The American Scholar - Summer 2013

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CONTENTS

ARTICLES 18 COVER STORY Laughter and the Brain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Restak Can humor help us better understand the most complex and enigmatic organ in the human body?

28 Ladies Last. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brenda Wineapple After the Civil War, both women and black men struggled to win the vote

44 Park of Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amanda Foreman Far more than an urban retreat, Hyde Park is a repository of British history and culture

54 Playing at Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pacifique Irankunda Having grown up amid the horrors of Burundi’s civil war, a young man is bewildered by the American lust for warlike video games

62 Intimacy With the Inevitable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William Harless A doctor’s journey, from student to resident to consoler of the dying

71 At Sixty-Five . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emily Fox Gordon After the excesses of youth and terrors of middle age, a writer faces the contingencies of being old

FICTION 77 Commencement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ralph Lombreglia 86 Chatang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nathaniel Rich

POETRY 39 Hymn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spencer Reece 42 Self-Portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rachel Hadas 43 Capitignano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karl Kirchwey

ARTS 93 Musical Chairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Janet Frank A veteran cellist with the National Symphony takes a close look at the entrances and exits of world-famous conductors

BOOKS 98 ESSAY Hannah Arendt on Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Maier-Katkin The Eichmann in Jerusalem debate still rages .............. and Nathan Stoltzfuss

104 REVIEWS The Bombmaker’s Burden Shirley Streshinsky ◆ Bad Medicine Alison Bass ◆ True North Fergus M. Bordewich ◆ Out of Africa Graeme Wood ◆ Say Anything Jennifer Sinor ◆ Science, Right and Wrong Sam Kean

DEPARTMENTS 2 Editor’s Note 3 Letters 6 LETTER FROM VIENNA

Selective Amnesia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alice Miller

10 WORKS IN PROGRESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Edited by Allen Freeman

16 TUNING UP Father’s Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Goodwin

118 COMMONPLACE BOOK Conquest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collected by Anne Matthews

120 THE PBK PRESIDENTS POLL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Margaret Foster

ON THE COVER Michael Flippo/Veer; photo-illustration by David Herbick


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T h e A m e r i c a n S c h o l a r , S u m m e r 2 0 1 3

EDITOR’S NOTE

StrangersWhen the doorbell rang after nine on a recent weeknight, my wife and I looked up from our important intellectual work (she was on Facebook; I was watching a Sopranos rerun). I wouldn’t say a shiver of fear ran through us, even if that weren’t a cliché, but on our small city’s residential streets, unexpected night visitors are a rar-ity. We tiptoed to the living room and boldly peeked through the blinds to see that the ringer was a well-dressed man holding a clipboard. We tiptoed away, and the ringer rang no more.

The dread that arose with that first ring was mostly justified by the clipboard—surely we would have been subjected to some sort of spiel had we opened the door—but in truth the dread was not untinged with fear. Our city has very little crime, and we did not even lock our doors for the first 20 years we lived here. But the stranger always arouses fear, a natu-ral instinct for self-preservation with an obvious Darwinian component.

I wonder how much the immi-gration debate depends on this fear of the stranger, and how the Boston bombers have intensified it. Those others with their unpronounceable names come from places without our values, where violence bubbles just below the surface, apt to erupt in the individual or—see Syria—in the society itself. Isn’t our very civi-lization threatened by these others, with their primitive ways?

Enter a very young man with the wonderfully appropriate name of

Pacifique, whose boyhood during the Burundian civil war was just such a nightmare of violence. In his village, he tells us in “Playing at Violence,” his story in this issue, families would hide in the forest when rebel militiamen drew near, and children like Pacifique wished “they had been

born blind and deaf so they couldn’t see their houses being burned and their mothers being raped before being killed, or hear the sounds of bombs or their parents screaming and crying.”

Pacifique left the village, going to a public boarding school on Lake Tanganyika. There a second child of the civil war, a brutal young man named Chrysostom, who considered the militiamen his friends, terrorized the other students in the school, both physically and psychologically. Isn’t this the sort of psychotic personality that a culture of violence produces? Certainly Pacifique knew other such children from his village for whom “violence became easy and fun,” who years later would brag about the atrocities they’d committed.

What of Pacifique himself? He not only escaped the village but also got out of Africa and found himself at Deerfield Academy in Massachu-setts. But did he escape a society in which violence had become easy and fun? Not entirely. The source of that violence, however, may surprise you, and show you just how right his given name is.

—ROBERT WILSON

Robert Wilson Editor

Sudip Bose Managing Editor/Fiction Editor

Bruce Falconer Senior Editor

Margaret Foster Associate Editor

David Herbick Design Director

Allen Freeman Advisory Editor

Sandra Costich Editor-at-Large

Langdon Hammer Poetry Editor

Sally Atwater Copy Editor

Leah Jacobs Editorial Assistant

Katherine R. Soule Consulting Editor

Contributing Editors:Ann Beattie, William

Deresiewicz, Adam Goodheart, Edward Hoagland, Ann Hulbert, Thomas Mallon, Anne Matthews,

Richard E. Nicholls, Patricia O’Toole, Phyllis Rose, Wendy

Smith, Jean Stipicevic, Jay Tolson, Charles Trueheart,

Ted Widmer

Editorial Board:Allison Blakely, Lincoln Caplan, Fred H. Cate, Joseph W. Gordon,

Anthony Grafton, Donald S. Lamm, Cullen Murphy,

Brenda Wineapple

John Churchill Publisher

Raymond Sachs Publishing Director

Steven Anderson Business Manager


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LETTERS

The American Scholar® is published quarterly for a general readership by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1606 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009; phone: (202) 265-3808; fax: (202) 265-0083; [email protected]. To subscribe or to order single copies, call (800) 821-4567 or visit theamericanscholar.org. Subscription rates: for individuals, $25 one year, $48 two years, $69 three years; for institutions, $30 one year, $58 two years. For Canadian subscriptions, add $10 a year for postage; for other international subscriptions, add $25 a year for postage. Single copies, $9 (Canada, $12; other international, $15). Newsstand distribution through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services. For information: Dawn Cresser ([email protected]); phone (516) 837-0832; fax (516) 825-8290. For advertising contact: Steven Anderson, [email protected], (202) 745-3247. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright ©2013 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. ISSN 0003-0937. Periodical postage paid at Wash-ington, DC, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to: The American Scholar, P.O. Box 8511, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8511. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. To raise additional revenues, we may make our mailing list available to select organizations. If you don’t want your name included, contact: The American Scholar, P.O. Box 8511, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8511.

Bankers as Public Servants“Good Fences Make Good Bankers” by William J. Quirk (Spring 2013) reminds me of an experi-ence I had in the 1950s. A final-year law student interviewing for a position with a major bank in Ohio, I had the temerity to ask the inter-viewer what kind of financial future I might expect in a legal career with a bank. He paused and in measured tones told me that if I was concerned with financial success, I should not go into banking. Bank-ing, he said earnestly, was a quasi-public-service industry, and its primary mission was to protect the funds of its depositors and assist its borrowing customers.

Can you picture a bank interviewer, with a straight face, uttering these same words to a young job applicant today?

FRED D. SHAPIROPepper Pike, Ohio

William Quirk’s article prompted me to recall some of my father’s insights. As a banker in rural eastern North Carolina for about 50 years in the middle of the last century, he repeatedly asserted two beliefs:

• No bank has any business speculating with its depositors’ money.

• The purpose of a [traditional commercial]

bank is to help people and businesses in a com-munity grow and prosper—not to get them in over their heads with indebtedness they can-not support.

Wisdom, indeed, from a country banker.CLIFFORD C. SIMPSON

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

Repealing the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was like drilling through

watertight doors and then hitting an iceberg. Gramm-Leach-Bliley [the 1999 act that repealed much of Glass-

Steagall] was an unmitigated disaster.

LEWIS C. TAISHOFFfrom our website

Another JourneyDonald Hall’s “One Road” brought back memories of my trip to Istanbul in 1959 after a summer’s study in Bonn, Germany. My bicycle had been stolen from in front of the university I was attend-ing, so a fellow Kalamazoo College student and I stuck out our thumbs. Somewhere in Austria, a German in a VW Beetle stopped and asked us where we were going. He was headed to Istanbul, he said, and we went along with him. The road was in better condition than Hall experienced seven years earlier, but it still yielded adven-tures. After a youth hostel stay in Istanbul, my


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Letter fromVIENNA

Selective Amnesia ALICE MILLER


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Last December, on a morning run through a city park in Vienna’s second district, I stumbled across a strange sight: a huge concrete tower looming above the snow. The park, the Augarten, features Vienna’s oldest Baroque gardens and once hosted concerts conducted by Mozart. Today the 17th-century Palais Augarten is the headquarters of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. But the giant, stained tower that rises above the park and the smaller tower that stands nearby? Alongside Vienna’s traditional archi-tecture—imposing, ornate, and meticulously main-tained—the towers look like they’ve been ripped out of a cartoon dystopia.

The park’s website tells me that they are Flaktürme, antiaircraft gun tow-ers, ordered by Hitler and built in the 1940s to protect Vienna from bombing. Berlin and Ham-burg had similar towers. Vienna’s largest is more than 160 feet high and reportedly weighs several hundred thousand tons. The city has tried to get rid of them—six are scattered around—but it’s not easy. Reinforced concrete is, after all, what we now use to bury our defunct nuclear power plants. One official said that even diamond saws couldn’t be used on structures so large.

Elsewhere in Vienna, one of the towers has been turned into an aquarium, but the other five stay fenced in and locked. No signs record the stories

of how the towers came to be here or what hap-pened inside, or the names of the prisoners of war who built them. In postwar postcards of Vienna’s skyline, the towers were carefully blanked out.

The Flaktürme are among the few traces of the Second World War that remain in Vienna. I’ve been here for five months, and, thanks to the classical architecture, I feel as though I live

in a distant century. Above me looms a Gothic cathe-dral, and as my sneakers slap the cobbled streets, a clatter of hoofs announces an oncoming horse and carriage. During the war, Vienna was bombed many times, but you’d never know. Sections of the city

were destroyed, but there are no lingering gaps or ripples in the urban fabric. Only recently I found photographs of the bombing at the train station just down the road from my apartment.

A photographer of decrepit, falling-down buildings, decaying cathedrals, and abandoned palaces in Europe tells me that, unlike Berlin, where many famous sites recall the war, Vienna offers little work for him. Buildings here are pulled down swiftly. Even when a structure is being restored, scrims stretched over the scaffolding are often imprinted with life-sized drawings of what the building will look like upon completion. The construction is hidden, as if to maintain the illusion of an unblemished historic paradise.

Even a cursory reading of Austria’s history

I’ve been in the Austrian capital for five months,

and, thanks to the classical architecture and cobbled streets, I feel as though I live in a distant century.

Alice Miller grew up in New Zealand, studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now lives in Vienna.


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Letter from Vienna

tells you why much of the last century has vanished from view. Emperor Franz Joseph shaped today’s Vienna

late in the 19th century, the city’s glowing period. He called for a wide boulevard—the Ringstrasse—to replace the 13th-century city walls. Along the ring road, the Viennese conceived a new univer-sity and grand buildings, including a theater, a city hall, and an opera house. Drama, art, and music were already staples of their culture, and in the years leading into the 20th century, the city was famously a center of ideas. Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Leon Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud met and debated in the legendary cafés. They could sit for hours over a single cup of coffee. Thoughts could be wandered through, passed around the Ringstrasse, critiqued from all angles. Theodor Herzl’s notion of a homeland for the Jews, Lenin’s idea for a communist nation, and Freud’s concept of the talking cure originated in this environment. Vienna was still the capital of a huge, sprawling empire, and that is the milieu

that today’s Vienna celebrates—in high-ceilinged coffeehouses, vast museums, and palaces that take up entire blocks.

But during the past hundred years, Vienna’s inquisitive cul-ture was crushed from inside and out. By 1918, the empire—with its perilous bureaucracy so well cap-tured by Kafka—had collapsed, and Vienna was suddenly the cap-ital of a minor European coun-try. Viennese writer Stefan Zweig described the new Austrian state as a “vague, gray and inert shadow. … The Czechs, Poles, Italians, and Slovenes had snatched away their countries; what remained was a mutilated trunk that bled from every vein.” And the worst was to come. By this time, a still-unknown

Austrian who had lived in Vienna for some years—having been twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts—had already moved to Munich, starting on the road that would lead him, 20 years later, back to Vienna, to declare Germany and Austria united, and to take the entire world to the edge of destruction.

This March saw the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s 1938 return to Vienna. Having already lost their empire, many Austrians favored the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria into Germany), and photographs show them welcoming the Führer. After the war, the Allies occupied Vienna, and mil-lions of deaths from the Holocaust were reported, including 65,000 Austrian Jews. In 1943, the Allies described Austria as Nazism’s “first victim,” and after the war, Austrian politicians embraced that version of events. Austria’s period of de-Nazifica-tion was brief, and the population went silent on the war. In a 1946 study, the government argued that the majority of Austrians had not cooperated with the Nazis, and that meant compensation or repatriation for the victims of Nazi rule was Ger-many’s responsibility.M

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A Flakturm in the Augar-ten: the city has tried to get rid of the Third Reich antiaircraft gun towers, so far without success.


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Not until 1986 did Austria’s Nazi past prop-erly resurface, when presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim—who had been UN secretary general from 1972 to 1982—was revealed to have fought for the German army in the war. Despite the ensuing international controversy, the Austrians elected him president in 1986. But Austria had begun to examine and acknowledge its partici-pation in the Nazi regime, and in 1991 it finally officially expressed regret for the nation’s role in the Holocaust. In 1998, a historical commission looked at Austria’s involvement in appropriat-ing Jewish assets at the time of Nazi rule and the possibility of returning them. But after so much time, many records proved difficult to recover, and much of the property will never be found.

This year’s 75th anniversary of the Anschluss prompted renewed discussions about the nation’s Nazi past. Most prominent was one story in March about the Vienna Philharmonic, picked up by news outlets around the world, report-ing that the orchestra once had a considerable Nazi membership; in the 1940s, nearly half of the Philharmonic musicians were active Nazis, and two were SS members. During the 1930s and 1940s, 13 Jewish members of the orchestra were expelled from its ranks. Two Jewish orchestra members died after they were dismissed, and five were killed in concentration camps. Other members who were married to Jews or classi-fied as “half-Jewish” were continually threat-ened with revocation of the “privilege” of their membership.

Although the media outside Vienna pre-fer the implications of a cover-up, most of the information about the persecution and murder of the orchestra’s Jewish members was previ-ously known. Oliver Rathkolb, the lead historian on an independent project studying the history of the Philharmonic, was surprised to find new archival material in his own research. But he didn’t believe that the information had been concealed. There no longer seems to be much resistance to recovering the Nazi past in Aus-tria. Rathkolb said he hadn’t encountered any

opposition to his research, and even back when the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) was in power—in coalition with the Austrian People’s Party from 1999 to 2005—it too pushed to recover Austria’s Nazi past.

I keep thinking of a metaphorical city described by an Austrian Jew who was forced out of Vienna in 1938. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagined a city made up of all its pasts at once—a version of Rome that could hold its earliest settlement at the same time as its most recent buildings, a city that could contain every palace, every castle, every ruin from all of its centuries in the same space and time. Freud’s Roman image resembles what many Viennese are trying to construct now: a city that knows all its pasts while unearthing a part of their subconscious that they’ve previously tried to avoid.

Echoes of 20th-century history sometimes still resound through Vienna, as on one particular night each year when political tension is guaranteed to surface on the streets. January and February are the peak of ball season. Balls occur most nights; on the subway you’ll see women wearing long, drifting gowns, perhaps with strands of silver threaded through their hair, and beside them impeccably tuxedoed men. Nearly 500 balls take place in any given year, including the famous Opera Ball, but also balls for Viennese industry, for the technical university, for the Philharmonic. Add to these a series of gay balls, a pharmacists’ ball, a hunters’ ball, and a somewhat less illustrious (as I can attest) techno ball.

But one particular ball each year causes more uproar than all the others combined: the ball asso-ciated with the FPÖ. When this event is held—at the Hofburg, a palace that was the main winter residence of the Habsburg dynasty—protesters line the streets carrying signs with slogans against Nazism. Last year, the ball caused more uproar than usual because it was held on Holocaust Day, and the FPÖ leader suggested that the protests showed that members of the far right were the persecuted


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Letter fromVienna

“new Jews.” The Hofburg tried to keep the ball from happening there this year, but its sponsors registered under another name, the Akademiker-ball, and apparently slipped past the authorities.

My boyfriend and I tried to get close to the Hofburg on the February evening of the ball. Barriers were being constructed by hundreds of police all over the city, and we could barely reach the Ringstrasse, let alone the palace. That night, women and men in their finery ran for their cars as protesters hurled paint balls. More than 2,500 demonstrators converged on the Hofburg, and nine of them were arrested.

Most discussions of Austrian history don’t involve women running in evening gowns and protesters flinging paint. This May marked the world premiere of a music drama project, staged inside the Austrian Parliament, that explores Euro-pean music, racism, and nationalism from before the First World War to the present. As Clemens Hellsberg, the president of the Philharmonic, has noted, Austrians can’t take credit for Bruckner, Brahms, and Mahler “and say that was us—but 1938 to 1945, that was the others.” At the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss, Austrian Chancel-lor Werner Faymann spoke at the cemetery that holds the remains of those who stood against the Nazis: “We are never permitted,” he said, “to forget or diminish the darkest time in the history of our country. We need solidarity and a union against racism, fascism, and right-wing extremism.”

The past may hover closer to the present than we think. Philharmonic historian Rathkolb sug-gested that the country’s current political climate is similar to the interwar period. That, he told The Vienna Review, is because instead of identifying the need for more democracy in political deci-sions, people are inclined to attack democracy as a whole. Some 20 percent of Austrians are said to be critical of democracy. This is not a small number, particularly within a political system that allows coalition governments. Talk occurs of the need for a “strong man” as leader, and for “freedom” in Europe—as can be seen in the existence of Aus-tria’s Freedom Party and Germany’s Free Forces.

A common target of frustration is the Euro-pean Union, which antidemocracy groups criticize as increasingly authoritarian. Austrian novelist Robert Menasse recently warned that those who blame the EU conceal the real problem, which, he says, is the member states themselves. The concept of a united Europe has hit its first great obstacle in the financial crisis, but it also faces serious ideological opposition. Rathkolb suggests that the wrath once directed toward the Jewish population is now being directed toward the EU.

Back to the giant, stained Flaktürme, looming above the Augarten. In 2006, students received permission to enter one of Vienna’s flak towers. They found the interior untouched since spring 1945, when thousands of civilians were sheltered inside while the Red Army poured into the city. Strewn about were wartime newspapers, chil-dren’s toys, military uniforms, and model planes used to trace the paths of Allied aircraft. On the walls were graffiti in French, Russian, and Ital-ian, left by the prisoners of war who had built the towers. Although the Flaktürme are now closed to the public, next May the concrete walls of one of the towers will serve as a screen on which the names of more than 90,000 Austrian victims of the Second World War will be projected.

A visitor to Vienna can’t help but admire the city’s luminous fin-de-siècle past and be drawn back into the age of empire. Meanwhile, in a quiet way, the Viennese are prying loose their stories of the war, finding new ways to tell them, and—like Freud’s image of a city—layering the narra-tives to better see the present. One of the early champions of a united Europe, Stefan Zweig fled to Brazil in 1941 and wrote that Europe seemed “doomed to die by its own madness.” He and his wife then poisoned themselves in a suicide pact. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, his united Europe has been realized, but its contin-ued existence will require a strong memory. As Freud described his city of the mind, “nothing that ever took shape has passed away.” l


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WORKS IN PROGRESSEdited by Allen Freeman

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Megaliths by a PolymathEdward Tufte, aka The da Vinci of Data, has spent a career explaining the theory and expression of visualized information. But these days he is pursu-ing something heavier and not at all theoretical: large, often whimsical sculptures of stone, wood, and steel set on his rural Connecticut property.

