I've made a kind of joke out of missing the sexual revolution in the 1960s. I was married in 1958, the marriage lasted eighteen years, those eighteen years ran right through the sexual revolution, and I did my best to stay faithful and save my marriage, because two people were seldom as different as my first wife and me and if I had been unfaithful we wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was I did fall miserably in love with somebody halfway through, and suffered for it for at least a year. But we had kids.
Still, all around me men and women were getting laid at a great rate, and my friend Bart and I used to get together once in a while and lament our bad fortune at missing it. To miss it was to miss out on the times, the zeitgeist, as if life was passing one by. I felt as if I were standing on the river bank and everybody else was midstream, bouncing up and down on their wild ride through the rapids. They, of course, were laughing. I was biting my lips. Isn't it important to be part of one's times, to get on the horse, to participate in history, live life as fully as possible?
Actually that's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer to it. Would Emily Dickinson have done better if she left her house once in a while, joined the Lady's Village Improvement Society, sang solos in church, had an affair? Henry James had an extremely social life but apparently never had sex with a woman, and probably not with a man, either, although it seems likely he was gay. But it doesn't seem to have kept him from understanding a great deal about human beings. I read most of the first volume of his collected letters a few years ago and found out that, a, he suffered from severe constipation, b, he once attended a dissection in a teaching hospital in Europe and watched as they took a dead body apart, c, he walked over the Alps, Switzerland to Italy, and then down into the Italian valleys, and d, he fell into a kind of ecstasy as he walked around Rome for the first time and wound up living in Rome for a grand total of four years off and on during his life. There are those who think he could have used a good lay, but I'm not one of them.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll--basically, I missed them all. Born too soon, I suppose. Rock and roll I'm not in the least sorry about. I love the Beatles but can't stand heavy metal or the Rolling Stones or the loudness of the whole business. The loudness is just noise, and it barely has structure for me and no appeal at all. Once Lorraine and I were in Oregon, we were having dinner with a friend of mine, Jody Proctor, and his wife Kit Sibert, and also with the drummer for the Blues Travelers, a well-known rock group; the drummer was engaged to Jody's daughter and after dinner we would all go to an auditorium where the Blues Travelers would be giving a concert. Before we left Jody gave us ear plugs. We never got past the intro band. It was deafening, even with ear plugs. I hated it. I'm a quiet man. We sometimes wind up at dinner parties with shouters, men especially who get a bit drunk and want to dominate the conversation and will shout you down and will not listen, and I just shut up. I won't compete with it. It's not really conversation. Evenings like that are boring and irritating.
But I didn't entirely miss out on drugs. I came to like dope and used it once in a while, although never alone, and although I've never tried cocaine I did try LSD once, and that was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. I was writing my first book at the time, on the mental health system, and wanted to know what a schizophrenic episode felt like from the inside and LSD was supposed to mimic it. My friend John and I drove up to the Catskills and picked up my friend Jody Sibert, Kit Sibert's sister, in Woodstock and we drove to a little cabin on an obscure road somewhere in the western end of the Catskills, a gray day, and went inside and I took a hit of blotter acid and waited, and nothing happened, and then things did start to happen. The room, for one thing, breathed when I breathed. The music of the flies buzzing at the windows organized itself into actual music. We listened to music, John and Jody and I, trying the baroque at first, but it proved, because your mind is moving at incredible speed, to be slow and tedious, so Jody, who stayed sober through it all, put on some Ravi Shankar and that, it turned out, was the actual music of the gods; and I thought most deeply, because that's what I did, I thought, as I say at great speed, about what had brought me there, all the twists and turns, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents taking this road instead of that, making an endless series of choices any one of which could have eliminated all chance of me being there that day; and it was as if the whole thing had been designed, all those choices, all life to that point, to bring me there to discover how infinitely complex it is, this tapestry the gods weave us into. Then I hallucinated our guardians, three spirits in human form standing about a foot off the ground, very shadowy, talking with each other; and at one point Jody bent down over me and said, whatever you're thinking right now, that's the way it is, and I had precisely at that point been thinking, whatever I'm thinking right now, that's the way it is. And this went on for hours. Toward the end we went outdoors into the misty rain and I looked at the surrounding hills and realized that beyond the horizon we were looking at, the horizon of hills, was nothing, only the potential, only not-yet-time, and that it was somehow our task on this earth to be, and ... well, I don't know. I took a Thorazine to come back down. The high lasted into the next day. I never felt the need to take acid again. Never wanted to. I had understood what I needed to understand.
None of this had any relationship to mental illness, as it happens. The book was a disaster, sold fewer than 5,000 copies, I got sued for libel for a case I described in which a child died, that cost me $45,000 in legal fees, the only consolation being that I not only won the suit, I made law in the state of Kansas. But that's a whole other story.
So here's the question: have I missed anything? Yeah, a whole lot. But maybe it all makes sense in the end.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
AMERICA
OCTOBER 16, 2010:
For months now I've been preoccupied, reading, trying to think my way through America past and present so that I can begin my next book, all in the midst of an election campaign dominated by the most remarkable crowd of lunatics and clowns this country has ever seen. The political positions are even more irrational than usual, the candidates a depressing bunch of ideologues and shameless liars, and the Tea Party is simply idiotic. It's one thing not to be able to spell--and they're famous for that--but it's quite another to fantasize that we can all can live in a world that vanished in the 1830s. The people who think there's too much government control, too many regulations, too many taxes, etc., will be the first to scream when the lack of protection wipes out their savings, say, or a bigger than usual pothole takes out their rear axle . Why, after all, should the FDIC--that's the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--insure our bank deposits at all? Isn't that another unnecessary government program? How about we buy private insurance for our bank deposits? We could go back to private roads, too, like the turnpike that a company of entrepreneurs built between here, in Sag Harbor, and East Hampton in the late 1700s. We could all then pay a fee whenever we decided to drive someplace. We would have toll booths, and toll keepers: jobs! Why should there be air traffic controllers for that matter, or National Institutes of Health, or a Library of Congress? The Tea Party doesn't want to improve the world as it is, make things run better, elect smarter people. They want to pretend the world as it is doesn't exist.
It's hard not to see the country declining. I'm a historian, I'm supposed to put current events into perspective, but if you look at the figures, at what's happening to middle class income, which has been stagnant in real dollars since 1973 and actually in decline the last few years, at the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, greater than it has been since the 1920s, at a collapsing infrastructure, at the rate of global warming, at educational achievement, which continues to get worse and worse, the decline of the United States of America is impossible to deny. The mood of the country is not positive. Half the population, according to the latest poll, no longer believes in the American dream, no longer thinks they have much of a chance to do better than their parents, no longer gets starry-eyed about the future.
When the country's political life is so debased it becomes a nuisance and a distraction to pay attention to it, yet how does one not? I am reading books about Richard Nixon and the 1960s and 1970s, about the "meaning" of America, and also about the tone the Spanish first set in the Americas in the early sixteenth century, and you can see threads running from the Spanish obsession with gold and, along with it, failed Spanish attempts to set up utopian governments among the Indians, right through to the explosion of corporate greed on Wall Street during the real estate boom and the last hippie communes of the 1970s. It is a struggle, but I'm beginning to see a pattern. But outside my windows the yelling continues. Part of me thinks, well, let the idiots get into office. Maybe it will wake them up. Maybe they'll understand then that governing a country this huge, this diverse, this contrarious and this complex takes more than slogans and ideologies and mini-think. It takes, more than anything else, intelligence. Then compromise. A certain amount of good will, which includes a willingness to listen, and to think outside their little boxes. And a power of persuasion that goes way beyond singing to their own choir.
