Usually, when I ask that question of myself, I mean when do I consciously choose to sit on a cushion or a chair, quiet my busy mind, straighten my back, hands loosely held in my lap, and be mindful — that is, in the curious circuitry of meditation, empty my mind.
I do that at least once a week, with a group of friends in my community, led by a thoughtful teacher of meditation whose tradition, which she wears lightly, is that of Zen Buddhism. There are perhaps eighteen of us, and those gatherings — our sangha, some of us say — are precious to us.
I also meditate at home, in my apartment, and so far, by myself. I find that harder to do than in the comradeship of our sangha. It is part of age old wisdom in monastic traditions that only very experienced and highly trained monks are encouraged to go alone, say to live as a hermit in the desert rather than a monk in daily supportive contact with his brethern. So it comes as no surprise to me that solitary meditation is hard. I feel less motivated to be still, more inclined to indulge my restless energy, or to be more active, more devoted to tasks, often more in touch with other people, friends, colleagues and family.
Within my community, not wholly unlike a monastery, but without a common spiritual tradition and its life of prayer and song or chant, each of us has valued private space to which we are glad we can retreat, close the door, sleep safely, read, write, do whatever we enjoy doing alone. (Some even watch television now and then.)
And there is common space, equally treasured, a dining room to join others for meals and conversation, opportunities to see good films on Fridays and Saturdays, and to attend groups that nourish our diverse interests — our sangha, a group called "Searching for Meaning," that allows us to explore the feelings and thoughts that are with us, the crises in which we may be enmeshed, the care we find in companionship; or a memoir-writing group, an exploration of philosophical questions, a poetry-writing circle, an opportunity to hear and discuss the good and (more) the bad news of the day.
We are a diverse lot, our friendships are many. Our connectedness with one another form a social quilt that makes life in community valuable, very different from living on our own, or with only one other person, or with our grown children, or in a "facility," all of which, for most of us, are a lot less attractive for various reasons than life in this community. No wonder, then, it feels to so many of us a blessing. Why are there so few true communities in this culture, so few villages and neighborhoods in which we can feel comfortably ourselves and with others we know at the same time?
I've lost my thread. I was saying I am less likely to meditate when I am alone than when I am with my fellow meditators, my sangha. For another take on that subject, I recall the words of a great teacher of meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh, or They, as his students know him. About a half-century ago, in an early class he taught after leaving Vietnam, They said,
[I]f you can meditate an hour each day that's good, but it's nowhere near enough. You've got to practice meditation when you walk, stand, lie down, sit, work, while washing your hands, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, drinking tea, talking to friends, or whatever you are doing: "While washing the dishes, you might be thinking about the tea afterwards, and so try to get them out of the way as quickly as possible in order to sit and drink tea. But that means that you are incapable of living during the time you are washing the dishes. When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you're drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. When you're using the toilet, let that be the most important thing in your life. And so on. Chopping wood is meditation. Carrying water is meditation. Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness. Each act is a rite, a ceremony. Raising a cup of tea to your mouth is a rite. Does the word "rite" seem too solemn? I use that word in order to jolt you into the reailization of the life-and-death matter of awareness.
They realized that to carry out that realization in practice — to be mindful every day and every hour, doing everything and nothing — is easier to say than to do. So he suggests what we do, or at least what we partly do, "try hard to reserve one day out of the week to devote entirely" to our practice of mindfulness. That was the ancient wisdom of most of the oldest spiritual traditions. Most of us, whether raised in religious traditions or not — we may be, as they say, "secular or ethnic Jews," "Christian non-conformists," "Christian agnostics," even "Christian athiests" — most of us have a practice.
When I first came to live and work in the extraordinary Norwegian healing community of Modum Bad — the baths at Modum — for its 19th century history had been as one of the great European spas — I offered a series of lectures and discussions on Shabat or Sabbath: the Jewish and then Christian practice of setting aside one whole day of the week, say from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown, or normally and problematically shortened in Christian practice to Sunday and then to Sunday morning. My friend who was the director of the hospital at Modum Bad asked me why I chose a Jewish theme. After all, most Norwegians are historically Christian. I reminded him that Jesus was a Jew and a rabbi.
My interest in that series of talks was less the traditional Shabat or Sabbath than it was the spirit of Shabat in our lives, I wanted to explore Sabbath time.
We commonly know Sabbath as a day of rest corresponding to the Biblical seventh day of creation, in which "God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1-3) The Hebrew word translated as "rested" is shabat, sabbath.
To understand the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, and we must understand the underlying distinction between the sacred and the profane.
It became common, in the early years of the 20th century, and in some sense far earlier, to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, experience, on the one hand, possessed of a numinous quality — experience of a reality that is overwhelming, awe-inspiring, at once (or on different occasions) terrifying and ecstatic, always permeated by mystery, “wholly other,” not in the sense of alien but rather different,extraordinary if one can imagine the full resonance, the furthest reaches of that word. Rudolf Otto's summary Latin phrase was mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means in English about what one would imagine it to mean. And, on the other hand, experience that is not numinous: the dogged reality of every day. The interesting thing about this distinction, however, is that it is never at rest, neither hard nor fast. Any object, for example—a stone, a tree, a sip of wine, a breath of air, an apricot—can reveal itself as sacred or profane, so that its sacredness is not inherent in the object itself, but in the character or quality of relationship between knower and known, a reality requiring both an “I” and an “Other.”
That is why the distinction is between sacred and profane, and not sacred and mundane. Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies impersonality, turning away, withdrawal, rather than turning towards, fragmentation or partiality rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue rather than dialogue, collectivity rather than community.
"There is a realm of time," writes the great scholar of Jewish ethics and mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, "where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord." That is Sabbath time. While there is great wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom that may reside within our souls--the Biblical command to keep the Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word "Remember," as if it refers to something we already knew, but may have forgotten — Sabbath time is not limited to that day, but is a way of being in time. If it is not a familiar practice, one might start with an hour — in which one is less likely, in any event, to be interrupted.
Heschel, in his small book of meditation on Sabbath, first seeks to convey an understanding that may not coincide with our common intuition: Sabbath, wisdom, holiness, life in its most vivid authenticity, has to do essentially with the sanctification of time. The verb shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing conclusion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is a verb, not a noun. ("Even God," writes Heschel, as if we should know better, "is conceived by most of us as a thing.")
The essential spirit of Sabbath is that of reanimation, redemption and resurrection. All week--in profane time--"there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world"--in sacred time--"man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the Earth." Sabbath is the soul in time, and time is full of such moments, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Indeed, our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, even to the experience of life as Sabbath. As one wise soul recently wrote to a dying friend,
"This sacred time is not about convenience or inconvenience; it isn't about meeting deadlines. It isn't about you (or anyone else) being in control. This sacred time is about learning to trust the eddies and shoals of the River. It is... about mystery. It is a broader, deeper, infinitely more significant agenda that is beyond our charting. It is singularly about you and your union with the Other. It is beyond our reckoning."
It is our choice and our gift, then, our craft and our practice, if you will, to make the most of Sabbath. The traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when not sinking like all dogma into formalism and legalism, are designed to assist us in that task. The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. (Think, in mundane terms, of the difference between digital and analog watches.) Heschel's language is particularly vivid. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce...[think Black Friday], the screetch of dissonant days,..." the farther we move from Sabbath.
So, I have moved far afield from my question, when do we — or I — practice meditation. Yet in moving to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and then to Abraham Joshua Heschel, I am closer to the heart of that question than when it came to mind early this morning.
This is a time of Thanksgiving, of Chanukah, of being thankful for the light as we approach the shortest day of the year at the winter solstice. At some point a few moments ago I wrote of an apricot, of the possibility that an apricot, like almost any object, can be sacred or profane or both. I was remembering these lines of W.S. Merwin's poem, "West Wall," with which I shall end these reflections:
In the unmade light I can see the world
as the leaves brighten I see the air
the shadows melt and the apricots appear
now that the branches vanish I see the apricots
from a thousand trees ripening in the air
they are ripening in the sun along the west wall
apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.
A useful perspective on Thanksgiving — the giving of thanks — and not only on Thanksgiving but any day — from Nick Kristof.
He's concerned with the relationship between thanks for others and empathy for others. Many of us are not accustomed to being thankful for the poor - it seems counterintuitive. We often don't give much thought to the ways of developing empathy for the poor. They all too easily become objects of our charity.
But charity is not compassion or love. In Martin Buber's terms, charity is an I-It relationship: writing a check, say. Love, compassion and true empathy have, at least some of the time, to be I-Thou relationships. I imagine the four Obamas — Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha — when they offered food yesterday to poor people in Washington, especially when they spoke with them and looked in their eyes, are engaged in true charity, true empathy. "Where is the Love?" is a good question, any day.
________________________
New York Times November 27, 2013
Where Is the Love?
By Nicholas D. Kristof
When I’ve written recently about food stamp recipients, the uninsured and prison inmates, I’ve had plenty of pushback from readers.
A reader named Keith reflected a coruscating chorus when he protested: “If kids are going hungry, it is because of the parents not upholding their responsibilities.”
A reader in Washington bluntly suggested taking children from parents and putting them in orphanages.
Jim asked: “Why should I have to subsidize someone else’s child? How about personal responsibility? If you procreate, you provide.”
After a recent column about an uninsured man who delayed seeing a doctor about a condition that turned out to be colon cancer, many readers noted that he is a lifelong smoker and said he had it coming.