Tufte calls his current works megaliths, and there are now some 700 tons of them. “My work in data theory continues in parallel with my sculpture,” he says. “The wonderful thing about big outdoor sculpture is that it lives in the real world. Over the years, I’ve stared at a lot of data visualizations on the glowing flat rectangle of the computer screen. So I love the reality and physi-

cality of joyful artworks residing in nature.”A professor emeritus of political science,

statistics, and computer science at Yale Uni-versity, Tufte has sold more than 1.5 million copies of books on graphic design and how to obtain the highest information value from data presentation.

Today Tufte crisscrosses the country lectur-ing on the value of presenting information-rich data simply. He’s drafting what he calls a book-movie—another melding of science and art titled “The Thinking Eye”—about seeing deeply and intensely and then reasoning about what you see. “My work is secretly about making peo-ple smarter,” he says. “In some ways, seeing is thinking.” —TOM BENTLEY


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Fracking Sleuths Apply DNAEnvironmentalists list contami-nation of drinking water first among dangers connected with hydraulic fracturing—fracking—the extraction of natural gas and oil from the ground by dig-ging deep and injecting millions of gallons of fluid into the earth. Fracking fluid, water seeded with sand and a proprietary mix of chemicals, fractures the shale, opening fissures in the rock through which gas can flow to the surface.

Each company’s brew of chemicals is a trade secret, thanks to a clause in the 2005 Safe Drinking Water Act that

made disclosure optional. Now a company founded by five current and former students of Duke University is work-ing on a new kind of disclosure. BaseTrace (also the name of the company) consists of “inert strands of resilient DNA” to be mixed into fracking fluid before it is forced down a well. Because

BaseTrace DNA would be par-ticular to each well, fracking fluid could indicate what com-pany was responsible for any adverse effects.

Companies will be motivated to use it as “an on-site diag-nostic tool for quick problem detection,” says Jake Rudolph, a cofounder, and to refute claims of contamination.

The DNA in BaseTrace is reported to be identifiable in low concentrations, so a well’s worth of fracking fluid would require only a thimbleful (left) of BaseTrace. The company is testing BaseTrace’s survival in harsh environments and looking for a partner to help in field tests. —LEAH JACOBS


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T h e A m e r i r , S u m m e r 2 0 1 3

In Light of the EnlightenmentThe 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called Age of Reason in Europe, were character-ized by a widespread interest in miraculous healing and occultism (magic, kabbalah, and alchemy), and for every Diderot, Goethe, Hume, or Locke there was a mysterious swindler like “Count” Cagliostro or an amateur mystic like the sentimental novel-ist Julie de Krüdener. Flimflam and ignorance are subjects of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, a book due out in July by John V. Fleming, emeritus professor of lit-erature at Princeton University. We asked Fleming to pose questions about what’s to be gained today by studying the Age of Reason. Here are four culled from a longer list.

1. The Enlightenment was the great age of serious letter writ-ing. Some French scholars of Freemasonry are working on the nature of epistolary exchange in the Enlightenment and the role that networks of correspondence play in the rapid transmission of new or controversial ideas. From a prominent correspondent writing from his private house or his communal lodge, letters could go out in all directions like radio waves, circles within con-centric circles. Then each node might become its own center. The image often used at the time was that of the spider’s web. The “system” could approach the multiplying leverage of today’s chain letters. One fascinating historical project now underway involves the detailed study of epistolary spider webs, taking as an example the correspondence received by the Swiss physiolo-gist and naturalist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777). This cor-respondence comprised 14,207 letters sent from 446 posting sta-tions throughout Europe.

In what ways does mod-ern electronic communication amplify this Enlightenment system, and in what ways does it undermine it? Can we look for-ward to editions of the Collected Emails and Selected Tweets of

the eminent scholars of our age?

2. In Dialectic of Enlighten-ment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno held that the Enlightenment attempted nothing less than “the disen-chantment of the world.” A materialist and empirical sensi-bility, expressed with scientific and experimental attitudes, called into question all existing mythological systems. The tri-umph of Reason was remorse-less, leaving little still standing of the old poetic universe. The poets themselves were aware of the onslaught. In 1611 John Donne published his “First Anniversary,” which included these famous lines:

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;The Sunne is lost, and th’earth, and no

man’s witCan well direct him where to looke

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Wordsworth’s disquiet was hardly less acute nearly two centuries later when he wrote in “A Poet’s Epitaph”:

Physician art thou? One, all eyes,Philosopher! a fingering slave,One that would peep and botaniseUpon his mother’s grave?

We are told that this century will belong to the biologists as the last one belonged to the physicists. Burgeoning new fields—molecular biology, neu-roscience—promise or threaten to further disenchant and demythologize the inner worlds of our emotional and mental experience. What will be the response of the poets?

3. Immanuel Kant prefaced the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) with the following sentence: “Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to con-sider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it can-not answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.” This observation may account for the widespread enthusiasm, in the elite cultural and intellectual centers of 18th-century Europe, for esotericism, occultism, R

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“mystical” Freemasonry, and certain religious phenomena that, from a current perspective, may seem very strange indeed.

Is Kant’s premise correct? Have more than two centuries of dramatic historical change and a huge increment in knowl-edge and learning answered any of the questions that in Kant’s view “transcend every faculty of the mind?”

4. If for the medieval period the queen of the sciences was theology, the Enlightenment’s scientific queen was alchemy. Some historians of the Enlight-enment, perhaps embarrassed by this reality, have chosen to underplay or ignore it. None-theless, for most of the 17th and 18th centuries the enthusiasm for alchemy among bankers and archbishops was hardly less intense than among Rosicru-cians and mystical Freemasons. If Sir Isaac Newton’s interest in the “Great Art” (alchemy) was eclipsed by his pursuit of bibli-cal numerology, it was nonethe-less keen. Modern historians of chemistry have shown that the experimental procedures of the alchemists, though founded in error, greatly advanced the dis-coveries of chemists. Of course the difference between an alche-mist and a chemist, though per-haps greater than that between a hawk and a handsaw, was in linguistic terms no greater than the ossified Arabic article al still retained in the former.

Could etymological mod-ernization add yet more dignity to any of the following: alcove, alembic, alfalfa, algebra, algo-rithm, Al Capone?J.

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Head in the CloudsMention global warming to economists, politicians, or Al Gore and you’ll probably trigger discussions of the pros and cons of levying carbon taxes or trading carbon credits to reduce car-bon emissions.

Last August, however, a group of researchers published an update on an alternative that is perhaps less fraught with politi-cal complexity. In the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 25 scientists detail an experimental plan to increase the albedo, or reflection coefficient, of the skies. [See also our article “Prozac for the Planet” by Christopher Cokinos, Autumn 2010.] “The basic principle behind the idea,” writes lead author John Latham, “is to seed marine stratocumulus clouds with sea water aerosol generated at or near the ocean surface.” Translation: make clouds thicker and whiter. This large-scale geoengineering project could increase Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight, thus cooling the globe.

The article reviews decades of literature about the science and technology behind marine cloud brightening, including precipi-tation pattern changes and increases in sea ice thickness. One drawback is that machines needed to accomplish the task, such as the Flettner rotor ship (above), may cost too much. And if not done carefully, such projects could alter global rainfall patterns or trigger other unintended ecological consequences. Still, the authors argue, the potential to maintain current global tempera-tures is too important to ignore. —JENNIFER HENDERSONR

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A Delicate HIV BalanceHIV, like other viruses, grows resistant to drugs, a concern that led to a study conducted at the University of Southern California and the RAND institutions. Researchers there ques-tioned the test-and-treat approach to HIV, which involves routine testing as part of hos-pital entrance procedure, and not just of those at risk. If the infection is found, patients are put on antiretroviral therapy regardless of the stage to which the disease has progressed. The approach, which has won endorsement by the National Institutes of Health, has been found to reduce the transmission rate and increase life expectancy.

But at what cost? USC Professor Neeraj Sood led a team that built a model simulating the HIV

epidemic for homosexual men in Los Angeles County. As expected, test-and-treat projected fewer new infections and fewer deaths, but there was also nearly twice the rate of multi-drug-resistant HIV. One possible solution is to continue ubiquitous testing but withhold treat-ment until the disease has progressed, a course that confers roughly half the benefits of test-and-treat with no increase in drug resistance.

Sood believes that test-and-treat “will con-tinue to grow in popularity” but hopes that pol-icymakers “will monitor multidrug resistance and take corrective action if they see a spike.” Meanwhile, he plans to add to his model the availability of prophylactic drugs like Truvada, which recently gained FDA approval. These drugs can be taken by those at risk to reduce the likelihood of infection. —EMILY OCHOA


after woodworker Todd Bol built a small memorial library in his front yard for his mother, a former schoolteacher. Pass-ersby were unsure whether it was a birdhouse or a book-worm’s fantasy, but soon Bol was constructing little libraries for interested neighbors.

Then the University of Wis-consin got involved. “Our goal in collaborating [with Todd Bol] was never to earn a lot of money,” says the university’s program manager, Rick Brooks. “We wanted to see if we could make a difference.” Bol and Brooks aspired to build more librar-ies than philanthropist Andrew Carnegie—a “mere” 2,509—and bring strangers together through the sharing of books.

The organization sells struc-tures made from salvaged barn boards and recycled sawdust. Most patrons create their own by bringing new life to old mailboxes and dollhouses, microwaves and canoes—even a beehive.

Weatherproof and able to hold about two dozen books, the libraries perch on tree stumps and poles along bike paths, beside cafés, and in front yards, inviting people to take or leave a book. An average of 25 to 50 books come and go each month, though some libraries have han-dled as many as 1,000 in 30 days.

“People call for a truck to pick up books to bring to our warehouse,” says Brooks, “but the truck is a beat-up Honda and the warehouse is my front porch.” —SASHA INGBER L

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More Libraries Than CarnegieE-books might be wiping out bookstores, but Little Free Library, a small and erudite nonprofit, has put more than 6,000 miniature libraries on the map. Their books have reached the hands of children as far away as Lithuania, Ghana, and Afghanistan.

The movement started in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009,


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Small Slice of The Big EasyA housing project, a shuttered nightclub, a pub-lic park, and a rundown record store—they are vital sites for creating a musical map of New Orleans, says Amber Wiley, a professor of archi-tecture at Tulane University.

This fall Wiley, the National Park Service, and Tulane City Center will host and record a public event called Sites and Sounds at the 1838 Old U.S. Mint Building on the edge of the French Quarter. Musical performances and lec-tures will focus on four sites within a small sec-tion of the city’s Uptown neighborhood:

l A. L. Davis Park is a celebration site for Mardi Gras Indian tribes and brass band parades.

l The Dew Drop Inn was an early performance site for both African-American musicians and cross-dressers from the 1940s to 1970s.

l Brown Sugar Records reflects a time when music was locally promoted and distributed.

l The Magnolia Projects pub-lic housing, built in 1941 and expanded in 1955, spawned several hip-hop stars and is featured in countless bounce songs. (Wiley is an expert in bounce music, a New Orleans genre that became popular in the 1990s and draws on a vari-ety of local traditions.)

“These places have been overlooked because the tourism industry in New Orleans has been geared strictly toward jazz,” she says. The collection of sites, incor-porating other, overlapping musical traditions, “is not on the tourist map of New Orleans, but it’s important in terms of an alternative his-tory.” The notoriously violent Magnolia Proj-ects, for example—razed in 2008, rebuilt, and renamed Harmony Oaks—represent an “inten-tionally erased history” whose positive cultural contributions should be remembered, Wiley believes. She hopes that highlighting the other locales will lead to their rehabilitation at a time when post-Katrina city planning threatens to destroy parts of the city’s past. —CHLOE TAFT

International Men of MysteryEuropean diplomats in the 16th century, who had few options for transporting official cor-respondence, employed couriers. Notori-ously unreliable, these messengers frequently extracted payment from both sides, readily accepted additional bribes, and were not above destroying a package’s contents and hiding out. Governments resorted to multiple couriers and secret codes to get information through safely.

Despite many cultural, religious, and politi-cal differences, Spain, England, and Scotland employed similar methods of diplomatic com-munication, says Denice Fett, author of a book to be titled “Lying Abroad: Information and the Cul-ture of Diplomacy in Reformation Europe.” What started out in 2010 as Fett’s history dissertation at Ohio State University is now an almost complete account of diplomacy in the early modern period.

Piecing together Europe’s network of spies during the Reformation, Fett has deciphered codes in journals, diaries, memoranda, work-ing papers, and the secret financial accounts of diplomats. In all, the correspondence trans-ported by courier, diplomacy’s “lifeblood,” as she calls it, has proved the most valuable. Not all the messages are easy to read, Fett says, and certain shady characters reappear as couriers in numer-ous letters from different European archives.

Once deciphered, one pieced-together nar-rative, written in onion juice by a prisoner, revealed an assassination plot. The letters read “like a bad spy novel,” Fett says.—JESSICA WILDE

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TUNING UP

The world was my oyster. So said my father, anyway, on those nights when he’d been drink-ing and we were cruising around in his two-tone Buick Riviera. This was the late 1950s in Brewton, Alabama, and Daddy was sending me away to the same boarding school in Rhode Island that he’d attended, Portsmouth Priory, a school run by Benedictine monks. In his mind, he was setting me on a path that would lead to an apartment on Park Avenue, a seat on the Stock Exchange, and an entry in the Social Register. There was nostalgia in his voice when he talked about New York City, where he’d grown up and where he spent a few years after graduating from Ports-mouth, skipping college to work at a bank and devote himself to hard, decorous partying. His life as a young man about town, a hanger-on at the fringes of society, was well documented in the scrapbooks that filled a long shelf in our

“library,” their pages stuffed with invitations and clippings from gossip columns and photographs taken at nightclubs. I might have been the only kid in Alabama who could name the Deb of the Year in 1938 (Brenda Frazier). Even at the age of 13, however, I understood that the future my father envisioned for me was the one he’d once wanted for himself, but he’d only gotten as far as the Stork Club. If he’d known how to make a go of it in New York, he wouldn’t have been living

Stephen Goodwin’s most recent novel is Breaking Her Fall. He teaches at George Mason University.

in a town he disdained, working for his father-in-law, and sidling in and out of the American Legion Hall to wet his whistle.

I went to Portsmouth on a scholarship. It came as news to me that I needed one. My grandfather, Baba, owned two textile mills and a dye plant named after me, Stephen Spinners, where the fabrics were dipped into vats of pungent chemi-cals. Some of my first memories are of wandering around in the house that Baba built for himself on a piece of land that had once been a pecan orchard. A few years later, my parents built our house next door and filled it with furniture that my mother picked out in one day at W. & J. Sloane in New York. By local standards, both houses were show places, not as grand as some of the old houses in town with their porches and columns, but solid and substantial. We had maids and cooks who wore aprons, and a yardman, Buster, who tended the displays of azaleas and cut the broad lawns with a gang mower pulled behind his Jeep. When my grandmother wanted to go somewhere, Buster put on a chauffeur’s cap and drove her in the big blue Chrysler Imperial. In the summer, we all took the train to Pennsylva-nia and stayed at my grandparents’ house, the one my mother had grown up in. There were so many kids in the family that we filled most of a Pullman car, and in those years of plenty we took help with us, our maid Ruth and her snaggle-toothed husband, David. The train nor- C

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mally sped right through Brewton, but for us it made a special stop, with sparks flying and steam hissing and the wheels singing on the rails, with the voices of the conductor and the porters ring-ing out in the sultry darkness. On those nights, my brothers and sisters and I felt just like royalty.

So I could not help knowing that we were bet-ter off than most people. In my childish way, I also knew that there was another order of wealth, a world of tycoons in top hats and millionaires with yachts, but I had glimpsed it only in movies and comic books. Maybe because that world wasn’t quite real, and was more than a little ridiculous, it had never occurred to me that I’d actually know people who belonged to it, or that I should care what they thought of me. As my father wanted me to understand, however, there would be rich boys at Portsmouth, and he didn’t want me to seem like a bump-kin. Daddy wanted to squeeze the hay-seed out of me, and he spoke with reverence of his own rich school-mates, pronouncing their names as though they belonged to a race of demigods. One lasting mem-ory of those drives in his Buick is of the urgency in his voice as he tried to impress upon me the importance of learning to move easily in their moneyed orbit.

A familiar story: the son is given the task of living out his father’s unfulfilled dream. Daddy took me to buy clothes and taught me how to wear them—how to match the knot of the tie to the collar of the shirt, what sort of collar went with what sort of lapel, how to position the clasp of the garter between the shin bone and the calf muscle. He despaired of my accent, though he’d always done his best to purge it of “y’alls” and “ittents” and other southernisms. He tried to teach me

the right way to comb my hair—like Cary Grant, not Elvis. The father who’d once, and only once, thrown me a baseball and said, “Never say I didn’t play ball with you”—this man had now focused his attention on me, and I was flattered. Throughout my childhood, we’d had battles about my clothes and haircuts and my accent, but now I wanted to do as he said. I wanted to please him.

He and my mother drove me to Rhode Island. On the day they delivered me to the school, it took him forever to dress and he fussed over me as if pre-paring me for a coming-out party. When we passed through the gate and onto the grounds, I felt a kind

of relief. The place was nowhere near as grand as I had imag-ined, just a sprawl of white clapboard build-ings, a few of which looked like barracks. And the other boys I saw looked like … boys.

But my father, I could tell, was all nerves. It was strange to see him like that, my father who was usually so utterly sure

of himself and so dismissive of everyone else. As I watched him talking to the other parents, to the monks and the masters, I was surprised, and sur-prised to find that I was also embarrassed. There was too much tooth in his smile, too much eager-ness in his laugh, too much Vitalis in his hair.

He must have felt like a failure that day, though I wasn’t thinking that at the time. I just wanted him to get back in the Buick and drive away. Of all the lessons he’d tried to teach me, the one that sank in was the one I learned the day he left me at Portsmouth, a lesson he never intended to teach. I didn’t want ever to have to try to pass myself off as rich, or to pass myself off as any-thing that I was not.

Put another way, I didn’t want to end up like my father. lC

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Richard Restak is a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist and the author of 20 books about the brain, includ-ing, most recently, Mind: The Big Questions and The Playful Brain. He is also a former adviser to the school of philosophy at The Catholic University of America.

Laughter and the Brain

CAN HUMOR HELP US BETTER UNDERSTAND THE MOST COMPLEX AND ENIGMATIC ORGAN IN THE HUMAN BODY?

RICHARD RESTAK

In my neuropsychiatric practice, I often use cartoons and jokes to measure a patient’s neurologic and psychiatric well-being. I start off with a standard illustration called “The Cookie Theft.” It depicts a boy, precariously balanced on a stool, pilfering cookies from a kitchen cabinet as his sister eggs him on, while their absentminded mother stands drying a plate, oblivious to the water overflowing from the sink onto the floor. Though not really a cartoon—in that nothing terribly funny is taking place—it allows me to begin assess-ing various things: abstraction ability, empathy, powers of observation and description, as well as sense of humor. I am especially curious to see how patients process the image, whether they perceive only a portion of it or take it in as a whole. Some people notice only the boy, others only the mother. [See Figure 1 on p. 20.]

Next, I show a series of cartoons, starting with examples from a newspaper comics page and working up to more sophisticated drawings from The New Yorker. I then ask for an explanation of what’s going on in each of them. Over the years, I’ve learned that you can’t fake an understanding of a cartoon; you either get it or you don’t.

Finally, I tell a few jokes set out in increasing levels of subtlety and complexity. Patients don’t have to find the jokes funny (humor is too heterogeneous for that), but they should be able to explain why other people might find them funny. Why am I interested in my patients’ ability to appreciate humor? Because humor impairment

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may point to operational problems at various levels of brain functioning.Charles Darwin referred to humor as “a tickling of the mind.” We speak of being

“tickled pink” at a funny joke, and tickling often leads to laughter, so the analogy is apt. At the physiological level, humor reduces levels of stress hormones such as cortisol and is thought to enhance our immune, endocrine, and cardiovascular systems. Laughter also provides a workout for the muscles of the diaphragm, abdomen, and face. A joke can raise our spirits, or ease our tension. If we’re able to laugh during a stressful situation, we can put psy-chological distance between ourselves and the stress. Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review for more than 30 years, chron-icled in his 1979 bestselling book, Anatomy of an Illness, how he attempted to cure himself of a mysterious and rapidly progressive inflamma-tory illness of the spine by engaging in hours-long laughing sessions while watching Marx Brothers films and reruns of the then-popular Candid Camera. Though Cousins’s claims could not be scientifically confirmed, even the most skeptical researchers agree that humor provides an antidote to some emotions widely recognized to be associated with illness—for example, the feelings of rage and fear that can precipitate a heart attack.