But it also takes something more. I think it was Walt Whitman who said that great poetry requires a great audience. So in politics: a great government requires a great electorate. Right now, I see no sign of a great electorate in the uninformed, irrational, angry voters of the United States.
For months now I've been preoccupied, reading, trying to think my way through America past and present so that I can begin my next book, all in the midst of an election campaign dominated by the most remarkable crowd of lunatics and clowns this country has ever seen. The political positions are even more irrational than usual, the candidates a depressing bunch of ideologues and shameless liars, and the Tea Party is simply idiotic. It's one thing not to be able to spell--and they're famous for that--but it's quite another to fantasize that we can all can live in a world that vanished in the 1830s. The people who think there's too much government control, too many regulations, too many taxes, etc., will be the first to scream when the lack of protection wipes out their savings, say, or a bigger than usual pothole takes out their rear axle . Why, after all, should the FDIC--that's the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--insure our bank deposits at all? Isn't that another unnecessary government program? How about we buy private insurance for our bank deposits? We could go back to private roads, too, like the turnpike that a company of entrepreneurs built between here, in Sag Harbor, and East Hampton in the late 1700s. We could all then pay a fee whenever we decided to drive someplace. We would have toll booths, and toll keepers: jobs! Why should there be air traffic controllers for that matter, or National Institutes of Health, or a Library of Congress? The Tea Party doesn't want to improve the world as it is, make things run better, elect smarter people. They want to pretend the world as it is doesn't exist.
It's hard not to see the country declining. I'm a historian, I'm supposed to put current events into perspective, but if you look at the figures, at what's happening to middle class income, which has been stagnant in real dollars since 1973 and actually in decline the last few years, at the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, greater than it has been since the 1920s, at a collapsing infrastructure, at the rate of global warming, at educational achievement, which continues to get worse and worse, the decline of the United States of America is impossible to deny. The mood of the country is not positive. Half the population, according to the latest poll, no longer believes in the American dream, no longer thinks they have much of a chance to do better than their parents, no longer gets starry-eyed about the future.
When the country's political life is so debased it becomes a nuisance and a distraction to pay attention to it, yet how does one not? I am reading books about Richard Nixon and the 1960s and 1970s, about the "meaning" of America, and also about the tone the Spanish first set in the Americas in the early sixteenth century, and you can see threads running from the Spanish obsession with gold and, along with it, failed Spanish attempts to set up utopian governments among the Indians, right through to the explosion of corporate greed on Wall Street during the real estate boom and the last hippie communes of the 1970s. It is a struggle, but I'm beginning to see a pattern. But outside my windows the yelling continues. Part of me thinks, well, let the idiots get into office. Maybe it will wake them up. Maybe they'll understand then that governing a country this huge, this diverse, this contrarious and this complex takes more than slogans and ideologies and mini-think. It takes, more than anything else, intelligence. Then compromise. A certain amount of good will, which includes a willingness to listen, and to think outside their little boxes. And a power of persuasion that goes way beyond singing to their own choir.
But it also takes something more. I think it was Walt Whitman who said that great poetry requires a great audience. So in politics: a great government requires a great electorate. Right now, I see no sign of a great electorate in the uninformed, irrational, angry voters of the United States.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
A MOMENT OF PEACE
Tuesday, September 21:
Yesterday, September 20, twenty-nine years ago, Lorraine and I got married. Right now our lives are in their usual turmoil, adjusted upwards by the work and anxiety involved in trying to get new projects into the air, but yesterday we let the work and the anxiety go, in favor of the day. We gave each other funny cards. I bought her some roses. We went to breakfast at Starbuck's, which we do many days, but lingered over the NYTimes. We went to lunch at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. Ted Conklin, who has owned the place for the last forty years or so, was there, and that was appropriate, because it was at Ted's grandmother's place in Westhampton Beach that we got married; Ted comped us a piece of chocolate cake in honor of the day but had to run, so we couldn't reminisce with him. After 29 years there's so much to remember, but that day was a standout. We had a band, the late Jim Chapin's band, and I stood up and sang "Sweet Lorraine" with the band backing me up. The whole group sang "Bye Bye Blackbird," the whole group being the friends and family who had gathered. My brother came with his wife and kids. It was one of the few times I ever really impressed him, because Ted's grandmother's house was grand, with a sun room, a billiard room, a third floor full of maid's rooms, an elevator, and it was right on the water, not the ocean but the bay side of Westhampton Beach. We danced, we ate, we laughed a great deal, my son was best man and toasted us--what was he, 16?--and did it beautifully, as he has done pretty much everything his whole life, and my daughter gave me a big big hug and danced and laughed and it was a joy to watch. Then we drove away in Ted's 1963 Bentley Continental, switching to our own car down the road where it was stashed.
After lunch yesterday, which lasted until almost three, I had to run a writing workship at a cancer care foundation where I'm on the board, but that's hardly work; and then at six I went next door with a drink and we had dinner there later and the evening was special and sweet, as time spent with these old friends usually is. Altogether a splendid day.
And what can I say about this marriage after twenty-nine years? Well, what do you say of your elbow, or your hand, or your heart? We are very different people, we like different foods, we don't often watch television together, golf bores her while I find it fascinating--to watch, that is--and she likes to go to the movies and I usually don't. We think differently; I'm slow and deliberate, she's quick, mercurial. But life is unimaginable without her. She is as much a part of me now as my elbow, my hand, my heart. And we do share a great deal: our political opinions, our general take on life, what you might call the emotional core. We both cry very easily at sentimental scenes, yet we recognize in each other a hardness at the core that is the hardness the Irish poet Yeats captured in his own epitaph: "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!" We both understand how much luck determines happiness. We are both totally committed to the work that sustains us, and gives meaning to our lives.
Next year will be our 30th. We fought for a year or more right after we got married, and it was partly about those differences I mentioned above but mostly about power, and who had more of it in the relationship. That happens with strong-minded people. For a long time I doubted we would make five years, much less thirty. But we weathered the turmoil. We each learned how not to be right, or rather how not to regard it as all that important whether we were or not. It took a long time, but here's the result. Us. A commonwealth of two. I lead in some areas, she in others. It seems to work. So far. If we can keep it up, we'll probably have another party. Ask all our friends, our families. Hire a hall, maybe. And I'll sing "Sweet Lorraine" again. I'm getting pretty good at it.
Yesterday, September 20, twenty-nine years ago, Lorraine and I got married. Right now our lives are in their usual turmoil, adjusted upwards by the work and anxiety involved in trying to get new projects into the air, but yesterday we let the work and the anxiety go, in favor of the day. We gave each other funny cards. I bought her some roses. We went to breakfast at Starbuck's, which we do many days, but lingered over the NYTimes. We went to lunch at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. Ted Conklin, who has owned the place for the last forty years or so, was there, and that was appropriate, because it was at Ted's grandmother's place in Westhampton Beach that we got married; Ted comped us a piece of chocolate cake in honor of the day but had to run, so we couldn't reminisce with him. After 29 years there's so much to remember, but that day was a standout. We had a band, the late Jim Chapin's band, and I stood up and sang "Sweet Lorraine" with the band backing me up. The whole group sang "Bye Bye Blackbird," the whole group being the friends and family who had gathered. My brother came with his wife and kids. It was one of the few times I ever really impressed him, because Ted's grandmother's house was grand, with a sun room, a billiard room, a third floor full of maid's rooms, an elevator, and it was right on the water, not the ocean but the bay side of Westhampton Beach. We danced, we ate, we laughed a great deal, my son was best man and toasted us--what was he, 16?--and did it beautifully, as he has done pretty much everything his whole life, and my daughter gave me a big big hug and danced and laughed and it was a joy to watch. Then we drove away in Ted's 1963 Bentley Continental, switching to our own car down the road where it was stashed.
