Lives

What is it about a gravesite…the silence of the stone itself, or the seeming permanence of the words etched into the stone, or the quiet peacefulness of the place, or simply the tribute it offers to a long-ago soul? Even a new grave gives me a sense of the person’s life and history, not just a death. I don’t intend here to be maudlin, because somehow a person’s burial place exudes a very real, personal quality…a life story. The place and the landscape and the marker amidst all the other stones always suggest to me something very real about the person, very much a sense of a life lived and a resolution, a sense of completion.

I have made a habit of visiting gravesites, especially of literary/artistic figures, and the visits always turn my mind to thoughts of the life that preceded.

A few years ago during a business trip, I made a side trip to Auvers-sur-Oise on the outskirts of Paris to visit Vincent van Gogh’s grave. The effect of the journey itself flavored my impressions: the confusion in Gare Saint-Lazare and two train rides through the French countryside; discovery of the hotel where van Gogh had lived and worked feverishly in his final days—he completed about 80 paintings in 70 days; my cooling myself in the church that van Gogh had painted…where I listened to the piano tuner finishing his work; then heading uphill along a dirt path to find the graveyard huddled in a wheat field dotted with orange poppies. Van Gogh’s grave lies at the north end of the yard and is distinguished only by its covering of ivy; the stone is beautifully simple with just his name and years and an epitaph, “ici repose” (here lies). He lies next to his very dedicated brother, Theo. It portrays a colorful, quiet, simple life supported by a dedicated brother.

In Rome, I visited the Cimitero Inglesi where both John Keats and Percy Shelley are buried. The neighborhood of the cemetery is less than scenic, it even feels threatening, with graffiti and weeds overrunning the buildings and sidewalks. But the cemetery itself is within a high wall and walking through its gates makes clear the difference: the graveyard is terraced so the graves mount in front of you, rising up a small incline in a manicured garden of flowers and topiaried bushes and gravel walks and pruned trees…and, of course, an overflow of elaborate stones and vaults and statues. Shelley’s grave, at the nearly top tier of the incline is marked with a stone laid flat on the ground, surrounded by small boxwoods and ivy. On it is cut, “Cor Cordium” (Heart of Hearts). He is buried next to Trelawney, a friend who identified Shelley’s drowned body when it washed up on shore…to lie through eternity next to his friend: it portrays a Romantic life with passionate friendships.

Across the main body of the cemetery in a section with many fewer graves and many fewer plantings and a wide spread of lawn is Keats’s grave. It is marked with an upright stone, which bears his famous epitaph, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”…but not his name. It stands among ivy and lilies surrounded by a small curb. He, too, is buried next to a friend, Joseph Severn, who had traveled to Rome with Keats to aid him through his illness. It is off in the far corner of the cemetery across from a stone bench nestled in the corner of the cemetery wall, where one can sit and consider the pathetic bitterness carved on the stone…to die at 25 in a far-off land, away from his bride-to-be, at the very beginning of his brilliance would make anyone bitter!

Last year I traveled to Copenhagen and made my pilgrimage to the home/museum of Karen Blixen (penname, Isak Dinesen), about 18 miles north of the city. On a very rainy morning in August, the train dropped me a mile from the museum. Nearly halfway to the museum, I found a path marked as a museum trail…I followed it hoping to find whatever destiny offered. The path wound through a beautifully maintained grove, dripping eerily with rain. I was led to an enormous beech tree and Blixen’s grave, essentially in the middle of nowhere. The flat stone, encircled by a chain, was etched with only her name; someone had thrown a bright red flower onto the stone...it lay wilting in the rain. The scene could not have felt lonelier...nor spoken more eloquently of a lonely life.

Finally, on a family trip to Italy, we visited the town of Rometta in the mountains of Sicily above Messina…the town from which family emigrated early in the twentieth century. Seeking family records and evidence led us, naturally, to the town’s cemetery. It sits atop a neighboring hill with a magnificent view to the sea and is made up of tombs and statues and markers—the likes of which we don’t find in the United States. The graveyard is crowded with stacked mausoleums and ranks and files of gravestones…all decorated with flowers and photos and statues and elaborate engravings naming “beloved wife” or “dedicated father” or “loving mother.” This cemetery portrays a community: hundreds of years and thousands of lives of family devotion.

It’s just the feeling I get…the cemeteries are so often beautiful and the gardening is an obvious expression of care and artistry and each grave marker tells something tragic or beautiful or mysterious about the souls interred there and the lives that led there.

Feast

My mother, enjoying her Thanksgiving feast, 1950. 

I remember clearly a Wednesday evening, many years ago, the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, when my mother taught me a life-lesson…I think it was as long ago as 1972. She and I were in the kitchen de-crusting and dicing loaves of bread so they could dry overnight to be mixed up as stuffing in the morning. My father came into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door and stood back to register the full sight: the door and all the shelves were laden with every imaginable ingredient that would become our Thanksgiving dinner…or so I thought. My father said, “Do we really need all this food for just one dinner?”

My mother answered without missing a single dicing motion on the bread, “Thanksgiving isn’t a dinner. Thanksgiving is a feast.” My life-lesson was learned that instant and I’ve observed it ever since. Thanksgiving is a feast and a feast means abundance and excess and abundant enjoyment. A feast is an occasion, not just a meal, where food and drink and people and celebration all meld.

My great-aunt Ada and my grandmother, preparing the feast, 1952.

Thus my sense of Thanksgiving was burnished. In my earliest years, we’d travel to my grandparents’ house where my mom would join her mom and her aunt in the small rowhome kitchen, where they’d dance around each other for hours of preparation. Later when my mother took over the holiday, I always made an effort to ensure a feast. I’d try to help my mother’s efforts, dicing the bread into cubes or making the cranberry sauce or mashing the potatoes. When I’ve been invited to a Thanksgiving feast, I’ve arrived with cranberry-nut bread or eggnog or bottles of wine, just to expand the feast. Then for years, my mother-in-law created the Italian version of the Thanksgiving feast, beginning the meal with pasta and meatballs and salad and string bean salad before clearing the table to make room for the turkey, stuffing, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce—whole and jellied! In recent years, we’ve hosted the feast, my wife working for days to duplicate the model of a feast that her mother had delivered. Now my responsibilities have expanded to include the hors d’oeuvres: jumbo stuffed olives and tiny pickles and cheeses and crackers and brie with fig jam and radishes and nuts.

My mother-in-law serving the feast, circa 2000.

No Thanksgiving feast would be complete without too many dessert options: the table cleared once again to make room for a display of pies and breads and whipped cream to decorate them and clementines and figs and raisins. Pumpkin pie (always), apple or apple-cranberry pie, sometimes a mincemeat pie, applesauce bread, ginger bread, dessert wines and cordials, and coffee. Ironically, sinful eating to give thanks to God for everything that we have.

In James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” he describes an elaborate holiday party full of lively conversation and song and dancing and just as much food and drink as I’ve listed above. He spends 250 words describing the dinner table, food, wine and beer…it is a wonderful temptation to recount the bounty of such feasts. His biographer claims that Joyce went to such lengths to describe the party feast because he had been living in relative poverty and could enjoy such abundance only in the retelling of it. I believe that that is a second life-lesson: one of the added beauties of a Thanksgiving feast is that it can feed our imaginations and hearts long after the table has been cleared. In the words of a friend, “Buon appetito!”