“What kind of a lame brain doofus is this guy?” one reader asked. “And like it’s our fault that he couldn’t afford to have himself checked out?”
Such scorn seems widespread, based on the comments I get on my blog and Facebook page — as well as on polling and on government policy. At root, these attitudes reflect a profound lack of empathy.
A Princeton University psychology professor, Susan Fiske, has found that when research subjects hooked up to neuro-imaging machines look at photos of the poor and homeless, their brains often react as if they are seeing things, not people. Her analysis suggests that Americans sometimes react to poverty not with sympathy but with revulsion.
So, on Thanksgiving, maybe we need a conversation about empathy for fellow humans in distress.
Let’s acknowledge one point made by these modern social Darwinists: It’s true that some people in poverty do suffer in part because of irresponsible behavior, from abuse of narcotics to criminality to laziness at school or jobs. But remember also that many of today’s poor are small children who have done nothing wrong.
Some 45 percent of food stamp recipients are children, for example. Do we really think that kids should go hungry if they have criminal parents? Should a little boy not get a curved spine treated properly because his dad is a deadbeat? Should a girl not be able to go to preschool because her mom is an alcoholic?
Successful people tend to see in themselves a simple narrative: You study hard, work long hours, obey the law and create your own good fortune. Well, yes. That often works fine in middle-class families.
But if you’re conceived by a teenage mom who drinks during pregnancy so that you’re born with fetal alcohol effects, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you from before birth. You’ll perhaps never get traction.
Likewise, if you’re born in a high-poverty neighborhood to a stressed-out single mom who doesn’t read to you and slaps you more than hugs you, you’ll face a huge handicap. One University of Minnesota study found that the kind of parenting a child receives in the first 3.5 years is a better predictor of high school graduation than I.Q.
All this helps explain why one of the strongest determinants of ending up poor is being born poor. As Warren Buffett puts it, our life outcomes often depend on the “ovarian lottery.” Sure, some people transcend their circumstances, but it’s callous for those born on second or third base to denounce the poor for failing to hit home runs.
John Rawls, the brilliant 20th-century philosopher, argued for a society that seems fair if we consider it from behind a “veil of ignorance” — meaning we don’t know whether we’ll be born to an investment banker or a teenage mom, in a leafy suburb or a gang-ridden inner city, healthy or disabled, smart or struggling, privileged or disadvantaged. That’s a shrewd analytical tool — and who among us would argue for food stamp cuts if we thought we might be among the hungry children?
As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let’s remember that the difference between being surrounded by a loving family or being homeless on the street is determined not just by our own level of virtue or self-discipline, but also by an inextricable mix of luck, biography, brain chemistry and genetics.
For those who are well-off, it may be easier to castigate the irresponsibility of the poor than to recognize that success in life is a reflection not only of enterprise and willpower, but also of random chance and early upbringing.
Low-income Americans, who actually encounter the needy in daily life, understand this complexity and respond with empathy. Researchers say that’s why the poorest 20 percent of Americans donate more to charity, as a fraction of their incomes, than the richest 20 percent. Meet those who need help, especially children, and you become less judgmental and more compassionate.
And compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization.
Pope Francis attends an audience with healthcare workers, in the Pope Paul VI hall, at the Vatican, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2013. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Earlier this month, Laurie Goodstein reported forThe New York Timesthat Pope Francis’ softer rhetoric on hot-button social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage were causing conservative Catholics no small amount of chagrin.
Pope Francis has attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny”, urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.
The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years in March.
He also called on rich people to share their wealth. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
In a sense, the new pope is just grappling with the reality he faces. Polls show that American Catholics, at least, agree with the pontiff’s position that the church focuses too much on social issues. And Francis recently commissioned a survey of Catholics around the world to see where they fall on these questions.
Meanwhile, Dominic Barton, the Managing Director of McKinsey & Co., writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: ”In 2012, the top 1% of earners in the US collected 19.3% of the country’s total household income–an all-time high… The disparity is growing rapidly as well. Incomes of the top 1% grew by 31.4% from 2009 to 2012, compared to just 0.4% for the remaining 99%.”
Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.
Family, community, faith, love... and bread. Preferably challah bread.
Bread
Each night, in a space he’d make between waking and purpose, my grandfather donned his one suit, in our still dark house, and drove through Brooklyn’s deserted streets following trolley tracks to the bakery.
There he’d change into white linen work clothes and cap, and in the absence of women, his hands were both loving, well into dawn and throughout the day— kneading, rolling out, shaping
each astonishing moment of yeasty predictability in that windowless world lit by slightly swaying naked bulbs, where the shadows staggered, woozy with the aromatic warmth of the work.
Then, the suit and drive, again. At our table, graced by a loaf that steamed when we sliced it, softened the butter and leavened the very air we’d breathe, he’d count us blessed.
— Richard Levine
Challah (plural: challot/challos) (Hebrew: חלה) is a Jewish braided bread eaten on shabat and holidays.
Where to get good challah bread in the San Francisco Bay area:
A good article by Jill Lepore of Harvard's history faculty. Judging by recent sales at Sotheby's, she is conservative in her estimate of a $15-$30 million price tag for "The Whole Booke of Psalmes," printed in Cambridge in 1640. Whoever buys it, would that he or she understood the 37th Psalm's promise that "the meeke shall inherit the earth." In some sense, that is a self-evident truth; in others, it is wildly wrong. Whoever "inherits" this book at Sotheby's will hardly be among the meek. Lepore's contrast between this auction and the sad decline in the number of American bookstores and public libraries is sobering. She should have added the fate of reading generally. We are becoming an illiterate culture, if not at Harvard, Yale and Amherst, then pretty much everywhere else.
A Most Expensive Book
The New York Times By Jill Lepore November 23, 2013
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — THE first English-language book printed in the New World is scheduled to be auctioned on Tuesday by Sotheby’s of New York. It’s expected to command between $15 million and $30 million — more than anyone, anywhere, has ever paid for a printed book.
“The Whole Booke of Psalmes” is in a vault at Sotheby’s in 2013.
Seventeen hundred copies of “The Whole Booke of Psalmes” were printed in Cambridge, Mass., in 1640; only 11 survive, making it scarcer than the Gutenberg Bible, of which there are 48 known copies. Five of the surviving copies of “The Whole Booke of Psalmes,” also known as the “Bay Psalm Book,” come from a collection begun by Thomas Prince. Prince was minister of Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the church where Benjamin Franklin and his sister Jane were baptized in 1706 and 1712.
Benjamin Franklin founded the first lending library in America, in Philadelphia, in 1731. Two years later, for Jane’s 21st birthday, he sent her a three-volume collection called “The Ladies’ Library,” to start her own.
Thomas Prince, stirred by the same spirit, founded a library, too. He kept his more than 2,000 books in a room in the church’s steeple, under the belfry, in boxes and barrels, for anyone to read, if never to remove. Inside his books, he liked to glue his bookplate:
This Book belongs to
The New-England Library,
Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince, upon his entring Harvard-College, July 6, 1703; and was given by said Prince, to remain therein for ever.
“The Whole Booke of Psalmes” is a collection of 150 psalms, in verse. In the 1630s, Puritan intellectuals in New England, believing the King James translation of the Bible to be corrupt, retranslated the psalms from Hebrew into English. Since they wanted the psalms to be sung, they set them to meter. They cared more about piety than poetry. As the Boston minister John Cotton, one of the translators, explained, “If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that God’s Altar needs not our polishings.”
Others favored more polishing. The first “improved” edition appeared in 1647, just seven years after the original. Thomas Prince’s own “Revised and Improved” translation was published in 1758, in time for one of his psalms to be read over his grave. In the King James, the 37th psalm promises that “the meeke shall inherite the earth.” In the Bay Psalm Book, “meek ones the inheritance/shall of the earth possesse.” In Prince: “the meek and humble shall/the earth as heirs possess.” Smooth and elegant these psalms are not.
In 1866, the Old South Meeting House gave the Prince collection to the Boston Public Library for safekeeping. There followed a certain amount of jiggery-pokery. One copy of “The Whole Booke of Psalmes” ended up in the hands of a mayor of Boston. After his death, when his estate announced plans to auction it, the deacons of Old South filed suit, claiming the church still owned the book. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sided with the mayor’s heirs, and the book was sold for $1,025, a sum so staggering that the story was reported in The New York Times.
Another copy was auctioned in 1879; it was bought for $1,200 by Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in America. That copy was auctioned again in 1947, when it commanded $151,000, breaking a record. The copy of the Bay Psalm book that Sotheby’s is set to auction this week comes from the Prince library, too. In protest of its sale, the Old South’s historian resigned.
“The Whole Book of Psalms” is less a book than a ruin — the remains of another age.
More rare and endangered than old books, lately, are bookstores and public libraries. In the United States, more than a thousand bookstores closed between 2000 and 2007. Borders, which owned more than 1,200 bookstores in 2003, shut the doors to the last of them in 2011. Public libraries in nearly every state have suffered budget cuts. Most have reduced hours and services; others have sold off books. Some libraries have merged; others have privatized. Two years ago, the American Library Association issued a task force report called “Keeping Public Libraries Public.” In an age of library downsizing, a nonprofit in Wisconsin makes Little Free Libraries, wooden boxes not much bigger than a mailbox, to put up in neighborhoods, for book swapping. They’re inspired. But they’re not buildings; they’re boxes.