After lunch yesterday, which lasted until almost three, I had to run a writing workship at a cancer care foundation where I'm on the board, but that's hardly work; and then at six I went next door with a drink and we had dinner there later and the evening was special and sweet, as time spent with these old friends usually is. Altogether a splendid day.
And what can I say about this marriage after twenty-nine years? Well, what do you say of your elbow, or your hand, or your heart? We are very different people, we like different foods, we don't often watch television together, golf bores her while I find it fascinating--to watch, that is--and she likes to go to the movies and I usually don't. We think differently; I'm slow and deliberate, she's quick, mercurial. But life is unimaginable without her. She is as much a part of me now as my elbow, my hand, my heart. And we do share a great deal: our political opinions, our general take on life, what you might call the emotional core. We both cry very easily at sentimental scenes, yet we recognize in each other a hardness at the core that is the hardness the Irish poet Yeats captured in his own epitaph: "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!" We both understand how much luck determines happiness. We are both totally committed to the work that sustains us, and gives meaning to our lives.
Next year will be our 30th. We fought for a year or more right after we got married, and it was partly about those differences I mentioned above but mostly about power, and who had more of it in the relationship. That happens with strong-minded people. For a long time I doubted we would make five years, much less thirty. But we weathered the turmoil. We each learned how not to be right, or rather how not to regard it as all that important whether we were or not. It took a long time, but here's the result. Us. A commonwealth of two. I lead in some areas, she in others. It seems to work. So far. If we can keep it up, we'll probably have another party. Ask all our friends, our families. Hire a hall, maybe. And I'll sing "Sweet Lorraine" again. I'm getting pretty good at it.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Blood relatives
September 8:
Last few days I've been hearing from Cindy, my cousin Joan's daughter. Joan died this year, having lived out her last years with senile dementia, which also made our grandmother's life at the end something you might imagine appropriate for monsters or Nazis or the like, but not for human beings. I had been sad to hear it. Joan, in fact, had a tough life all through. She came to live with us when I was about ten or eleven; she was sixteen or seventeen and pregnant, at a time in this country when being single and pregnant was scandalous and shameful. She had been living in Elmira, New York, with her mother and father. She came to us to get away, hide the pregnancy, hide the shame. My mother used to spirit her in and out of the house in big coats to the doctor's office. When the baby was born my parents arranged for her to be adopted privately, through the doctor, so that there would be no public record of its parentage. Was this legal? I've often wondered. Joan was no doubt told to forget the whole thing and get on with her life. She did, of course. We all do after tragedies and miseries. But I think it affected everything afterward. Many years later, having married one of the leading figures in this country advocating open adoption records--my beloved Lorraine--I asked Joan if she wanted us to help her find the daughter she had given away for adoption. She said no. She was too scared.
Now Cindy wants to find her.
We'll do what we can, but it's going to be hard. But the whole situation makes me angry, and always has. I loved Joan. She was easy to love, spirited, cute, full of energy. What kind of country would do that to its young women, make them abandon babies to strangers instead of finding ways to help them keep them? Do you think rich girls had to endure this? Babies belong with their natural parents, the people who gave them birth. If that's not possible, and it sometimes isn't possible, we, collectively, as a society, ought to find ways to place them nearby, with blood relatives, with help from the state or private agencies dedicated to this purpose. Blood belongs with blood. It is inconceivable to me that I might have been denied knowledge of my origins by law because I might have been adopted. By law, in most states, adopted children cannot know who their parents were. This is barbaric. It benefits no one except adopted parents, who can then pretend that their adopted children didn't come from another family, another background, another way of life. I base my entire sense of who I am on the fact that my father was the son of Swedish immigrants. I have my grandfather's naturalization papers, and a photograph of his family, my father then a little boy, taken the day the papers came. I cherish these records. My mother was the daughter of a marriage between a self-made man of Danish/German origin and a woman whose family can be traced back to kings and queens. You think I'm not interested in this? Adoptees are not allowed to know this information. Their birth certificates are falsified, or locked away. Having an identity is surely one of the natural rights. But what good is having it if you are prevented from knowing it?
Cindy didn't know Joan had had another daughter, and given it away, but she told me that she had always sensed that someone was missing. I hope she finds this woman, who's now in her 60s. My Lorraine found the daughter she had given up for adoption under equally difficult circumstances; she now enjoys very nice relationships with her daughter's own two daughters. This is blood. It's fundamental; it's part of the human condition; and to ignore it, or think it doesn't matter, damages lives in ways we're only beginning to understand. We come from families, a network of relationships based on blood ties; and most of us maintain those ties all our lives. To break those ties by law is a crime against nature. Adoption records in a few states have been opened, but in the rest, no. Reform has been blocked mostly by adoptive parents, working in many cases through adoption agencies. Adoption has its place. Sometimes it's the only solution in difficult circumstances. But to keep knowledge of their origins from the people most concerned in knowing them is, plain and simple, a profound injustice.
Good luck, Cindy. Hope it happens. Hope you find her.
Last few days I've been hearing from Cindy, my cousin Joan's daughter. Joan died this year, having lived out her last years with senile dementia, which also made our grandmother's life at the end something you might imagine appropriate for monsters or Nazis or the like, but not for human beings. I had been sad to hear it. Joan, in fact, had a tough life all through. She came to live with us when I was about ten or eleven; she was sixteen or seventeen and pregnant, at a time in this country when being single and pregnant was scandalous and shameful. She had been living in Elmira, New York, with her mother and father. She came to us to get away, hide the pregnancy, hide the shame. My mother used to spirit her in and out of the house in big coats to the doctor's office. When the baby was born my parents arranged for her to be adopted privately, through the doctor, so that there would be no public record of its parentage. Was this legal? I've often wondered. Joan was no doubt told to forget the whole thing and get on with her life. She did, of course. We all do after tragedies and miseries. But I think it affected everything afterward. Many years later, having married one of the leading figures in this country advocating open adoption records--my beloved Lorraine--I asked Joan if she wanted us to help her find the daughter she had given away for adoption. She said no. She was too scared.
Now Cindy wants to find her.
We'll do what we can, but it's going to be hard. But the whole situation makes me angry, and always has. I loved Joan. She was easy to love, spirited, cute, full of energy. What kind of country would do that to its young women, make them abandon babies to strangers instead of finding ways to help them keep them? Do you think rich girls had to endure this? Babies belong with their natural parents, the people who gave them birth. If that's not possible, and it sometimes isn't possible, we, collectively, as a society, ought to find ways to place them nearby, with blood relatives, with help from the state or private agencies dedicated to this purpose. Blood belongs with blood. It is inconceivable to me that I might have been denied knowledge of my origins by law because I might have been adopted. By law, in most states, adopted children cannot know who their parents were. This is barbaric. It benefits no one except adopted parents, who can then pretend that their adopted children didn't come from another family, another background, another way of life. I base my entire sense of who I am on the fact that my father was the son of Swedish immigrants. I have my grandfather's naturalization papers, and a photograph of his family, my father then a little boy, taken the day the papers came. I cherish these records. My mother was the daughter of a marriage between a self-made man of Danish/German origin and a woman whose family can be traced back to kings and queens. You think I'm not interested in this? Adoptees are not allowed to know this information. Their birth certificates are falsified, or locked away. Having an identity is surely one of the natural rights. But what good is having it if you are prevented from knowing it?