Though I wouldn’t take a position on whether laughter has universally salutary benefits, many laughter associations and workshops around the world—common most notably in India and Sweden—do just that. Their goal is to promote good health via the therapeutic properties of laughter. LaughterWorks, which bills itself as “Austra-lia’s leading laughter leaders,” arranges seminars and workshops for various groups, as well as half-hour sessions of “laughing, breathing and gentle exercise, under the guidance of one of our qualified laughers.”

A Swedish friend described a laughter-inducing exercise involving two people sit-ting across from each other. When one begins to laugh, the other soon starts laughing, too. Not long ago, my friend and I decided to try this ourselves. She sat facing me, and after a few awkward moments (at least on my part) spent staring silently at each other, she began laughing. I wasn’t sure how to respond. But a few moments later I found myself laughing, even though nothing funny was said. I must admit that I felt better after our laughter exercise. But why?

Figure 1: “The Cookie Theft”


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In the weeks that followed, as I searched for an explanation, I was invited to par-ticipate in a discussion with three popular comedians—Robert Kelly, Dan Naturman, and Kristin Montella—at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village. The four of us sat at the famous Comedy Table, reserved for professional comedians, and spent almost two hours engaging in some high-speed repartee concerning the interaction between comedians and their audiences. The comedians, naturally curious about the presence of a “brain doctor” in their midst, may not have known that the club’s owner, Noam Dworman, had read my books and has long maintained a lively interest in neuroscience.

Soon after, I sat on a panel at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan, where I joined New Yorker cartoonists Zach Kanin, Paul Noth, and David Sipress to explore the ques-tion of why people find cartoons funny. We discussed how humor, whether conveyed by joke or cartoon, has both a subjective component (exhilaration or mirth) and its physi-cal expression (smiling or laughing). One can exist without the other: we may find a ris-qué joke amusing but withhold a smile if we happen to be in polite company. We may also laugh nervously when we’re made to feel uncomfortable. We laugh when we hear others laugh—as I experienced with my Swedish friend (indeed, this phenomenon of contagious laughter is why laugh tracks are used in situation comedies). Laughter can even be induced chemically, with laughing gas, or via electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain.

Recently, scientists have begun conducting research into the neurological pro-cesses underpinning mirth and laughter. I would not suggest that neuroscience can

“explain” humor or provide the reason why we laugh at certain jokes or cartoons and not at others. Trying to parse humor, in any case, can be a self-defeating exercise. As E. B. White once wrote, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” Still, neuroscience can provide some useful insights into what happens when we find a joke or cartoon funny. Ultimately, it isn’t just humor that we seek to better understand, but rather, that most complex and elusive of organs: the human brain.

The brain has no humor “center.” Humor is associated with—note that I didn’t say “caused by,” à la White’s frog dissection analogy—brain networks involving the temporal and frontal lobes in the cerebral cortex. Located near the top of the brain, these cortical areas are related to speech, general information, and the appreciation of contradiction and illogicality. Obviously we can’t appreciate a joke told in a language we can’t speak, or a cartoon that relies heavily on cultural norms or information for-eign to us. Within these cortical areas the joke or cartoon is parsed.

All humor involves playing with what linguists call scripts (also referred to as frames). Basically, scripts are hypotheses about the world and how it works based on


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our previous life experiences. Consider what happens when a friend suggests meeting at a restaurant. Instantaneously our brains configure a scenario involving waiters or waitresses, menus, a sequence of eatables set out in order from appetizer to dessert, followed by a bill and the computation of a tip. This process, highly compressed and applicable to almost any kind of restaurant, works largely outside conscious aware-ness. And because our scripts are so generalized and compressed, we tend to make unwarranted assumptions based on them. Humor takes advantage of this tendency. Consider, for example, almost any joke from stand-up comedian Steven Wright, known for his ironic, deadpan delivery:

—I saw a bank that said “24 Hour Banking,” but I didn’t have that much time.—I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included. So I had to buy them again.—I washed a sock. Then I put it in the dryer. When I took it out it was gone.—I went into a store and asked the clerk if there was anything I could put under my

coasters. He asked why I wanted to do that. I told him I wanted to make sure my coasters weren’t scratching my table.

In each of these examples, everyday activities are given a different spin by forcing the listener to modify standard scripts about them. Indeed, the process of reacting to and appreciating humor begins with the activation of a script in the brain’s temporal lobes.

It is the brain’s frontal lobes that make sense of the discrepancy between the script and the situation described by the joke or illustrated by the cartoon. This abil-ity is unique to our species. Though apes can engage in play and tease each other by initiating false alarm calls accompanied by laughter, they cannot shift back and forth between multiple mental interpretations of a situation. Only we can do this because—thanks to the larger size of our frontal lobes compared with other species—we are the only creatures that possess a highly evolved working memory, which by creating and storing scripts allows us to appreciate sophisticated and subtle forms of humor. Neuroscientists often compare working memory to mental juggling. To appreciate a cartoon or a joke, you have to keep in mind at least two possible scenarios: your initial assumptions, created and stored over a lifetime in the temporal lobes, along with the alternative explanations that are worked out with the aid of the frontal lobes.

In the realm of psychology, there are three general theories that explain how humor works. According to the most common explanation for humor—the tension release theory—we experience, for a brief period after hearing a joke or looking at a cartoon, a tension that counterbalances what we assume about the situation being described or illustrated against what the comedian or cartoonist intends to convey. The tension is released only when the joke or cartoon is understood.

The second most popular theory of humor, the incongruity resolution model, involves ZA

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the solving of a paradox or incongru-ity in a playful context. This theory is based on the deep relationship that exists in the human brain between the laughable and the illogical. As a species, we place great value on logic. Even so, we will playfully accept a sit-uation that is highly unlikely or even impossible (a cartoon depicting an attempted kidnapping by Martians) as long as the scenario depicted in the cartoon is coherent and logically consistent with its theme. [See Figure 2, left.] Incongruity resolution usu-ally takes a little longer than tension release and occurs in two stages. First, expectations about the meaning of a joke or cartoon are jarringly under-mined by the punch line of the joke or the caption of the cartoon. This leads to a form of problem solving aimed at

reconciling the discrepancy. When we solve the problem, the pieces fall into place and we experience the joy that accompanies insight. Failure to get the point of a joke or cartoon causes the same discomfort we feel when we cannot solve a problem.

Finally, the superiority theory emphasizes how mirth and laughter so often involve a focus on someone else’s mistakes, misfortune, or stupidity. In Plato’s dialogue Philebus, Socrates says, “When we laugh at the ridiculous aspects of our friends, the admixture of pleasure in our malice produces a mixture of pleasure and distress. For we agreed some time ago that malice was a form of distress; but laughter is enjoyable, and on these occasions both occur simultaneously.” The superiority theory lends itself espe-cially to an explanation of cruel and hostile humor: the situation depicted in the joke or cartoon could never happen to us, hence our amusement. In a word, we feel supe-rior to the person suffering misfortune.

In practice, most humor incorporates aspects of all three of those theories. But under-standing the humor of a joke or cartoon is only half the process. If successful, jokes evoke mirth and laughter, emotional responses that involve a subcortical network (that is, beneath the cortex) devoted to mediating reward or pleasure. Whenever we’re doing something we love, this subcortical network is activated and “lights up” in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan, which measures brain activity by noting changes in blood flow.

Figure 2

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area, associated with spontaneous creative efforts. Similarly, the successful stand-up comedian has to “let go” and resist the temptation to self-criticize and self-monitor, which can lead to mistakes in delivery, timing, or presentation.

Indeed, when a comedian bombs on stage, it can take a personal toll on his or her mental health. In an interview with fellow comedian David Steinberg on Showtime’s Inside Comedy, Steven Wright described comedic performance as “very dangerous, like walking a tightrope, or like running across a lake of ice where the ice is breaking behind you and it is going to take an hour to get to the other side.” Steve Martin told Steinberg of the comedian’s need to steel himself against the pain aroused when no one laughs at a joke or, worse yet, when you get booed off the stage. “Stand-up comedy is the ego’s last stand,” according to Martin. This proved true for the late Jonathan Win-ters, who suffered a serious nervous breakdown during a performance in San Francisco in 1959. After spending time in a psychiatric hospital, Winters returned to stand-up only to suffer another nervous collapse two years later, after which he quit nightclub performances altogether and turned his attention to making records.

Physical injuries to some areas of the brain—namely, the right hemisphere, which plays a special role in the integration of perceptions, enabling us to see the “whole pic-ture”—can damage the ability to process and appreciate humor. Injury to the frontal lobe (within the right hemisphere) prevents a person from shifting back and forth between an initial assumption (based on scripts) and the alternative explanation suggested by a joke or cartoon. A patient with an impaired frontal lobe is, instead, overly literal, unable to make the frame shifts necessary for the creation or appreciation of humor.

In addition, damage to the frontal lobes creates in some patients a predilection for a peculiar form of gallows humor known as Witzelsucht. (In German, witzeln means

“to wisecrack,” and Sucht means “addiction.”) A patient of Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Stuss with bilateral frontal lobe injury was asked to look at a drawing of a casket with three faces beneath it—one smiling, one neutral, one tearful—and decide which of the facial expressions was most appropriate, given the situation. Without hesitation he selected the smiling face. “Why did you pick the smiling face?” he was asked. He laughed and responded, “Because it’s not me in the coffin.” Witzelsucht often also takes the form of bizarre puns, one-liners, and slapstick comments that morbidly refer to some aspect of the patient’s illness. It is further distinguished by an inability to appreciate complex or subtly embedded jokes or cartoons, such as the one from The New Yorker shown in Figure 4 on the following page.

Given how much we seem to value humor in our daily lives, one would expect that we would be telling and listening to jokes all the time. Yet how many jokes have you been told today? How long has it been since somebody came up to you D

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much to do with that most fundamental of human behaviors—falling in love.According to Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico,

humor “may be one of the most important traits for humans seeking mates.” Since jokes and cartoons strike different degrees of mirth in different people, humor helps us iden-tify others with dispositions and propensities similar to our own. (On occasion, of course, we encounter people who find nothing funny, but who wants to spend a life with them?) Humor appreciation, however, differs between the sexes, according to psychologist Eric R. Bressler, who notes that, in general, women tend to favor men who make them laugh, while men favor women who laugh at their jokes. Indeed, the amount of female laughter at a man’s jokes can accurately predict the level of attraction experienced by both partners. Presumably the interest expressed when a woman laughs at a man’s jokes spurs the man to additional interest. Bressler found that men’s laughter, in contrast, did not pre-dict interest in future interaction on the part of either the woman or the man. Nor are the expressions of humor the same. Men, in general, favor slapstick humor and hostile jokes, while women—again, generally speaking—prefer self-deprecating humor and funny stories.

These gender differences have practical implications for long-term relationships. Psychologists Catherine Cohan and Thomas Bradbury analyzed the marriages of 60 couples over an 18-month period and found that when men used humor to cope with stressful events, such as job loss or death, it led to a greater incidence of divorce and separation than when women used humor in those same stressful situations. Cohan and Bradbury speculate that the more aggressive humor of men in times of turmoil adversely affects bonding between partners, compared with the more soothing humor favored by women. Though male humor may play a role in establishing romantic rela-tionships, it would seem that female humor is more effective in maintaining them.

Humor is constantly evolving—comics’ tastes change, as does what society con-siders funny. Our parents and grandparents would have found this sort of joke amusing: Knock knock. Who’s there? Madame. Madame who? Madame foot’s caught in the door! We no doubt find it juvenile and embarrassing. “Humor” based on racial and ethnic stereo-types or physical or mental disabilities is no longer acceptable, which is all to the good. However humor evolves in the future, neuroscience will attempt to explain its mechan-ics. It’s a subject that raises perplexing questions: Are smiling and laughing based on the same or different circuits within the brain? Do the stages of humor response, whether to cartoons or jokes, involve distinct brain regions? Though much may be known about the brain structures involved in humor, what exactly is the sequence of their activation? New studies are coming out all the time; dissecting humor, it turns out, isn’t quite the gruesome affair that E. B. White imagined. And why should it be? Our brains, after all, are hardwired for laughter. The enduring mystery is understanding how. lPA

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Brenda Wineapple’s new book, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848–1877, from which this essay is adapted, appears in August. Her most recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Ladies LastAFTER THE CIVIL WAR, BOTH WOMEN AND BLACK MEN

STRUGGLED TO WIN THE VOTE. WHY THE MEN SUCCEEDED

BRENDA WINEAPPLE

When Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton duked it out for the Demo-cratic presidential nomination in 2008, their rivalry was often framed by the invidi-ous question of who should go first into the highest office in the land, a black man or a woman. Of course, either possibility would have been unthinkable back in 1866, just after the Civil War, when slavery had so recently been abolished and black men—and all women—were far from being guaranteed the vote, never mind holding high office.

But the 2008 primary season wasn’t the first time that women and black men were forced into unhappy competition—not for the presidency, but for the franchise itself. “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had memorably written to her patriotic husband, John, in 1776. Ninety years later, in 1866, it seemed that no one had. “I have argued constantly with [Wendell] Phillips and the whole fraternity,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton complained to Susan B. Anthony about male abolitionists, and “all will favor enfranchising the negro without us. Woman’s cause is in deep water.”

For almost two decades Stanton had been passionately committed to securing equal rights for American women. The author of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, read at the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, which she had helped organize, Stan-ton had been married for 25 years to Henry Brewster Stanton, a well-known abolitionist. Defying stereotypes about women activists being mean, mannish, and unmarried, she had given birth to seven children, and she was round and rosy, her hair snow-white, her manner amiable, her dress an unoffending and forgettable calico. Said a friend about the men who sat open-mouthed when Stanton appeared in public, “Our fossil is first amazed—

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next bewildered—then fascinated—then con-vinced—not exactly of the doctrine of wom-an’s suffrage, perhaps—but at any rate that a woman to be an advo-cate of that doctrine need neither be a fright nor a fury.”

In 1840, while on her honeymoon, Stan-ton had been excluded from the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and from then on her commitment to abolition had included or been superseded by her commitment to women’s rights. Along with Anthony, she had established during the Civil War the Women’s National Loyal League, a political organiza-tion like the male-only Union League, which had been founded to preserve the Union but had also gathered sup-

port for emancipation, the Republican Party, the Thirteenth Amendment, and equal rights.Stanton and Anthony did not meet until 1851, when the two women quickly discov-

ered that they complemented each other perfectly; they remained political partners in the fight for women’s suffrage and equal rights for 50 years. “I forged the thunderbolts,” said Stanton, “and she fired them.” Stanton possessed tremendous legal intelligence (her father was a judge), and Anthony, Herculean endurance. “No matter what is done or is not done, how you are criticized or misunderstood, or what efforts are made to block your path,” Anthony counseled a new generation of women, “remember that the

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found that they complemented each other perfectly. “I forged the thunder-bolts,” said Stanton, “and she fired them.”

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only fear you need have is the fear of not standing by the thing you believe to be right.” That encouragement meant a great deal to the 1,500 people gathered in Washington to listen to Anthony’s final public speech, delivered on her last birthday, and to hear her firmly declare, “Failure is impossible.” She died in 1906 at age 86, and Gertrude Stein would call her “the mother of us all.”

Yet failure was very possible, and she’d become accustomed to it. Unlike Stanton, Anthony did not come from wealth. Her father, a Quaker, managed a cotton mill in upstate New York, but during the Panic of 1837, he lost his job and just about everything else. Anthony, who had been in school near Philadelphia, came home to support her large family (she had six siblings) by teaching. In 1845, after her father’s financial condition improved and he bought a farm, she moved to Rochester, New York, where she contin-ued to teach in one school after another, earning less money than the male instructors.

There she met the abolitionists Amy and Isaac Post and Frederick Douglass, who fought not just for abolition but also for women’s rights and equality for all. As a tem-perance reformer, Anthony had learned early on that though women were invited to meetings, they were told not to speak. So now she spoke. Barbed and sarcastic, she made her positions clear: respect for women’s work, equal opportunity and equal pay, liberalized divorce laws, and the ballot. Because she was a merciless organizer, she circulated petitions, scheduled meetings to coincide with legislative events, wrote pamphlets, and traveled from county to county and state to state. Easy to spot in her gold-framed spectacles, she preferred to be photographed only in profile because of a wandering eye. She was not conventionally pretty or conventionally charming or conventionally dependent on anything or anyone.

After the Civil War, the matter of rights for black people, for poor southern whites, and even for ex-Confederates—but not for women—was on the table. And by the spring of 1866, the women’s cause, as Stanton had said, was in deep water. So Anthony and Stanton, along with their allies in the abolitionist movement—including Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, and the radical editor Theodore Tilton—formed the American Equal Rights Association to lobby the government for equal rights for all, male and female, black and white. As Douglass eloquently declared, “The right of woman to vote is as sacred in my judgment as that of man, and I am quite willing at any time to hold up both hands in favor of this right.”

The path to securing the women’s vote had just been made more difficult, though: the Fourteenth Amendment, defining citizenship and ensuring due process and equal protection, had introduced the category of “male” into the Constitution, where it had never been used before. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” Stanton gloomily warned,

“it will take us at least a century to get it out.”Why not guarantee voting rights to every adult person—or, better yet, to every

citizen? Stanton wanted to know. “The disfranchised all make the same demand, and LIB

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the same logic and justice which secures suffrage to one class gives it to all,” she explained. She and Anthony hoped to have another friend in the popular orator Anna Dickinson. (Douglass credited Dickinson, along with Tilton, for articulating what would become the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing black male suffrage, and she was also praised for educating the public about it.) But Dickinson linked arms with more moderate Republicans, who, along with many former abolitionists, unceremo-niously reminded Stanton and Anthony that this was the “Negro’s hour.” This was the nation’s hour, Stanton replied.

Everyone walks through the door or no one walks through the door, she said. The silver-tongued orator Wendell Phil-lips, a longtime abolitionist, disagreed. A spokesman for the independent voter, the disenfranchised, and the cause of black equality, Phillips was not ready to speak up for women. He reiterated that the ladies’ turn would come; they just needed to wait. He did not object to the enfranchisement of women per se, he said, but he thought that campaigning for “woman suffrage” under-cut the case for black males. One reform at a time. Stanton was furious. “If the two mil-lions of southern black women are not to be secured in their rights of person, property, wages, and children,” she said, “then their emancipation is but another form of slavery.”

The renowned editor Horace Greeley, once a supporter of women’s suffrage, also took a step back. “The ballot and the bullet go together,” he said, waving Stanton away.

“If you vote, are you ready to fight?” Stanton answered, “Yes, we are ready to fight, sir, just as you did in the late war,

by sending our substitutes.”Greeley was silent but never for long. “Public sentiment,” he soon explained more

temperately, “does not demand and would not sustain an innovation so revolution-ary and sweeping.” The Negro’s hour would swiftly pass if nothing were done; Stanton should know that.

In the spring of 1867, before the first anniversary of the American Equal Rights

“The right of woman to vote is as sacred in my judgment

as that of man,” Frederick Douglass declared, “and I am quite willing at any

time to hold up both hands in favor of this right.”

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Association meeting in New York City, George T. Downing, an entrepreneur and leading black activist, asked Stanton whether she really believed that black men shouldn’t have the vote until women did. Everyone should have the ballot, she replied; Reconstruction without universal suffrage did not interest her. Equal rights for all. But frankly, she continued, she didn’t trust the “colored man” to safeguard a woman’s rights. “Degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are,” she explained. “I desire that we go into the kingdom together.”