In 1785, Benjamin Franklin shipped to the town of Franklin, Mass. — the first town of many named in his honor — 116 books for a public library. His sister Jane, who never went to school and never learned to spell, asked him to send her a list of those books. “My Reason for this Request is I have a grat deal of time on my hands,” she explained. “I Love Reading ...and I dont doubt I can Borrow of won and another of my Acquaintance.” Then she set about trying to read every book on that list, from Locke to Montesquieu, from Blackstone to Newton.
In Franklin, Mass., those books — the gift from Benjamin Franklin — are still there, in the town library. They are locked in a cabinet. A few years back, the library’s board, citing a lack of funds for the care of rare books, decided that the door to that cabinet must never be opened. None of those books will ever be read again.
Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.”
Every time somebody says to me, “It’s so impressive how you manage to get writing done despite being on Facebook/Twitter/etc. all the time,” I cringe. I’ve been hit by a backhanded compliment. I’m surfing, tweeting and emailing — leaving my digital prints everywhere and probably picking up some nasty computer viruses — while serious writers are working pristinely, heroically beyond the clutches of the Internet.
Jonathan Franzen found the Internet such a threat that he disabled it by plugging an Ethernet cable into his computer with super glue. The philosophy behind this act of almost rageful vandalism seems self-evident. Compared to the hard work of writing, the Internet gives an easy way out. Before, the writer took breaks for things like coffee, cigarettes, drugs — items that each have natural limits in the human body. But now, you’re basically working in an intellectual red-light district where, at any time — every three seconds if you want — you can dip into the constantly replenished streams of email/Facebook/Gawker/eBay/YouTube/Instagram.
When you’re done, you have a snazzy pair of new shoes and have laughed at a lot of cat videos but are bereft of well-crafted sentences. At least — so the theory goes. Even more alarmingly, others warn, your lack of self-control might damage your brain permanently. In “The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember,” the tech journalist Nicholas Carr warns that the Internet can rewire our brains to prefer information in “short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts” instead of the long and steady and linear presentations that characterize deep reading.
I came of age as a writer in the ’90s, when the Internet was often not worth the hassle to access — you had to tie up the phone line, and once there, you’d be stuck typing out extremely long URLs that would lead you to marginal websites with hard-to-read fonts. My writing reflected its minimal presence: I recently donated my first novel’s research materials for a collection, and what I sent them was hundreds of pages of documents, books, a pile of Life magazines, newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, a box of audiotapes and reporters’ notebooks filled with notes. No list of URLs.
In the last eight years of my current novel, however, I have stumbled into the age of Wi-Fi and Google. At first, I made valiant efforts to spurn this new, faster, easier-to-use Internet. After all, George Eliot wrote “Middlemarch” — on which my novel is loosely based — without it, right? I even became an early adopter of a (then) free software program called Freedom, which blocks Internet access in a way that’s more reversible than super glue.
I also maintained my intuitive preference for the hard copy. My tools include cluttered shelves groaning with books and magazines, a bulletin board shingled with post-its and my coup de grâce: a Brobdingnagian three-ring binder whose pages are pasted with whatever research, writing bits and random ephemera I’ve decided to collect — the binder itself is probably Tolstoyan novel-length or more.
But even with these preferences, I have come to realize that my writing brain has been waiting for something exactly like today’s dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet.
The World Wide Web is uncurated, which means that there are a million, zillion data points of light out there (Google was indeed named for the number “googol”— 10 to the 100th power). At any given moment, 99.9 percent of it is extraneous, irrelevant, but that’s exactly what I need: an endless pool in which to wallow and do the backstroke.
I work via slow accretions of often seemingly unrelated stuff. When I complete that unwieldy, puzzling first draft, I spread it out on the desk like a soothsayer viewing entrails, and try to find patterns. If asked, I might pretty up my process and call it bricolage or intellectual scrapbooking, but it really is merely the result of a magpie mind/brain, one that flits from one shiny thing to another. While I still work in my plodding way, the ever renewing bits of information in my Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds provide endless fodder, like going shell collecting on the beach on a normal day versus the day after a hurricane when the ocean has burped up every interesting bit of stuff imaginable.
What keeps my writing process slow is not the Web, but the need to spend so much time circling a scene or a character, trying to get it in a form that reflects what I see in my mind. The payoff often comes when some trifle — say, an article on Inuit recipes for fermented salmon heads — that I’ve clicked on for no discernible reason, can years later become the perfect thing for a character musing on his long-ago romantic summer job in a cannery in Alaska. And while I still have epiphanic moments while staring out my window like a proper author, or am inspired by a long article in the New York Review of Books, I am just as often prompted by a random bit I’ve gleaned on a friend’s Twitter feed as it speeds by, or the latest ha-ha list from BuzzFeed.
It became my guilty secret that a foray into Wikipedia, Gawker, Twitter and even eBay (an absolute font of consumer and postconsumer culture) could set my mind rolling. Seemingly unrelated bits, like what looks like random bumps on a player-piano roll, would, when put in the right part of my brain, create actual music.
But the backhanded complimenters also want to know, what about all the creative juices I divert to the writing of the useless 140-character tweets and Facebook updates? Mr. Franzen, not surprisingly, says Twitter represents “Everything I oppose” (I’m pretty sure I read that article online after a friend tweeted it).
But I gave Twitter and Facebook a shot and toggle between both most days. One of my lifelong superstitions is to never talk about any work when it’s in progress — lest its essential energy leak out into the atmosphere rather than the page — but I have no such inhibitions doing unrelated, throwaway writing while I’m writing. In fact, I find that posting a tweet or a Facebook status update can be a nice little warm-up, mental knuckle-cracking before getting down to the real business.
Especially in this technical age, the tools a writer has to work with change almost daily — today the Internet, tomorrow nanobot implants for the brain. But I believe the process stays essentially the same. William Gibson suggests that in order to produce one’s most creative work, writers need to learn to cultivate their “personal micro culture,” an acquired sense of what feels right to the artist, rather than an emulation of others’ work. So while many writers I admire practice Internet abstinence, I accept that my nature is more restless and creatively promiscuous. I was, therefore, delighted to learn that my salmon-head-fermenting friends the Inuits call the “Internet,”ikiaqqivik, which in Inuktitut means, roughly, “traveling through layers,” a word they use to describe what their shamans do in finding answers.
Henry James thought George Eliot, with her sharp eye for the twisty hierarchies of social manners, was one of the best British writers of her time, but he criticized her for what he thought were the overlapping, excessive, and broken plots in “Middlemarch.” I think she would have loved Facebook.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee teaches writing at Columbia and is working on a novel about health care.
President Abraham Lincoln, November 8, 1863, eleven days before he gave his Gettysburg Address. Compare this photo with the last photograph of Lincoln, taken only 1½ years later, included below. The costs of those months of service to the nation in wartime are evident on his face in the later photo. At any time, the presidency is a stressful job; in wartime or crisis especially so, particularly if one is as deeply ethical, as profoundly feeling and as devoted to the lives of others as was Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln's address at Gettysburg is probably the most famous American speech — short, eloquent, modest, not near enough to the end of America's costliest war, on our own soil. A scholar said correctly that it's harder to write a short speech than a long one. Lincoln prepared his with care. Legend has it that he thought it a failure, as his audience at the end was silent. It was a sober occasion, November 19, 1863, 150 years ago today. President Lincoln had come to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate Soldiers National Cemetery, where those who fell at the Battle of Gettysburg were buried, and more were to be buried still.
"In the summer of 1863, General Robert E. Lee pushed northward into Pennsylvania. The Union army met him at Gettysburg, and from July 1 to July 3, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War ensued. By the time it was over, the Confederates were in retreat, and the battlefield was strewn with more than 50,000 dead and wounded." — Sage Sossel in The Atlantic
When Lincoln spoke in Gettysburg, the air was still thick with the smell of death.
His address, in its entirety, is carved on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
I memorized it as a child, and I remember it still. Two hundred and sixty eight words, two or three minutes to say.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I still shiver when I read or say Lincoln's words.
November 19, 2013
Abraham Lincoln, the last portrait, only days before his assassination
Lincoln at Gettysburg Long Ago
By The Editorial Board, The New York Times
Garry Wills once wrote that “all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address,” which was read aloud by a bareheaded man, exhausted and ill, before a black-suited crowd 150 years ago. Mr. Wills chose the right word: “descends.” Lincoln’s speech is the pinnacle of American civic utterance. His words honoring the dead at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, do what words are only rarely able to do. They invoke an eloquent silence.
Most of us recall the momentous phrases in this short, simple speech. But other words and phrases are doing work that is nearly as important. “Now,” Lincoln says, “we are engaged in a great civil war.” It is “now” that resonates. So does the word “here.” Lincoln uses it eight times, seven in the last paragraph: the brave men “who struggled here,” the living crowd that is “dedicated here” to finishing the work of the honored dead, and we who “here highly resolve” that this nation shall not perish from the earth.
There is an overpowering immediacy in these plain words. They root Lincoln’s more expansive rhythms to the moment, insisting, as we listen, on where we are as much as why we have gathered. All these years later, those words, “now” and “here,” work to place us on that field that November afternoon. So much of what we feel about Lincoln still arises from this speech. There is no false modesty in his sense of insufficiency, only respect for the dead on both sides of that battle. He embodies the very premise of his speech — that only the dead can consecrate the ground at Gettysburg — by making his speech so short.