Thing

I must have angered the gods when I blogged in August that I am one of the luckiest people I know. They must have decided to punish my hubris…since that time, things have turned downhill in several ways. The sense that I claimed as central to my luck—“disparate elements come together at any given moment in my mind, one that makes the other even better, two that give each other a new quality,”—has now turned into my ability to add insult to sadness to injury!

What can one do when a string of misfortunes just keeps stringing along? When people on whom you’ve depended suddenly begin to let you down? When organizations you’ve trusted demonstrate their untrustworthiness? When places you’ve enjoyed change beyond recognition into strange places, places of unease and discomfort? When neighbors become un-neighborly? When health begins to fail for family and friends and self…even when death descends on loved ones?

I’ve realized that at the core of such suffering is a fear that I’ve long been wrong about so many things. Being betrayed or disappointed by a stranger may hurt, but betrayal by a trusted friend makes one realize one’s misperceptions…and then wondering how long and how often and to what extent you’ve been wrong…that compounds a hurt with self-doubt. So many little, trusted elements of our day can betray us and undermine our confidences. But these are not the feelings nor ruminations of a lucky man…

Even as my luck has changed, I try to hang onto that one thing that can make other things feel/seem/look better. I believe that there is that one thing that drives each of us to do all that we do; that one thing that drives each of us to be all that we are…that one thing that is all that matters…that is everything! I don’t know exactly what that one thing is…and I trust that it is different for everyone…but I believe that there is that one thing that has buoyed me up in the past and will get me through this string of misfortunes.

Curley (Jack Palance) in City Slickers (1991) and Michael (Robert DeNiro) in The Deer Hunter (1978) both mention the “one thing” and the “one shot” that we find/get in life; perhaps Gatsby is reaching for that one thing in the form of the green light at the end of the pier when Nick watches him from the bushes, or maybe Dulcinea is that one thing for Don Quixote. I think of it as the tonic of any song, the one basic clear defined tone that gives meaning to all the other notes in that key. Like at the end of the stereotypical knock on the door…rat tat a tat tat, tat…you hear that final note even when it isn’t tapped out. Your head and ears hear it unheard because you know the sound of it even though it hasn’t been tapped out…it’s that one thing that we hang onto and know and trust, even when a string of misfortunes just keeps stringing along.

I suppose it may be what some people call God or Love or Faith…all kinds of nebulous and frightening words. But I think it is a mystery of intertwined values for each of us, making any singular word inaccurate, approximate, unsatisfying. I know that my luck—good or bad, god-sent or god-cursed—won’t overcome my one thing. There is no word for that.

Evil

I have many complaints about the movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), but chief among them is Coppola’s decision to create an impossible central theme: “Love never dies.” Coppola creates a story about the Count’s unending love for a woman across the centuries and his pledged resentment against God. Coppola’s story makes for a dramatic opening sequence: the dome of the Hagia Sophia shrouded in smoke, followed by a confusion of violence and suffering and blood. But he drives the story from that point forward on Dracula’s love…a choice that is impossible based on Bram Stoker’s original character.

In his original book, Dracula, Stoker creates the title character as the absolute embodiment of evil…incapable of humanity, incapable of good, incapable of love. Even the vampire women say to the Count, “You yourself never loved; you never love!” Stoker creates the Count as a demonic animal, driven only by selfish appetite…for blood, yes, but also for power, worshipers, and evil. When nearly trapped, the Count threatens his enemies, “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.” In Stoker’s creation, the vampire is only selfish appetite…anathema to any idea and ideal of Love. Stoker expands the threat of Dracula’s absolute evil, when his main adversary, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, says that Dracula “must go on age after age…multiplying the evils of the world.  And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water.”

Stoker’s central theme is a complex weaving of the simplistic idea of “Good versus Evil.” But Stoker takes the idea to its limit: he creates the Count as absolute Evil—yes, with a capital E—and challenges a band of five men and a woman to rise as high as they can to defeat him with Good—yes, with a capital G.

A difficulty with the book Dracula is the absolute natures of both the Good and the Evil that Stoker portrays. Ironically, when I taught the book to high-school Seniors, these modern readers accepted the Count’s absolute Evil so much more easily than the absolute Good of his adversaries. The students found the band who battle the Count silly…how they are tied together through deep love and friendship, deep trust and generosity, and an explicit knowledge and commitment to those principles. The band spends more time describing and pledging their noble feelings than they spend actually fighting Dracula. At one point, the head of the band, Van Helsing, says quite simply, “There are darknesses in life, and there are lights.” But the students—and I think all modern readers—have difficulty believing in such clearly stated and acted Good. Today, that level of Good seems reserved for the comic-book style heroes, like Superman and Supergirl, not for realistic characters.

Thus, when Coppola gives the Count his motivation—Love enduring through the centuries—I must object. These are neither the characters nor the story that Bram Stoker created. If Coppola’s Dracula (Gary Oldman) loves Mina (Winona Ryder), he is not the irredeemable demon that Stoker created; if Mina could be clear-headedly attracted to the Count, she is not the angel at the center of the band that Stoker created; and then the whole central theme of “Good versus Evil” falls out. Coppola gives us a story about a somewhat justified vampire being murdered by those who don’t understand his angst…this is my chief complaint. I don’t care to list my other complaints.

On the other hand, I enjoy a few things about Coppola’s movie: the art direction is lush and exciting—if a bit too Tim Burton-esque; many of the Gothic affectations are very powerfully fun: the independent shadows in the castle, and the night of terror when the vampire women seduce Jonathan (Keanu Reeves); Tom Waits’s mad portrayal of the madman Renfield; and the over-the-edge eroticism of an otherwise repressed-Victorian story…the vampire women’s and Lucy’s unabashed yet discreet seductiveness.

Coppola surely knew how to create a modern, visually exciting story, with its CGI and its misunderstood antihero; and Stoker surely created a Victorian Gothic, conceptually moral story for the ages, with heroes and a heroine and an absolutely Evil villain. But they are not the same stories.

Creepy

During the Halloween season, horror stories of every kind thrive: on film, in books, in commercial haunted houses, and even in neighborhood front yards. Horror stories include everything from ghost tales for children, designed to make the dark feel scarier, to the extreme “torture porn” movies of maniacs, torture, terror, and rivers of blood.

Personally, I prefer the fright of things “creepy”…that strange scariness that makes me nervously afraid and apprehensive. I prefer the subtle fear of ghost stories—more than the grotesque fear of slasher stories—where the danger is uncertain, the adversary is a mystery, and the possibilities create a sense of fears unknown.

My favorite example of subtle fear is Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. First published in 1898 as a serialized story in Collier’s Weekly, the story carefully presents a gradual realization by the unnamed narrator/nanny and then her stepwise campaign to save two possessed children…the story progresses methodically and cautiously, like the turning of a screw in the title. When the narrator first senses and then sees one of the ghosts, James builds the scene with growing realization and prolonged interpretation by the narrator: “I became aware that…we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world.” No slashing screaming ghosts in this story! The narration is calculated; the motivations of the heroine are deep-rooted; the innocence of the children is too perfect; and the ghosts are ravenous to possess them; yet James gives us fears through a narrator and children and ghosts who are ambiguous. The ghosts and their haunting seem real and frightening, but doubt makes it all creepy…a nervous apprehension for the children…is it the ghosts or the narrator who threatens them?