Annoyed, Downing asked his question a different way: whether Stanton would really reject half a good result—the enfranchising of men regardless of color—if women didn’t get the vote. Digging in her heels, she retorted with an argument that alienated some of her supporters, both then and now. “The wisest order of enfranchisement is to take the educated classes first,” she said. That is, why allow uneducated men to govern women? “Would Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith or Theodore Tilton be willing to stand aside and trust their individual interests, and the whole welfare of the nation to the lowest strata of manhood?” she asked.

If not, why ask educated women, who love their country, who desire to mould its insti-tutions on the highest idea of justice and equality, who feel that their enfranchisement is of vital importance to this end, why ask them to stand aside while two million igno-rant men are ushered into the halls of legislation?

It was not her best moment. From the crowd, someone shouted out, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

While the members of the American Equal Rights Association were meeting in New York, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, were in Kansas stumping for universal suffrage. The Kansas legislature had proposed separate but related ref-erenda to the state constitution: one would grant black men the vote by removing the word “white” from the constitution; the other would grant women the vote by remov-ing the word “male.” If both referenda passed in the fall of 1867, impartial suffrage, as it was called, would prevail on the Kansas plains—and from there, the sky was the limit.

“Success in Kansas means success everywhere,” said Blackwell.Canvassing the state in the winter and spring of 1867, Stone and Blackwell bumped

along in oxcarts and open wagons, traveling as far as 40 miles a day. It was hard work, but their spirits were high. Stone excitedly telegraphed the New York meeting of the American Equal Rights Association: “Kansas rules the world!”

But all was not well. “A persistent effort has been made by the enemies of female suffrage,” commented a Kansas newspaper editor, “to get up a fight between that and


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negro suffrage.” Pitting women against black men seemed a ploy engineered by the enemies of both movements, even though friction already existed between them, and some Kansans had already formed an anti–women’s-suffrage league. That league sought help from the Republican State Committee, which sent out speakers to defeat the women—including one man who stood up at a women’s suffrage meeting to ask whether men really wanted old maids to vote.

That sort of prejudice was not confined to Kansas. “I do not believe in suffrage for women,” said Jessie Benton Frémont, the writer and wife of the former explorer and Republican presidential candidate. “I think women in their present position manage men better.” Anyway, didn’t women acquire power from some separate and higher sphere? Wouldn’t voting therefore demean women? “As to woman’s rights, I have always found privileges much better things,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister chastised his daughter. “I do not like your saying that you ‘suppose many women would vote as well as most men,’ ” she continued. “It is placing women whose mental endowments make them the eminent and enviable few, just on a level with the herd of mediocre men.”

When Stone and Blackwell returned to the East, Stanton and Anthony were among those who took their place. They too traveled as much as 25 or 30 miles daily, speak-ing in every county and every school district in Kansas. They slept in farmhouses, chewed moldy biscuits, and hauled with them speeches, documents, and tracts. Their male allies in the American Equal Rights Association—Phillips, Beecher, Tilton—did not show up. Tilton offered to print only one editorial in his paper, The Independent. Beecher was busy writing a novel for which he had been paid a $30,000 advance. Phil-lips was on vacation. The men signed a petition on the women’s behalf; that was all. “I have often found men who, if you could believe their words, were ready to die for the negro,” Olympia Brown, the country’s first female minister, grimly reflected, “but would at the same time oppose bitterly any enlargement of women’s opportunity or sphere.”

Anthony tried Anna Dickinson, who was home in Philadelphia, sick. “If only Anna E. Dickinson could make 10 or 15 of the strong points—we should feel sure,” Anthony said, and tried again. Dickinson did not budge. Recalled a rueful Olympia Brown, “We had no party, no organization, no money.” Until, that is, the ostenta-tiously rich George Francis Train blew into town in October, prepared to fund the campaign, hop on the Kansas trail, and save the day.

As a boy, the Boston-born Train had heard Ralph Waldo Emerson, the esteemed master of self-reliance, deliver one of his rousing speeches. Taking to heart Emerson’s injunction to build your own world, he had gone to work for a relative in the shipping business in Liverpool. Then he made his way to the gold-rush town of Melbourne, Australia, where he started his own firm, amassed a fortune, dispatched the first clip-


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per ships to California, and frequently sent off vivid journalistic reports to The Boston Post about commerce—and about his travels to Java, Singapore, and Shanghai.

Back in America, after speculating in contraband cotton during the war, Train bought shares in the Union Pacific Railroad and in 1864 concocted a system, which he called the Crédit Mobilier of America, to capitalize the railroad and secure land rights from the government for its expansion. In the long run it would lead to a famous con-gressional bribery scandal, but for now he grew even wealthier.

Train possessed a gift for platform histrionics that turned staid New England rec-titude on its head. Wearing lavender kid gloves, a blue dress coat with brass buttons, white vests, and shiny patent-leather boots, he rambled, he clowned, he blustered, and he mesmerized his audience for as long as two and a half hours with his jokes and his causes: Irish home rule, soft (paper) money, eight-hour working days—and suffrage for women. He believed himself destined to become president of the United States, and in 1872 he ran as an independent candidate.

An American of his time and place, Train was a robust racist. Years earlier, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, while Charles Sumner had been praising Lincoln’s prelimi-nary emancipation proclamation, Train had interrupted to harangue the Massa-chusetts senator, who, Train said, “could speak of nothing but the ‘sublime nigger.’ ”

He thus seemed an unlikely choice to help Stanton and Anthony in Kansas. But Stanton did not care if Train was a bigot or a boob. He put his money and his showmanship at suffrage’s disposal. “If the Devil steps forward ready to help,” she declared, “I shall say good fellow come on!” The Republicans had sabotaged women. Train understood that. “The Garrisons, Phillipses, Greeleys, and Beech-ers,” he sang in his own little ditty, “False prophets, false guides, false teachers and preachers, / Left Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, Brown, and Stone / To fight the Kansas battles alone.”

Why, then, shouldn’t Stanton seek help from Train? Her friends were appalled. Train was an antiwar Democrat with a reputation as a huckster who entertained audi-ences by pandering to their basest fears, warning them that with black male suffrage,

“We shall see some white woman in a case of negro rape being tried by 12 negro jury-men.” Stanton replied,

Suppose George Francis Train had devoted his time & money for three months to the negro as he has to the woman, would not the abolitionist on all sides be ready to eulogize & accept him, of course they would. Do they ignore everyone who is false to woman? By no means.

Let him who was without sin cast the first stone. “I would not talk of negroes or women,” she also pointed out, “but citizens; that is where Wendell Phillips failed; he

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should have passed from the abolitionist into the statesman … instead of falling back to the Republican platform.”

Though Train may have damaged the Kansas campaign, neither referendum was likely to win anyway, and neither did. “It was not the woman suffrage question that killed the negro question,” Anthony summed up. “It was the Republican leaders.” As far as she was concerned, and she was prescient, the Republicans had by not joining the two causes thrown the black man overboard, and the female rats had known when to leave a sinking ship.

In other words, there was plenty of blame to go around.

With Train covering their expenses, Anthony and Stanton went back east, delivering speeches all the way, and though Train’s racism continued to alienate for-mer friends and delight enemies, Anthony and Stanton refused to denounce him. Nor did they, as it turned out, move from suffrage to statesmanship. And their rhetoric was disconcerting, patronizing, xenophobic. In St. Louis, Anthony told an audience,

When you propose to elevate the lowest and most degraded classes of men to an even platform with white men—with the cultivated, educated, wealthy white men of the State—it is certainly time for you to begin to think at least whether it might not be proper to lift the wives, daughters, and mothers of your State to an even pedestal.

The next year, Stanton said without compunction,

Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the differ-ence between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Indepen-dence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble. …

Would these gentlemen who, on all sides, are telling us “to wait until the negro is safe” be willing to stand aside and trust all their interests in hands like these?

This argument played into other hands—those of the most bigoted Democrats—but Stanton and Anthony were angry, resentful, indignant. Frederick Douglass tried to smooth out relations with them in New York in the spring of 1869. Speaking before a crowd in Steinway Hall at the American Equal Rights Association annual meeting, he affirmed his friendship for Stanton and his respect for her—there was no greater advocate of equal rights, he said—but he just could not embrace her use of such unfor-tunate terms as Sambo.

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was as urgent as it was to black men. “When women, because they are women,” he said,

are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are ob-jects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.

A voice shouted from the back of the hall, “Is that not all true about black women?”“Yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman,” he answered, “but not because she is

a woman, but because she is black.”Such was the argument, the quandary, the political koan: was it fair, right, practi-

cal to put black men ahead of women, all women, if one had to choose? Did one have to choose? Could fairness, justice, and expedience be separated? Should they? The dilemma split men and women of good will; it ruffled feathers and assumptions. Clara Barton, who had worked without stop during the war and afterward, taking medicine and succor and information to the wounded and their families, believed women should vote, yet she too felt obliged to put black men ahead of women; how not? There were

“thousands of hungry Negroes men & women & children at our doors,” she explained, “thousands upon thousands waiting in fear, trembling and uncertainty all through the South, surrounded by an enemy as implacable as death, and cold as the grave.” To her, giving black men the vote might stop the brutal murders and beatings inflicted on the entire black population.

Then there was the matter of politics. In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant, running as a Repub-lican, had been elected president, but he’d won by only 300,000 votes. Both moder-ate and radical Republicans saw the Democratic handwriting on the wall. If they did not pass federal legislation to secure the black man the vote, Republicans would lose elections—and fail to complete the work that the war had begun: not just to save the Union but to reconstruct it. The ladies had to wait, and ladies, ladylike, should do so.

Though the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 did enfranchise the black man—“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—the amendment said nothing about protecting or enforcing that right. It did not prevent any state from adopting restrictions that might deprive him of his ability to cast his ballot. Nor did its language anticipate the terrorist techniques, the murders, the beatings, and the threats that would be used to frighten black voters in L

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the South. The black man could be asked whether he owned property, whether he could read or write, whether he knew how many bubbles were contained in a bar of soap. Yet Wendell Phillips, for one, realized that a broader amendment was further than most people were willing to go. He urged his radical friends not to oppose the Fif-teenth Amendment if for no other reason than as an act of common political sense.

After the amendment passed both houses, the American Anti-Slavery Society disbanded. In May 1870 Congress did try to look after the black voter with an enforce-ment bill aimed to safeguard him and his right to vote, and Phillips promised he would keep up the good fight to ensure black men their rights. And to work for women.

But because the Fifteenth Amendment had excluded them, Stanton denounced it for enacting “an aristocracy of sex.” The amendment might be hailed for creating a national citizenship in a unified nation, but women had been specifically discounted. She and Anthony therefore moved in a

different direction that, though it included the ballot, also envisioned a reconstructed American society where women and men could be treated equally, where women could earn the same wages for the same work, where they could go to college or, as Margaret Fuller had put it so many years before, become sea captains.

Stanton and Anthony organized the New York–based National Woman Suffrage Association, with Stanton as its initial president and its members mainly educated white women. Its membership did not include Lucy Stone. She disagreed with Stan-ton, disliked Anthony, and hated to discuss such distracting topics as labor laws, especially before black men got the vote. Yet she too was an indefatigable activist, the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a bachelor’s degree—at Oberlin College—and a superlative organizer and orator with a low, pleasing voice. She had insisted on keeping her name after marriage but was more conservative on social issues than either Stanton or Anthony. She believed that changing the divorce laws, for instance, would permit men to abandon women. And she’d been completely scandalized by

As an American of his time and place, George Francis Train was a robust racist. He was an unlikely choice to help the leaders of the women’s rights movement achieve their goals.

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Stanton and Anthony’s alliance with George Francis Train.Calculating the harm done by Train’s involvement in women’s suffrage and, worse,

by Stanton’s opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment, and furious when she learned that the National Woman Suffrage Association had been formed behind her back, as it seemed to her, Stone established a dissident movement that included the notables of the abolition movement, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas Higginson, as well a new convert, Julia Ward Howe, famous as the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That was the core of the American Woman Suffrage Association. As its executive committee disingenuously said, it had been organized “without depreciat-ing the value of Associations already existing.” But its very existence did depreciate Stanton and Anthony.

The American Woman Suffrage Association did not push for restructuring the relationship between men and women; ultimately and despite their very real, deep, and utter commitment to women’s suffrage and civil rights, those liberal white men and women were reformers, not radicals. They wanted to create a national alliance focusing mainly on the ballot box and steering clear of such polemical topics as divorce, prostitution, contraception, and women’s control over their own bodies. Yet the two groups did share a great deal, as Theodore Tilton knew, and in the spring of 1870, when he proposed their merger, many well-known white and black advocates of women’s suffrage, such as Lucretia Mott, Gerrit Smith, and Harriet Tubman, met the proposal with what seemed like relief. Others were dubious. No good comes of meddling, Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier said; that was too bad, he also said, since all this strife just made more sport for the Philistines.

Whittier was right. The Boston secessionists, as Stanton privately called Stone’s group, would never agree to any merger, and the two factions didn’t unite for another two decades. The question batted about ever since was whether the rupture cost women the vote, which they would not receive for another 50 years. Perhaps; but the call for equal rights for women, like so much other reform, had already lost steam after the war. People were tired of causes, tired of speeches, tired of platforms and planks. The hour was not the Negro’s or the woman’s; it belonged to retrenchment.

Yet it also seems true that a black man voting was a far less dumbfounding spec-tacle than a woman doing so. Stanton was not wrong about this; the so-called aristoc-racy of sex did exist. Since free black men had been walking on the streets of Boston, New York, and Brattleboro, riding the streetcars in Washington, and working on the docks of Baltimore and San Francisco, the idea of those men voting, despite the color of their skin, was not as alarming as a woman with political power. They were, after all, men. Stanton tried to reassure the critics. Giving women the ballot did not sully women, demoralize marriage, or wreck the home, she said. It did not render men an appendage of the dinner pot and washtub. But not many people wanted to listen. l


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And after the day was over, I told my friend Marie this story:

He was a young man and it was finally April.A piano player played in Washington Square Park.The young man walked along with the older man.Daffodil buds unbuckled their gold in the prosperous dirt beds wherever the two men looked. Green applause stirred in the trees.A woman on the street called out to the older man:

“Beautiful man, you, beautiful man …”The two knew each other and this coincidence made a bright light.She spent her days raising doves and squirrels.How did she support herself?She observed the two together and respected the fragility of the momentas the angel does in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation.

The young man came to visit the city. He said he had written in his diary about the older man,had thought about him since they had lunch the week before,a lunch the young man suggested. He gave the older man a CD, all love songs.The older man had been alone long enough to be reflective.In the Anglo-Catholic churches that Sundaydeacons would chant the story of Lazarus from the Gospel of John:

Those who believe in me will live, even though they die.

The young man said to the older man: “When did you come out?”They walked through the park. With deliberation, the older man said: “I could kiss you.”Somewhere, doves settled on the ledges of the woman’s shoulders.Silence surrounded the men as they went back to a brownstone and lay on a high four-poster bed.

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Before them a painting of a Roman city,intricate as a symphony, that could have contained them. Light grew long in the window and across the painting’s canvas. The older man said: “Do you feel like you could kiss me?”The young man responded,speaking in a voice that lacked drama, a voice both kind and bright, and said: “Not now.”The deacons practiced their chanting:

Those who live and believe in me will never die.

Time pressed on the older man.His passion collapsed.Things would go unexplored.The two men felt the folly of the moment.The young man lingered with nonchalance, a cruelty that belongs to youth.Deacons took out their pencils and underlined certain words:

Mary arrived where Jesus was, and as soon as she saw him, she fell at his feet. “Lord,” she said, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

They went to dinner.A Chinese restaurant on Sixth Avenue.One they had not planned on.Another friend of the older man joined them, a woman who was writing a play with many characters.She promised to take the young man to Grand Central,for the young man had never been to the city before.Suddenly, before they ordered their meal,through the phosphorescent window now expanding like a poem, filling with a throng earnest to go home,two more men appeared, both middle-aged,whom the older man knew.Was it possible he had not seen them in twenty years?They came to the glass like fish in an aquarium.What were their names?Into the restaurant and poem, they came.One had been married to a woman, and had had a child,and he did remember the child’s name.In the sacristies, deacons continued their chanting,going down a third on the fourth syllable from the end of every sentence:


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He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus come out!”

The table was full now.Joy grew in the dark as it had in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. Silverware glinted. People opened the caves of their mouths,laughed so their gold and silver fillings shone,raised their arms like circuit breakers,everyone connected by the pleasures of the ordinary life.(O, the voltage of wants and needs contained in that city!)Everyone spoke over each other, told jokes.The waitress recorded everyone’s order, distracted.The two new men announced they were married:proudly, they showed their rings.Then it was time for the young man to depart.The doves must have been sleeping by then.Everyone stood. The dark street shone with light.Electricity and stars! Fire, bolts, shards, beams, shafts, glints, shimmers, matches, cigarettes, sparks!The deacons were lousy with gospels, leaving them open all over the city.

“We were free,” I said to Marie, “and I was happy.It didn’t matter about the young man.”There was no more time to hate ourselves.Many had already died and some had been kept from dying.We spoke of her brother, John,and we spoke of my cousin, John, both now long gone.It was our time now.Over the phone, I could hear her daughter asking for dinner in the background,the daughter that had come to her late in life, a gift.The Gospel of John was right: the world holds so much life.There are not enough books to record it all.I kissed the young man on his cheek, very lightly.

Jesus said to them: “Unbind him, and let him go.”

We each went our separate ways following where we were being led.Marie said: “Write it down, just as it happened.”

Spencer Reece, currently serving as a chaplain in Honduras, is the author of The Clerk’s Tale and the forthcom-ing The Road to Emmaus, both collections of his poetry.


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Afternoon the time. The season winter.In the studio, light thick as creamfilters through a barely noticed windowtaken for granted, as we do with daylight.Behind the figure, a sketched mantelpiece;in front of it a canvaswhose back we see—its wooden frame, its staples.

In the center of the compositiona face—intent, dark, female, more or less.A left hand holds a brush up to the canvas,hovering close to it but not quite touching,poised to revise the image of a self.

That face both is and isn’t looking out at us,is and isn’t looking at itself;is looking and not looking both at onceinto the frame, the mirror,the window of the canvas, the red sweater,that irreplaceable moment in the roomof which I am a witness,that square of silence. Call it afternoon.

Rachel Hadas, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of several books of poetry and, most recently, a book of prose titled Strange Relations: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry.

Self-PortraitRACHEL HADAS


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The pool shifts comfortably under its own weight, an incompressible blue gem

touched now and then by a quiver like that seen racing through muscles at rest,

above the raddled filament and stretched medallion of morning sun,

and beyond, cloud shadows play across the Mugello Valley, while swallow after swallow

veers in to mar the calm meniscus (though it heals), as if the element of air

should take and bear something far into morning, while swallows stall

and drop, in their drinking, gold at the throat, then flee with lashings of

pure light, and each so rapid, in the near-perfect silence, that it is as I read once

on the wall by an ancient statue of a girl dressed as Diana, The gown lisps off her shoulder:

the swallows lisp at the water.

Karl Kirchwey, professor of the arts and director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, is the author of six volumes of poetry and a forthcoming book of Roman poems, Stumbling Blocks.

CapitignanoKARL KIRCHWEY


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Amanda Foreman is the author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire: Britain’s Cru-cial Role in the American Civil War, one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2011. She is the recipient of the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Fletcher Pratt Award for Civil War History.

Park of AgesFAR MORE THAN JUST AN URBAN RETREAT, HYDE PARK IS A LIVING ARCHIVE OF BRITISH CULTURE AND HISTORY

AMANDA FOREMAN

There are eight royal parks in London, but only one so exceeds its original pur-pose as to inhabit a place in the consciousness of Great Britain. To walk through Hyde Park is to become immersed in a visual encyclopedia containing the cultural records of two millennia. Despite the changes wrought by time, the park remains one of the most important repositories of national identity. Here, along avenues of ancient trees, among monuments to the great and the lost, in the landmarks built by previous gen-erations, survive the tangible memories of Britain’s past. Though not always obvious or easily decoded, their effect on every passerby is nonetheless profound, a reminder that no exact line divides history from the present: our perception of each forms and shapes the other.