For many of us, almost everything we think about the Civil War, about the “new birth of freedom” it was meant to bring, is merely an extension of Lincoln’s words. That, perhaps, is what Lincoln understood best as he began to talk that afternoon. He was there not only to speak our thoughts aloud but to give them language so moving that they could continue to resound all these years later. And so they still do.
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Walt Whitman on Lincoln's life and death
Walt Whitman wrote most memorably of Lincoln in his Leaves of Grass. I cannot resist his feeling for Lincoln, his response to Lincoln's death and vision of the slow train bearing the body, the sheer beauty of Whitman's words, of which those below are a few. Whitman himself served as a nurse during the Civil War. He knew war, its terrible wounds and its dealing of death.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
................
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
.........................
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
......................
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
________________________________
One day I'll write about these moving lines of Whitman. Not today.
Let the story be told for now in this iconic photograph of a black man weeping for Franklin D. Roosevelt as Roosevelt's body traveled like Lincoln's, by slow car and then train toward his final resting place. My grandmother sat in silence with my mother.
Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing his accordian as Franklin D. Roosevelt's body is carried away from Warm Springs. Many Americans on that day had known no other president. As the cortege drew into the drive and halted, the sad strains of Jackson's accordion played "Going Home." Graham Jackson had played many times for FDR. Today, with tears running down both sides of his face, he stood in front of the group and paid his last homage. And as the cars started again slowly, driving around the semicircular drive and on toward the station, Jackson played one of the President's favorite hymns, "Nearer, My God, To Thee."
Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address
on the Capitol steps, March 4, 1933
The only presidential speech that stands with Lincoln's at Gettysburg is Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in March of 1933, reassuring a deeply troubled nation in the throes of Depression, an address in which he gave birth to the phrase "a New Deal" for the American people.
Revolution was in the air, Depression a grim reality for a great many Americans. They badly needed reassurance. As James Tobin writes in his new book, The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency,
"The preceding week had been the worst in the history of the American economy. People felt a collective desperation unknown in the United States since the Civil War. The banking system was collapsing... One in four Americans was out of work, and the prospect of many more losing their livelihoods loomed over everyone. Two million people or more were riding freight trains in search of a chance to work. Dairy farmers in Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin had blockaded roads and dumped thousands of gallons of milk on the pavement in an effort to drive up starvation prices of two cents a quart. On the left there was dead-serious talk of the need for social revolution; on the right, of the need for a dictator."
Gathering around their radios, standing in the Capitol plaza, up the steps of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, some in the branches of trees, they heard his voice, strong and confident as I remember it. This speech was recorded; we can hear his voice, judge its quality, but realize he spoke in a day when speeches still needed to be heard — microphones and PA systems were in their early stages of development. He may sound strident. He was not. He was confident, ready to assume the presidency in a time of crisis unequaled in American history.
Franklin Roosevelt did not disappoint. He had, in a sense, been preparing for this moment most of his life. When he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs in 1921, he suffered a setback that became a source of renewal, strength, and moral courage. As he walked slowly to the podium now, supported by his steel braces, a cane and the arm of his son Jimmy, everyone knew that he was crippled, and no one imagined that fact a deterrent to his capacity to lead the nation. A hundred thousand people watched. As Tobin writes, "It was not an act of deception; he was not trying to fool anyone into thinking he was not crippled. Anyone who read the newspapers knew that. Rather, it was a deliberate show of strength, a silent, symbolic assertion that he could bear the burden of the presidency."
He said,
"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.... In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties.
"They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
"Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.... True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
"For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less ... We do not distrust the future of democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action."
__________________________
He did just that, the first hundred days of his presidency filled with legislation as none other before or after. The first steps on the long road of recovery were taken. World War II did not end the Great Depression, nor did Roosevelt's leadership. Ordinary people did. But his principled leadership was critical. Re-elected an unprecedented four times, the last in 1944, near the end of a long and costly war, as was Lincoln at Gettysburg.
Neither Roosevelt nor Lincoln lived to see their wars end. Both were casulties of the war they endured, as much as those who died in the fields and trenches, the cities and hamlets of America and Europe. FDR died of a cerebral hemmhorage on April 12, 1945, at his Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. When Lincoln was pronounced dead the next morning, his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, said, "Now he belongs to the ages." The same could have been said of these two remarkable men, reckognized by American historians as our greatest presidents.
The proximity of the two dates is remarkable. After being shot by John Wilkes Booth, the fatally wounded president was carried across the street to the Petersen House, where he died the next morning, April 15, 1865. Ford's Theatre is now the centerpiece of a National Historic Site. FDR's Little White House is now part of Georgia's state park system. The Roosevelt family held its reunion there this year. My grandfather departed on his last trip to the Little White House on March 30, 1945, my sixth birthday. He said to my mother, "Give my love to Johnny." My mother and I were living with him in The White House. He was exhausted from his wartime responsibilities, and felt, after his long journey — seven thousand miles home by sea and air from Yalta in the Crimea — he did not rest enough at the family's Hyde Park home. According to some observers at Warm Springs, Roosevelt looked "ghastly."
When he reported to a joint session of Congress on the Yalta trip on March 1, 1945, he sat for the first time before the legislators, and said for the first time, as he had never spoken in public about his disability, “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down…but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around the bottom of my legs.”
FDR's braces, now in the museum of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Libary, Hyde Park, New York.
Wikipedia reports correctly that "his usual cordial waves to the residents of Warm Springs were weak." Unlike his previous visits, he avoided the swimming pool he used to seek recovery from polio and then comfort himself in previous trips; he had been a strong swimmer. I swam with him in The White House pool; he liked to give me a friendly dunk, but made sure I resurfaced.
On April 12, 1945, he was sitting for a portrait at the Little White House when he put his hand to his temple and said, "I have a terrible headache." He had suffered a stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage. He died two hours later. I was hospitalized with a staph infection at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The family was more worried about me than about him, who had always recovered his legendary energy at Warm Springs. My mother and grandmother did not accompany him to Warm Springs, in order to remain closer to me. He called every day to ask my mother how I was.
I remember a nurse ran into my room to turn off the radio. I had already heard the news of his death, but at 6 years old I had a hard time associating the announcement with my PaPa, my glorious grandfather, so proud of his grandchildren, all of whom gathered at The White House for his last inauguration on January 20th. Perhaps he had a premonition of his death.
In that family photograph I sit on the floor in front, he is in a chair on the right, his face radiant, just days before he left for Warm Springs. That day he did not feel his exhaustion. Look at his face.
Family portrait — all his grandchildren, his wife (my grandmother) Eleanor, gathered for his fourth inauguration as president. I sit in the middle, a little bewildered at the number of other kids — I was the only grandchild then living in The White House. I am holding a small music box, with a Currier & Ives winter scene on the front. I am dressed in a dark suit and tie and short pants for the occasion. My grandmother rests her hand on my brother's arm (he's wearing his uniform of a military academy where he studied). My sister is beside him, the eldest grandchild. They had lived in The White House with our mother when they were younger and known to the country as Sistie and Buzzie. White House staff can be glimpsed in the background, ready to take command of their charge — mostly me. The others returned to their mothers. My mother was present in those war years, but more with her father than with me, her young bewildered son. I did have close companions: the White House guards, my omnipresent Secret Service agents, who drove me to pre-school through the fords in Rock Creek, and an array of nannies.
Exhausted, he struggled to finish his job of leading the United States, first in Depression then at war, here meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. Like almost everyone in those days, he smoked a lot, up to three packs of Camels a day, often in a cigarette holder. My mother was with him, a joy for her to be at his side.
FDR's Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he died on April 12, 1945.
The Roosevelt family recently had a reunion at Warm Springs, in the autumn of 2013 (no longer observing the quadrennial presidential calendar as when I began to organize those reunions in 1980 and 1984, years of presidential elections — albeit not happy ones, the first when Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbant Jimmy Carter, and in 1984 when Reagan was decisively re-elected. Since 1984 was also the centennial of my grandmother's birth in 1884, President Reagan invited the Roosevelts to join him for a luncheon at The White House. I shall not forget his drawing me aside to convey a conviction of his, "You know," he said, "if your grandfather was president today, he would be doing exactly what I am doing."
I held my tongue. It was his House, after all, and as my grandmother dryly said at all of our family gatherings at Hyde Park, when she offered the initial toast "to the President of the United States," "that means the office of the president, not necessarily the present incumbant." Nonetheless, I found President Reagan's remark appallingly ill-informed and self-serving, and I inwardly fumed. During the soup course, at our table filled with Roosevelt scholars who shared my view of the president's remark, I dropped one of the lenses of my eyeglasses into my cream of cauliflower soup. Since I could not remove cream of cauliflower from the errant lens with a fancy White House linen napkin, I said goodbye to President and Mrs. Reagen with one lens in and the other out.
The last photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt, taken at Warm Springs on April 11, 1945, the day before he died. He was 63 years old on January 30, 1945. Compare it with Lincoln's last photograph above, when he was 56.
Elizabeth Shoumatoff's romanticized unfinished portrait, seeing him as she remembered him, not as the terribly tired and ill man he was, April 12, 1945. He sat at his desk as Shoumatoff painted, two good women who admired him and made no demands beside him — Daisy Suckley and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. He said to Madame Shoumatoff that he had only 10 minutes more to sit for her painting. Suddenly he put his hand to his temple, and complained of a terrible pain in the back of his head, His journey was done, his job, like his portrait, unfinished, but the United Nations in prospect, the peace he tirelessly sought. Hitler was beaten. Japan's surrender would follow. I loved him as PaPa. My grandmother told Vice-President Truman in her characteristic quiet voice, "Harry, the president is dead." He asked if there was anything he could do for her, to which she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."