Cindy didn't know Joan had had another daughter, and given it away, but she told me that she had always sensed that someone was missing. I hope she finds this woman, who's now in her 60s. My Lorraine found the daughter she had given up for adoption under equally difficult circumstances; she now enjoys very nice relationships with her daughter's own two daughters. This is blood. It's fundamental; it's part of the human condition; and to ignore it, or think it doesn't matter, damages lives in ways we're only beginning to understand. We come from families, a network of relationships based on blood ties; and most of us maintain those ties all our lives. To break those ties by law is a crime against nature. Adoption records in a few states have been opened, but in the rest, no. Reform has been blocked mostly by adoptive parents, working in many cases through adoption agencies. Adoption has its place. Sometimes it's the only solution in difficult circumstances. But to keep knowledge of their origins from the people most concerned in knowing them is, plain and simple, a profound injustice.
Good luck, Cindy. Hope it happens. Hope you find her.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Empty Mind
September 5:
Last week I finished my book proposal, which required me to write not only an outline but a sample of a particular chapter, and now I am just empty. I have no thoughts, no ideas, not a whisper of insight or anything else. I must be resting. Maybe this is what the Zen people mean when they talk about having an empty mind. I've been reading back issues of TLS, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books--I have scores of them, neglected during times when I was full of thoughts and writing and working, too exhausted then to read book reviews--and that's been pleasant, but they often connect in some way to what I've been working on, and that hasn't been the case this time. Maybe it's the holiday. Labor Day weekend. The chaos threatened by Hurricane Earl, which passed us by. I've taken to watching golf, something I never did before, but I think I relate to the inwardness of this sport now, the way you play mostly against yourself and the turmoil in your mind, monkey mind, flitting from tree to tree in your patch of forest, always on the move, and never ever satisfied. Zen and the Art of Golf. There have been books along this line, Golf in the Kingdom comes to mind. Maybe that's not the title. But it must be extremely intimidating, standing on the tee, your ball before you, the hole as much as 500 yards away, and you have only five shots to get your ball in the hole and stay at par. Five hundred yards, and that hole is so small. That they can do it at all is extraordinary. They do it, furthermore, with cameras staring at them, hundreds of people nearby, muttering or holding their collective breath, all eyes on them. I finally get golf. Next lifetime, maybe I'll take it up. It may be the best test of focus there is.
Empty mind. An astrologer told me once that one of my tasks in this life was to achieve just that, higher consciousness, the empty mind, the ultimate openness. Thanks, Leor. That was his name. Any other little jobs for me? This isn't it, this current emptiness. This is more like exhausted brain. I was going for broke before I finished the proposal, cramming information in, plunking down little details here, there, that illuminated and fit and helped make sense of what was happening. In a way, and oddly, when you're in the zone as a writer you actually achieve a kind of emptiness; you yourself are not writing, something else is writing. What you are, if you stop to think about it, is in fact at those moments an open question. Lots of people have testified to this. Time passes without your being aware of it. You forget to get hungry, you forget to get thirsty. Something is playing you like a violin. You're not sure that you should be taking credit for this work. Maybe this is what Rilke meant when he advised his young poet not to rush into writing but to live, to let life get into the blood; and only then write. And Alexander Pope's advice to people who wanted to show him their work: put it away for a year, in a desk drawer, lock the drawer, don't look at it, don't think about it. When the year is up, rewrite it.
I don't have a year; I have about a week. That's when I'll go back and fix what needs to be fixed, and submit this thing, and then wait for an answer. While I'm waiting I'll be empty some more. Maybe I'll do some yard work, or go to New York and visit a museum, have lunch with my daughter, try reading a novel. Let it all go for a while. Pretend my mind is empty. Maybe then answers will come.
Last week I finished my book proposal, which required me to write not only an outline but a sample of a particular chapter, and now I am just empty. I have no thoughts, no ideas, not a whisper of insight or anything else. I must be resting. Maybe this is what the Zen people mean when they talk about having an empty mind. I've been reading back issues of TLS, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books--I have scores of them, neglected during times when I was full of thoughts and writing and working, too exhausted then to read book reviews--and that's been pleasant, but they often connect in some way to what I've been working on, and that hasn't been the case this time. Maybe it's the holiday. Labor Day weekend. The chaos threatened by Hurricane Earl, which passed us by. I've taken to watching golf, something I never did before, but I think I relate to the inwardness of this sport now, the way you play mostly against yourself and the turmoil in your mind, monkey mind, flitting from tree to tree in your patch of forest, always on the move, and never ever satisfied. Zen and the Art of Golf. There have been books along this line, Golf in the Kingdom comes to mind. Maybe that's not the title. But it must be extremely intimidating, standing on the tee, your ball before you, the hole as much as 500 yards away, and you have only five shots to get your ball in the hole and stay at par. Five hundred yards, and that hole is so small. That they can do it at all is extraordinary. They do it, furthermore, with cameras staring at them, hundreds of people nearby, muttering or holding their collective breath, all eyes on them. I finally get golf. Next lifetime, maybe I'll take it up. It may be the best test of focus there is.
Empty mind. An astrologer told me once that one of my tasks in this life was to achieve just that, higher consciousness, the empty mind, the ultimate openness. Thanks, Leor. That was his name. Any other little jobs for me? This isn't it, this current emptiness. This is more like exhausted brain. I was going for broke before I finished the proposal, cramming information in, plunking down little details here, there, that illuminated and fit and helped make sense of what was happening. In a way, and oddly, when you're in the zone as a writer you actually achieve a kind of emptiness; you yourself are not writing, something else is writing. What you are, if you stop to think about it, is in fact at those moments an open question. Lots of people have testified to this. Time passes without your being aware of it. You forget to get hungry, you forget to get thirsty. Something is playing you like a violin. You're not sure that you should be taking credit for this work. Maybe this is what Rilke meant when he advised his young poet not to rush into writing but to live, to let life get into the blood; and only then write. And Alexander Pope's advice to people who wanted to show him their work: put it away for a year, in a desk drawer, lock the drawer, don't look at it, don't think about it. When the year is up, rewrite it.
I don't have a year; I have about a week. That's when I'll go back and fix what needs to be fixed, and submit this thing, and then wait for an answer. While I'm waiting I'll be empty some more. Maybe I'll do some yard work, or go to New York and visit a museum, have lunch with my daughter, try reading a novel. Let it all go for a while. Pretend my mind is empty. Maybe then answers will come.