Then in 1961, Jack Clayton adapted James’s story to film—an adaptation I love because it honors the original subtle creepiness and accentuates it appropriately. The Innocents is a psychological ghost story that maintains the lushness of James’s prose and exploits all the uncertainty, mystery, and ambiguity of his story. The opening 45 seconds—a child’s voice singing a morbid song before any visuals begin—introduce an immediate creepy sense, which is then reinforced with a shift to birdsong and weeping as two wringing, praying hands appear. A trapped, claustrophobic feeling begins here and pervades the film. Deborah Kerr, as the governess Miss Giddens, gives a powerful portrayal of James’s frightened and frightening narrator.

Clayton chose to work in black and white to deepen the shadows of the story and created over-lush sets to mimic James’s rich language; cinematographer Freddie Francis focused the visuals with special filters to darken and blur the edges of nearly every scene; and Truman Capote adds his Southern gothic perspective of both language and elements. For example, Capote invokes creepiness without forcing straightforward horror when the girl, Flora, innocently observes, “Oh look, a lovely spider and it’s eating a butterfly.” He populates the story with statuary, birds, reptiles, and bugs…inhuman characters as creepy as the ghosts.

Clayton introduces the ghosts themselves always through the eyes of the governess…we see her reaction first and then we see—or think we see—the ghosts. They appear through fogged glass or a haze of fog on the tower or, when in plain daylight on the lakeside, the ghostly image is blended grey into the surrounding landscape. Are we seeing them or is she imagining them?

Both children are played perfectly, in their own ways scarier than Regan in The Exorcist. For the final creepiness, the boy, Miles, exudes a growing sense of perverse maturity as he evolves into adulthood in the presence of the governess. Although just a boy, he plays into a suggestive role through his language and comportment. While at dinner—when Miles says that he “feels quite the master of the house”—he offers to protect Miss Giddens and reaches his hand across the table; she is disarmed and reaches to take his hand but he giggles and slaps an aspic rabbit instead…which wobbles grotesquely and erotically. The tension and interplay between these two characters is suggestive, ambiguous, tortured, and creepy—they share two kisses, each more creepy than the other!

If the Saw franchise of torture porn is your idea of good horror, then neither Turn of the Screw nor The Innocents is for you. But if you want the subtle creepiness of psychological uncertainty and you enjoy the masterful telling of a gothic ghost story…treat yourself to either or both.

Octoberly Magic

In Pennsylvania, Octoberly magic is in full bloom…it has been evolving slowly as the Sun sets earlier and rises later and piles of pumpkins accumulate and show themselves everywhere and in the cornfields the corn stalks rattle dry in the breeze and the temperatures never rise to 80 anymore during the day. I awake in the partial dark of dawn now, my ride home from work happens on the light side of dusk and will happen on the dark side of dusk in a week or two, and soon the night will outlast the day by far. Orion is already showing up in the late night to dominate the sky. I wonder how people in other places around the world get to enjoy Octoberly magic…I’ve just reclaimed my sweaters from the cedar closet and laid the quilt on my bed. I’ve treated myself to mashed potatoes and roasted acorn squash and butternut squash soup and stewed apples and spiced wafers and, yes, even a bag of orange-crème filled Oreos. October’s portrayal of all the beauty of autumn is here!

Later in autumn, other concepts beyond the falling cold and the slanting Sun begin to dominate the imagination. In November, our thoughts turn to Thanksgiving—an autumn holiday, true, but one with its own sensibility of family and abundance and scholastic football. In December, the Christmas holiday and ideas of winter will dominate, even though autumn persists through two-thirds of the month. So we are left with late September and October to fire our imaginations of autumn.

For me, here in Pennsylvania, autumn and October are contained in a single image: the pumpkin. Certainly autumn has other abundances: apples (Honey Crisp being the ugliest but most delicious) and nuts and squash and mums. But pumpkins seem to present a personification of the season…durable, swollen plump, heavy, seed-filled, and bright orange. I had the joy thirty years ago of seeing a pumpkin field in the distance as I drove through Connecticut…a dry-brown acreage dotted with orange; it is a unique image of autumn that has stuck in my imagination. 

One year, my wife and I made a terrible mistake by going to Linvilla Orchards the day after Halloween; around the grounds, dozens of large wooden crates that in recent days had been piled high with pumpkins-for-sale were left nearly empty…except for the depressing shards of smashed pumpkins that hadn’t survived to decorate someone’s stoop. The sight of the shards and seeds mashed at the bottom of the crates depressed me terribly, as it does even today as I write about it! Seeing unsold Christmas trees the day after Christmas may be depressing, but not so depressing…somehow the pumpkins are more human, more personified—probably because of the possibility of their becoming Jack-o-lanterns—and seeing them lost to misfortune in the bottoms of wooden crates was very sad. 

Testament to the autumnal quality of pumpkins is the ubiquity of “pumpkin spice” as the natural marketing campaigns of the season. It seems that everything that can be flavored with pumpkin spice is flavored with pumpkin spice: coffee, candy, bread, ice cream, muffins, pancakes, waffles, milkshakes, candles. I wait each year to see the next addition to the pumpkin-spice litany…laundry detergent? Scented tissues?

Treat yourself: buy a pumpkin and sit it somewhere prominent at your home. Near the front door or in the middle of the kitchen table. Everyone who sees it will sense the season and enjoy the Octoberly magic of it.

Constancy

During my summer visit to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I thought at first that I had stepped into an amusing coincidence. As I’ve thought about it since, I’ve come to realize instead that a truth had been offered to me that day.

My son and I entered the main lobby, turned left, and wandered into the Greek and Roman Art gallery…statues, pieces of statues, tombs, and columns of marble. We happened upon the remains of a second century Roman statue, Three Graces. The perfection of the marble statue has been damaged by time—the heads and arms of the figures are missing. But, of course, the perfected human forms are still striking: an incredibly human appearance of three women, known to the Greeks and Romans as the Three Graces: Beauty, Joy, and Abundance. We both paused a moment to admire the statue and imagine the impact of when it had been whole. It seemed a very ethereal, mythical, ancient piece of art. Three beautiful ladies making a kind of dancing circle, symbolizing all that is festive and pleasurable in the world.

We made our way to the back of the museum into the Modern and Contemporary Art gallery: Balthus, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, and so many others. The works are, of course, very modern…impressionist, abstract, pop. We were looking at a particularly abstract, enigmatic Picasso when I said, “It’s amazing that artists who used to create things like that statue evolved to create this thing.” For an instant we were both amused, until we noted that the next painting on the wall, by an American artist (Manierre Dawson) in 1912, was the very same ancient subject:  Meeting (The Three Graces). “Oh my God,” my son said. “Here’s the Three Graces again!” 

It seemed an idle coincidence…we had happened upon two versions of the same concept expressed 1700 years apart: The Three Graces. Mythologically, they were conceived as goddesses who brought an abundance of the pleasures of life. Over the centuries, expressions of a central human need for these pleasures—grace and beauty and creativity and joy and abundance—and their personification have persisted. We learned that day that in ancient Rome and centuries later in Chicago the simple, central, human love of these graces gave rise to an artistic expression. 