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Of course the unscrupulous moneychangers — like JP Morgan Chase, fined an unprecedented $13 billion yesterday, — have returned, as they always have. Chase will not pay $13 billion; much of the fine is tax deductible, and Chase reliably will pass it on to us, the American public. No one speaks today with the force and clarity of FDR about moneychangers in their temple of acquisitiveness. Their place is secure; too secure.
by a physician devoted to enhancing the lives of elderly people
[My own comments follow her short piece]
17 Nov 2013
The 1.4 million people who live in nursing homes are among the most vulnerable, powerless individuals in American society. They are old (mean age 79.2), they are physically frail (60% are unable to do 4 or more of the most basic daily activities), and most of them are cognitively impaired, many of them severely (39%).
Nursing homes have come a long way since the bad old days when residents were tied up, neglected, and abused, and one of the stratagems for improving care has been the “care planning meeting.”
A plan of care must be developed by the facility staff for all new admissions to nursing homes that are Medicare or Medicaid certified, addressing physical, emotional, and medical needs. These plans are reviewed on a quarterly basis—more often if there is a major change in status, such as a hospitalization. And one of the innovations of the last decade is to invite family members to participate in care planning meetings. This gives families information about their loved one and an opportunity to make suggestions and raise concerns.
But one issue that neither staff nor families routinely raise and that the many websites that advise families about how to negotiate the unfamiliar nursing home terrain is medications. And that, especially in light of recent revelations, is an essential question.
The recent revelation is that Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest drug company, just settled a variety of civil and criminal complaints about its sales of the psychiatric drug Risperidone (Risperdal) for $2.2 billion (yes, that’s billion) J&J “accepted accountability” for misbranding Risperdal as useful for treating elderly patients with dementia, for marketing Risperdal for the elderly, and for paying kickbacks to both physicians and to Omnicare, the largest pharmacy supplying nursing homes, for using the drug.
It’s been known for quite some time that drugs like risperidone, an “atypical” neuroleptic used in the treatment of schizophrenia, come with considerable side effects. Though less likely to cause Parkinsonian symptoms than earlier “typical” neuroleptics such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) or haloperidol (Haldol), it can cause sedation, low blood pressure, and dry mouth, among other symptoms. Then it was shown to increase the risk of diabetes and weight gain. And a meta-analysis in 2005 found it increased the risk of sudden death by 60-79%, which led to the FDA issuing a “black box” warning—a warning on the risperidone label, highlighting its hazards.
Families and physicians might have been willing to accept the risk of side effects and even of death when the drug was used in people who were already very old and very sick, if it had been effective. Unfortunately, a series of studies looking at whether risperidone and other “atypical neuroleptics” (similar drugs in the same class) were effective in controlling the behavioral symptoms of dementia—problems such as agitation or paranoia—found only limited evidence that it achieves these goals.
Since behavioral symptoms are often very difficult to control and create problems both for the patient and for nursing homes, physicians have continued to use neuroleptics including risperidone “off label,” that is for uses other than those for which the FDA approved them. This is an entirely legitimate practice. What is not legal is for drug companies to advertise their drugs for use in these conditions or to bribe physicians or pharmacies to use the drugs.
The Justice Department is hoping that the new settlement (in which, by the way, J&J does not admit any wrongdoing) will stop the prevailing practice and serve as a deterrent to this kind of behavior in the future. Given that GlaxoSmithKline settled with the government last year for $3 billion over similar behavior with respect to two antidepressants (Paxil and Wellbutrin), along with a diabetes drug, and that Pfizer made a payment of $2.3 billion in 2009 over inappropriate marketing of several other drugs, it’s not so clear that ithe deal will deter outrageous behavior.
[Emphasis added by the editor of Reckonings in the following paragraph.]
It is entirely possible that settlements of this kind are seen by Big Pharma [the big pharmaceutical companies] as the cost of doing business. Everybody misbehaves all the time [they assume]; occasionally a company is caught; on balance, a periodic payoff may be worth the tremendous benefits. After all, at its peak in 2007, J&J sold $4.5 billion worth of Risperdal. The company has now signed a 5-year “corporate integrity agreement” in addition to paying the fine, but analogous agreements signed by medical device manufacturers in the past led to no substantive changes in behavior.
So in those care planning meetings in the nursing home, if they ask nothing else, family members should ask “what drugs is mom on?” And that should be followed by “why is she on them?” and “are they helping?” And if there is no good reason for giving the medication, ask that it be stopped, especially neuroleptics. It will save mom a lot of misery—and save money for all of us.
[Editor's note: If you are such a family member, I suggest two of you take turns asking the questions. Everyone in a hospital needs an ally, visitors as well as patients. Be kind but firm. You are there for answers you can understand. Say "medications" rather than "drugs": there is no substantive difference, but medication is the name doctors are accustomed to hearing, and he/she is more likely to think you are serious. Ask "Why is she taking those medications?" Then, "Is it helping?"
Listen to the answers. If you find an answer confusing, say so. Write down the names of the drugs Don't be afraid to ask the doctor to spell them - drugs often have complicated names, especially if they are generics and no one is being paid to dream up fancy and memorable propriatory names like Zoloft, Restoril, Prozac, Celexa, Valium, Effexor). I am a psychologist, so I tend to remember propriatory names for meds to treat mental and emotional distress. See also Daniel Carlat's article, "Mind Over Meds," published in The New York Times in April of 2010.
If the doctor is abrupt or impatient — he has, after all, other patients to attend — don't be put off. Stay the course. If he says he has to go, ask when you may speak with him. Talk with other family members and the one who is hospitalized, and then do your own careful research at home. There are several reliable websites on medications, including those of NIH and NIMH, and commercial sites like www.webmd.com and www.rxlist.com.
That care planning meeting should be the start of an important conversation, not its end.]
Farrar, Straus & Giroux has just published a short, delicate and extraordinary book, a facsimile copy of Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal, written when she was a 20 year old student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1946 and 1947.
It was intended, of course, as a private journal, not for publication, and was found among her papers after her death. At that precocious age her passionate religiosigy and her remarkable gift for writing prefigure her later published work, most usefully gathered in the Library of America one-volume edition of her collected published works. As Marilynne Robinson notes in the review of the journal reprinted below, O'Connor's journal is addressed to God. "The brillance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in [it]... This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind." And soul. She is already aware that there is no way we can know God, that we are always getting in the way of our relationship with God, although we can in a host of ways ask God's help in getting less in the way, even getting out of the way. But, in O'Connor's inspired use of the word, our attention is always fugitive.
Reading O'Connor's words, I sometimes wonder why it does not occur to all of us to create at one or another time in our lives something kin to her prayer journal. That leads me to want to understand how that journal, in more than aesthetic terms, evolved into her published writing. What does it have in common with those stories that are at once so wonderful, compelling and hard — Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge.
After all, her journal is a youthful expression of what we commonly call our practice or our vocation, if by those terms we mean our most wholehearted devotion to life.
Perhaps for most of us it is less a matter of conscious choice than what we have called, in various times and places, what has come to us unbidden, as accretion, conversion, discovery, a conversation that began in an ordinary way and then somehow became extraordinary, in Martin Buber's language, a transition from I-It to I-You or I-Thou. Our true vocation or calling may appear slowly or in a radical encounter or discovery. We may have been saying it, practicing for it, a long time, and one day come upon the familiar in a way that is wholly new, find it extraordinary, then with practice ordinary again, a gift of our capacity for life. We grew up saying, say, the Lord's Prayer — "on earth as it is in heaven." Then we may be granted a realization of what is truly meant by "Not my will, Lord, but Thine." Eliot wrote in "Ash Wednesday," "Teach us to sit still, even among these rocks, our peace in His will." And -— at least if we are given anything like her gifts, even in much lesser measure, we are always learning, practicing, forgetting, learning again, finding practice where we least expected it.
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I want to include here for interested Reckonings readers, three things. The order is important if unconventional: first, a review of the slim book in the current (November 17, 2013) New York Times Book Review by one of our finest contemporary novelists (Housekeeping, Gilead and Home) and essayists (especially When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012); second, a brief introduction to the book by the publisher, and third, an excerpt from O'Connor's journal itself.
Marilynne Robinson's review is most valuable as an introduction, as Robinson, a woman and a gifted writer of great intelligence and sensitivity, familiar with O'Connor's later published stories and novels, and a person of faith, comes closer to meeting the young Flannery O'Connor on her own ground (something that can only be approximated, except by God). The publisher's introduction is a more conventional introduction, perhaps, and still valuable, even eloquent.
I hope my wish to offer the last, a brief excerpt from the journal itself, is self-explanatory.
1. Here is Marilynne Robinson's review.
November 15, 2013 The New York Times Book Review
The Believer
By Marilynne Robinson
A PRAYER JOURNAL By Flannery O’Connor 96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18.
This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.
The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.” Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play.
It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. O’Connor’s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her “with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,” she begins the next entry: “Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — just like the typewriter was mine.”
Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O’Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O’Connor, were naïve, sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism ever can be.
While O’Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she was also a daily communicant at St. Mary’s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. She says: “I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church.” She knows all the arguments against religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of “Wise Blood,” the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic.