Friday, August 27, 2010
AUGUST 27
Reading Christopher Columbus's own accounts of his travels through the Caribbean, I have trouble containing myself; I have this strong desire to physically cry out to him, as if there were some kind of magic megaphone you could use to contact the past, look! be more curious! He mentions seeing a million cormorants--a million--flying over the ocean south of Jamaica, and then huge clouds of butterflies darkening the skies. A local chieftain comes out to his ship to see what manner of man he is, and what these ships are doing there, and he is naked, his body painted, great plumes of feathers on his head, gold earrings hanging from his ears, and I want an artist to be on board, to paint him. He is the first European to describe a Caribbean coral reef, but the description is so sketchy: lots of fish of all shapes and sizes, all kinds of colors. Isn't it a marvel. He does not make you see it. It's frustrating, because it all vanished so soon after he was there. By the 1520s the population of Hispaniola, estimated to have numbered around 350,000 people, had shrunk to around 60,000. The splendor of the Taino caciques had been totally lost. A few decades later the Tainos had disappeared altogether. Slavery, European diseases, suicide. They must have known they were doomed. The only satisfaction they might have gained from the circumstances is that they did have a kind of revenge. Before Columbus and his crew sailed to the West Indies, there was no syphilis in Europe. By 1493 it was at large in the Old World, and it came from the Americas, there's little question about that. It proved devastating. It was called the French disease, but a pox upon that; it was an American disease, and it was the Spanish, who could not get enough of the native women, who brought it back to Europe.
But it's getting to be fun to write about all this, to track down the first elusive traces of my subject in his writings, and in Vespucci's Letters, and in the writings of Peter Martyr and Oviedo and Las Casas, the early Church Fathers of the Americas. So often the subject was gold. I have been studying the subject, and the vast majority of the gold that came out of the Spanish Main went to finance the wars of the Spanish Kings, and was wasted. In Spain itself the wiser sort knew what was happening; what was not spent on warfare was spent on trifles and luxuries. It was not used to build commerce or infrastructure, to improve roads, harbors, to make farmland more productive. It went, essentially, into the ephemeral satisfactions of the rich and powerful. By the seventeenth century Spain was already beginning its long decline.
There's something soothing about all this. History is a calming sort of study. Consumed by our own problems, we lose sight of how much worse it has been in the past and how consistent is human folly and short-sightedness. We seem to learn nothing, certainly not from history; we make the same mistakes over and over, enter wars equally as senseless as the Wars of the Roses or the Hundred Years War or Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Egypt, one of my favorites. What you learn from history, if you learn anything, is caution. Prudence. You learn something about the Law of Unintended Consequences, and its universal application in human affairs. We had a mayor here in Sag Harbor some years ago who did nothing, and he proved an excellent mayor in many ways, because doing nothing is often the best thing to do. I voted for his re-election, but he lost. The people always want action.
Anyway, it's Friday. No more Columbus tomorrow. I have bills to pay, errands to run, maybe a yarde sale to try out. Next week I'll finish this section of the book, and see how it holds together. In writing, it's always a question of length versus depth; and since this will be such a long book, I can't go too deep here. So be it. It will take careful editing on my part. Wish me luck.
Reading Christopher Columbus's own accounts of his travels through the Caribbean, I have trouble containing myself; I have this strong desire to physically cry out to him, as if there were some kind of magic megaphone you could use to contact the past, look! be more curious! He mentions seeing a million cormorants--a million--flying over the ocean south of Jamaica, and then huge clouds of butterflies darkening the skies. A local chieftain comes out to his ship to see what manner of man he is, and what these ships are doing there, and he is naked, his body painted, great plumes of feathers on his head, gold earrings hanging from his ears, and I want an artist to be on board, to paint him. He is the first European to describe a Caribbean coral reef, but the description is so sketchy: lots of fish of all shapes and sizes, all kinds of colors. Isn't it a marvel. He does not make you see it. It's frustrating, because it all vanished so soon after he was there. By the 1520s the population of Hispaniola, estimated to have numbered around 350,000 people, had shrunk to around 60,000. The splendor of the Taino caciques had been totally lost. A few decades later the Tainos had disappeared altogether. Slavery, European diseases, suicide. They must have known they were doomed. The only satisfaction they might have gained from the circumstances is that they did have a kind of revenge. Before Columbus and his crew sailed to the West Indies, there was no syphilis in Europe. By 1493 it was at large in the Old World, and it came from the Americas, there's little question about that. It proved devastating. It was called the French disease, but a pox upon that; it was an American disease, and it was the Spanish, who could not get enough of the native women, who brought it back to Europe.
But it's getting to be fun to write about all this, to track down the first elusive traces of my subject in his writings, and in Vespucci's Letters, and in the writings of Peter Martyr and Oviedo and Las Casas, the early Church Fathers of the Americas. So often the subject was gold. I have been studying the subject, and the vast majority of the gold that came out of the Spanish Main went to finance the wars of the Spanish Kings, and was wasted. In Spain itself the wiser sort knew what was happening; what was not spent on warfare was spent on trifles and luxuries. It was not used to build commerce or infrastructure, to improve roads, harbors, to make farmland more productive. It went, essentially, into the ephemeral satisfactions of the rich and powerful. By the seventeenth century Spain was already beginning its long decline.
There's something soothing about all this. History is a calming sort of study. Consumed by our own problems, we lose sight of how much worse it has been in the past and how consistent is human folly and short-sightedness. We seem to learn nothing, certainly not from history; we make the same mistakes over and over, enter wars equally as senseless as the Wars of the Roses or the Hundred Years War or Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Egypt, one of my favorites. What you learn from history, if you learn anything, is caution. Prudence. You learn something about the Law of Unintended Consequences, and its universal application in human affairs. We had a mayor here in Sag Harbor some years ago who did nothing, and he proved an excellent mayor in many ways, because doing nothing is often the best thing to do. I voted for his re-election, but he lost. The people always want action.
Anyway, it's Friday. No more Columbus tomorrow. I have bills to pay, errands to run, maybe a yarde sale to try out. Next week I'll finish this section of the book, and see how it holds together. In writing, it's always a question of length versus depth; and since this will be such a long book, I can't go too deep here. So be it. It will take careful editing on my part. Wish me luck.
Friday, August 20, 2010
South Pacific
August 20:
The other night Lorraine and I watched on PBS a performance of South Pacific, televised from the stage at Lincoln Center. It was nearly three hours long, but we sat in our kitchen and watched it on our smallest TV set, more or less transfixed. And what moved us the most was listening to the song "Some Enchanted Evening." We have a history with that song. During the first summer we lived together we got a bit drunk with some friends--well, more than a bit, maybe--and walked down to the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, where we live, which for those who don't know it is a small hotel with a gourmet restaurant and one of the ten best wine lists in the country. It is owned by a friend named Ted Conklin and has been for about forty years or so. Every Friday night that summer we gathered at the Hotel and sat at a round table under the moose with a bunch of other journalists, trading gossip, telling stories, boasting shamelessly about where we had been, whom we knew, what we had done. A great crew, we were, the Hotel our private club. But we rarely ate there. Too expensive. We only drank there.
But this was a Saturday night, when the elite with money came. There were, if I remember, five or six of us: a friend of Lorraine's named Peter Dee, a playwright; Chris Norwood, a writer; Peter McCabe, formerly the managing editor of Harper's, who was English; Lorraine and I; maybe one other. Memory fails. We had a guitar with us, one of us strummed it, and we stood there in the lobby and sang "Some Enchanted Evening," as loud as we could.
Ted desperately wanted us to leave. These were his paying customers. But he took it in good spirit, threw pennies at us, and couldn't help but smile. We did leave when the song was over, and life at the Hotel returned to normal.