Since then, I’ve come to realize that our “happening upon them” in the museum that day wasn’t just a coincidence…because I have since found that the portrayal of the Three Graces has gone on all over Western society all the time: in Florence, Italy in 1480; in Antwerp, Belgium in 1640; in Paris, France at the end of the 1700s; in Woburn, England at the beginning of the 1800s; in Dawson’s Cubist work in 1912 and James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” in 1914; in Indianapolis, IN in 1925; and even more modernly in Milwaukee, WI in 1965. 

I’ve come to understand that notwithstanding the evolution of art, some things are constant. We may see the specifics of beauty and joy and abundance differently; we may sense them differently; we may express them differently; we may experience them differently; but at the center of human experience seems to be a constancy of longing, a longing for these goddesses who bring an abundance of the pleasures of life.

Memory

I am, at heart, a dedicated Henry James fan and I will likely write future blogs celebrating his work. But here I want to contradict something he said in his travelogue, Italian Hours. After having enjoyed the beauties of Venice, James writes, “Exquisite hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have always a terrible standard of enjoyment.” I understand his point about the power of a perfect experience…it stays with us. But to me, the “terrible standard” is the wrong approach to a wonderful memory.

I’ve had exquisite hours to which I love to return, to sense again, to enjoy again. Memories, for me, are a comfort and delight of the past just as dreams are a comfort and delight of the future. Even during the dullest hours of today, I love to return to many of those experiences that were, for me, exquisite:

• To my evening a decade ago in Prague when, lost in the dark on winding winter streets, I encountered two young ladies at an intersection that none of us knew. “Do you speak English?” they asked me, shivering against the cold. “Yes,” I said, “I’m from Pennsylvania.” They were as lost in search of their hotel as I was in search of my restaurant. They, too, were from Pennsylvania and we laughed at the coincidence. It was February with snowflakes on the air and the temperature at a negative Celsius…about 8 degrees Fahrenheit. I had passed their hotel a few blocks back and I directed them as well as I could; they had passed my restaurant and hesitantly directed me…we parted and I was soon warm at table with menu in hand. I enjoyed wine with my dinner and wondered if they’d found their hotel.
• To my dinner in Vienna when a funny little sommelier—a bespectacled man who resembled Wally Cox in size and appearance—introduced me to grappa. I had had an excellent meal in the excellent company of friends and asked the server which of the two grappas on the menu was better; “Let me get the sommelier,” she said. I think the sommelier had waited his whole life for that question…he explained the prestige of a vineyard’s grappa and the process for distilling it and the tradition of the crystal bottles and the differences among vineyards that flavored each grappa. “I’ve just returned from Italy with two grappas that are not even on the menu yet,” he said. I asked him to serve me the best of the lot and he returned with two glasses, serving each of the two new grappas. Each had its own flavor, both burned the taste of dinner from my mouth and throat…I’ve enjoyed grappa ever since.
• To my visit with friends to a wine bar buried in a hotel on the twisting streets of Tangier. We had traveled all day—a 6-hour train ride from Madrid, a 3-hour ferry ride across the Mediterranean, and an hour taxi ride into the city—to find ourselves, finally, gathered at the bar. We had concocted our adventure: a visit to Morocco that would last just hours. The bartender spoke English beautifully to offer us French or Spanish wines, “…but why not try our Moroccan wine, they are just as good and only 200 dirham,” he said. We took his advice although we didn’t share his opinion…the wine was not as good as the French or the Spanish wines, but it was cheap and we were tired and it was fun to be drinking Moroccan wine in the north of Africa.
• To my habit in earlier years of taking evening walks on the beach in Wildwood, NJ, where the beaches had grown so wide that walking on the water’s edge felt miles away from the noise and bluster of the boardwalk. I was among very few people at that hour on the beach, all of whom were relaxed and purposeless. The blazing afternoon Sun had sunk to the west and the darkness rose in the east, making the beach feel impeccably private. I often spent my evening off—just one day a week—flying my red kite and enjoying an imagined notoriety as people on the boardwalk would wonder whose kite it was in the sky and I imagined how they’d trace the string back to its origin, to find not a child, but a grown man—a tall grown man—dancing his kite in the sky.

Henry James was both wrong and unfortunate: to have known exquisite hours is a wonderful well from which I draw again and again.

Autumn

River Itchen in autumn, in Hampshire in the south of England.

Tomorrow, September 22, is the first day of fall—the season so nice, they named it twice: fall and autumn. The Earth passes the equinox—the Earth’s pole is pointed parallel to the Sun, neither toward it nor away from it for one small instant, making day equal to night. It is the season when some people regret the fading of summer, but others rejoice in the cool beauty and colors of autumn. I am among the latter…how everything luxuriates in the shifting border between waning days of warmth and waxing nights of cool clarity, how the humidity passes, how the air moves with new sharpness, and how everything begins to turn inward against the coming cold. Autumn brings an automatic sentimentality with it, a sense of having survived the heat and a preparation for the future cold; as Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker says in The Great Gatsby, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  

But I am more mindful, always mindful, when fall comes, of Keats’s “To Autumn,” what some—myself included—call the most beautiful poem in the English language. He drew an image of autumn that overflows with activity…he persistently turns verbs into adjectives to create a scene that we can “watch” in an active sense, not just “see” in a painterly sense…in his ode of 254 words, he uses 49 verbs and verb forms…just about 20% words of action and movement. Keats profiles autumn as it turns the rich ripeness of late summer into the dead cold of winter…and he makes it happen with words for all our senses: “to swell the gourd” (visual), “by a cider-press…the last oozings” (taste), “the fume of poppies” (scent), “hedge-crickets sing” (aural), “a wailful choir” (vocal), and “until they think warm days will never cease” (tactile). Then he uses that high-school-English personification to see autumn as a woman sitting on the granary floor with her hair being lifted by the winnowing wind…it is a beautiful praise to the season in action and images and anticipation.

Ironically, Keats wrote the poem after a walk in the countryside on September 19, 1819…a few days before autumn technically began and a little more than a year before he died. At the age of 23, Keats devoured the beauty of what he saw along the River Itchen and was moved to forge those impressions into an ode…that is the curse of the poet: his drive to capture and represent in language everything his senses perceived. If he died too young, at least he relished every moment as it came…in writing.

My initial goal in this blog is to express my relevance…and I am sad that the delicacy and passion and beauty of poetry is so rarely appreciated anymore. I think, therefore, that I am somewhat irrelevant with this posting. But only somewhat…I believe that a thing of beauty will never be completely irrelevant. And so, that is my curse: my drive to capture and share in language the beauty I enjoy. I’ll finish simply how Keats beautifully began, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

Living

Gene Wilder
(© Dave Pickoff/Associated Press)

As is typical when popular figures die, the Internet was suddenly abuzz about Gene Wilder when he died last week…true stories, apocryphal stories, secret stories. His life and career were being evaluated by anyone who felt the impact of his death, whether that person is qualified or unqualified to offer an opinion.

I am among the latter group, the “unqualified,” and so my opinion is actually about something Wilder said in his role as Willy Wonka, words written by Roald Dahl, but brought to life by Wilder. After little Charlie Bucket proves himself worthy of Willy Wonka’s trust, Willy says to him at the movie’s end, “But Charlie, don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. …He lived happily ever after.”