The young writer prays, “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.” At prayer she is scrupulous in her candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She says, “Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.” This might serve as a gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a world. She asks: “Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that’s all right. Maybe if I’m doing it it’s all right?” Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its writer’s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has thanked God: “I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. . . . Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right — or any wrong.”
The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind.
Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead,” and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books was published last year [2012].
2. This is the introduction to A Prayer Journal offered by its publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
" I would like to write a beautiful prayer,' writes the young Flannery O’Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. “There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise.” Written between 1946 and 1947 while O’Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O’Connor’s singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. “I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You.”
O’Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: “Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted,” she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story.”
As W. A. Sessions, who knew O’Connor, writes in his introduction [in the book itself], it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel,Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O’Connor’s own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman’s coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.
A quick interpolation, an excerpt from James Parker's review in The Atlantic:
“Miraculous . . . Both a blueprint for her fiction and a prophetic dreaming-out of her life’s purpose and pattern . . . Beneath the surface, as recorded on the 47 and a half handwritten pages to which we now have access, [O’Connor] was refining her vocation with the muscularity and spiritual ferocity of a young saint-in-waiting.”
___________________
3. And here, finally, is the brief excerpt from Flannery O'Connor's journal itself, made available by the publisher:
“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon . . . “I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside . . . “I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You.”
Maria Popova, a fine writer and proprietor of the online journal, Brain Pickings, recently wrote about a letter Susan Sontag addressed to Jorge Luis Borges, and an essay Sontag wrote about Borges after his death. Collectively they are powerful literary statements — and resonant of psyche and spirit — expressive, in Sontag's phrase, of “serenity and transcendence of self.”
Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag
Popova begins by introducing the circumstances —
"In October of 1982, 83-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who at that point had been blind for nearly 30 years, gathered sixty of his closest friends and admirers at a special dinner in New York. Susan Sontag was there. Speaking to a reporter covering the event, she captured the enormity of Borges’s spirit and significance with her signature eloquent precision, saying:“There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.”
"Borges died four years later.
"On the 10th anniversary of his death, Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled“Letter to Borges,” penned on June 13, 1996, and included in her 2001 collection, Where the Stress Falls: Essays.
"Sontag begins the letter, the proposition of which she deems not “too odd” since Borges’s literature has always been 'placed under the sign of eternity,' with a sublime paean to his genius and humility:
You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.
You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.
The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.
"Sontag signs off by tying the two — the beauty of Borges and the beauty of books — back together with her signature blend of deeply personal reflection and universally resonant insight:
Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books— of reading itself— be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!)
All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.
Editor's note [Reckonings]: simply a suggestion. Read it again. Then read Borges, at least some of his poems, his stories, his essays. Most of them, thankfully, are available in English, primarily in three companion books in the same format, Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, and Selected Non-Fictions. We are fortunate that the work of Borges has drawn able translators, Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, John Updike.
Maria Popova, a fine writer and proprietor of the online journal, Brain Pickings, recently wrote about a letter Susan Sontag addressed to Jorge Luis Borges, and an essay Sontag wrote about Borges after his death. Collectively they are powerful literary statements — and resonant of psyche and spirit — expressive, in Sontag's phrase, of “serenity and transcendence of self.”
Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag
Popova begins by introducing the circumstances —
"In October of 1982, 83-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who at that point had been blind for nearly 30 years, gathered sixty of his closest friends and admirers at a special dinner in New York. Susan Sontag was there. Speaking to a reporter covering the event, she captured the enormity of Borges’s spirit and significance with her signature eloquent precision, saying:“There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.”
"Borges died four years later.
"On the 10th anniversary of his death, Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled“Letter to Borges,” penned on June 13, 1996, and included in her 2001 collection, Where the Stress Falls: Essays.
"Sontag begins the letter, the proposition of which she deems not “too odd” since Borges’s literature has always been 'placed under the sign of eternity,' with a sublime paean to his genius and humility:
You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.
You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.
The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.
"Sontag signs off by tying the two — the beauty of Borges and the beauty of books — back together with her signature blend of deeply personal reflection and universally resonant insight:
Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books— of reading itself— be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.
Editor's note: simply a suggestion. Read it again. Then read Borges, his poems, his stories, his essays. Most of them, thankfully, are available in English, primarily in three companion books in the same format, Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, and Selected Non-Fictions.We are fortunate that the work of Borges has drawn able translators, Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, John Updike.
According to The New York Times, "Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004 for a four-year mission, but was so successful that NASA gave it a two-year extension, to September 2010. Then, in February [of 2013], NASA extended it a second time for what it calls the Solstice mission, lasting until Saturn's northern hemisphere summer in 2017.... "
The Solstice mission — when the sun stops: when the sun is still, and we may see in awe.
Wikipedia observes, "Of the many ways in which solstice can be defined, one of the most common (and perhaps most easily understood) is by the astronomical phenomenon for which it is named, which is readily observable by anyone on Earth: a 'sun-standing.' This modern scientific word [is derived] from a Latin scientific word in use in the late Roman republic of the 1st century BC: solstitium. Pliny uses it a number of times in his Natural History with the same meaning that it has today. It contains two Latin-language morphemes, sol, 'sun', and -stitium, 'stoppage.'
"During the northern solstice, places on the Arctic Circle will see the Sun just on the horizon at midnight, and all places north of the Arctic Circle will see the Sun above the horizon for 24 hours, an entire day. That is the midnight sun, or midsummer-night, or polar day. Places on the Antarctic Circle will see the Sun on the horizon at midday, and all places south of the Antarctic Circle will not see the Sun above the horizon at any time of day. That is the midnight sun, or midsummer-night sun, or polar day. That is the polar night. During the solstice in December the effects on the two hemispheres are exactly the opposite."
On Feb. 5, 2006, Cassini took the photograph below of two of Saturn's moons, the tiny, frozen Enceladus set against the smoggy, golden Titan.
And here are two more of Saturn's moons, the smaller moving in back of the larger, emerging on the right.
A 1969 triptych by Francis Bacon sold Tuesday night at Christie’s for $142.4 million, described as the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction.
Seven bidders vied for the painting – “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” – that depicts Bacon’s friend and rival, Lucian Freud, sitting on a wooden chair against an orange background. It ended up selling for $142,405,000.
"Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America’s spymasters had made just that mistake. If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in May and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other. In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be....
"Conceptually speaking, we’ve never seen anything like the National Security Agency’s urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet -- to keep track of humanity, all of humanity, from its major leaders to obscure figures in the backlands of the planet. And the fact is that, within the scope of what might be technologically feasible in our era, they seem not to have missed an opportunity.
"[T]he NSA has at least 35,000 employees, possibly as many as 55,000, and an almost $11 billion budget....
"Along with the giant Internet corporations, they have been involved in a process aimed at taking away the very notion of a right to privacy in our world; yet they utterly failed to grasp the basic lesson they have taught the rest of us. If we live in an era of no privacy, there are no exemptions; if, that is, it’s an age of no-privacy for us, then it’s an age of no-privacy for them, too.
"The word 'conspiracy' is an interesting one in this context. It comes from the Latin conspirare for 'breathe the same air.' In order to do that, you need to be a small group in a small room. Make yourself the largest surveillance outfit on the planet, hire tens of thousands of private contractors — young computer geeks plunged into a situation that would have boggled the mind of George Orwell — and organize a system of storage and electronic retrieval that puts much at an insider’s fingertips, and you’ve just kissed secrecy goodnight and put it to bed for the duration.
"[I]t’s reasonable to assume that, while U.S. spymasters and operators were working at the technological frontiers of surveillance and cryptography, their model for success was distinctly antiquated. However unconsciously, they were still living with a World War II-style mindset. Back then, in an all-out military conflict between two sides, listening in on enemy communications had been at least one key to winning the war. Breaking the German Enigma codes meant knowing precisely where the enemy’s U-boats were, just as breaking Japan’s naval codes ensured victory in the Battle of Midway and elsewhere.
"Unfortunately for the NSA and two administrations in Washington, our world isn’t so clear-cut any more. Breaking the codes, whatever codes, isn’t going to do the trick. You may be able to pick up every kind of communication in Pakistan or Egypt, but even if you could listen to or read them all (and the NSA doesn’t have the linguists or the time to do so), instead of simply drowning in useless data, what good would it do you?
"What’s perhaps most striking ... is the inability of the Obama administration and its intelligence bureaucrats to grasp the nature of what’s happening to them. For that, they would need to skip those daily briefs from an intelligence community which, on the subject, seems blind, deaf, and dumb, and instead take a clear look at the world.
"In short, if the NSA’s surveillance lineup was classic New York Yankees, their season is shaping up as a last-place finish.
"Here, then, is the bottom line of the scorecard for twenty-first century Washington: omniscience, maybe; omnipotence, forget it; intelligence, not a bit of it; and no end in sight.
"[Note: A small bow of thanks to Adam Hochschild and John Cobb for helping spark this piece into existence.]"
Reckonings Editor's note: Tom Engelhardt is rarely responsible for slipping up, and this one is a minor, puzzling and forgivable overstatement —not omnipotence and not omniscience either, unless one counts sheer dead weight as the sum of knowledge. Also, it can and should be clear from reading Tom's account that intelligence is not intrinsically intelligent. This is downright Orwellian. More is less. Strength is weakness. So perhaps less Orwell's 1984, more Alice in Wonderland. No wonder (he said) I spent only one summer in Washington. It was not the heat or humidity that drove me out, not even the weighty responsibility of being the State Department's desk officer for Outer Space. In fact, that was not my title. I was a desk officer in the State Department, but even the State Department was not so crazy as to imagine the US owned outer space. My responsibility was to know the Communications Satellite Corporation, then a plublic-private enterprise. The best part was flying weekly to the United Nations to brief our ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, one of my heros. He was a fine man, if not a successful candidate for president, having the misfortune to be running against Dwight D. Eisenhower (not one of my heros, but a decent man, a good president, a fine general. I think my grandmother was in love with Adlai Stevenson, and he with her. He inscribed a biography about his life, Stuart Brown'sAdlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics, "To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience."