The boundaries of Hyde Park did not happen by accident. The lanes of traffic thundering past Speakers’ Corner, in the northeastern part of the park, grew out of two Roman roads that intersected near the stream called the Eya-burn (the Tyburn). One, the Via Trinobantia, crossed from the south to the east coast of England, enabling the swift movement of centurions during times of English rebellion. Today the road takes shoppers from Bayswater to Oxford Street, the harsh trumpets of war replaced with the siren call of commerce. Heading in the other direction from Edgware Road to Park Lane was Watling Street, one of the longest and most important communica-tion routes in Roman Britain. On this road in 61 A.D., Suetonius decisively crushed Queen Boudica and her ill-equipped army of Iceni and Trinovantes tribesmen, leav-ing Londinium and all of southern England under Roman rule for the next 400 years.

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A thousand acres of forest and marshland lay between the River Thames in the south, the Via Trinobantia in the north, the Tyburn River in the east, and a small stream called the Westbourne in the west. The self-contained nature of the land was expressed in its Anglo-Saxon name, Eia, meaning island. Prized for its excellent hunting grounds and proximity to London, the Manorship of Eia passed through several Anglo-Saxon owners until the Norman Conquest in 1066. William I seized Eia and conveyed it to one of his Norman supporters, Geoffrey de Mandeville. The transition of ownership made little difference to the surrounding villages and settlements until Mandeville became fearful that the life everlasting promised in the Bible would be of the wrong kind unless he made the proper amends. And so, around the time of the Domesday Book, the great survey of much of England and Wales completed in 1086, the manor of Eia was divided into three smaller manors: Neyte, Ebury (also spelled Eabury), and Hyde. The manors of Neyte and Hyde—more than 600 acres—became the property of the Benedictine monks at Westminster Abbey.

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Untroubled by the plagues, wars, and rebellions of medieval England, the monks enjoyed a bucolic idyll within the confines of Hyde Manor, cultivating some parts for crops and leaving the rest as a game reserve for wild boar and deer. The chief interrup-tions to their peace were the riotous processions—always on a Monday—from the walls of London to the crossroads at the village of Tyburn, where criminals and religious martyrs were taken to be hanged. Elaborate rituals of pain and torture accompanied these executions. Before they were publicly displayed, prisoners were often disem-boweled, then burned alive. But over time, the gore and eviscerations receded even as the spectacles grew in popularity, taking on a carnival-like atmosphere. Hanging days became public holidays; 14,000 spectators might turn out to watch an ordinary criminal, though for someone particularly notorious the number could swell to more than 100,000. It became customary for the condemned to give speeches before they met their death. Gradually yet ineluctably the right for speakers to say whatever they wished on this tiny corner of England was established.

In 1536 the monks were troubled no more by the grisly proceedings adjacent to their property. Henry VIII forced the abbot of Westminster to relinquish Hyde Manor in exchange for a less prosperous estate in Berkshire, some 60 miles away. Hyde became a royal park, wooden fences keeping the deer in and the poachers out. Members of the royal court could enjoy the park, but the public had little access to it until 1620, when James I opened certain areas to “well dressed persons.” In 1637 his son, Charles I, officially opened Hyde Park to the public. At 600 acres the park was smaller than it had been, and wilder than under its Benedictine occupation. Only a few bridleways and ponds broke up the monotony of grass and woods. But it had one great attraction, known as the Ring. This was a circular carriage drive, built near a marsh that would one day become the Serpentine lake. Foreigners were baffled by its attraction to wealthy Londoners. As an anonymous Frenchman living in England in the 17th century noted:

They take their rides in a coach in an open field where there is a circle, not very large, enclosed by rails. There the coaches drive slowly round, some in one direction, others the opposite way, which, seen from a distance, produces a rather pretty effect, and proves clearly that they only come there in order to see and to be seen. Hence it follows that this promenade, even in the midst of summer, is deserted the moment night begins to fall, that is to say, just at the time when there would be some real pleasure in enjoying the fresh air. Then everybody retires, because the principal attraction of the place is gone.

The Ring emptied of its riders once the quarrels between the Parliamentarians (the Roundheads) and the Royalists (the Cavaliers) turned into deadly conflict. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1642, the king’s troops marched and paraded around the

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park. By 1648 the cavalry regiments stationed there answered only to Oliver Cromwell. When peace resumed in 1651, the country’s Puritan victors could see no good use for the park and plenty of reasons to suspect its bad influence on public morals. Parlia-ment ordered its sale in three lots, raising a total of £17,000 (the equivalent of roughly £130,000 today). Londoners who had become used to frequenting the park whenever they liked were outraged at being charged a toll for entry. In April 1653 the diarist John Evelyn complained bitterly after his carriage was stopped at the gate. “I went to take the aire in Hide Park,” he wrote. “When every coach was made to pay a shilling, and every horse sixpence, by the sordid fellow who had purchased it of the State.”

Traffic around the Ring did not cease, however, during Cromwell’s protectorate. Even Cromwell was not averse to showing off his driving skills, although his enthusi-asm waned after his horses bolted and he was dragged along the ground for a consid-erable distance. But the park’s popularity remained at a low ebb until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Within weeks of his return to London, the Ring was once again teeming with carriages and riders—many of them women wearing a daring new fashion known as the riding habit, consisting of hat, skirt, and tailored shirt and jacket. Soldiers filled the park, but this time to participate in royal parades and military pageants. The public also returned, simply to enjoy the fresh air and freedom of open space. The lowly

naval clerk and inveterate diarist Samuel Pepys records how, in the summer of 1660, he went “with Mr. Moor and Creed to Hyde Park, by coach, and saw a fine foot-race three times round the Park, between an Irishman and Crow, that was once my Lord Claypole’s footman.” A horserace was promised to follow soon afterward, so

Pepys and his friends stayed to watch. Unable to afford the price of syllabub, a des-sert drink made with cream and alcohol, Pepys settled for

“milk from a red cow” sold by a pretty milkmaid. Shortly after Pepys’s visit, Cromwell himself received the Hyde Park treatment reserved for criminals and traitors. More than two years after his death in 1658, his corpse was exhumed and symboli-cally hanged at Tyburn, after which his body was thrown

During Queen Victoria’s reign, Londoners flocked to the Serpentine to boat, bathe, and as shown in this lithograph, do a little nighttime skating. IS

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into a gravel pit and his head stuck on a pike outside Westminster Abbey, where it remained until 1685.

Charles II ordered the boundaries of the park to be set in brick and the deer restocked, but otherwise he remained true to his father’s wishes. His promise to keep the park open to the public was tested almost immediately. Only five years after the king’s restoration, London was ravaged by plague. Thousands abandoned their homes, setting up temporary dwellings in Hyde Park’s woods in the vain hope that the scourge would not reach them there. Refugee camps occupied the park until the last vestiges of the plague disappeared in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Then, as quickly as the tents and mud dwellings vanished, the idlers, strutters, and oglers reappeared at the Ring. Pepys resumed his wistful jaunts to the park to watch and envy the aristocracy. Finally, in 1669 he became the proud possessor of his own coach. Pepys had closely supervised its construction, insisting on extra coats of varnish to “make it more and more yellow.” At last, on May Day 1669, he made his first appearance at the Ring. Mrs. Pepys accompanied him, looking

extraordinary fine with her flowered tabby gown that she made two years ago, now laced exceeding pretty, and indeed was fine all over, and mighty earnest to go; though the day was very lowering; and she would have me put on my fine suit, which I did. And so anon, we went alone through the town with our new liveries of serge and the horses’ manes and tails tied with red ribbons, and the standards gilt with varnish, that people did mightily look upon us; and the truth is I did not see any coach more pretty, though more gay than ours.

Unfortunately, Pepys’s dreams of glory were dashed by the weather. He found the park “full of Coaches, but dusty, and windy, and cold, and now and then a little drib-bling of rain; and what made it worse, there were so many hackney coaches as spoiled the sight of the gentlemen’s, and so we had little pleasure.” On their way home they stopped to drink a cup of syllabub, which cheered them up considerably.

A century and a half later, Pepys’s favorite haunt had all but disappeared. Though the Ring was once “celebrated in old novels and plays,” wrote a journalist in the Origi-nal magazine in 1835, no physical marker or tribute to its popularity remained. After consulting some old maps, the writer decided that the Ring was “still traceable round a clump of trees near the foot-barracks.” Here, he told readers, “used to assemble all the fashion of the day.” The Ring’s slow demise began in the 1690s when King William and Queen Mary moved out of London on account of his asthma and went to live in Kensington Palace, on the western edge of the park. The king’s daily commute into


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town posed few problems in the morning, but at night the unlit road became the haunt of gangs and highwaymen. William ordered a new route, wide enough to accommo-date three carriages driving abreast, to be constructed through Hyde Park. The way was lit with 300 oil lamps in winter—the first illuminated highway in England—and patrolled by guards until 11 P.M. The new road was called, aptly, the King’s Road or La Route du Roi (French being commonly spoken by the aristocracy). London argot cor-rupted the French to Rod-du-Ro and finally Rotten Row.

Naturally, wherever the king went, the aristocracy was sure to follow. The pres-ence of so much finery corralled along a single road attracted yet more thieves and gunmen. Once in a great while a highwayman would be captured and punished at Tyburn, including the notorious (and wildly popular) “Gentleman Jack” Sheppard, who was hanged before a crowd of 200,000 on November 16, 1724. Four years later, John Gay immortalized Jack’s life and death in The Beggar’s Opera. “Since laws were made, for every degree, / To curb vice in others, as well as in me,” sings Sheppard’s character, renamed Captain Macheath, “I wonder we han’t better company / Upon Tyburn Tree.” Despite the opera’s success with the public (it rescued Gay from bank-ruptcy), Londoners demanded more rather than fewer safeguards around Hyde Park. The ban on masks and hackney carriages within the park’s grounds was more rigor-ously enforced—on the assumption that the owners of privately owned vehicles were too wealthy to go robbing one another.

In 1730 Queen Caroline, the sorely tried wife of George II, decided that Hyde Park would be better served by a program of beautification than by yet more guards. The queen inspired a new approach to landscape, one that allowed for graceful curves and natural bends rather than the straight delineations of the Dutch style. On her orders, the ponds that had once supplied the monks of Westminster Abbey with fresh wild-fowl were joined together and transformed into the Serpentine. As Caroline’s plans took shape, she became increasingly ambitious in her scope. She separated almost 300 acres from Hyde Park through the ingenious construction of a ditch (a ha-ha in modern parlance) and renamed the area Kensington Gardens. There she added the Round Pond, where toy boats and greedy ducks have converged ever since, the pictur-esque Long Water, and the architectural gem Queen Caroline’s Temple. Enraptured by the success of her own changes, she tentatively asked Prime Minister Robert Walpole what it would cost to take back the parks into royal ownership. “Only three crowns, ma’am,” he is said to have replied, meaning those of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The improvements to Hyde Park did not meet all Queen Caroline’s expectations. For a while, violence in the area soared rather than diminished. Dueling there became so endemic that it permeated London’s literary and social culture. In 1751 readers breath-lessly followed the fortunes of Captain Booth, the hero of Henry Fielding’s Amelia, who was forced to defend his honor in Hyde Park at “that place which may be properly called


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the field of blood, being that part, a little to the left of the ring, which heroes have chosen for the scene of their exit out of this world.” After a fierce sword fight, “Booth ran the colonel through the body and threw him on the ground, at the same time possess-ing himself of the colonel’s sword.” In reality, pistols were more common than swords. In 1763, John Wilkes, a radical MP and campaigner for press free-dom, received the following challenge from a political opponent: “I desire that you may meet me in Hyde Park immediately, with a brace of pistols each, to determine our differ-ence. I shall go to the ring in Hyde Park, with my pistols so concealed that nobody may see them; and I will wait in expectation of you for one hour.” Wilkes survived a bullet to his abdomen and went on to champion the cause of American independence. Over the next few decades the roster of duelists expanded to include a lord chancellor, a foreign secretary, two prime ministers (including William Pitt the Younger), the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Lady Almeria Braddock, who called a Mrs. Elphinstone to account following a disparaging comment about her age.

The character of Hyde Park changed only when social attitudes to violence in gen-eral became less tolerant. Toward the end of the 18th century, the public hangings at Tyburn came to be regarded as an unsavory relic of the past. James Boswell, the biog-rapher of Dr. Johnson, roundly condemned the practice after he witnessed the hang-ing of Paul Lewis, a former naval officer turned highwayman. Lewis struck him as too attractive a man to die in so degrading a manner. He “was a genteel, spirited young fellow,” recorded Boswell in his London diary. “He was just a Macheath.” Neverthe-less, Boswell went to Hyde Park:

My curiosity to see the melancholy spectacle of the executions was so strong that I could not resist it, although I was sensible that I would suffer much from it. In my younger years I had read in the Lives of the Convicts so much about Tyburn that I had

Two depictions of Hyde Park: a map made in 1833 by the English cartographer William Schmollinger and an aer-ial photo from 2011

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a sort of horrid eagerness to be there. I also wished to see the last behaviour of Paul Lewis, the handsome fellow whom I had seen the day before. Accordingly I took Cap-tain Temple with me, and he and I got upon a scaffold very near the fatal tree, so that we could clearly see all the dismal scene. There was a most prodigious crowd of specta-tors. I was most terribly shocked, and thrown into a very deep melancholy.

The last public hanging at Tyburn took place on November 3, 1783. Among the final roster of criminals to be executed that year was William Wynne Ryland, a successful engraver who was caught forging a bill of sale to the East India Company. The poet William Blake had refused to be apprenticed to him, telling his father that the man

“looks as if he will live to be hanged.” But after Ryland’s death Blake wrote hauntingly in “Jerusalem” of “Tyburn’s fatal tree”: “Bending across the road of Oxford Street; it from Hyde Park / To Tyburn’s deathful shades, admits the wandering souls / Of multi-tudes who die from Earth.” By the time Blake had completed the printing and engrav-ing of his epic poem, it was not only public hangings that had fallen from favor. The last known duel at Hyde Park took place in 1817 between two anonymous gentlemen who were carried off the field, both wounded but alive.

By the Regency era, society divided its time between riding in the mornings along Rotten Row and driving around the park in the evening. These outings were far more than an elegant constitutional among friends and acquaintances. The park was one of the few places were men and women could mingle freely, and therefore one of the most socially fraught venues in London. Until 1816 Beau Brummell ruled mercilessly as the sole arbiter of male fashion. “All the world watched Brummell to imitate him,” recalled the memoirist Captain Gronow. To greet Brummell in the park and receive a raised eyebrow, or worse, was to be humiliated for the season. Few mourned the sar-torial tyrant when he fled England to escape his creditors, but English male attire was never again so inventive or interesting. Women, too, were judged and appraised by their peers each time they appeared in the park. As the ambitious Becky Sharp discov-ers in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, her powers of attraction are no match against the merciless patronesses of Rotten Row. “When Lady de la Mole, who had ridden a score of times by Becky’s side at Brussels, met Mrs. Crawley’s open carriage in Hyde Park, her Ladyship was quite blind, and could not in the least recognize her former friend.” But once Becky acquires Lord Steyne as her “protector,” she discovers that the rules of the park are idiosyncratic in their application. His Highness the Prince of Peterwaradin compliments her “in the Ring of Hyde Park with a profound salute of the hat,” which leads to an invitation to the French embassy, and after that to the great houses of Mayfair. And so, “In a word, she was admitted to be among the ‘best’ people.”

For those who could not or dared not sample the air at Rotten Row, the park under George IV offered a host of new buildings and improvements to enjoy. The king was A

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determined to give Londoners a park that rivaled any of its European counterparts. New trees were planted and the surviving deer removed. The roads and tracks were widened; Charles II’s brick walls were replaced by railings; the Serpentine received its iconic stone bridge by John Rennie; and Decimus Burton added a swath of grandeur with his arches, screens, and lodges at all the major entrances to the park. Speakers’ Corner acquired new significance with the addition of John Nash’s Marble Arch, and Hyde Park Corner achieved infamy with Sir Richard Westmacott’s 18-foot bronze statue depicting a naked Achilles—the first nude statue erected in England since the departure of the Romans. The statue had been cast from the cannons captured at Waterloo and Salamanca and paid for by British women as a tribute to the Duke of Wellington. The organizers, how-ever, had not thought to interrogate the sculptor over his intentions regarding Achilles’ anatomy, and a fig leaf was soon added. So began the time-honored practice among the English of commissioning public art only to be outraged by it afterward.

Hyde Park became safer after Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. By Queen Victoria’s reign a person could walk across the park at sunrise without fear of harassment, as the novelist Anthony Trollope was accustomed to do every day before work. Bathers and boaters frequented the Serpentine, confident in the knowledge that the volunteers of the Humane Society were on hand to rescue any-one in difficulty. People seeking sanctuary from the noisy world could wander through the newly created Dell or along one of the more secluded pathways to the north of the park. Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby thinks of the park in much the same way as his living counterparts do now—as a place where he can go to clear his head, and though he cannot quite do so, the fault isn’t with his surroundings:

He passed into Hyde Park, now silent and deserted, and increased his rate of walking as if in the hope of leaving his thoughts behind. They crowded upon him more thickly, however, now there were no passing objects to attract his attention; and the one idea was always uppermost, that some stroke of ill-fortune must have occurred so calami-tous in its nature that all were fearful of disclosing it to him. The old question arose again and again—What could it be? Nicholas walked till he was weary, but was not one bit the wiser; and indeed he came out of the Park at last a great deal more confused and perplexed than when he went in.

George IV’s elegant park railings remained intact until July 1866, when the commis-sioner of police attempted to bar the Reform League, established to support universal male suffrage, from holding a rally. It was an act of folly by the authorities; public protests had been common since the 1820s. Undeterred by the locked gates at Marble Arch or the presence of uniformed constables, 200,000 protesters surged forward in continuous waves.

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ings, yielding easily to the pressure of the crowd.” A year later, the Reform League brought 50,000 protesters into the park. The police summoned the Horse Guards for assistance, but this time the only real violence was to the flowerbeds and the home secretary’s ego. More public confrontations followed until the government caved in and accepted that Speakers’ Corner commanded a special position in the body politic of the country.

On October 15, 1872, The Times announced the government’s change of heart: “The Commissioners of Works have caused to be erected in Hyde Park, at exactly 150 yards distance from the so-called ‘Reformers’ Tree,’ a granite pedestal and iron stan-dard, surmounted by a board, to mark the spot where it shall be lawful (and there only) to hold public meetings.” Parliament was sanctioning the right to congregate rather than the right to speak freely, but it became popular tradition that both had been established. Since then, self-expression at Speakers’ Corner has appeared in all its guises, from the studied rhetoric of George Orwell to a sealed white bag containing a silent (but protesting) John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Today, Speakers’ Corner serves a far deeper purpose than its history would suggest. Virginia Woolf saw the park in general, and Speakers’ Corner in particular, as an invis-ible anchor, mooring an uncertain present to the indelible past. In her last novel, The Years, seemingly insignificant experiences, such as walking through Speakers’ Corner, enable the Partiger family to link what they have left behind with what they have become:

They were near the bald rubbed space where the speakers congregate. Meetings were in full swing. Groups had gathered round the different orators. Mounted on their platforms, or sometimes only on boxes, the speakers were holding forth. The voices became louder, louder and louder as they approached. …

“What about this chap?” said Martin. Here was a large man, banging on the rail of his platform.

“Fellow citizens!” he was shouting. They stopped. The crowd of loafers, errand-boys and nursemaids gaped up at him with their mouths falling open and their eyes gazing blankly. …

“Joostice and liberty,” said Martin, repeating his words, as the fist thumped on the railing. … They strolled on.

In our time the park has new gardens to enjoy, new memorials to mourn over, and new ways of congregating. Rotten Row is no longer the fashionable destination it once was; Speakers’ Corner is more a curiosity than an agent of social change. The Serpen-tine is too warm for ice skating anymore; the famous pet cemetery has been closed for many years. Yet Hyde Park is still a living archive of Britain’s collective memory. It reso-nates across all time because it has a life separate from its physical existence, in art and in literature, and in the rituals of remembrance and celebration that unite the nation. l


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Pacifique Irankunda, who moved to the United States from Burundi, graduated from Deerfield Academy and, recently, from Williams College, where he double-majored in political science and psychology.