I have always found myself doubting the concept of “happily ever after,” no matter where I find it. “Happily ever after” seems to last only until the next month’s bills come due or until the next doctor’s visit. However, I’ve realized that the important element in Wonka’s pronouncement is the verb phrase, “lived happily.” Wonka (Wilder) doesn’t tell Charlie to “be happy” …he tells him to “live happily.” A major difference that I completely support…making an explicit and conscious effort to live a certain way…active verb and clear adverb.

Of course, if a man had everything he’d always wanted, it might be easy to live happily. That man—or woman—could enjoy his family, friends, home, car, investments. But life isn’t so simple. For any man or woman, having a family and friends and a home and a car and investments puts him at risk: so much to protect, so much to lose!

Being the lucky man that I proclaimed myself to be in an earlier blog, I am a man who has everything I’ve always wanted—not suddenly, but everything. Yet I find myself frequently struggling to take Wonka’s advice: live happily. Life continually sends challenges and disappointments, charlatans and thieves, illness and tragedies…life is not a happy thing all by itself. But I try explicitly and consciously to live happily.

Look at Charlie’s first reaction when initially Wonka tells him that he has lost: deep disappointment and disillusionment are clearly in Charlie’s face. At the same time, though, Charlie redeems the moment by returning the Everlasting Gobstopper to Willy, an explicit and conscious effort to reject Grandpa’s plan for revenge. An explicit and conscious effort not to give in to the disappointment. “So shines a good deed in a weary world...” says Wonka—quoting Shakespeare—and Charlie suddenly gets everything he'd always wanted: the chocolate, the chocolate factory, the Oompa Loompas, a new home for his family….and Wonka challenges him to “live happily.” Perhaps I’ve read too much into the line—the closing line of the movie—but I like it better that Wonka is challenging Charlie than lying to him.

I am a “dreamer of dreams" that Wonka says we are. Living happily is a dream of mine…a dream that is evasive and difficult and tiring…a dream worth dreaming: living happily.

Belief

© REAGANFOUNDATION.ORG

I am not asking you to agree with me, just to understand a frame of reference to this story. I’ll confess that Ronald Reagan is the only president during my lifetime in whom I believed…he is also the first President for whom I actually voted. I believed that he, as President of the United States of America, would serve the needs of the country and the world. He exuded strength and direction, he communicated, he dealt with others in the government…sometimes he supported them, sometimes he convinced them to support him…he was a leader. He made some bad decisions during his presidency, but I like to remember the good ones, the strong ones that positioned this country or moved this country the way I believed.

I’ve lived through many other Presidents—I was born when Eisenhower was in office—but I didn’t really “believe in” any of the others. I was too young to understand Kennedy, so I experienced him and his legacy only through the achievements of the Space Program. I was riding on the Cape May-Lewes ferry and they played the radio broadcast over the loudspeaker the night Nixon resigned; I waited to see where the country would go. Jimmy Carter, I perceived to be “a good man”—his work in Habitat for Humanity has borne that out—but I didn’t believe in his presidency. Even when Obama took office, I perceived him to be a good man—but I didn’t and don’t believe in his presidency.

Through all these presidencies, I’ve always believed that the system would get us through…if the President is imperfect, at least the system will keep the country moving the way I believe. I believed in the system of “checks and balances” that I’d learned in school. Yes, some individuals would unfairly miss out, others would unfairly benefit, but the system kept the country on track…if imperfectly.

Now, my belief has turned to disbelief. I can’t believe that our choice for President this election is between an imbecile and a liar. The “best” the country has to offer is an imbecile on one side—I watch each day to hear what new imbecility he spouts; and a liar on the other—I watch each day to hear what new unethical or criminal behavior she “explains” away. What’s worse, I watch each day to hear how the system is so entrenched in its tribalisms that the country is moving in a way and in a direction that I simply can’t believe. Most people with whom I’ve been foolish enough to discuss the election have told me how they plan to vote “against” a candidate: “I have to keep him from getting into office” or “I have to prevent her from getting into office.”

I still believe in the value of true leadership…both the value and power of leadership in a President, and the value and power of leadership in the world. For now, I’ll have to wait and hope for someone to believe in.

Myth

Last week I enjoyed a visit with my son to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. I arrived early, so while I awaited his arrival, I sat in the shade and watched the melting-pot of people in New York. They each and all enjoyed the fountain in front of the museum: children couldn’t resist running their hands along the overflow edge; adults exaggerated the cooling effect of the waters as they put their palms down in it; dozens of families and couples snapped their pictures or asked the assistance of a stranger to take their picture with the fountain as a backdrop. When my son arrived, we continued to watch for a few minutes…I wanted him to enjoy what I’d gotten to see.

Inside the museum, I led him quickly to the room decorated with Thomas Hart Benton’s mural, America Today. Again, I wanted him to enjoy something I’d gotten to see…I had visited the mural months before by myself. In particular, I sought his 24-year-old opinion of Benton’s vision of America in the 1930s.

The room is dark to highlight the paintings, although I’m not sure that they need any highlighting: the ten panels of murals are bright and active and powerful. No subtlety of image, no subtlety of color, no subtlety of editorial. Benton presents a mythic vision of America—populated by heroic figures, expanding by force-of-will and force-of-brawn, moved by idealized machines, eking into the future of technology. His is a vision of a glorious “today” building the glories of tomorrow. Separate panels feature the mythic people and effort in the wheat fields of the Midwest; the cotton fields of the South; production of lumber, oil, steel. Benton’s mythology is not blind to the challenges: two panels feature both the erection of new cities and the entrapment of people already in modern cities. There is even a fringe of protest…images of breadline hands clamoring for a handout share a panel with images of top-hatted money-men whose hands are clamoring for cash…ironically all hands are in an exchange, one side of charity and one side of greed. But Benton’s overall editorial is a statement of force of will, strength of character, and clarity of purpose. Benton painted his vision during the days of the Great Depression, but his editorial offers no view of government, no view of racism, no view of defeat or victimization. His statement is clear: the people of America are building their future.

I asked my son for his impressions, knowing full well and fearing his knowledge of today’s America, today’s politics, today’s confusion of visions. “I love it,” he said. “We have to know and accept and acknowledge our history,” he said. “We have to know what America is…” I realized that he saw well beyond and understood well beyond the image of America being presented today…that his is the America we had watched at the fountain.

Luck

July 2016, Ocean City, NJ

In the course of my day whenever I tell a certain friend of mine that “I am lucky,” he instantly says to me, “We make our own luck.” I think he’s paying me a compliment, but I must admit that usually I think luck follows me, finds me, bursts upon me, without my doing a thing. Yes, I think very often that I am one of the luckiest people I know.

Ironically, I think that one of my greatest strokes of luck is that I am even lucky enough to identify my luckiness. As an example…over the past New-Year weekend, I watched several episodes of the Twilight Zone marathon, and noted one particular episode “The Trouble With Templeton,” wherein an aging actor complains and feels defeated by his advanced state in life; but he waxes sentimental and remembers his first wife and his early career and says with a slight smile, “There are some moments in life that have an indescribable loveliness to them.” I loved the phrase—as I said in an earlier blog, it captures an idea so perfectly that it can’t be improved—so I copied it down…the Twilight Zone writers are among the best writers in television.