So we sat there and the star who was playing Emile burst into this wonderful song and we both started to cry. Lorraine and I had literally seen each other across a crowded room, had gotten together soon thereafter. And of that group of five, Peter Dee was dead of lung cancer, and Peter McCabe had killed himself in Los Angeles. McCabe was not the best of men; he was known to be abusive to women, and his loss was not mourned by a lot of people. But he was what people used to call a boon companion, and very charming; for a while I loved him. As for Peter Dee, he never had the Broadway production he so much wanted; he never made it, as we say. The last time we saw him alive was in the Adirondacks, where a play of his was being produced, starring Julie Harris, who was a friend of his. Peter Dee was for a long time Lorraine's best friend.
So that song evoked all those mixed but very powerful emotions as only music can: Love, loss, and nearly thirty years of marriage. And now Ted Conklin has remarried himself for the third time, and we keep hearing rumors that he's sold the Hotel. He's seldom there any more. No wonder we cried. Time flies; and even when you're home, you can't go home again.
The other night Lorraine and I watched on PBS a performance of South Pacific, televised from the stage at Lincoln Center. It was nearly three hours long, but we sat in our kitchen and watched it on our smallest TV set, more or less transfixed. And what moved us the most was listening to the song "Some Enchanted Evening." We have a history with that song. During the first summer we lived together we got a bit drunk with some friends--well, more than a bit, maybe--and walked down to the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, where we live, which for those who don't know it is a small hotel with a gourmet restaurant and one of the ten best wine lists in the country. It is owned by a friend named Ted Conklin and has been for about forty years or so. Every Friday night that summer we gathered at the Hotel and sat at a round table under the moose with a bunch of other journalists, trading gossip, telling stories, boasting shamelessly about where we had been, whom we knew, what we had done. A great crew, we were, the Hotel our private club. But we rarely ate there. Too expensive. We only drank there.
But this was a Saturday night, when the elite with money came. There were, if I remember, five or six of us: a friend of Lorraine's named Peter Dee, a playwright; Chris Norwood, a writer; Peter McCabe, formerly the managing editor of Harper's, who was English; Lorraine and I; maybe one other. Memory fails. We had a guitar with us, one of us strummed it, and we stood there in the lobby and sang "Some Enchanted Evening," as loud as we could.
Ted desperately wanted us to leave. These were his paying customers. But he took it in good spirit, threw pennies at us, and couldn't help but smile. We did leave when the song was over, and life at the Hotel returned to normal.
So we sat there and the star who was playing Emile burst into this wonderful song and we both started to cry. Lorraine and I had literally seen each other across a crowded room, had gotten together soon thereafter. And of that group of five, Peter Dee was dead of lung cancer, and Peter McCabe had killed himself in Los Angeles. McCabe was not the best of men; he was known to be abusive to women, and his loss was not mourned by a lot of people. But he was what people used to call a boon companion, and very charming; for a while I loved him. As for Peter Dee, he never had the Broadway production he so much wanted; he never made it, as we say. The last time we saw him alive was in the Adirondacks, where a play of his was being produced, starring Julie Harris, who was a friend of his. Peter Dee was for a long time Lorraine's best friend.
So that song evoked all those mixed but very powerful emotions as only music can: Love, loss, and nearly thirty years of marriage. And now Ted Conklin has remarried himself for the third time, and we keep hearing rumors that he's sold the Hotel. He's seldom there any more. No wonder we cried. Time flies; and even when you're home, you can't go home again.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
August 15:
My daughter turns 50 today.
She was my first child, and I was quite young, a little younger than my first wife, in fact. I have a large head and my first wife was small, so in the interest of safety a Caesarean section was ordered and the birth, therefore, could be scheduled, and it was, for noon, at a hospital in New York that no longer exists. Women's Hospital, I believe, was the name. We checked her in that morning, as I remember, and she was prepped, and I sat outside in the waiting room with the New York Times. It was before the days when husbands would be admitted to the delivery room, to be part of the action. A nurse wandered by and commented on how calm and cool I seemed. In fact I was reading the same paragraph over and over again, for probably half an hour, trying without any success whatsoever to grasp the sense of it. I was so young, hardly more than a boy myself in many ways. Then, around one, a nurse came out and said I could go and see my wife, and my child, a girl. We had already decided to name her Katherine, agreeing that it should be spelled in precisely that way, and we would call her Kate.
Perhaps it was my child I saw first, before my wife. It doesn't matter. What mattered was the emotion, the surge of it that turned my life and my understanding of life upside down, on the spot. I was totally unprepared for it. Suddenly I was a father, I was responsible for a new human life, and it was a beautiful life, I could see that right away. Suddenly nothing else mattered. My parents had made great sacrifices for my brother and myself, and at a young age you don't appreciate them. Now I knew why they had given up so much. The whole experience was a version of enlightenment, a kind of satori, and I loved that child as I had never loved anything before, and I knew I would never forget that day.
I never have. Kate and I have been through some bad times, and for too many years we did not see each other or speak to each other. During those years anything relating to fathers and daughters, good or bad, in the movies or on TV, would drive me to tears. But I never forgot that day and never stopped loving her as intensely as I did that first day. There's a line in Rilke, a love poem, where he says that some god has tossed him aside like a spear and is living his life. Maybe its original is in Sappho. It doesn't matter; the point is, that's what it felt like. It still feels that way. Kate and I are very good friends now, maybe all the better because of how much we hurt each other those years ago. Don't know about that. But this is an important day for me. This is the day she was born. In a way it's my birthday as well.
My daughter turns 50 today.
She was my first child, and I was quite young, a little younger than my first wife, in fact. I have a large head and my first wife was small, so in the interest of safety a Caesarean section was ordered and the birth, therefore, could be scheduled, and it was, for noon, at a hospital in New York that no longer exists. Women's Hospital, I believe, was the name. We checked her in that morning, as I remember, and she was prepped, and I sat outside in the waiting room with the New York Times. It was before the days when husbands would be admitted to the delivery room, to be part of the action. A nurse wandered by and commented on how calm and cool I seemed. In fact I was reading the same paragraph over and over again, for probably half an hour, trying without any success whatsoever to grasp the sense of it. I was so young, hardly more than a boy myself in many ways. Then, around one, a nurse came out and said I could go and see my wife, and my child, a girl. We had already decided to name her Katherine, agreeing that it should be spelled in precisely that way, and we would call her Kate.
Perhaps it was my child I saw first, before my wife. It doesn't matter. What mattered was the emotion, the surge of it that turned my life and my understanding of life upside down, on the spot. I was totally unprepared for it. Suddenly I was a father, I was responsible for a new human life, and it was a beautiful life, I could see that right away. Suddenly nothing else mattered. My parents had made great sacrifices for my brother and myself, and at a young age you don't appreciate them. Now I knew why they had given up so much. The whole experience was a version of enlightenment, a kind of satori, and I loved that child as I had never loved anything before, and I knew I would never forget that day.
I never have. Kate and I have been through some bad times, and for too many years we did not see each other or speak to each other. During those years anything relating to fathers and daughters, good or bad, in the movies or on TV, would drive me to tears. But I never forgot that day and never stopped loving her as intensely as I did that first day. There's a line in Rilke, a love poem, where he says that some god has tossed him aside like a spear and is living his life. Maybe its original is in Sappho. It doesn't matter; the point is, that's what it felt like. It still feels that way. Kate and I are very good friends now, maybe all the better because of how much we hurt each other those years ago. Don't know about that. But this is an important day for me. This is the day she was born. In a way it's my birthday as well.
Friday, August 13, 2010
August 13:
Here's how life works sometimes.
