from their youth in the Middle Ages, my mother's parents were up to date. They had emerged from a mir, a communal village in White Russia -- my mother's birthplace -- to a life filled with a panoply of gadgets and modern marvels. They owned the first television set I could watch regularly. Ten years later, night-owl ads on television could never interest me because my curiosity about novelties had already been sated at their house.
They filled the role of entertainer for years, along the way teaching me some basic lessons I have carried through life: how to get money from the bank, how to use a hammer, how to know when it is polite to begin eating. But they became truly human for me when my grandmother showed me her family photograph album, with pictures of distant cousin, this one now in New York, this one in Amsterdam.
A child has a hard time imagining that grandparents might have cousins. Family relations are too complex for a young mind, especially when the extended family is scattered all over the planet. I rarely met any of the people in those pictures, though they could show me they were special when I did. Once, for example, on the roof of a building in Brooklyn, a man who had until then been just a frozen face in a picture book became mythological to me when he flipped through a wad of ten dollar bills in his wallet and bestowed one on me, the first I ever held in my hand.
Generally, the photograph album was reserved for stiff European faces, for bodies clad in dark, shapeless clothing, posing formally, faces that no longer existed except in the memory of my grandmother. She could barely talk to me about them. The war had carried all of them off, demolishing the dreams that her family would get together again. I was not old enough to know that there had been more than one war, so I did not know whether she was talking about 1915 or 1940.
To the end, my grandmother used the word "machine" to refer to a car. Even my mother remembered the first time she saw a car in her village, surrounded by curious townspeople. She, the child, was astonished enough to recall the event to me, and older people must have been as amazed as if they had seen people fly. But that small town twenty years before the first car braved the dirt roads of the Ukraine is the background of the most memorable picture my grandmother ever drew for me
My grandmother never thought of herself as a great storyteller, but how she described her first glimpse of my grandfather is burnt so clearly into my own mind that I might as well have lived the experience myself. It is so vivid that I have more than once dreamed that I was there. The most beautiful sight in her long life, she told me, was that of a man on a horse trotting into town, the man who would eventually change her life and result in mine.
That image, that thought, that beauty -- they are mine. They are me before me, time before time, time out of time. They represented an iconic moment in Libby Taitelbaum's life, but they endure in a perverted form in my memory as a family story with pictures, one that could easily have died fifty years ago with my grandmother but did not.
When you are young, grandparents just come with the territory. You never think much about them. They are not as stern as parents, and they often represent the gateway to exotic treasures that do not exist at home. It was not until I was a teen-ager that I thought about where my mother's family had come from, and what they had experienced on the way to their new home across the ocean.
For a long time I had no interest in what they might have experienced in that unknown place in those far-off days. The past becomes important only when the child's horizon explodes in an endless range of questions: Where did I come from? Why was I born into this family and not another? Why are the lives of my parents and grandparents so different? Why do some of my grandparents speak decent English while some others act as if they still lived in the Old Country?
If my father's parents seemed not to have recovered from their youth in the Middle Ages, my mother's parents were up to date. They had emerged from a mir, a communal village in White Russia -- my mother's birthplace -- to a life filled with a panoply of gadgets and modern marvels. They owned the first television set I could watch regularly. Ten years later, night-owl ads on television could never interest me because my curiosity about novelties had already been sated at their house.
They filled the role of entertainer for years, along the way teaching me some basic lessons I have carried through life: how to get money from the bank, how to use a hammer, how to know when it is polite to begin eating. But they became truly human for me when my grandmother showed me her family photograph album, with pictures of distant cousin, this one now in New York, this one in Amsterdam.
A child has a hard time imagining that grandparents might have cousins. Family relations are too complex for a young mind, especially when the extended family is scattered all over the planet. I rarely met any of the people in those pictures, though they could show me they were special when I did. Once, for example, on the roof of a building in Brooklyn, a man who had until then been just a frozen face in a picture book became mythological to me when he flipped through a wad of ten dollar bills in his wallet and bestowed one on me, the first I ever held in my hand.