Months later, on a chilly Sunday night, I went outside at 3 a.m. to watch a meteor shower; the skies were brilliantly clear and the temperature had dropped and a slight breeze stirred the trees and my neighborhood was silent but for the breeze, so I climbed into my sleeping bag on the front lawn and watched the skies. Within 5 minutes a meteor silently streaked across about 20° of the sky; within the hour, I was treated to two dozen shooting stars and even watched a satellite crawl across the sky, too. I loved that the universe had put on this show and that I had seen fit to set my alarm and go out in the cold to watch it. In a haze of pre-dawn sleepiness, I wondered, if I am happy to have these meteors flame up for my entertainment, are the meteors happy that I’ve taken time to watch them? But then I thought—lying alone in the cold and dark, loving the breeze in the branches, loving the view of the sky and its momentary silent streaks, knowing that the harmony of the universe had tumbled rocks through millions of miles of empty space to burn up in our atmosphere…just for me—I thought of the words of the Twilight Zone episode: “There are some moments in life that have an indescribable loveliness to them.”

Months later, after a violent rain storm had blown through our neighborhood, the sky opened to the west and the sun broke out on the late-afternoon horizon. We walked outside to see if a rainbow had formed under the departing clouds. To our amazement, the full arc of a rainbow was visible…something I’d never seen before. My wife, my daughter, and I tried to capture it with our cameras. I thought again of the Twilight Zone quote, because the sight and the moment certainly had an “indescribable loveliness” to them.

That is a central “luck” of my life: disparate elements come together at any given moment in my mind, one that makes the other even better, two that give each other a new quality. My life isn’t just a trip through time, it isn’t just me here stuck inside my head…life, my life, is having the luck to enjoy how everything combines to make those moments of “indescribable loveliness.” Like when a line from a 1960s TV show helps me enjoy a meteor or a rainbow.

Wonder

Reaching its peak before dawn on the morning of August 12th, the Perseid Meteor Shower  orchestrates time, distance, speed, and light for our entertainment…and it happens silently and free for us to see. When you make the early-morning effort to see it, you’ll lose all sense of feeling less-than-special or forgotten-by-the-world: you get to witness the glowing, streaking flashes of thousand-year-old dust as it burns up entering our atmosphere at 130,000 mph. Soundless, instantaneous streaks of spacerock vaporizing before your eyes. This year promises a bigger show than normal because Jupiter’s gravity changed the course of dust that has hurtled through space since the year 1079…yes, a comet (Swift-Tuttle) orbits the sun every 133 years to a furthest point about 4.75 trillion miles away and leaves a dust trail that crashes into our sky once every year. All this celestial enormity—plus some serendipitous help from Jupiter—combines for an especially dazzling lightshow in the sky this year…if you’ll make the early-morning effort to see it.

I’ve made that effort before and will again this year. In August 2013, I went to the beach at about 2 a.m.—I was the only person in sight. I must admit that it can be spooky on the beach in the dark, but the Milky Way was as plain as I hoped for and as soon as I climbed the dunes onto the beach, an orange ball of light shot through the sky directly in front of me…ZOOM! I had an immediate sense that it would be a good night. About 100 yards from the water, I lay in the sand to look up. For the next hour I was entertained by bright meteors that interrupted a constant flurry of things that I couldn’t quite define…little flashes and streaks…were they birds in the dark or flecks in my eye or tiny short-lived meteors… I couldn’t tell. I thought of a line in Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that describes “a movement of darkness on darkness”…that’s how the haze of movement seemed. I lay there for an hour counting 16 no-doubt-about-it meteors before the dampness got to me. Lying there, listening to the constancy of surf, seeing the Milky Way, spotting the silent streaks of light, watching the smear of the Pleiades climb the dawning sky, I got a very mystical sense that added to the spookiness. I’d read a line somewhere about being “privy to the mind of God,” and I felt that while I was lying there.

On the next night I returned to the beach with my daughter and two reclining beach chairs. A broken front of clouds drifted over, but lots of sky was visible and we saw dozens of no-doubt-about-it meteors: one even left a streak that took a few added instants to fade. After we’d both aaahhhh’ed our amazement, she said, “What does it mean, what does it mean?” in imitation of Skeleton Jack from Nightmare Before Christmas…I suspected that she was enjoying the same mystical sense of the event. I asked her if she saw the other constant flurry of undefined movement and she said, “Yes.” We stayed for an hour and a half before my wife and son came wandering down to join us. We counted a total of 40 bright meteors that night. By 4 a.m., as dependable as the heavens are, the Pleiades were well up, Taurus was plain above the quickening horizon, and even Orion was starting to show before the night ended.

It had been an unexpected family event, there that night on the beach under a black sky streaked instantly with light that went instantly dark again; the four of us walked in wonder back to the house to what sleep we could find before the sun rose.

Humanism

The Annunciation, (1489) by Italian Renaissance master, Botticelli; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

Before my family trip to Italy, I had greatly anticipated visiting the Uffizi in Florence, especially to see Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus . We all know the image from advertising rip-offs of it…the beautiful naked goddess rising from the clam shell. The Venus was as beautiful as I’d expected: part human—almost childlike—and part goddess, a bit risqué and completely pagan. Her hair and its motion are real and tactile and seductive. The colors are more subdued than I’d expected, but Venus is brighter and more real than all the older art and icons hung in the previous rooms…where all the paintings are hung chronologically.

On a side wall, I came to Botticelli’s The Annunciation. Never have I been so surprised by a painting…it is magnificent: a flourish of humility in the face of power and glory. I couldn’t believe how emotive it is or how emoto-genic it was for me…the image on this page doesn’t convey the glory of the actual painting. In the rooms previous to the Botticelli collection—where all the paintings predated his—the paintings are static and designed to be awe-inspiring…images of the Virgin or Christ without living dimension…not badly painted, but statically presented. They were meant to be “beheld” and knelt before and prayed before…they were made to be icons, awesome and inspirational. But Botticelli’s paintings tell a story: drama in a frame.

I’ve always loved standing in front of a painting in a museum, in the same relative place that the artist stood when painting it….in this case, 525 years ago! To me, Botticelli has painted a relationship between the angel and Mary…the painting is not about the message, not about the miracle; the painting is about the relationship and communication between the angel and Mary. The angel, even bent to his knee, is glorious and assertive but supplicating, softening his majesty and the glory of his message…“I do not want to overpower you…” he seems to say. “You were born for and lived for this moment.”

Mary is a picture of absolute humility, with her head tilted and bowed before the angel; “Why me?” she seems to be wondering. She offers no hint of rejection; her hands are not extended to ward off the angel, but to interrogate him and wonder, “Why me?” Botticelli has perfectly captured/created Mary’s humility as a living woman and has perfectly showed it. A living, breathing woman—not a holy thing or an icon—like my own mother or my wife. “I’m going to have the miracle of a child?” Botticelli has portrayed a human moment of moment!

My tour guide explained the use of perspective accentuated by the gridwork floor and how the landscape out the window was typically Italianate…and I wanted to interrupt and correct him. He talked about the bowing of Mary’s head as a sign of reverence, and I wanted to shout, “Shut up! This is about the angel and Mary communicating, a very personal and human moment!” Even though it was a divine moment, Botticelli represented it as a completely human moment.