We're coming toward the end of fixing up our house, which badly needed maintenance, but one of the first things we did was to cut down the big wild cherry tree on the border of our property toward the back. A large branch had fallen off in a windstorm some years ago and damaged one of our cars, the tree was dying, with few leaves, and we were worried that a hurricane could take it down and do a lot of damage, possibly to the neighbor's property. One of the last people I want in my life is an insurance adjuster. So I asked Mark, a tree surgeon married to one of my nieces, if he wanted the job and he did, came out, cut it down, would not let me pay him anything (I donated some money to his kids' college fund instead, and that seemed to please him), but left us to take care of the wood. Which was piled up on the turnaround space at the back of our driveway. There was a lot of it. Some of the pieces were big thick things that it would take a front loader to pick up.
The wood sat there for a couple of months while contractors repainted the house, reshingled it, and tore out the old rotten deck and put a new one in. We couldn't do anything about the wood because a large dumpster was sitting in the driveway, blocking access to it. Then the dumpster was gone, the other work was done, and there we were, looking at a whole lot of wood and a huge pile of debris. So Lorraine, the bright one of the two of us, went to the internet to see what wild cherry was worth. A fair amount, it turned out, to the right people. She put an ad in the local paper to sell it: $100 to anyone willing to take it away. A woman named Anna came to look at.
Anna's husband, as it happens, is an Australian sculptor and furniture maker, currently in Australia but coming back soon, and he was looking to find some American wood. She said ours was just what he wanted. How about a trade? she suggested. I'll get my daughter's fiance to take the wood, she said,and he'll also take the debris, and there was a lot of debris, not just from the tree but hedge trimmings, torn up vines, all kinds of junk that would cost a fair amount to get rid of.
OK, sounds good to us, we said. The next day her daughter's fiance showed up with a truck. He turned out to be a landscaper and yard maintenance guy, and he indeed took the debris, and some of the wood, then came back the next day with a front loader and captured the big stuff. Then he wanted to know if we were interested in getting Bob out of our driveway. When we moved into this house Bob was a red cedar growing by chance at the edge of our driveway, between the curb and the madacam, and about six inches tall, and we let it grow, and grow, and grew fond ot if, and gave it a name, Bob, and now it's 22 feet tall and very handsome. But in the way. It was getting harder and harder to steer a truck, or anything, between Bob and the hedge that borders the driveway on the other side. People, in fact, think we're kind of crazy for letting Bob grow. But our new friend the fiance, whose name is Eugene O'Neill, said it was a $3500 tree now, and urged us to move it to safer ground. So we are moving it to safer ground: about six feet to the west. Now Bob can truly flourish, and harbor small birds, and offer us something green to look at in the winter. Meanwhile, to offset the cost of doing this somewhat, the Australian sculptor is going to make us a fine piece of furniture out of our wild cherry wood, and possibly, who knows? a piece of sculpture as well. And all this makes me very happy, because the tree is getting used, and Bob will flourish unchecked and grow handsomer and handsomer, and the old wild cherry won't fall on anyone, and, best of all, because it illustrates something I've believed for a long time and that comes straight from the Tao Te Ching: When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
If you understand that, you understand everything.
Here's how life works sometimes.
We're coming toward the end of fixing up our house, which badly needed maintenance, but one of the first things we did was to cut down the big wild cherry tree on the border of our property toward the back. A large branch had fallen off in a windstorm some years ago and damaged one of our cars, the tree was dying, with few leaves, and we were worried that a hurricane could take it down and do a lot of damage, possibly to the neighbor's property. One of the last people I want in my life is an insurance adjuster. So I asked Mark, a tree surgeon married to one of my nieces, if he wanted the job and he did, came out, cut it down, would not let me pay him anything (I donated some money to his kids' college fund instead, and that seemed to please him), but left us to take care of the wood. Which was piled up on the turnaround space at the back of our driveway. There was a lot of it. Some of the pieces were big thick things that it would take a front loader to pick up.
The wood sat there for a couple of months while contractors repainted the house, reshingled it, and tore out the old rotten deck and put a new one in. We couldn't do anything about the wood because a large dumpster was sitting in the driveway, blocking access to it. Then the dumpster was gone, the other work was done, and there we were, looking at a whole lot of wood and a huge pile of debris. So Lorraine, the bright one of the two of us, went to the internet to see what wild cherry was worth. A fair amount, it turned out, to the right people. She put an ad in the local paper to sell it: $100 to anyone willing to take it away. A woman named Anna came to look at.
Anna's husband, as it happens, is an Australian sculptor and furniture maker, currently in Australia but coming back soon, and he was looking to find some American wood. She said ours was just what he wanted. How about a trade? she suggested. I'll get my daughter's fiance to take the wood, she said,and he'll also take the debris, and there was a lot of debris, not just from the tree but hedge trimmings, torn up vines, all kinds of junk that would cost a fair amount to get rid of.
OK, sounds good to us, we said. The next day her daughter's fiance showed up with a truck. He turned out to be a landscaper and yard maintenance guy, and he indeed took the debris, and some of the wood, then came back the next day with a front loader and captured the big stuff. Then he wanted to know if we were interested in getting Bob out of our driveway. When we moved into this house Bob was a red cedar growing by chance at the edge of our driveway, between the curb and the madacam, and about six inches tall, and we let it grow, and grow, and grew fond ot if, and gave it a name, Bob, and now it's 22 feet tall and very handsome. But in the way. It was getting harder and harder to steer a truck, or anything, between Bob and the hedge that borders the driveway on the other side. People, in fact, think we're kind of crazy for letting Bob grow. But our new friend the fiance, whose name is Eugene O'Neill, said it was a $3500 tree now, and urged us to move it to safer ground. So we are moving it to safer ground: about six feet to the west. Now Bob can truly flourish, and harbor small birds, and offer us something green to look at in the winter. Meanwhile, to offset the cost of doing this somewhat, the Australian sculptor is going to make us a fine piece of furniture out of our wild cherry wood, and possibly, who knows? a piece of sculpture as well. And all this makes me very happy, because the tree is getting used, and Bob will flourish unchecked and grow handsomer and handsomer, and the old wild cherry won't fall on anyone, and, best of all, because it illustrates something I've believed for a long time and that comes straight from the Tao Te Ching: When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
If you understand that, you understand everything.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Augst 2:
My old friend Bart, who's a rare book and manuscript appraiser, called me today, we were talking about books and our own relationship to them, and I asked him what Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in the original dust jacket, was going for these days, and he told me that a really good copy had been sold recently for a quarter of a million dollars. That prompted me to find my own copy of the book, a Modern Library edition of 1934, and look it up on ABEbooks, the go-to site for used and rare, and look up values. I knew it had to have some value because Fitzgerald wrote a new introduction for that edition, so it was a first edition of the introduction. Aha! I said to myself when I saw the first entry, $2,000; but alas, that's with the dust jacket, and I don't have the dust jacket. Without the dust jacket, and without the remainder mark that so many of them have, because this edition did not sell well, and in decent condition, it's worth maybe a couple of hundred dollars. Which is something. I can't complain. Besides, I can read it without worrying about messing it up in some way, bumping a corner, say, or tearing the jacket, and reducing its value. I think that's what I'll do. I'll read it.