Another small bow of thanks to Tom Engelhardt for his astute analysis. Interested readers should go to www.tomdispatch.com, for diverse and consistently intelligent voices on public affairs from foreign and military policy to environmental issues, including Rebecca Solnit, Adam Hochschild, Ann Jones, Peter Van Buren, Jeremy Scahill, Bill McKibben, Andrew Bacevich, and in the old days, Chalmers Johnson. TomDispatch is invaluable. So is Tom.
Lisel Mueller is an accomplished poet. She was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. Her family
was forced to flee the Nazis when she was 15.
"In November" is full of Mueller's gifts of language, sensitive imagination and insight. Like (and unlike) Christian Wiman, Stanley Kunitz and Emily Dickinson, she is a manifold survivor and a builder of bridges. Her poems are a gift to us, a blessing, a witness to grace in living. She has lived many lives and knows miracles and the grace of God. Even more - not more than the grace of God - there is the title poem of her collection, Alive Together.
Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection; Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award; Learning to Play by Ear (1990); and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her other awards and honors include the Carl Sandburg Award, the Helen Bullis Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
“I am always haunted by the sense that I could have been someone else, there but for the grace of God go I, that kind of thing, and that's a reason I chose as my title poem, or as a title for the book, the poem ‘Alive Together,’ which is in the book and was written quite a few years ago, and which is a kind of catalogue of all the people I was thinking of who I might have been at various times in history, and the miracle and the accident that it is that any of us are who we are.” Mueller’s work frequently treats history, as well as the folk and fairy tales she studied as a graduate student.
“I write a lot of poems that have tension between what is going on now in society and what has always been there. My poems are much concerned with history. The message is obvious. My family went through terrible times. In Europe no one has had a private life not affected by history. I'm constantly aware of how privileged we [Americans] are.”
“Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments. It was only after my husband and I built our house in Lake County, Illinois, near Libertyville, that my consciousness changed. On the first morning in our new home I woke up to the mooing of cows. Cows under my window, thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago! But there they were, rubbing against the fence that separated our one-acre lot from our neighbor's 200-acre estate, and they were Holsteins, the only cows I knew from vacations in the flat North German countryside of my childhood. That was my initiation, and after 40 years in this house I know what time of day it is by the way the light slants. I am intimately familiar with the names and habits of the wildflowers and the birds that live in our hawthorns and aspens. We all live together, in the world and in my poems.”
In
November
by Lisel Mueller
Outside
the house the wind is howling
and the
trees are creaking horribly.
This is
an old story
with
its old beginning,
as I
lay me down to sleep.
But
when I wake up, sunlight
has
taken over the room.
You
have already made the coffee
and the
radio brings us music
from a
confident age. In the paper
bad
news is set in distant places.
Whatever
was bound to happen
in my
story did not happen.
But I
know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps
a name was changed.
A small
mistake. Perhaps
a woman
I do not know
is
facing the day with the heavy heart
that,
by all rights, should have been mine.
Alive Together
Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive with anyone under the sun, when I might have been Abelard's woman or the whore of a Renaissance pope or a peasant wife with not enough food and not enough love, with my children dead of the plague. I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with the golden nose, who poked it into the business of stars, or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth. I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas or a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, my daughter, lost in a drunken bet. I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff. I like to think I might have been Mary Shelley in love with a wrong-headed angel, or Mary's friend. I might have been you. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists in square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who-but for endless ifs- might have missed out on being alive together with marvels and follies and longings and lies and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance.
Here is a wonderful letter from Harvey Cox to The New York Times, courtesy of my friend George Wilson, who is Cox's good friend:
Dear Editor:
I read your article (Sunday 10 Nov.) just after returning
from Rome where I met Pope Francis personally after he had spoken to
twenty thousand enthusiastic people from at least a dozen countries in St.
Peter’s Square. He has an immense job ahead of him, and of course he will face
some opposition. Yet in talking with him he seemed calm and centered, but open
and unassuming. He listens well, and has already sent a questionnaire asking a
billion Catholics for their views on important issues facing the Church. As we
parted, he took my hand in both his and asked me to pray for him. I intend to,
and I wish those who are already grumbling about him would cease their
complaining and do the same.
Harvey Cox,
Hollis Professor of Divinity
Harvard University
________________________________
Prescience
I make no claim to prescience - foreknowledge of something before it happens; even less to precognition, which has become associated with paranormal psychology and extrasensory perception, although the word's Latin origin (præ-, "before" + cognitio, "acquiring knowledge") suggests nothing about extrasensory knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge is always tenuous, tentative and developmental, although it can sometimes feel like it happens in a flash of what we usually call insight.
Perhaps waking from a dream - we have, after all, been engaged in what Freud called "dream work" while asleep - we may discover that we have found the solution to last night's puzzle. Usually that means we have loosened our hold on the felt need for the solution. That may seem like precognition - in effect, we think we knew the solution before we knew we knew it - and is usually a pleasant surprise. Dierdre Barrett, a professor of behavioral medicine at Harvard Medical School, published a study of "dream incubation" in the journal Dreaming in 1993, suggesting that going to sleep with a problem on one's mind often resulted in memorable dreams about that problem, leaving a conscious residual movement towards solution.
I've wandered from prescience, but not very far. And I have yet to come to Pope Francis. So I'll cut to the chase. More useful words than prescience are premonition and intuition. Carl Jung sometimes referred to intuition as the capability to "see around corners." A useful analogy, but only that. We don't literally have x-ray capacity to see through the brick wall to what remains invisible around the corner. The analogy is nonetheless useful because it returns us to our senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, the shiver of embodied anticipation: all contribute to our sense of what's "around the corner." So do our hopes and fears.
Pope Francis
So to Pope Francis. Since hearing of his seemingly offhand remark about gay life and marriage, "Who am I to judge?," I've been listening to Francis with hope for - premonition of - a more tolerant, humane and humble papacy. As John Feffer has recently remarked, Pope Francis "has brought the Franciscan ethos of humility into the magnificent halls of the Vatican. Indeed, Pope Francis signaled his new style by eschewing the richly appointed papal apartment in favor of the Saint Marta hotel. That’s a four-star accommodation, but it’s still a step down from where his predecessors bunked. It allows the new pope to maintain some distance from the flatteries and intrigues of the Vatican, what he has called 'the leprosy of the papacy.'
He has expressed the view "that the Church should be more catholic in its embrace of others: gays, atheists, those who use contraception, those overcome with doubt. He has even gone so far as to call proselytism 'solemn nonsense.'" Feffer writes that there three distinct realms in which Pope Francis may bring a kind of liberation theology to the Church, specifically in the United States.
The first is immigration: "In September, the new pope emphatically stood with the vulnerable with his message on the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. 'Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity.... They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more.”
So Feffer writes,
"To do: Perhaps a visit by Pope Francis to key House districts in the United States could provide the push the Obama administration needs to get comprehensive immigration reform, which the Senate passed over the summer, through Congress."
Feffer's second realm is economic justice: the enormous problem of growing inequality. "After all, Feffer reminds us, "he adopted his name to honor the legacy of Francis of Assisi, who abandoned his wealth to live practically as a beggar, ministering to the poor, the lepers, and the animals. Last month, Francis decried the 'globalization of indifference' and urged world leaders to break down 'the barriers of individualism and the slavery of profit at all cost.' He has not been afraid to point fingers. Growing inequality has resulted 'from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, thus denyng the right of control to States, which are charged with providing for the common good.'"
A second To Do: "Pope Francis has already met with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim to talk about ways to alleviate extreme poverty. Perhaps he could next meet with the IMF’s Christine Lagarde to roll back the austerity mindset that dominates thinking about the global economy."
Finally, the realm of Islam:
"Pope Francis has sought to repair ties with the world of Islam. As Akbar Ahmed and Craig Considine have written in The Washington Post, 'Before an audience of ambassadors from 180 countries, he explained how he wanted to work for peace and bridge-building between peoples. Muslims and Catholics, he claimed, needed to intensify their dialogue. Positive shockwaves were sent into Muslim-Catholic circles, and Muslim scholars and religious institutions around the world welcomed Pope Francis’s election.'"
To do: "Pope Francis could help the world move from the heightened tensions of the post-9/11 era into an era of mutual understanding. Maybe it’s time for another major address in Cairo, with a new and more pointed message about the need to cooperate across confessional boundaries."
Feffer concludes, "If Pope Francis's audacity not only shakes up the Catholic Church (Vatican III, anyone?) but also helps to reframe globalization and geopolitics (a tall order indeed), then the Nobel committee might start thinking about awarding its first peace prize to a pontiff."
________________________
Another important message from the Vatican, reported by Agence France Press:
The Vatican on Tuesday launched an unprecedented worldwide consultation on the new realities of family life including gay marriage as part of Pope Francis’s efforts to reform the Catholic Church.