Generally, the photograph album was reserved for stiff European faces, for bodies clad in dark, shapeless clothing, posing formally, faces that no longer existed except in the memory of my grandmother. She could barely talk to me about them. The war had carried all of them off, demolishing the dreams that her family would get together again. I was not old enough to know that there had been more than one war, so I did not know whether she was talking about 1915 or 1940.
To the end, my grandmother used the word "machine" to refer to a car. Even my mother remembered the first time she saw a car in her village, surrounded by curious townspeople. She, the child, was astonished enough to recall the event to me, and older people must have been as amazed as if they had seen people fly. But that small town twenty years before the first car braved the dirt roads of the Ukraine is the background of the most memorable picture my grandmother ever drew for me
My grandmother never thought of herself as a great storyteller, but how she described her first glimpse of my grandfather is burnt so clearly into my own mind that I might as well have lived the experience myself. It is so vivid that I have more than once dreamed that I was there. The most beautiful sight in her long life, she told me, was that of a man on a horse trotting into town, the man who would eventually change her life and result in mine.
That image, that thought, that beauty -- they are mine. They are me before me, time before time, time out of time. They represented an iconic moment in Libby Taitelbaum's life, but they endure in a perverted form in my memory as a family story with pictures, one that could easily have died fifty years ago with my grandmother but did not.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Blessings
Every once in a while you hear somebody say that something was a mixed blessing. Have you ever known a blessing that was not mixed?
Saturday, November 5, 2011
An argument against couch potatoes
A woman I knew worked like a fiend until she was 60, then took early retirement. She wanted to carry out a dream she had had all her life, to see the world, to take in everything she could. While lying on a beach in Greece, she felt sick enough to go back home, where she was found to be hosting a batch of tumors. She spent her last six months taking in the view from a hospital bed.
I am healthier than most people my age, but my wife is afraid I will wither away from lack of purpose if I stop working, even though I generally hate what I do and find most of my jobs worthless. Then along comes the story of Andy Rooney, now dead only a few weeks after his last rant on 60 Minutes, and I wonder if my wife doesn't have a point.
Moving seems to keep you alive, regardless of what the motion is. Being Andy Rooney won't kill you until you are 92; watching Andy Rooney too much could lay you out far sooner than that.
I am healthier than most people my age, but my wife is afraid I will wither away from lack of purpose if I stop working, even though I generally hate what I do and find most of my jobs worthless. Then along comes the story of Andy Rooney, now dead only a few weeks after his last rant on 60 Minutes, and I wonder if my wife doesn't have a point.
Moving seems to keep you alive, regardless of what the motion is. Being Andy Rooney won't kill you until you are 92; watching Andy Rooney too much could lay you out far sooner than that.
Friday, November 4, 2011
In our own little boxes
I see two friends regularly, both of them introverted immigrants from very different parts of the world. They are awkward on the telephone, and it is always a challenge to get a conversation started with either of them because we seem to share little in common. But they were both professionals in their own fields (one an economist and the other a technical writer and scientific editor), and they often have insights that make me rethink my own positions. There are very few weeks in the past twenty years when we have not talked to each other.
Almost all the people I have seen in the course of my work or recreation clearly had more points of contact with me than these two. Yet we rarely saw each other outside the times we were thrown together by circumstances. We did business, played tennis, even went to parties together. But we could go months without seeing each other without giving it a thought. This situation is not unique: how often do you go out of your way to see your relatives?
When I was very young, it seemed as if everybody I knew had something to say to me, and it was usually about what I had to know, how I should act, what was important. They were teaching me the state of the world as they saw it and the values I should carry through life.