Playing at Violence

HAVING GROWN UP AMID THE HORRORS OF BURUNDI’S CIVIL WAR, A YOUNG MAN IS BEWILDERED BY THE AMERICAN LUST FOR WARLIKE VIDEO GAMES

PACIFIQUE IRANKUNDA

On a fall afternoon a few years ago, inside my dorm room at Deerfield Academy, I started hearing gunshots. I had been warned that in America people hunt with guns. I comforted myself with this thought at first, but the sounds went on and on and grew increasingly familiar. It can’t be hunting, I thought. Why would anyone be hunting on the grounds of a Massachusetts prep school?

I threw my door open and rushed outside the building, but I couldn’t hear the sounds anymore. I saw students chatting and laughing as if everything was normal. Was I just dreaming? I went back inside the dorm. Walking down the hallway, I heard the sounds again. Oh, it must be a student watching a movie! I thought and returned to my room, closing the door. Idiot! I laughed at myself—where was I going to go anyway? I had just come to America, and I could hardly find my way around the campus. Even if the gunfire had been real, I would have had no idea where to run.

As I sat at my desk, the sounds brought back images from my home village in Burundi. This disturbed me. Finally, I covered my ears. From time to time, I would uncover them, hoping the movie had ended, but the sounds went on and on. A movie of gunshots and nothing else? I wondered. What type of movie is that?

As dinnertime approached, students started emerging from their rooms, and I joined them in the hallway. “Were you just watching a movie?” I asked one of my dorm mates.

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Playing at Violence

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“Oh, I’m sorry! Was it loud?” he said.“No, no!” I said. “I just was curious to know what movie you were watching.”“It wasn’t actually a movie,” he said. “I was playing video games.”Huh, I thought. I did not ask for an explanation. At the time, I didn’t know what

video games were, only that they made noises that sounded like gunfire.

There was a time when silence reigned all over my village. Rivers were loud, but their rhythmic sounds were part of the silence. People worked in their fields with hoes. There were no cars, no factories. I imagine that to Westerners that time and place would have resembled the Stone Age. Planes flew over the village, but never more than once a week. There was another season that broke this silence. It was the time of crops growing. From the early stage of the seeds’ sprouting, parents would send their kids into the fields to make noise and chase away the birds that ate the seedlings. This went on for a month, and after that the silence would come again. I enjoyed the quiet, but it did not last. Another season erupted and broke all the silence. It was the season of war. It came in the fall when I was four, and it lasted for more than a decade.

In this new season, just as in any other, some things died and others were born. Every-thing was transformed. When the militia attacked a village, it left behind the remains of the dead—people and animals—and the houses in ruin. People moved from their houses to live in the forests. New words appeared—ibinywamaraso (“the blood drinkers”) and ivyamfurambi (“deeds of the wrong first born”)—and new expressions: kamwe kamwe ku ruyeye ku rwembe (“one after another, gently on a razor”). This slogan and others like it said not to worry if you did not kill many people. The secret was to keep killing.

This new season made children my age wish they had been born blind and deaf so they couldn’t see their houses being burned and their mothers being raped before being killed, or hear the sounds of bombs or their parents screaming and crying. But at other times, you wished you had the eyes of a hawk and the ears of a deer, so that you could distinguish, in the dark, a black stump with branches from a man dressed in black pointing a gun, or a thin string tied to a mine from a long blade of grass lying across your path. These were times when you needed to know that the sound of rain-drops falling on leaves wasn’t that of militiamen approaching on tiptoes. For a while you wished for something, and after another while you wished for the opposite. You learned to cover your eyes in the day; you learned to see in the dark.

In the hallway at Deerfield, the boy, whom I’ll call Luke, went on talking about video games, as we waited for our classmates to join us for dinner. Almost everything Luke said was so confusing that I asked him: “What do you mean by saying you killed so-and-so?”


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Playing at Violence

“Well, my enemies. Paci, how often do you play video games?”“Actually, what are they?”The other students looked at each other and smiled.

“Come on, Paci!” Luke led me to his room. He took up a little device in his hands and turned on his computer. He pointed at the computer screen, at images of people with guns. “Once you press this button, they start moving and you hunt them, see?” Out of the computer’s speakers came the sound of shooting, the sound of war.

“You’ll have to play with us, Paci!”I faced the computer but lowered my eyes. I didn’t want to offend him, but I didn’t

want to watch what was happening on the screen. Instead, I watched his fingers mov-ing, handling the device.

“What are you doing with this thing?” I asked, pointing at the little device in his hands.

“I’m playing! That’s how you play!” “So you’re actually doing the shooting?” “Yeah! Here, you try it.”“No, no. Thanks. Let’s go to dinner.”

In the seventh year of war in Burundi, I went to a public boarding school by the shore of Lake Tanganyika. At that school and many others, returning students hazed incoming ones. Although the rigor and form of hazing differed from one school to another, the objective of hazing was the same everywhere: to embarrass new students. Usually a group of returning boys and girls would gather in a circle around a new student, ordering him or her to tell vulgar jokes. This worked best with girls, who would often start crying halfway through a joke and be doubly embarrassed. Some new boys enjoyed telling dirty jokes, but all boys were embarrassed if they were made to cry in public, and if you were a boy, no matter how tough you were, you were unlikely to leave the center of the circle without wiping your eyes. Every word—every gesture—was treated as an insult by the haz-ers, and the penalty was for one of them to rap his knuckles on your head. If you were a girl, you often had to do more than tell a dirty joke. You might also be commanded by one of the boys, “Date me until I fall in love with you!” The hazers would tell you to caress the boy who had said those words. And then that boy would scream and call out, “She is harrassing me! Please stop! Stop! Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Other times the boy would make noises as if he were having sex and say things like, “What a whore!”

A person was assigned especially to haze me. His name was Chrysostom. Most of the hazers wanted to inflict only psychological pain. Chrysostom was different. If, for example, you saw a new girl cradling her breasts in pain, you knew that she had been hazed by Chrysostom.


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I met him on my first day at that school. He came up to me and yelled, “Kinyuzu!” The name designated a new student who, according to the rules of hazing, did not deserve a proper name.

I did not reply.“Why don’t you open your mouth and say, ‘Yes!’ ” I kept quiet.Chrysostom looked puzzled, as if I had done something not only incomprehen-

sible but absolutely stupid. He then laughed ironically and called me by my proper name. “All right, Pacifique.”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you surprised I know your name?” he asked. “Well, yes, because we just met,” I replied. “Do you know my name?” “No,” I said. “Because mine is too unimportant to know, but yours … You’re a big shot, huh?”Chrysostom was short but strong. He had a thick, muscular neck, and when he

laughed, the muscles around his neck would get bigger and bigger as if air were being pumped into them. He was the boy who could get away with offending anyone, no matter how strong the other person was. Students would tell you: “Unless you intend to kill him, you should not try to fight Chrysostom.” Whether you started the fight or he started it, it was for you to end it. You had to accept humiliation and ask for mercy. Otherwise the fight would never end. He would never quit.

From the moment we met until the end of the year, Chrysostom never let a day go by without spending some time with me. He made me his closest friend, in his spe-cial way of companionship. He always wanted me to tell him jokes, but he also made sure I did not go to sleep without being beaten up. Unlike others who often were not interested in jokes but only in inflicting humiliation, Chrysostom would listen to my jokes and would laugh when they amused him. If someone else had beaten me up, he did not need to beat me again. I only needed to go see him and tell him I had already been beaten, and then tell him jokes.

There was a particularly vulgar joke that hazers found funny, so new students told it often. The joke went like this: two children are playing outside their house on a sunny afternoon. It is a hot day, and their parents are napping—windows wide open. All of a sudden, funny noises come out of their parents’ room; they are making love. One child runs over, looks through the window, and calls to his sister: “Mom and Dad are fight-ing!” The other child joins the first at the window. After a while, the children begin to cry. As they cry, the sister watches Mommy grabbing Daddy’s shoulder, and then she shouts, “Go, Mummy, go!” The brother grabs his sister, and a real fight begins—the kids are taking sides. After the parents have “come to peace,” they hear their children


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fighting outside. They rush out and separate them and angrily question them, and the kids reply, “But you were also fighting!” This was the punch line.

When I told this idiotic joke to Chrysostom, he didn’t laugh. After a moment of awkwardness, he asked me, “Were the kids seriously fighting?”

“The story goes that they fought to their bleeding,” I said. Then he broke into laugh-ter. If there was anything related to violence in a joke, Chrysostom always wanted to hear more about it.

Another interesting thing about Chrysostom was that he wanted to tell me stories, too. He told me he lived in Bujumbura Rural, a province where a group of militia called the FNL (Forces nationales de liberation) camped. He would tell me how he enjoyed watching the FNL combatants—whom he called friends—fighting with government sol-diers. Though he never said that he himself killed or had fought for the FNL, in his stories he sometimes used “we.” He would imitate the sounds of different guns and would keep doing it for such a long time that his voice would get hoarse. He repeated one story often. He never seemed to remember that I had already heard it. He laughed while telling it as if it were new every time.

“Back home, my friends, the FNL,” he would start. “You know the FNL, right?” I would nod.

“When we catch people … oh it is so funny … the soldiers … those for the govern-ment … oh dear! Ntakintu kiryoshe nkico, wohora uraraba! Nothing else on earth could be more amusing! You know how a cat, when he catches a mouse, you know how he can play with the mouse knowing that the mouse won’t go anywhere? It is just like that. Oh, boy!” Then he would laugh and laugh. The muscles around his neck would swell. When he stopped laughing, he would go on: “We ask them questions, you know, and when they hesitate … You know, in the eyes!” He would stretch out his arm and point his long fingernails at my eyes. “And then after …” He would interrupt himself with laughter again. “The FNL would never waste their bullets, you know, they would use a rope, you know, even a shoelace, and put it around their neck, and …” Saying this, he would grab my neck and squeeze it. “And … strangle the idiots!” Then, as if hit by an electric shock, he would release my neck and fall backward onto his bed, and laugh so hard that tears came from his eyes. “I miss home! I very much look forward to vacation.”

I could see he was absorbed by his story, as if he were right back there strangling someone. He did not realize that I was shivering the whole time.

“What do you do on vacation?” he would ask me. For me, going on vacation did not mean going to my family’s house, but rather joining my mother and brother in the forest, where we hid from Chrysostom’s friends, the militiamen he always told me about. I could not tell him this, of course. I would change the subject.

I tried to please Chrysostom, hoping he would stop abusing me, but he was not aware of what I felt. I would take him to a restaurant, buy him soda and cookies, but it


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was like caressing a stone. He would often put his arm around my shoulders, and we would walk around while I told him jokes. He would listen very carefully and would laugh and even give me a high five. Students who saw us walking side by side thought we were the best of friends. In fact, Chrysostom himself seemed to think I was his best friend. When he learned I was going to another school for my remaining years of high school, he told me: “I will miss you! You are very sweet. I do not feel I will have someone else to spend time with and have fun.” And I could see in his face that he actually meant it.

It was an interesting friendship, but I am glad that it ended.

That evening at Deerfield, on the way back from dinner, Luke asked me to go play war video games with him. “No,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do.” I did have work to do. But I had other reasons for staying away. I thought that the boys who played the video games probably took drugs, that they were gangsters who pretended to be innocent.

One evening, I was having trouble with my computer, and I went to Luke’s room to ask him for help. I found him in the midst of shooting imaginary people. After he fixed my computer, he asked me if I wanted to watch him play for a little bit. I said I did not and tried to explain: “You know, I’ve seen the real thing. So I’m not really interested. I’m sorry.”

“Wait, you … How?” He stopped playing.“There was a war back in my country,” I told him. “I was little when it started, and

I grew up in it. So I saw a lot of that.” “Wow!” he said. He asked me to tell him more. There was excitement in his face,

which surprised me, and frightened me a little. When I first came to school in America, I assumed that I would never talk about the war in Burundi. Doing so might refresh my bad memories. And wouldn’t the other students think that I was violent myself? Besides, who would want to hear about such horrible things?

He wanted me to tell him about the war. I said I would tell him some other day, knowing that day would never come. It would have been like telling jokes to Chryso-stom. Was this boy like Chrysostom? Was he addicted to violence, too? “And thanks so much for fixing my computer,” I said and quietly left his room.

Over the next few months, I realized I was wrong about Luke. He and my other dorm mates who liked playing violent video games weren’t gangsters at all. They were just young, inexperienced, innocent. It took me some time to realize that the shooting wasn’t real to them. They were just playing. For them the games were “mindless,” as one friend told me. Many kids at the school played the same kinds of games. So there was nothing unusual about Luke. He was just doing what many American kids did. I felt relieved, but I was also puzzled by what seemed to me like an odd sort of enter-tainment. How could violence so easily be turned into a game? How could companies


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invent such games in the first place? And how could parents buy them for their children?I lived through 13 years of civil war. I know that violence can become almost a culture

in itself, and that it twists not all but many of the people who are trapped in it. Of course, not all the children who grew up in the war became violent. How you responded to your own resentments, whether you seethed with thoughts of revenge, how your parents, neighbors, and friends responded to the bloodshed—all of these things helped determine your own taste for violence. I was lucky. Many others were not. Maybe Chrysostom was a particularly sadistic case. I don’t really know. Maybe he would have been a bad guy wherever he grew up. But he was not born violent, and certainly the war helped shape him. I don’t know what happened to him as a child, but I imagine that since he himself grew up in that season of war in Burundi, he probably underwent a transformation and adapted the way a plant adapts. Vio-lence in my country and in neighboring Rwanda and Congo had a similar effect on soldiers and militiamen, and especially on children drafted into armies or rebel militias. I remember how Nyandwi, a schoolmate and a neighbor who had joined one of the mili-tias, hunted my family. When we escaped from him, he killed his own sister, appar-ently out of nothing more than frustration. I recall how Nyandwi, when he was no longer a militiaman, would proudly tell stories of how he killed 30 children with machetes in a single night. It was how his militia colleagues had initiated him, he explained.

I remember how Gilbert, a neighbor and Nyandwi’s friend, enjoyed telling similar stories of when he was in the militia. How every one of his reactions, when he was back in the village, was violent and how he always laughed after he had done something vio-lent. How he would heat a nail and stab the feet of his sisters to find out the truth if he suspected they had told him lies. To many young people, violence became easy and fun. It became one of their hobbies, as it seemed to have become Chrysostom’s hobby. It is hard to allow yourself to imagine that you could become one of those young people, but you have to admit that you could, when you remind yourself that the children who are twisted by war were once lovely three-year-olds who smiled and charmed with their innocence.

I think back to the season of war and remember how we fled deep into the jungle, far from any people. That was how we managed to survive, by hiding, by turning our backs on the rest of humanity. Those parents who sent their children into the jungle to pro-tect them from the bloodshed—they would have envied the peace that Luke and others like him took for granted. Most of all, they would have envied the fact that these lucky children did not know the true devastation of war. That they only played at violence. l

He was just doing what many American kids did. I

felt relieved, but puzzled by what seemed to me like an odd sort of entertainment. How could violence so eas-ily be turned into a game?


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William Harless is a physician-scientist and the medical director of the Cape Breton Cancer Centre in Nova Scotia. A practicing oncologist, hematologist, and cancer researcher, he is writing a book about his experiences treating cancer patients.

Intimacy With the Inevitable

A DOCTOR’S JOURNEY, FROM STUDENT TO RESIDENT TO CONSOLER OF THE DYING

WILLIAM HARLESS

When I was accepted to medical school, I was sure that dead people would not disturb me all that much. One of my closest friends, who had been a practicing physi-cian before leaving the medical profession to study ancient history and write novels, warned me to approach the dead carefully. He said that one of the most important rites of passage for the aspiring physician was not only to learn enough about the contours of the human body to pass the first-year course in anatomy but also to learn how to become comfortable with dead people.

I wasn’t worried. I had been educated as a scientist and was finishing up my doc-toral dissertation in biology—not one to be troubled by such things. Trained to believe firmly in rationality and logic, I was trying to relegate the emotional part of my being to the basement of my mind—especially after the recent failure of a relationship with a woman I had loved.

During an orientation tour before classes started, a third-year medical student took me to visit the hospital morgue. Walking down sterile white corridors and a few flights of stairs, we came to a half-lighted hallway that gave way to a narrow passage. At the end of the passage he abruptly turned and led me into a large room in which an open steel container held a dead woman. I had expected half-torn flesh and nothing really resembling a human being, thinking that the most oppressive aspect of confronting

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the dead must be the smell. But the body, submerged in a solution of formaldehyde, was a recent death, and her eyes were wide open and looking upward with an expres-sion of profound sadness. It was difficult to avoid her empty stare. I wondered who she was and why she had died, trying hard to remind myself that I was a scientist and not someone easily subject to the emotional vagaries of the unenlightened.

My guide launched into exquisite detail about how the disease process had taken her life, and I began to feel nauseated. Ignorant of the esoteric language of pathophysi-ology at the time, I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying, but I wasn’t listen-ing closely, either, as I was just trying to hold my composure. I mumbled some excuse about being late and rushed outside into the intense light of a Texas noonday sun. This was fortunate for me, as my eyes were already beginning to betray me. I headed toward the privacy of my car, and once inside sobbed uncontrollably, as if my entire body were vomiting an overwhelming sadness. But who was I crying for? For her? For those I loved? For myself? I didn’t know, and I still don’t. This was just an encounter with a dead body. Only later would I become much more intimate and familiar with death—something altogether different.

I had been exposed to death as a child. I remember the day my best friend, Eric, didn’t show up for first grade. I also remember the days that followed, with frequent appearances by Sister Bruno at our classroom door to tell us that Eric was getting better H

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and soon would return to school. Every morning I expected to see my friend. One day Sister Bruno came to our door and told us he had died during the night. I couldn’t be-lieve it. Hadn’t she assured us that he was getting better? What could have possibly hap-pened? Many years later I realized that she was either ignorant of his condition or a liar. My friend had acute lymphocytic leukemia, and there was no cure for it. Today childhood leukemia is curable more often than not, but in 1965 almost everyone who got it died.

My parents took me to the funeral home to say goodbye to my friend. He was lying in a box, dressed in a white gown, and he had a red glow on his face. Understanding death can be nothing short of impossible for a child. It is the same for an animal, which will stand over the body of a loved one for a long time, pawing at it, trying to get it to respond. Eric’s body was unchanged, as far as I could see, and yet I was told that he was no longer there. But he was there. I even talked to him. If my mother had not stopped

me, I would have grabbed his hand and tried to wake him up.

But the dead don’t wake up. This real-ization may be what separates us from other animals. The cliché that logic and reason distinguish humans from the rest of the animal kingdom has never seemed valid to me, particularly because many of us behave as if we were disinvested of these particular qualities. We are, however, pretty good at recognizing death. Many

of us believe in some form of life beyond our present existence, but only within the context of the next world. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, who took elaborate steps to preserve the body for the voyage to the world beyond, we bury our dead deep in the ground or burn their remains.

Sigmund Freud taught us that, second to sex, death and the response to death most define human existence. The twin pillars—the creative force of sex and the destructive force of death—are the guiding forces that shape human culture and civilization, Freud said. Synthesis and antithesis. Everything else is at best secondary and at worst meaningless.

During my medical school years, death easily eclipsed sex—if not in importance, then certainly in my own experience. Dead people filled my days, while only an occasional lover ever filled my nights. Some of this may have been the result of the low self-esteem engendered by the psychological trauma of medical school. Medical students are essen-tially useless in the hospital because they know little that is applicable there. Ability and training are of the utmost importance in the practical fields, and medicine—despite a proud intellectual history and tradition emanating from the liberal arts and sciences—is perhaps the most practical of all fields: only skills and knowledge—derived from theory,

Many years later I realized that Sister Bruno was either ignorant of his condition or a liar. My friend had acute lymphocytic leukemia, and in 1965 almost everyone who got it died.