A questionnaire has been sent to bishops around the world asking them for detailed information about the “many new situations requiring the Church’s attention and pastoral care”.
“Concerns which were unheard of until a few years ago have arisen today as a result of different situations, from the widespread practice of cohabitation… to same-sex unions,” it said.
The 39 questions are unusual because of their non-judgemental, practical nature in what could be a signal of greater openness and increased pastoral care regardless of a believer’s background.
Referring to gay couples, one questions asks: “What pastoral attention can be given to people who have chosen to live in these types of union?”
“In the case of unions of persons of the same sex who have adopted children, what can be done pastorally in light of transmitting the faith?”
On remarried divorcees, who under the current rules are not allowed to receive Holy Communion in a Catholic church, the questionnaire asks: “Do they feel marginalised or suffer from the impossibility of receiving the sacraments?”
On divorce and separated couples in general, it asks: “How do you deal with this situation in appropriate pastoral programmes?”
The initiative is part of preparations for a synod of bishops next year and another in 2015 that the Vatican said will formulate “working guidelines in the pastoral care of the person and the family”.
Lorenzo Baldisseri, head of the synod of bishops, told reporters that the meeting’s theme “reflects very well the pastoral zeal with which the Holy Father wishes to approach the proclamation of the Gospel to the family in today’s world”.
He said the consultation also showed Francis, who has said the Catholic Church is too “Vatican-centric”, wanted more “collegiality”.
Cardinal Peter Erdo, president of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe, referred in particular to the increase in cohabiting Catholic couples who do not intend to marry, saying “the phenomenon requires a deepened reflection.”
Pope Francis has shown a more open style since being elected in March and a desire to bring the Catholic Church more in touch with the lives of ordinary people, although experts say he is unlikely to bring about major changes in doctrine.
Francis has said priests should baptise children even when the parents are not married and, when asked recently about his views on gays, he replied: “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?”
Meditation entails open awareness, attention at once focused and unfocused. Daniel Goleman, student of mind and brain, whose sister once kindly found me a job, writes thoughtfully about such awareness in his new book, Focus (HarperCollins, 2013). But a more useful and immediately available resource may be Nicholas Carr's review of Focus in The New York Times (well, if not more useful, certainly less demanding of our attention, and cheaper — Carr can be snippy and not above the cheap shot —"Focus lacks focus").
"[Open awareness]," Carr writes, "is a form of attentiveness characterized by 'utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind.' Experiments suggest it’s also the source of our most creative thoughts. Going beyond 'orienting,' in which we deliberately gather information, and 'selective attention,' in which we concentrate on solving a particular problem, open awareness frees the brain to make the 'serendipitous associations' that lead to fresh insights. Artists and inventors alike seem unusually adept at such productive daydreaming.
"We tend to think of attention as a switch that’s on or off — we’re focused or we’re distracted. That’s a misperception [and a bad analogy]. Attention, as Goleman explains, comes in many varieties. Its extreme forms tend to be the most limiting. When we’re too attentive, we fall victim to tunnel vision. The mind narrows. When attention is absent, we lose control of our thoughts. We turn into scatterbrains. Open awareness lies in a particularly fertile area between the poles. It gives us entry into what Nathaniel Hawthorne, in one of his notebooks, described as 'that pleasant mood of mind where gaiety and pensiveness intermingle.'”
What a wonderful phrase, from an old master who knew whereof he wrote. Open awareness has been around for a very long time, longer in the East than in the West. It is often and rightly associated with Zen practice. I remember the writings of Alan Watts and Philip Kapleau, and of course Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
I meditate, once a week in a group with a fine teacher, and every day in the early morning and early evening, dawn and dusk, those two times I have always thought magic and not to be missed.
The religious traditions of West and East recognize these as sacred time, times of prayer, the fading of dark and the coming of light, sunrise; the fading of light at end of day, sunset, homecoming, the hearth where we tell and listen to stories.
Frederick Buechner, in the following passage, draws a distinction between diffused and focused consciousness, and identifies the latter with his experience of meditation. In my own experience, meditation draws upon both kinds of consciousness, or perhaps better said, upon a range of ways of being in the world. I do enjoy Buechner's likening the mind to a balloon, and the experience of meditation is often as he describes — oneness, pervasive lovingkindness, no watcher, no watched, all subject, no object. There is only a rose, a fire, and then "the fire and the rose are one."
Ultimately there is only one, called by many names and none. T.S. Eliot, at the end of his masterpiece, Four Quartets,
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Meditation
When not focusing on anything in particular, the mind skitters around mindlessly among whatever thoughts happen to present themselves. To think is to direct the mind in a more or less systematic way along a specific sequence of thoughts toward a specific end. To meditate is to open the mind to a single thought until it fills the mind so completely that there is no room left for anything else. If you compare the mind to a balloon, meditation as a religious technique is the process of inflating it with a single thought to the point where the balloon finally bursts and there is no longer even the thinnest skin between what is inside it and what is outside it. The thinker and the thought become one in much the same way that if you concentrate long enough on watching a fire burn, after a while the distinction between you as the one that is watching and the fire as the one that is being watched disappears, and you yourself burst into flames.
Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations
Now and then - more now than then - we encounter evidence of the astonishing gifts of the
Internet. Needless to say, just as frequently we are bombarded by evidence to
the contrary. That issue will endure.
Here is one such gift, from Andrew Revkin of The New York Times:
David Rothenberg’s engaging reflection on
evolution and aesthetics, Survival of the Beautiful,came to mind as this amazing photograph, taken in
Dubai by Peter Roosenschoon, a conservation officer at the Dubai Desert
Conservation Reserve, circulated on Twitter (thanks to Ziya Tong, a host of Daily
Planet, a Discovery program in Canada)
[David Rothenberg's extraordinary book, Survival
of the Beautiful, is more than an "engaging reflection."
I did a bit of sifting and found more photos from Roosenschoon on the UAE
Birding Web site and a very nice description of what’s known about this species
in The National, an English language Emirates newspaper. Here’s an excerpt from
the fascinating piece, by Anna Zacharias:
[A] closer examination of the transparent wings of Goniurellia tridens reveals
a piece of evolutionary art. Each wing carries a precisely detailed image of an
ant-like insect, complete with six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and
tapered abdomen.
“The image on the wing is absolutely perfect,” says Dr. Brigitte Howarth, the
fly specialist at Zayed University [link] who first discovered G. tridens in
the UAE.
It is a member of tephritidae, a family – there are two – of 5,000 species of
fruit flies whose colorful markings have earned them the name “peacock flies.”
In the UAE alone, 27 picture wing species are known. Some have wings bearing
simple shapes but others, like G. tridens, are far more complex.
Dr Howarth first saw G. tridens on an oleander shrub in northern Oman. “I was
looking at the stem of the leaves and I noticed that there were some insects
crawling around. When I sort of honed in I started to notice what I thought was
a couple of ants moving around.”
At first she suspected an infestation on the fly’s wings. “But it was so
symmetrical that I thought, ‘oh this is not possible’. When I got it under the
microscope I realized that these were insects painted onto the wings.”
Editor's note: Here is a brief characterization of David Rothenberg:
David Rothenberg is a rarity--an actual polymath--and his writing, like the music he
plays, reveals an extraordinary mixture of curiosity, intelligence, and
playfulness. Tracing complex ideas that link consciousness, human spirit, and
creativity within the framework of Darwinian theory leads to the sort of book
you would expect from a man who makes music with whales and cicadas. Where does
the impetus for the making of art and music reside? How does that fit into an
evolutionary scheme? Read this book and enter into Rothenberg's world. You will
be rewarded with an exploration of these questions that is both entertaining
and revelatory.
Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, was co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East." Rabin was assassinated in Jerusalem exactly a year later, on November 4, 1995, by an Israeli Jewish separatist who regarded Rabin as a traitor to the cause of a Jewish state of Israel.
When he traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Prize a year earlier, Rabin asked his friend, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), to accompany him and read from his poems at the Nobel ceremony.
Later Amichai himself was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1982 he received the Israel Prize for Poetry for effecting “a revolutionary change in poetry’s language.”
Amichai knew war intimately, having survived World War II as a Jew in Germany, and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973-74 and 1982.
(The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Hundred Years of War, by James L. Gelvin. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Amichai read his poem "God has pity on kindergarten children" at the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. The poem is inscribed on a wall at the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv.
God has pity on kindergarten children, He pities school children — less. But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them, And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours In the scorching sand To reach the dressing station, Streaming with blood.
But perhaps He will have pity on those who love truly And take care of them And shade them Like a tree over the sleeper on the public bench.
Perhaps even we will spend on them Our last pennies of kindness Inherited from mother,
So that their own happiness will protect us Now and on other days.
Amichai wrote "Wildpeace" later, in memory of his friend Rabin.
Wildpeace
Not the peace of a cease-fire not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.)
Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.
Here is one more poem from that volume, expressive of the manifold experience of resurrection:
Resurrection
Afterward they will get up all together, and with a sound of chairs scraping they will face the narrow exit.
And their clothes are crumpled and covered with dust and cigarette ashes and their hand discovers in the inside pocket a ticket stub from a very previous season.
And their faces are still crisscrossed with God’s will. And their eyes are red from so much sleeplessness under the ground.
And right away, questions: What time is it? Where did you put mine? When? When?
And one of them can be seen in an ancient scanning of the sky, to see if rain. Or a woman, with an age-old gesture, wipes her eyes and lifts the heavy hair at the back of her neck.