I’d seen Giotto’s Madonna a few rooms earlier in the museum; he supposedly led the way to Humanism…giving Mary a realistic feel. But 180 years later, Botticelli beats him hands down. I’d read about the Renaissance’s Humanism, but it had never really meant anything to me before. Until the Botticelli…Humanism is there in blue and red and gold…humans in a human moment are there in blue and red and gold.

Borders

Approaching storm, June 2016, Ocean City, NJ.

I’ve spent my entire life within 100 miles of the seashore. Over a seventeen-year stretch, I lived each summer in a New-Jersey-shore town and I’ve always felt something different about being there, on the coast. Now I live on the bay with an expansive view of the water and the flat horizon of mainland to the west where I can watch storms slowly crawl toward me. When the winds come from the west, from over the mainland—a “land breeze”—they are usually hot and stultifying and insect-filled. Hungry greenhead flies ride in from the marshes on land breezes, so do mosquitoes and no-see-ums. Sitting on the beach can be unbearable on such days. When the wind turns, when the wind becomes a sea breeze, the temperature drops and the air is fresher and fragrant and the beach is a paradise.

At the seashore, I'm treated to a menagerie of seabirds across the skies and on the water, different birds than I see on the mainland. Seabirds sound different, too; they don’t have songs like the mainland songbirds—their calls are staccato and harsh. They have unique names like kitiwakes and petrels. Cormorants put on a show whenever they turn their bodies in flight, lift their heads, extend their legs, and settle into the water. I've watched common terns—a white seabird with a black cap, red feet, and black-tipped red beak; they are quick as light and they dive into the water like a spear to feed. Often the terns have to outrace the larger gulls who swoop in to steal their catch. On the beach, I’m amused late in the afternoon when the sandpipers race against the crawl of the ocean’s very edge, staying out of reach of the waves, picking the sand for food. I love watching the skimmers over the bay at dusk...black-backed, long-winged birds whose lower bill extends past its upper bill so they can skim the water with open beak in a great circle around the bays and lagoons.

The water is equally alive, even in the shallows of the bay or in the churn of the surf. I’ve seen schools of skates as they shoot through the rolling waves, feeding on unseeable creatures. I’ve watched pods of dolphin as they curl across the ocean surface, their dorsal fins scaring people at first—“Is that a shark out there?”—and then delighting them as five, six, seven fins move in unrehearsed unison. Bay waters often glitter with schools of tiny fish darting just under the surface. The sun glitters on their silver sides or the surface churns when they rush in confusion. I’ve also watched larger fish appear from underneath—seemingly out of nowhere—to scoop up a mouthful of minnows. Or sometimes a fish will pop out of the water in a glitter and splash back in an ever-growing ring.

Seeing and feeling storms approach—regular summer thunderstorms from the west, not the life-changing hurricanes that come from the south—gives the greatest sense of being at the seashore. The birds react in anticipation; the waters turn dark as they absorb the sky’s deepening grey-blue and they begin to chop; the winds shift from sea breeze rushing into the storm to land breeze rushing and rising into the clouds; the lightning bolts down in the distance or flashes fire filling the clouds; I’ve watched the rain as it advances over the bay in a froth, and then it’s soon upon me.

I love the something different about the seashore, because even in my quietest times—especially in my quietest times ahead of a storm—I feel it. I feel a difference of standing solidly on solid land, tied to the tides, brushed by breezes…I love to greet the border interaction among three worlds—land, sea, and sky—constant and constantly visible.

Shazam

With the summer heat upon us, I regret the loss of my ability to enjoy a Martini. Time was that I could wend away an evening enjoying an ice-cold Martini or two while listening to music or reading or just staring out into space…just to wend away the evening and enjoy the Martini, not to lose myself in drunkenness. But several years ago, inexplicably, gin decided to mistreat me…a single ice-cold Martini and I had trouble speaking clearly. I realized that terrible evening that neither my speech nor my thinking was clear, after just one drink. Trying to ignore my misfortune, I tried another Martini a week later and suffered the same, cruel effect.

No more are my summers filled with early-evenings of gin-flavored relaxation. I had really enjoyed the spice-rich flavor of Bombay gin, although a friend always championed the crisp juniper of Beefeater’s. A Martini is made of four elements that must be expertly aligned: ice-coldness, gin, dry vermouth, and olives. Some sadly mistaken people drink Martinis with an onion or a twist, but those treatments miss so much of the essential. The martini must be icy—it must be drunk quickly or the coldness fades as a contributing factor; the vermouth must be a whisper that seduces the dryness of the gin to the surface—too much vermouth and the clarity of the gin is overwhelmed; the olives add a salty crunch just before the final swallow. Not the pretentious Martini of James Bond; but served ice cold in a tall, conic, frosty, sweating glass, Martinis are a quintessential summer experience: the cleanliness of the gin, the hint of vermouth’s grape, the salt and crunch of the olives all crystal clear in the crystal. Simple. Perfect. Summer.

Fortunately, bourbon has not mistreated me…yet. I used to reserve Manhattans for wintertime, but without Martinis, I sometimes call a Manhattan into summer duty, too. But let me warn you: Beware the Manhattan! It can be a half-hour of heaven in a glass, or it can be a grand disappointment. I’ve had many a Manhattan poured for me at bars and restaurants, and often they are no better than a dump of whiskey in a glass. Often, bartenders mix a Manhattan as if it were a whiskeyed version of the Martini with just a hint of vermouth or they add some designer cherry or way too much bitters. But such a drink expresses the bartender’s ignorance much more than it provides the pleasure of the Manhattan. A real Manhattan offers a richness of flavor that is a delight. Really…a delight. Four elements: cherries with their juice, sweet vermouth, bourbon, and a splash of bitters. It must be cold, too, to be enjoyed, but it can be served “on the rocks.” I prefer my Manhattan served in a highball glass to funnel the scents to my nose as I sip. A Manhattan has a sweetness to it…a good bourbon—Knob Creek is my preference, but I’m not a bourbon snob—has the natural sweetness of corn, then mix it with two Maraschino cherries and a teaspoon of the juice, then add sweet vermouth (one part vermouth to three parts bourbon) to complete the sweetness, and finally just a splash—one or two drops—of bitters to add a real flavor fullness. The bitters—if added last right on top of the floating ice—grab your nose before you even taste the drink. It’s like eating chocolate-covered pretzels, or sweet and sour chicken from your favorite Chinese restaurant, or cheese-stuffed jalapenos… it’s the complexity of flavors dazzling your mouth that astounds you. The sweet vermouth accentuates the corn-sweetness of the bourbon, and the pure sweetness of the cherry adds to it all…except that the bitters smell like mincemeat pie and taste like a surprise. I hate getting a poorly made Manhattan—in the end it’s just a drink…it’s like kissing one’s Aunt Erma. But a well-made Manhattan is a delight of mixed flavors, accentuated one against the other, intertwined and inseparable…it’s like kissing the girl you’ve always wanted to kiss, and right in the middle of it, she pulls you closer. Shazam!

Language

I’ve been trying to develop an essay on the importance and power of human language; ironically I’ve struggled to find the right words. Human language expresses subtleties and complexities of our existence: meanings and contradictions and explanations and questions and compromise. The character Thomas More, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, says that God created Man “…to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind!” To me, the tangles of my mind are filled with tangles of language.