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it is true—can save a human life. In hospitals, nurses are infinitely more important than medical students. Even the phlebotomist is a more useful member of the medical team than a medical student. Your place in the hospital is fixed and unalterable, at the very bottom of a complex and ruthless social hierarchy. Often as I entered the hospital in the early morning, while putting on the short white jacket that defined me as a student (physicians wore full-length jackets), I would say to myself, only half-joking: Once a self-respecting individual with a certain modicum of personal dignity, I am now the lowest and most contemptible form of human life, the medical student.

As such, you are regularly confronted by the dead, without being personally invested in either death or dying. You might have a courtside seat, but you are only an observer. And when a decision is to be made or an action taken to slow a disease or salvage a vital physiological function to prevent someone from dying, you fade into the background quickly. You are a theoretician with limited practical experience, and even your theory is primitive compared with that of any practicing physician.

Once you graduate, things are different. Overnight you are expected to make important medical decisions, and (despite what I believe to be a deliberate effort in our corporation-dominated culture to delegitimize the medical profession by referring to physicians as providers) you are called doctor. What you now provide is a hard-won knowledge and level of skill that will often make the difference between someone’s living and dying. This responsibility, this terrible responsibility, will define you as a physician.

During my first year of postgraduate training as a medical resident at the Uni-versity of Illinois, I lived from patient to patient, problem to problem, call to call. The Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics, a handbook that describes succinctly the management of many common medical conditions, was my trusted friend, providing answers to questions I didn’t even know could be asked. I was treading water that first year, but some incidents from the time stand out more than others.

As the intern on call for the intensive-care unit, I was asked by the emergency room physician to admit a 26-year-old woman with a subarachnoid hemorrhage. This con-dition is caused by a breach in the wall of a blood vessel in the brain. When the vessel breaks, blood spills into the confined space of the skull, damaging brain function, often irreversibly. The patient had been working the telephone at her customer-service job when she told a coworker she had a headache. Thirty minutes later, she slumped over her desk and lapsed into unconsciousness.

She was taken to our hospital’s emergency room and placed in a private room. Her husband put a photograph next to her bed. In the photo she was a beautiful woman sitting on a large wooden chair while holding a small boy—her son; both were dressed up and smiling happily. I turned off the lights and listened to her breathe in the dark-


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ness. Deeply, slowly, and rhythmically, her lungs took in air. Her heartbeat, strong and full, was audible even without the use of my stethoscope. I flashed my penlight into her eyes. The nerve connecting the retina to her brain could be clearly seen and its passage traced. Her arteries and veins pulsated with the flow of blood, trembling with the rhythmic contractions of her heart. Although the signs of life were present, I knew she was dead. Who she was and might have been were gone. There was noth-ing there but a beating heart and memories lost forever within a tangle of millions of disaggregated nerve cells. I thought about her son, waiting at home, looking for his mother. Again the overwhelming nausea struck.

As I walked out of the room, the ER physician flippantly said: “Once there was a brain, now there is nothing.” His simple statement of fact enraged me. I wanted to shout at him, to insult him, to hurt him. But he was my superior—in rank, experience, and most important in knowledge—and even if he had been my peer I wouldn’t have done it. Six months into my internship, I had already learned that reflex callousness was a defense practiced by all physicians at some point to protect themselves from the overwhelming weight and sadness of being witnesses to horrors.

On another occasion that year I assumed care of a man in his mid-40s who was hav-ing increased difficulty with his breathing. He insisted, as did his wife, that he wanted to be a “full code,” which meant he was to be resuscitated and put on a mechanical ventilator if his condition were to deteriorate further. At shift rounds, the senior resi-dent asked me about him before leaving to cover another floor. I said the patient had been diagnosed with a sarcoma (cancer) two years earlier and was recently found to have multiple metastases to his lungs, which portends a poor prognosis. I had not seen the x-rays, having only briefly skimmed the written radiology report when I took over from the day-shift intern. The patient was one of many in my care that night, and his story passed by as quickly as did the others.

Three hours later my code pager went off, and I raced apprehensively up four flights of stairs to the man’s room. A phalanx of family members stood outside the door. The code had already started, and the nurses were at the bedside administering chest compressions and a breathing bag. I was grateful when the senior resident came into the room shortly after I entered, quickly taking charge of the situation. The patient’s pulse had returned, and he was given a milligram of epinephrine on the orders of my senior, who asked about the man’s medical condition. I said that he was recently found to have cancer spreading to his lungs, and the resident asked me if I was sure. I said that I was. As the code continued and the nurses kept trying to resuscitate the patient, the doctor once again asked me in a voice pleading for certainty: “Are you sure?” I again told him that I was. He then called off the code, telling the nurses to stop everything that they were doing. One of the older and more experienced nurses, busy ventilating the patient, argued loudly with him. The patient had not signed the


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do-not-resuscitate order, she said, and wanted to be a full code. The doctor told her in a voice intolerant of dissent to stop what she was doing. Over two minutes passed before the man’s pulse finally disappeared.

I left the room, threading past the sobbing family members, and walked downstairs to the radiology department to view the x-rays. In the faint light of the primitive view-ing screen I saw multiple hazy outlines in the man’s lungs, distinct shadows outlining the contours of disease and his inevitable demise. We could have done nothing for him. The decision to withdraw treatment had been right.

But what if I had been wrong?

By the time I finished the first year of postgraduate training, more and more of my rotations were spent in an old Veterans Administration hospital in Danville, Illinois. It was here that death and dying took on a truly macabre aspect. Dark and spooky and set way back from the main road on a large piece of land, the compound consisted of ancient buildings that included the main hospital, an emergency room, a psychiatric hospital, and a nursing home. The buildings were interconnected by an elaborate system of tunnels that wove across a deeply wooded landscape containing a large cemetery where the dead from previous wars were buried. An intern took care of patients in the main hospital, and the senior resident (me) managed the ER and put out whatever medical fires arose in the other buildings. Except for the often-exceptional nurses who worked that graveyard shift, everyone else in the complex was either asleep or dead: those in the ground, the dying soon to be put into that ground, and the seriously ill whom we wanted to keep above the ground—at least on our watch.

During quiet periods when I was on call at night, I would try to rest. That is when the dead from my own life would visit me, inhabiting the twilight realm that comes before deep sleep. Oftentimes a phone would wake me, and I would learn that some-one in the large extended-care ward needed to be pronounced dead. When the needs of the living permitted, I would make my way through the tunnels to the “outback,” as we jokingly referred to the extended-care ward.

Sometimes on these late-night death rounds I would bring the intern with me, and we would practice our intubation skills on the corpse. If rigor mortis had already set in, getting the endotracheal tube in the airway was no simple matter because it wasn’t easy to extend the neck enough to visualize the vocal cords and the opening to the trachea. Although this practice might seem somewhat irreverent (it was never officially sanc-tioned), if anyone alive in those buildings were to crash that night, we would be the ones to perform intubation and put the patient on the ventilator. So we practiced life-saving skills on the dead, thanked them for their gift to us, and pronounced them.


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Making such a pronouncement was a simple administrative duty. Listen for heart sounds, check for air entry, look for the response of the eyes to light, fill out the coro-ner’s report to document the time of death and the likely cause, and call the nearest relative, often a wife or a child. During this conversation I would express my regret over the death of the person they loved. This expression, at first an inconvenience and a duty, became much more genuine when I learned something about the person who had just died. If time permitted, I would read the medical chart and service record before calling a relative. That he had been born in Dubuque in 1922 and had two children, one of whom died of appendicitis at the age of seven. Or that he worked for U.S. Steel in Gary and eventually started his own shoe factory. Before long, feigning an interest was supplanted with concern, often heightened by admiration. Many of the men had been on the beaches of Normandy. Some had helped liberate Nazi death camps. Two had survived the Bataan Death March. One had worked on the Manhattan Project. They were born long ago, they lived, they loved, and they died.

By the time my residency ended, I had learned a great deal about death and the specific steps you can take to prevent it. But not until I treated patients with cancer did I start to learn something about dying. Most patients with other medical condi-tions will either get better fairly quickly, or die. Most cancer patients are relatively healthy when first diagnosed and when told they have cancer often respond that they feel fine. But something primordial is growing inside their bodies, with its own ruth-lessly efficient and highly developed program for survival, and if it has spread much beyond the primary tumor, we often cannot, with our current scientific knowledge, prevent that cancer from taking their lives.

You try to be optimistic with all your patients; you have to be optimistic if you hope to win their trust, but you know that most of what you do will only postpone (and not for too long) the inevitable. Cancer often robs a person of everything before it kills them. It slowly strangles the things that make life worthwhile. As an oncologist, you learn to fear suffering much more than you fear death. By suffering I mean not only physical pain, although that is real enough. I am also talking about the emotional suffering experienced by cancer patients and their loved ones as the disease eats away at life.

I saw it with my friend Mani. We had helped each other survive the inhumanity of medical school, becoming the closest of friends. Every evening that we were free from our responsibilities in the hospital we would get together and take a long walk around the outer edge of the island of Galveston, Texas. Landmarks have changed a lot since we graduated. Gone is the path that took us past an old, rarely used airport, an unfenced tropical garden, and a pristine wetland. Indeed, the path itself is a corpse


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that succumbed to the associated plagues of overdevelopment and overpopulation. But not so long ago we had the outer island to ourselves—with the welcome exception of a post-rainfall riot of frogs and migratory crabs that jumped or scuttled across our pathway, seeking whatever watercourse was sure to lie nearby. The skies were par-ticularly bright near the gardens at the edge of the bay. Artificial light receded, and we could watch the moonlight skip across the waves or we could trace the arc of the Milky Way through the night sky. We would talk about anything and everything. He taught me computer science and electrical engineering. I taught him cosmology and medieval philosophy. It was a grand bargain.

Mani was 35 years old when he was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. He fought the disease silently and with great dignity for more than two years, a dura-tion that put him in the top one percent of people with his cancer (he was always exceptional). But toward the end of his life he began to suffer less silently. On my last visit, a month before he died, Mani, who never smoked or rarely even drank a glass of wine when he was healthy, was consum-ing a regular dose of narcotics that could render an addict comatose. I listened to him retreat to the bathroom at night to retch and vomit (his bowel strangulated by the narcotics and his liver encased in tumors), and I remember saying a prayer for him, hoping that somewhere, somehow, some God might care about Mani.

The dead in my own life—including the loves lost still living, those that I loved who are dead, and the patients who died under my care—are many, and I suspect these losses are more emotionally damaging to me than I know. Being a physician has given me an intimacy with death and with dying that is a privilege as well as a burden. And if there is one benefit to practicing medicine today besides the enormous satisfaction that comes from helping to alleviate human suffering, it is intimacy with death. This intimacy, I believe, provides physicians with a certain immunity to the existential terror associated with death and dying, immunity not available to the uninitiated. The practice of medicine is like the grim exchange the medieval knight has with the personification of Death as they play chess in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Such a chess match with death is something physicians engage in constantly during our careers, and although I am unaware of any study addressing the question of how doctors face their own deaths, I believe that the close relationship we have with death

The practice of medicine is like the grim exchange the medieval knight has

with the personification of Death as they play chess

in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.


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prepares us well for this unwelcome visitor when he comes for us.I recall the story of Armand Trousseau. He was an accomplished 19th-century

French physician who had observed and described a link between the spontaneous formation of blood clots and visceral cancer. When he developed a blood clot several years later, he recognized it as his death knell, and in the objective manner of the sci-entist chronicled its features and natural history for the benefit of others. Meanwhile, he finalized his personal affairs, correctly predicting that his death was imminent. This very deliberate and rational approach to one’s own death has always struck me as strangely remarkable—a not-insignificant triumph of the individual human spirit.

A young trauma surgeon whom I took care of while doing my fellowship training was also an astute observer of his own dying process and, in that recognition, seemed to prepare himself for death as well as anyone can. Unfailingly kind and considerate, he was respected by his colleagues and his patients, and his quiet demeanor and respect-ful nature belied the stereotype of the brash and arrogant trauma surgeon. After he was diagnosed with a rare form of embryonal cancer, Dr. Ronald Albuquerque placed himself under the care of my mentor during fellowship, Dr. Miklos Auber, himself as close to the ideal of a physician as one could imagine. Dr. Auber was legendary for his dedication to his patients, and it was not unusual for the residents on the night float shift to see him well past midnight, studying patients’ charts or agonizing over a lab value, hoping to find some clue somewhere that might help him save a life.

The two physicians shared a passion for music, and I suspect that this love, as well as their mutual respect, brought them together as doctor and patient. Dr. Auber’s great-great-great-grandfather, Daniel Auber, was a French composer, and I occasion-ally heard the product of his life’s work on the classical music station as I drove to work. I looked up his picture on the Internet and was struck by the resemblance of the two. Being only several generations apart, they were sure to harbor similar genes. But Daniel Auber was unique, as is Dr. Auber, as are all of us, with our own distinct genetic imprint and life experiences. This absolute and irreplaceable uniqueness makes the death of any one of us of such singular moment.

Two weeks before Dr. Albuquerque died, he came to the cancer clinic with his violin and played. It was a deeply felt musical display by a man who knew he was dying. Terribly frail, even emaciated, he gave a virtuoso performance for the other cancer patients hooked up to their IVs dripping assorted poisons. When the incred-ible sound from his violin gently embraced the people in the cancer center, for a moment, for just a moment, there was no suffering, no death; there was only beauty. Looking back on it now, I see that his musical performance was not only his way of saying goodbye to all of us. It was also, even more profoundly, his way of saying goodbye to himself. l


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At Sixty-Five AFTER THE EXCESSES OF YOUTH AND TERRORS OF MIDDLE AGE,

A WRITER FACES THE CONTINGENCIES OF BEING OLD

EMILY FOX GORDON

Emily Fox Gordon’s most recent work is Book of Days: Personal Essays. She is also the author of two memoirs and a novel.

Over the past few years, I’ve really begun to feel age. I feel it in my left eye, which sometimes leaks spontaneously—I swipe at it with the back of my wrist and people take me to be weeping. I feel it in my new habit of swinging both legs out of the car at the same time, apparently in unconscious response to a directive from the part of my brain that monitors muscle strength and balance. Having risen to my feet, I feel it in an embarrassing arthritic hobble that takes me 10 seconds to walk off, hoping all the while that other parking lot crossers aren’t noticing, though several of them seem to be suffering from the same condition, or worse.

I hasten to add that though my muscles may be weakening and my joints stiffen-ing, I’m not infirm. I’m as vigorous as I ever was, and reasonably healthy. Mentally, I’m quite intact, though my memory, always bad, grows worse. People tell me I seem younger than my years.

But as I say, I’m feeling age. I feel it in my invisibility to strangers. I haven’t been nubile for many years, and never got many glances when I was. I didn’t mind that, or told myself I didn’t. I saw my ordinary looks as protective coloration, a duck blind behind which I could comfortably observe and take my shots. But I’m not at all sure I like this new kind of anonymity, which is an absolute dismissal. Even in contextualized situations like readings and receptions, eyes slide past me; internal shutters fail to click.

When I was 30, I felt sure that a paradoxical reward awaited me at 60, if I made it that far. Having never had any beauty to lose, I reasoned, I’d be exempted from mourn-ing its loss. But as I’ve grown older, this proposition has turned inside out. I see now that I did have at least some beauty—not much, but some—and exactly because I had so little, I could hardly afford to lose it. Now, at this inconvenient moment, I real-


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ize that I do care about my looks. I find myself spending more energy compensating for my inadequacies than I used to. I search for becoming clothes. I color my hair. I experiment, in a gingerly way, with makeup. I suspect these efforts don’t do a lot for me, though they do make some difference, if only in letting people know I’m trying.

But it’s not easy to judge success or failure, when these days the reference class itself is collapsing. So many women my age have fallen victim to disqualifying condi-tions; it’s hardly a consolation to congratulate myself on having escaped the ones I’ve so far escaped. After 60, nearly every blessing is hinged to a curse that has fallen on someone else. Counting those blessings takes the form of saying to myself: at least I don’t have varicose veins; at least I don’t have a bald spot; at least I don’t have a dowager’s hump. Surely there’s a diminishing utility in these kinds of comparisons, which extend seamlessly from minor gloating to deadly schadenfreude. (At least I haven’t lost my mind. At least I’m not alone.)

There’s a saving element of aesthetic disinterestedness in my new concern for superficialities. I find I can amuse myself for hours looking at clothes in stores. In the process, I learn about line and mass and balance, note that V-neck sweaters are flat-tering, and that elbow-length sleeves are not. (Would that I’d learned these lessons earlier, when they were more applicable!) I take pleasure in rifling through racks, in running my fingers over fabrics, in holding garments at arm’s length and appreciating the poignant way they seem to be offering themselves: Choose me! Saleswomen under-stand what I’m just now coming to acknowledge, which is the primitive imperative to decorate oneself, even if one is a crone—especially if one is a crone. “Ready to check out,” they ask as I stand before a mirror, draping myself with scarves, “or still playing?”

I do most of this playing and self-decorating alone, but also sometimes in the com-pany of other women. It’s an odd surprise to me that these days I experience myself as more feminine than I ever did in my childbearing years, or at least more identified with other women. Now that all, or most, bets are off, I see that the deep alienation I felt from my gender for most of my life was largely defensive. Under the aspect of decline, I under-stand other women better. As our sags and wrinkles make us kin, I feel a tenderness for them, particularly for their—for our—slight shoulders and delicate wrists, those skeletal markers of femininity that no drag queen can approximate. I’m persuaded that we’re alike, that we were alike all along. I feel a new sympathy for other women, and for myself.

Tiresias-like, I understand men better too, and make allowance for the lust that enslaves them all their lives. I think of the boys I knew when I was a teenager, of what was really going on in their minds. How could I have missed it?

Another small surprise: the intense pleasure I take in pure, strong, flamboyant color. A yellow hibiscus blossom, seen at a distance, will stop me in my tracks. Many years ago, my husband and I spent a few nights in a New England guesthouse. One morning I came to breakfast in a bright red top, an unusual choice for me. Our hostess, a bent, G

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At Sixty-Five

muttering old thing, emerged from behind her dark desk under the stairs and trotted up to me, all animation now, her eyes alight. “RED!” she bellowed. “I LOVE RED!” I was baffled and amused. What was this about, this senile glee? Now I begin to understand.

Thirty years ago I assumed I would take the eccentric route as I aged, become one of those bluff, outspoken, truth-telling old women people claim to admire, even as they avoid them. That would have been in keeping with my strong contrarian impulse. But instead of growing bolder and more heedless, I seem to be growing more circumspect, more nervously observant of the proprieties, more conscious of other people’s feelings.

At my age, motives are generally multiple. I can think of three explanations for this development in my behavior. Ranged along a continuum that moves from most to least cynical, they are as follows:

1. Age is unnecessary, as Lear observed. More and more, I feel that I’m here on suf-ferance. If I don’t want to be left out on an ice floe, I’d better try to be pleasant.

2. Being interesting is getting harder, but I can always be good.3. Age is slowly melting away the outer layers of my personality, revealing the

sweetness within.

I feel my aging in my moods, which have always been volatile, but are steadier now than they were when I was still menstruating and out of my mind for half the month. Even so, I can’t say I often feel serene. A lot of the time what I feel is a buzzy muzziness, G

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as though I need to give my head a good shake (perhaps it’s tinnitus). And though my moods have stabilized, the background coloration of my subjectivity has darkened. This is a difficult distinction to make, because the concepts of mood and color seem inseparable, but a darkening of mood is not the same as a lowering of mood. It’s an indelible staining, the result of a long immersion in the vat of years. Depression can occur concomitantly, of course. In fact, the darkening makes the lowering more likely.

I can’t deny that often I am depressed, but I also find myself in the grip of an inalien-able stoicism. Even when my moods are acutely painful, I no longer try to force my way out of them through explosion or confrontation or drinking. The price in shame would be too high: after 60, one no longer gets the discounted rate. I simply wait for my moods to go away. What replaces them is nothing like euphoria. It’s often the default

state of muzziness I describe above, but sometimes—if the mood has been very bad, and I’m lucky—the muzziness lifts like a California fog and I enjoy an interval of steady, neutral clarity.