I've been reading so much lately about Christopher Columbus and now I'm starting to write, and it feels good to begin. How many years will it take? It will take years. So it's hard at this moment to think about reading other things, but I do. I read TLS as always, and the London Review of Books, all the book reviews, in fact, I look through the New Yorker, I read the daily paper, and the local papers. I wonder sometimes if it's making me smarter. I doubt it. Looking through old notebooks once in a while, I discover insights I had forgotten I had, and they impress me. Old thoughts, but real thoughts. I've talked about this before, having thoughts, original thoughts, ideas, insights, those moments that clarify and expand your understanding of the world and how it works, and how exciting that can be. I know writers who have spun out the one original thought they have had in their lives into entire careers. And you can see how that could happen, how you could get on that horse and ride it until it dropped from exhaustion, or you got bored with it. Think about people who lecture on one subject, over and over again. I'm thinking of joining that crowd. I have ideas for two lectures, attractive to businessmen, that would allow me to retire. They're really good ideas. I could expand them into books very easily.
It would kill me, no doubt, because it's not really what I want to do, but the money, the money.... Like a quarter of a million dollars for a copy of Gatsby in the original dust jacket. And if it were signed? Maybe this one was signed. I have thousands of books in the house and you would think I'd have something I could cash in on, but in fact I've already done that, sold most of my rare books, and there was nothing even close to that in value. Not even remotely close. But some nice books nevetheless. Sometimes I miss them.
BOOK REVIEW
But here's a new one, Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, by Peter Barber and Tom Harper (University of Chicago Press, $45), it's the catalog of an exhibition at the British Library, it's a big handsome book and it describes the use of maps in the Renaissance when maps were expensive to produce, great huge things that covered walls and to be found almost exclusively in the palaces of the nobility. The first map that caught my eye in the book is a woodcut map of Venice so large, approximately four feet by eleven, that it had to be printed in separate sheets, then joined at the seams, and so detailed that a resident could easily have picked out his own building from the mass of buildings on display. This map must have taken months to draw; it looks at the city from an elevation that does not exist anywhere near Venice, so the mapmaker must have gone canal by canal, street by street, through Venice to mark the sites of buildings, their shapes and sizes, in order to make something reasonably accurate. The quality of the woodcut itself is extraordinary and shows the influence of the great Albrecht Durer. According to the text, it cost 3 ducats, "affrordable only to the wealthiest, not to mention the most tasteful, of art collectors and ruler."
I've never owned anything like such a map, but I've seen numerous reproductions of them. I remember when we were living in Rome in the apartment of an American sculptor, who in turn was living in our house in Sag Harbor, he had a map of Rome dating from the sixteenth century that showed the buildings like this map of Venice, and the building we were living in was on the map. That was kind of a thrill. I used to live in a house built around 1810 and I owned a map of our village made for one of the county atlases that were ubiquitous in the U. S. in the late nineteenth century, and it showed our house, and the other houses on our street; and it could not help but rouse one's sense of history.
It's quite a book. There are the maps stamped on coins and the miniature maps printed on the pocket globes that became popular in the seventeenth century; there are later maps such as might be found in the room of a secretary of state of some nation, or in a merchant's house, and of course my favorite, maps of the Americas with half of North America blank space, because it took such a long time to discover the whole of our own continent. The text that accompanies each map is informative and intelligent and never overbearing. A beautiful book. I'm grateful for it.
My old friend Bart, who's a rare book and manuscript appraiser, called me today, we were talking about books and our own relationship to them, and I asked him what Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in the original dust jacket, was going for these days, and he told me that a really good copy had been sold recently for a quarter of a million dollars. That prompted me to find my own copy of the book, a Modern Library edition of 1934, and look it up on ABEbooks, the go-to site for used and rare, and look up values. I knew it had to have some value because Fitzgerald wrote a new introduction for that edition, so it was a first edition of the introduction. Aha! I said to myself when I saw the first entry, $2,000; but alas, that's with the dust jacket, and I don't have the dust jacket. Without the dust jacket, and without the remainder mark that so many of them have, because this edition did not sell well, and in decent condition, it's worth maybe a couple of hundred dollars. Which is something. I can't complain. Besides, I can read it without worrying about messing it up in some way, bumping a corner, say, or tearing the jacket, and reducing its value. I think that's what I'll do. I'll read it.
I've been reading so much lately about Christopher Columbus and now I'm starting to write, and it feels good to begin. How many years will it take? It will take years. So it's hard at this moment to think about reading other things, but I do. I read TLS as always, and the London Review of Books, all the book reviews, in fact, I look through the New Yorker, I read the daily paper, and the local papers. I wonder sometimes if it's making me smarter. I doubt it. Looking through old notebooks once in a while, I discover insights I had forgotten I had, and they impress me. Old thoughts, but real thoughts. I've talked about this before, having thoughts, original thoughts, ideas, insights, those moments that clarify and expand your understanding of the world and how it works, and how exciting that can be. I know writers who have spun out the one original thought they have had in their lives into entire careers. And you can see how that could happen, how you could get on that horse and ride it until it dropped from exhaustion, or you got bored with it. Think about people who lecture on one subject, over and over again. I'm thinking of joining that crowd. I have ideas for two lectures, attractive to businessmen, that would allow me to retire. They're really good ideas. I could expand them into books very easily.
It would kill me, no doubt, because it's not really what I want to do, but the money, the money.... Like a quarter of a million dollars for a copy of Gatsby in the original dust jacket. And if it were signed? Maybe this one was signed. I have thousands of books in the house and you would think I'd have something I could cash in on, but in fact I've already done that, sold most of my rare books, and there was nothing even close to that in value. Not even remotely close. But some nice books nevetheless. Sometimes I miss them.
BOOK REVIEW
But here's a new one, Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, by Peter Barber and Tom Harper (University of Chicago Press, $45), it's the catalog of an exhibition at the British Library, it's a big handsome book and it describes the use of maps in the Renaissance when maps were expensive to produce, great huge things that covered walls and to be found almost exclusively in the palaces of the nobility. The first map that caught my eye in the book is a woodcut map of Venice so large, approximately four feet by eleven, that it had to be printed in separate sheets, then joined at the seams, and so detailed that a resident could easily have picked out his own building from the mass of buildings on display. This map must have taken months to draw; it looks at the city from an elevation that does not exist anywhere near Venice, so the mapmaker must have gone canal by canal, street by street, through Venice to mark the sites of buildings, their shapes and sizes, in order to make something reasonably accurate. The quality of the woodcut itself is extraordinary and shows the influence of the great Albrecht Durer. According to the text, it cost 3 ducats, "affrordable only to the wealthiest, not to mention the most tasteful, of art collectors and ruler."
I've never owned anything like such a map, but I've seen numerous reproductions of them. I remember when we were living in Rome in the apartment of an American sculptor, who in turn was living in our house in Sag Harbor, he had a map of Rome dating from the sixteenth century that showed the buildings like this map of Venice, and the building we were living in was on the map. That was kind of a thrill. I used to live in a house built around 1810 and I owned a map of our village made for one of the county atlases that were ubiquitous in the U. S. in the late nineteenth century, and it showed our house, and the other houses on our street; and it could not help but rouse one's sense of history.
It's quite a book. There are the maps stamped on coins and the miniature maps printed on the pocket globes that became popular in the seventeenth century; there are later maps such as might be found in the room of a secretary of state of some nation, or in a merchant's house, and of course my favorite, maps of the Americas with half of North America blank space, because it took such a long time to discover the whole of our own continent. The text that accompanies each map is informative and intelligent and never overbearing. A beautiful book. I'm grateful for it.
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