Yesterday—July 4, 2016—a satellite arrived at Jupiter and, reports say, “Jupiter will give up its secrets.” But even in all its magnificence, Jupiter won’t express a thing, won’t say a word…anything that is learned or “given up” will be the language of scientists who labor to formulate that understanding into words. Our understanding of Jupiter has grown since the Babylonians first identified it about 2800 years ago…without language, where would all that understanding go?

Look at everything that language allows; think of everything that lack-of-language would take away. Language can be as pinpoint as a person chooses and can uniquely express that person’s humanity in a pinpoint, unique way. Language can make plain a person’s humanity to the humanity of others. So, language is at the center of a person’s ability to experience life…I must assume, then, that the more enriched a person’s language, the more enriched is his/her existence.

I have a friend who recently told me that in Montaigne’s essays in the late 1500s, he writes that language is a defining feature of being human. I hated to find out that “my idea” had already been expressed 450 years ago but I love that a friend learned the idea from this antique source and then shared it with me, expanding my own understanding in the tangles of my mind: being human and using language are inseparably intertwined. Without living things, in all the universe there would be no source for love or hate or sadness or joy or anger or sympathy or understanding…nowhere. Because in all the universe, only living things have those appetites and emotions and achievements…and the need to express them in words.

Other living things can certainly communicate; animals clearly communicate through body language—for example, our cats express many emotions by purring or rubbing or hissing or arching their backs…but their communication is limited to gross appetites and emotions: hunger, joy, anger, and love. Our language allows us to refine those things, to know the variations of love or the various evils of hate or the damages of fear and anger… expressing those subtleties and complexities is purely human.

I think this is why I often resort to quotations to a make a point: many phrases in books, poems, songs, and movies have captured an idea so perfectly that it can’t be improved; even the sound of the words—their poetic quality—sometimes adds to the beauty (a purely human perception) of the idea. Within the tangles of my mind, I often come upon the words of others that illuminate a subtlety here, a complexity there…and then I find and add a few words of my own. Regularly, I struggle to find the right words, but I believe the struggle is important because the right word holds the importance and the power.

Wisdom

My dad in 1949, Atlantic City, NJ

In the shadow of Father’s Day—yesterday—I am thinking about my father, whom I lost seven years ago. Since then, I’ve gotten to enjoy Father’s Day without any worry of meeting a son’s Father’s Day duty or the pressure of buying a Father’s Day gift. But the day has never passed without my thinking about—and missing—my dad. Understandably, he has grown wiser in my eyes over time because now I am wrestling with that role: trying to infuse my days of fatherhood with some kind of wisdom.

One word of wisdom that came from him—probably his wisest advice—did not come in the form of an old expression or an aphorism or quote from a book or play…he was full of those and always had them at-the-ready. This time, in the natural flow of life, he listened to something I’d said, understood it in a bigger context than I could, and instantly directed me into a thought that I should have had on my own, into a thought that I’d never abandon thereafter, into a thought that ended up—I think—changing my life.

On Father’s Day in 2006, my family—wife, son, and daughter—took a trip to Florida. We stayed in a beautiful resort hotel overlooking the Gulf. We arrived in a gloomy overcast Florida after a long morning of travel, and my wife and son collapsed on the bed for a nap. I sneaked onto the balcony to call my dad—a son’s Father’s Day duty. My daughter begged me to go swimming in the “waterfall pool,” a great attraction for any 12-year-old, but I bemoaned the weather and my travel fatigue and my need to make the phone call. “We’re here all week,” I excused myself. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

I chatted with my dad about the trip and our plans for the week and about his plans for Father’s Day…my siblings would be visiting him shortly. In the background of our conversation, he could hear my daughter pestering me about the pool. He paused in the conversation and said, “Son,” so I paused to listen. “If your daughter wants you to go swimming with her…go swimming with her.” It was a pronouncement of great certainty and clarity. I was stuck there in the middle: between a daughter and a father where I was the father and the son…he fully appreciated the moment and made it clear for me. I wished right then that he could come swimming with us.

Needless to say, we went swimming in the waterfall pool within the hour, despite the slight sprinkle of warm rain, despite being the only people at the pool or in the pool. I remember standing waist-deep in the pool, washed by the waterfall, holding my daughter’s hand, wondering how many sons and daughters were watching us from the hotel windows wishing their old man had taken them swimming.

In his poem, “East Coker,” T. S. Eliot says, “Do not let me hear/Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.” My dad’s wisdom on that Father’s Day was his folly and he made it mine…sending us swimming in the rain because he could, because we could.

Meanings

James Joyce, photograph by Sylvia Beach, Paris, Bloomsday 1925. Image courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Used with permission.

I’ve been reading and enjoying James Joyce’s Ulysses since first reading it in 1974. I remember asking my college professor, “Can someone who doesn’t know The Odyssey (the Greek story on which it is loosely based) make sense of this?” I asked because many sections of the novel were confusingly complicated…I was struggling through my first reading. Her answer was, “Yes, the association just lets you enjoy another level of meaning and interpretation.” Her answer opened me up to “levels of meaning” and I’ve been reading Ulysses that way ever since: a conundrum of meaningful entertainment.

Joyce, I think, created a richly blended world of reality and myth. Leopold Bloom, the novel’s central character, is a person who loves living life and all it offers as he wanders Dublin, just as Odysseus loves adventure and all it offers as he wanders the Mediterranean. But Bloom is not the hero that Odysseus is—he does not challenge the Sirens nor the Cyclops the way Odysseus does. I’ve come to understand Bloom’s behaviors and tastes and appetites as purely Epicurean: Bloom pursues and meets and enjoys the realities of Dublin life “with relish.” As a reader, I understand things about Bloom because they are the same and because they are different than his ancient Greek counterpart. He is completely a Dubliner, but he is mythic, too.

Other characters, other places, and other incidents in the novel have those same blended sources: part 1904 Dublin and part ancient Greek myth…and everything in between. Each time I’ve read the novel, I’ve understood more and different meanings of Joyce’s story because my own library of sources has expanded as I’ve experienced more of life, literature, and history.  My college professor was correct about enjoying additional levels of meaning and interpretation through association. For me, finding those levels is a beauty of the novel.

A few years ago, I bought the audiobook of Ulysses and was amazed at how clear and engaging the book becomes when it is read aloud in a voice tinged with an Irish brogue. I think the Irish brogue was probably how Joyce heard the book in his head while he was drafting it. The meaning of each sentence is clearer, plot developments are clearer, and characters themselves are clearer…and then it occurred to me: the producers of the audiobook have made specific editorial decisions to present the text clearly. “Read the sentence this way,” they must have told the performers. All the challenges and ambiguities and richness of potential meanings in the text are “pre-digested” by the producers…the audiobook presents an excellent single version of the book—a straight path through what can be a labyrinth of Joyce’s craft. For me, that clarity of such a complex novel is a beauty of the audiobook.

Thursday, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day on which the novel takes place. The Rosenbach Museum and Library at 2008 Delancey Place in Philadelphia features live readings of excerpts of the novel…attendees get to hear dozens of interpretations of the novel as the readers present their selections just the way they mean it.