One of those values was the importance of staying connected with others. As can be expected, though, all of those people have moved on to another world and broken the connection. I remember this when I talk to my grandson about social obligations because I know my daughter, his mother, and her husband are creating a society of their own, which will touch my own more and more marginally as time goes by. And then we will never see each other again. It is inevitable. That's life.
It is typical of our times to offer to do lunch with somebody we have no intention of seeing again. I try not to do it, but it has happened to me more times than I care to recall. I remember the first time. A friend had left the company but had kept up telephone contact, at first daily, then weekly, then unpredictably. Finally, the calls would end suddenly with an urgent announcement that there was somebody else on another line, but couldn't we do lunch sometime? Despite these empty promises to get together again, we saw each other only once more, in a shopping mall, as I was going up an escalator and she was passing me in the other direction. It was a symbol of our entire relationship.
Used to be, even in my lifetime, that the only way to get to know somebody was to meet and talk and realize that here was a person you shared something with. Now, with social networking groups, you can meet hundreds of people whose interests touch yours at one point or two and whose observations may even inspire you to comment in return, but who would never become your real friends.
We say we touch these people, but how many of them would we visit if they were seriously ill in the hospital? How would we even find out they were ill? How many of them would want to see us at their son's wedding? Our relations with them are limited to a single interest, a single attitude. People are more complex than that.
Remember the man who invited a hundred local Facebook friends to a party and nobody showed up. We want to touch other human beings and our technology gives us the tools to begin the process, but we are no longer in the habit of following through. The trick is not to reach out. It is to reach back.
Almost all the people I have seen in the course of my work or recreation clearly had more points of contact with me than these two. Yet we rarely saw each other outside the times we were thrown together by circumstances. We did business, played tennis, even went to parties together. But we could go months without seeing each other without giving it a thought. This situation is not unique: how often do you go out of your way to see your relatives?
When I was very young, it seemed as if everybody I knew had something to say to me, and it was usually about what I had to know, how I should act, what was important. They were teaching me the state of the world as they saw it and the values I should carry through life.
One of those values was the importance of staying connected with others. As can be expected, though, all of those people have moved on to another world and broken the connection. I remember this when I talk to my grandson about social obligations because I know my daughter, his mother, and her husband are creating a society of their own, which will touch my own more and more marginally as time goes by. And then we will never see each other again. It is inevitable. That's life.
It is typical of our times to offer to do lunch with somebody we have no intention of seeing again. I try not to do it, but it has happened to me more times than I care to recall. I remember the first time. A friend had left the company but had kept up telephone contact, at first daily, then weekly, then unpredictably. Finally, the calls would end suddenly with an urgent announcement that there was somebody else on another line, but couldn't we do lunch sometime? Despite these empty promises to get together again, we saw each other only once more, in a shopping mall, as I was going up an escalator and she was passing me in the other direction. It was a symbol of our entire relationship.
Used to be, even in my lifetime, that the only way to get to know somebody was to meet and talk and realize that here was a person you shared something with. Now, with social networking groups, you can meet hundreds of people whose interests touch yours at one point or two and whose observations may even inspire you to comment in return, but who would never become your real friends.
We say we touch these people, but how many of them would we visit if they were seriously ill in the hospital? How would we even find out they were ill? How many of them would want to see us at their son's wedding? Our relations with them are limited to a single interest, a single attitude. People are more complex than that.
Remember the man who invited a hundred local Facebook friends to a party and nobody showed up. We want to touch other human beings and our technology gives us the tools to begin the process, but we are no longer in the habit of following through. The trick is not to reach out. It is to reach back.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Corporations and governments
The people trying to occupy whatever corresponds to Wall Street in their communities are a few years too late. They didn't notice when corporations became more powerful than governments, when they could start poisoning the environment and our children and legislation could not keep up. They did not say anything when television numbed their minds and made it impossible for most people to notice that governments were increasingly irrelevant. I saw an interview last night in which somebody said political leaders are like placebos, to give people the impression that they have something to say about the way things are run. Amen to that.
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