Not only am I better at containing my emotions, I’m also much more in control of my appetites, partly because many of them have shrunk. I’m improved in many other ways as well; I’m more conscientious, more prudent, better organized, more reliable. It

amazes me that in my youth I was so morally careless and cheerfully self-destructive. I remember late nights in my early 20s, joyously rocketing along piney back roads in some drunk’s car toward a party house rented by an older male reprobate. What was I after? I can’t recall, though I do remember what I got. Now I feel poisoned if I drink two glasses of wine. Not that feeling poisoned stops me, though it does slow me down.

I’m proud of my newfound moderation and self-control, but I also must report that I’ve begun to notice in myself a certain age-related tendency to peevishness. Like the fussy old lady in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, who only wants a properly made cup of tea and a piece of really crisp toast, I get seriously annoyed when the soup I’ve ordered comes to the table lukewarm. In earlier days I’d have bolted it obliviously, along with a sandwich, but a tiny disappointment like this really bothers me now: the only lunch I’ll get today, ruined! Even so, I won’t send it back to be reheated. That’s not like me. That’s the behavior of my alter ego, the grouse-stick-brandishing old bat I haven’t become.

I also notice an age-related touchiness, an increased sensitivity to slights and insults to my dignity. I’ve always been easily hurt and quick to anger, but when I was young there was a robustness to my reactions. What I feel now instead of a straightforward rage is a quivering, querulous outrage that I have no choice but to conceal behind a

I no longer sit bolt upright in bed, gasping at the thought of personal extinction. I suppose that aging is getting me used to the idea—limbering me up for it, so to speak.


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At Sixty-Five

tight smile. It’s as if I suddenly expect chivalric treatment: How can people wound me when I’m old, and I can no longer chalk their slights up to experience? How can they hurt me when I can no longer learn anything from it?

I’ve become much more sensible about my health, but also more relaxed about the prospect of getting sick. For many years I interpreted every flutter in my stomach as the sure sign of something terminal. Occasionally my panics took me to the emergency room, where irritated interns looked me over and sent me home, but mostly I avoided doctors because I feared that they’d catch me out. Diagnosis meant judgment, and sick-ness meant death. I lived much of my adult life in a state of medical dread. I look back on my earlier self with exasperation: so much of life wasted in vague neurotic terror, when now it turns out that all along I was quite well. Only a person who knew nothing of illness could have romanticized it the way I did, allowed it to carry so much existential freight.

Now I shrug off symptoms that 30 years ago would have had me calling an ambulance; but I also monitor my health. I take long conditioning walks, I floss faithfully, I keep reg-ular hours, I seek balance. I actually find it comforting to stand in line at the pharmacy, to produce my Aetna card at the doctor’s office. I suffer from none of the obscure and terrifying ailments I feared when I was younger, though I do require medication for ele-vated blood pressure and high cholesterol. I find it almost reassuring to have developed these garden-variety, though serious, conditions. I’ve joined the great citizen army of the elderly, and finally I’m like everyone else. In a few weeks I’ll be eligible for Medicare!

My fear of death is considerably diminished, or perhaps it’s only more diffuse, more mixed together with the other elements of my subjectivity. At any rate, I no longer sit bolt upright in bed, gasping at the thought of personal extinction. I suppose that aging is getting me used to the idea—limbering me up for it, so to speak. What fills me with dread, these days, is not the prospect of my own death but the thought of losing my husband.

I check in with a psychiatrist at irregular intervals, a cheerful man in his mid-70s. I admire his graceful and realistic acceptance of his own aging, and would take him as a model, if I could feel any certainty that the path of my aging will follow his—there are so many possible branchings. The last time I was in his office, I asked him: What are the compensations of age? “Well,” he said, tentatively, “how about wisdom?” I was disappointed. That was it, wisdom? “Wisdom?” I said. “I’m wise enough already.” He smiled faintly at this wise-guy riposte, lapsed into silence for a moment and then quietly mentioned that old friends of his had been dying at an increasing rate lately.

“Just one,” he said, “after another.” Oh, how foolish I was in an essay I wrote a decade ago, to carry on as though I

were ancient and resigned to it. Such presumption, and I was barely menopausal! The prematurity of this claim left me in an awkward position, like a sheepish party guest


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who has made a great show of saying goodnight to everyone and then finds she must return to retrieve her car keys.

Young people are forever professing shock when I mention my age. “You can’t be,” they say, and I assure them, with a certain grim relish, that I am. They continue to protest, but begin to take my word for it. I walk away from these encounters feeling like a fraud, partly because I’ve so obviously been fishing for compliments, but more importantly because I’ve left the impression that I’m an authority about age, that I know where I am in my life. I’m reminded of the shame I felt when I was 12, and I told my eight-year-old cousin some nonsense about sex in a falsely wised-up way.

This is a good time in my life. To say otherwise would be rank ingratitude. I’ve finally worked free of the agitation and misery of youth, which in my case extended well into middle age. I’ve learned better how to live, to do my part in maintaining my marriage, to master impulse and cultivate self-respect. If only, I find myself thinking, I can manage to keep it up for a while, I can shape the end of my life in a way that jus-tifies and redeems what came before. But I’m suspicious of that ambition: it puts me in mind of some heresy I read about once—I forget its name.

I can’t know, of course, how long I’ll be able to keep it up. I can’t know where I stand in relation to the end. What I do know is that a lot can happen during the time I have. It’s a happening time: the late years are an avalanche of contingency. All the ways of going, all the ways that lead up to going—the ischemic episodes, embolisms, synco-pes, infarctions, -omas! I could have a bad fall, drift into dementia, develop diabetes or pulmonary obstruction or heart disease or all three at once, discover I have cancer. I could lose my sight, my hearing, my colon, my husband. A sinister home health aide could steal my electronics and credit cards and disappear, leaving me without food for days. The state could take away my driver’s license.

Any of these things, or any combination of them, could happen, and soon. Or not: I could continue moving along the gently tilted plateau I’ve been negotiating for years now, though the angle has been growing a little steeper. I could continue to write, to take walks and cook and travel and drink (moderately) and have lunch with friends and talk to my husband. Whatever happens, I continue to have a future. What will that future consist of? As always, I don’t know, though the range of possibility has nar-rowed considerably. I don’t know, and the reason I’m tempted to carry on as if I did is that I’m trying to bargain, in some primitive way, with my unknown fate. But there’s no bargaining, no knowing the worst, no protecting myself from the shocks of age.

“Lord,” says the psalmist, “make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.” The Lord, if I read the psalm correctly, gives no response. In the psalm’s last line, the psalmist-petitioner drops his demand for knowledge in favor of a plea for an extension: “O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence and be no more.” l


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FICTION

CommencementRALPH LOMBREGLIA

talk about certain things that might inflame the students. Unlike most motivational speakers in the college market, Bob had begun actually motivating his audiences—to have uprisings, so-called, although as far as he could tell they were more like love-ins and smoke-fests in his honor. At most gigs, he was now being ambushed before the show with content guidance and contract riders saying that if he ignored the guidance, which was his legal right, and then something bad happened, he had better be carrying some pretty fucking great insurance.

A shy, beautiful girl from the dean’s office brought him the news in the greenroom, where he was relaxing with a drink. She wore a daffodil-

yellow frock and bluish-black sandals that turned out to be tattoos, and her name was Simile. She had her skateboard with her, and she was nervous, darting her bashful eyes and twisting the chestnut hair on the half of her head that hadn’t been shaved.

It irritated Bob that the overlords had sent this gentle child of English majors to muzzle a visiting celebrity. “Don’t feel bad, Simile,” he said. “They all do this. I expected it. Thank you for coming to tell me.”

“No problem,” she replied.“You’re sure?”“About what?”“That there’s no problem.”She stood staring at him as if she’d been

unplugged. Before Simile’s time, the idea was that you “were welcome” to whatever kindness someone had done for you. Now the idea was that all interactions between human beings were inher-

It was happening all the time now when Bob appeared at institutions of higher learning: last-minute negotiations were required before he could take the stage. Tonight, the administration of San Jose College of the Mind would ask him not to

Ralph Lombreglia is the author of two short-story collec-tions, Men Under Water and Make Me Work. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, among other magazines.


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ently problematic, but in this case no “problem” had arisen, and so “thank you” was irrelevant and you should have saved your breath.

“You’ve never seen my bits on people saying, ‘No problem’?”

“Oh yeah, they’re really funny.”He had to hand it to the educators. They were

getting amazingly consistent results. The brilliant stroke had been taking reading off the curriculum and replacing it with code. All the other goodness flowed from that. In his act, he railed at his fans for being complete and total dumbfucks about every-thing except software, weed, music, and sex, in that order, and he always got a huge laugh with that.

Simile had no documents in her hands, just the skateboard. “The dean has to put his concerns in writing,” Bob said.

“The dean’s a she. She wants to discuss it in person.”

He sipped his drink. It was not precise to say that half of Simile’s head was shaved. Only the lower right side was bare, starting about where a prep school boy, such as Bob had once been, might part his hair. The bright line between glossy tresses and naked scalp was a startling sight, a glimpse of the Reaper’s blade that Bob would have had trouble not staring at even if Simile hadn’t had a yin-yang symbol tattooed there above her ear.

The greenroom was also the living room of Bob’s hotel suite. The stage entrance was just down the hall from his door. A publicity binder on the coffee table explained that College of the Mind had partnered with major financial and hospitality institutions to create the campus of the future, where living spaces, learning spaces, and spaces for leveraging capital all dovetailed together in a free-market continuum.

Bob believed in bringing the fight to the foe, but this was like French-kissing the foe. Still, he liked the accommodations. He would step from his living room into the arms of thousands—liter-ally into their arms if his fans had their way. They often wanted to carry him on their shoulders after

he got finished ridiculing them and the world they lived in. Carla would never allow it. She had the same walkie-talkie the security guards used, and she would find out what channel they were on and start ordering them around. Nobody got anywhere near Bob.

“The dean’s a huge fan of yours,” Simile said. She was sitting on the sofa opposite his, mov-ing her skateboard around on the floor with her decorated feet. It had aliens painted on it.

Bob had a headache. He massaged his forehead and laugh-snorted softly. “You are such a trust-ing soul, Simile, such a true believer. In itself, a beautiful thing. But they always say this. They’re always my biggest fans. And then they slap the restraints on me.” He rattled the ice in his empty glass. “You have a beautiful name, by the way.”

“Thank you,” she said.“No problem,” said Bob, to which Simile only

smiled sweetly. He added, “Naming a baby is the only real magic most people ever perform. Aside from the really big magic of making the baby in the first place.”

She stopped wiggling her skateboard.“I’m saying your parents did a good thing when

they named you Simile.”“They didn’t. They named me Roberta. I named

myself Simile.”“Ah, interesting. Roberta was your slave name.

Simile is your free name.”“I never thought of that.”“Hey, question for you. Why do they always

wait till the very last minute to tell me the for-bidden topics?”

“To make sure they’re up with current events?”“I think it’s to mess with my mojo. Keep me

off-balance. Keep me guessing.”“Our dean isn’t sneaky like that. She’s really nice.”And is this dean of yours also really nice-looking,

Simile? Bob wondered, and he knew it reflected badly on him and made him seem shallow, or it would if suddenly everyone were able to read his mind, which, mercifully, wasn’t possible quite yet. He was not a shallow person. He was a deep and principled man. But he was a man nonetheless, F

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and on a 10-week road trip with an estranged girlfriend who continued to be his tour manager.

He wondered if Carla planned to show her-self this evening. He hadn’t seen her since they arrived, hours ago.

“This going-to-talk-to-the-dean thing is dicey, Simile. It could look bad if it ever got out. You know,

‘Bob’s just a monkey on a string’ kind of thing.”“I would never tell anyone,” she said.He turned over another glass and filled it

with ice from the bucket. “Good. Let’s drink a toast to that.”

“The drinking age is 21, and I’m only 20.”He was momentarily taken aback by such

compliance from a person so copiously inked and pierced. But of course the tats and the studs were compliance, too. The campus of the future was a sinister place that didn’t look like a sinister place. And they called Bob dangerous!

“Here, I’m pouring you a little one. You’re obvi-ously a grown woman.”

“She’s obviously nothing of the kind.” It was Carla, coming in behind him through the door that connected her suite to his, a door she kept

locked. “This is what we call a girl, Bob. Sorry, honey. He has trouble telling the difference.”

Bob introduced the ladies. Carla smiled wickedly when she heard Simile’s name. She was dressed in a pink tank top and black harem pants that seemed to flow up through her body to become the roots of her white buzzcut.

“Are you here with the contract rider, Miss Metaphor?”

“We were just talking about that,” said Bob. He gave his young emissary a wink. “Simile reports that the dean—a very cool, hip young guy, by the way, huge fan of mine—had the idea that I might come over and hear the Ten Commandments in person.”

“No, I’m afraid not, Similicious. We don’t take meetings with college deans. It’s bad enough that we voluntarily violate Bob’s civil rights by attach-ing your riders to our contracts to begin with.”

Bob put on his suit jacket. “Carla, Simile is a student here at the college, not one of the col-lege’s attorneys. Sorry, Simile, she has trouble telling the difference. I told Simile about our policy, and she asked me to make an exception. F

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And in this case, I feel it’s justified.”“And you’re planning to stroll across campus

with a drink in your hand, like Dean Martin.”“Your dean’s name isn’t Dean Martin, is it?”

said Bob.“No, Dean White.”Carla took his glass away. “Simile, because

most of Bob’s brain is taken up by insights into the human condition, he’s not real good at tell-ing time. Please have him back here in one hour. Or less. With the contract rider.”

Bob wiggled his fingers at Carla to say goodbye. She made a downward-pointing gesture at Bob’s crotch that meant, Do it and see what happens.

Bob’s whole act was just little stuff, little realizations anybody could have—You’re building your own prison, shitheads!—and he didn’t claim otherwise. You think I’m a genius? he asked his fans when he wasn’t upbraiding them for being such pathetic conformist sheep. An idiot could see this stuff. They laughed.

If Bob hadn’t been born funny, he’d be in a facility somewhere.

He was, or he had been, a software engineer, though you could hardly call code writing “engi-neering” by the time Bob staggered into the pro-fession. Or even a profession, really. It was more like investors putting suppositories up corpora-tions and software coming out, and whatever blast of corporate code hit the citizens first was what you got for a civilization. Thus you ended up with things like The Pigbook, which Bob had first seen years ago when he went to college. It was printed on paper back then, with photos of all the entering freshmen so you could get to know your classmates and decide which ones you wanted to fuck. The electronic Trojan-horse version of The Pigbook had now swapped itself for half the Network and was going for the rest. Which completely sucked. And so of course Bob’s fans loved it.

He wasn’t the first geek to point his phone at himself, mock the dirtbags who ran the world, and put it up on the Net. But apparently he was

the first to focus on the essential dirtbaggery of geekdom itself. The popularity of this message was a mystery, but Bob had a theory: deep down, his fans knew their world was crap. That was why they resonated so well with Bob’s signature theme: I love something, and the thing I love sucks. He had borrowed the theme from William Butler Yeats. Naturally, Yeats had phrased it differently.

Carla had her own theory, and they fought about it as they fought about everything. Her theory went: yes, the young clamored for Bob, but their elders paid his fees. The reason? Sim-ple. Let the kids blow off some steam with Bob’s potty mouth and revolutionary posturing, and then let them get back to those cubicles. It was what she had seen when she first stumbled upon Bob’s videos on the Net, and why she had come to find him and love him and get him hooked on the heroin of doing it live, on stage and in person.

And becoming a hero to people half his age. Yes, Bob was an old guy. His year-count began with a four. He’d survived the terrifying decade beyond his 20s, and he still looked halfway decent. He’d held the big corporate jobs, and he wasn’t dead, or at least not literally. He was a source of hope to the kids coming up. He stepped into the footlights like a game-show host and told his fans that the world was fucked far worse than they suspected it was fucked. He went on rants they might have gone on themselves, had they not been completely stupefied by bullshit. He was middle-aged and enraged so they didn’t have to be—which, if you thought about it, was a lot like being a savior.

A limousine was waiting outside to take Bob to the dean, but he insisted upon walking. Simile skated beside him. He wanted to get a feel for the school, maybe hang with some fans, see where he stood vis-à-vis inciting a riot tonight. But except for a maintenance crew here and there, College of the Mind was deserted.

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then spun and came gliding back. “Getting ready for tonight, probably.”

“They have to get ready? Mentally or physically?”

“I guess both.”Incessant, metronomic pounding was audible

everywhere on campus, as if San Jose College of the Mind were striking the tempo of planet Earth, or even the universe. At first, Bob had taken it for the bass drum of the school’s marching band, but the school didn’t have a band, or any other form of music education, Simile informed him. The sound was a pile driver on the biggest college complex of all, off in the distance.

More buildings? thought Bob. But why? The grounds were already encrusted with mirror-faced towers and cubes that didn’t even look occupied. He saw his reflection wherever he looked, and he disliked seeing it even though it was a nice reflection: a tall, handsome man in a two-button sharkskin suit and creamy shirt open at the col-lar, the eternal choices of the tasteful playboy, with a fetching co-ed circling him like Tinkerbell.

He asked Simile about her course of study. It was graphic design for video games. The aliens on her board were her own creations. She was pretty good. They were scary aliens.

“What’s this ‘free-market continuum’ racket they’ve got going here? I read about it in the hotel brochure.”

Simile hopped her board onto a curbstone, flinging sparks. “Companies want things, and we want things.”

“Yeah? What do we want?”“To go to college.”“Oh, right. And?”“And so they pay for our courses, and our home-

work belongs to them.”“What a league of gentlemen, those risk-

taking entrepreneurs. But after graduation you’re free, right?”

“Well, no. Early-stage investors have a stake in us.”

“For how long?”“Forever, I guess.”

“No, Simile. That’s indentured servitude.”They entered College of the Mind’s adminis-

trative precinct, where a few clusters of students were wandering around on petro-turf so green Bob could taste it. He had a touch of synesthesia and sometimes tasted music, too, or heard certain frequencies of light. The students realized it was him and came vectoring over, the guys looking about 14 while the girls looked exactly the right age for Bob—younger than Bob, of course, but young adults, unlike the tykes whose hands they were holding. They all had their mobiles out so they could take Bob’s picture and oink this adven-ture to their peeps on The Pig.

“Get off the fucking Pigbook!” Bob said. “How many times do I have to tell you? They own your brains!”

“Bob! We can’t get off it! It’s where everybody is!”“Build your own place where everybody is!”He meant it literally, but they thought he

was speaking in parables. They wanted him to smoke a mind-expanding cigar with them. Well, of course he knew that was coming. Another source of Bob’s popularity was that he encour-aged orgiastic behavior of all types. He ran the magical item under his nose and almost took a bite, it smelled so much like candy. The dark brown paper was mint-chocolate flavored, with an oval logo embossed in it. He held it up in the sun, trying to make it out.

“It’s the college seal,” the students said.“They sell these in the campus store?”“No, they’re handing them out for free in your

honor!”“Wow. I don’t know what to say. I’m touched.

But, guys, if I did this with everyone who asked, I’d be an acorn squash by now. So I have this bummer of a policy: I don’t do it with anyone.”

They were already remarkably wrecked any-way. They settled for having him sign their bodies with permanent marker. Then they hugged him and wobbled away, and Bob and Simile continued their journey to the dean.

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“No. What makes you ask?”“You guys are kind of intense. What’s the deal

with that?”It was an innocent question, but it caused

Bob to search his mind for an answer that wasn’t there, the mental equivalent of an infinite loop. It triggered one of the spells he had sometimes, where he left his body and got … not glimpses of the future, but more like smells of the future, whiffs of the beast’s body as it advanced. Today, for some reason, the beast smelled like marzi-pan. The scent of sweet almond paste flooded Bob’s mind. He felt certain that dogs smelled the future this way all the time, except dogs under-stood what they were smelling, and Bob didn’t.

What was the deal with Carla now? What, what, what? His recent travels with her had beaten him up so badly, he had no idea anymore. He used to be crazy about her, and maybe he still was, but she also drove him insane. She was exciting and bossy in equal measures, the two things Bob needed in a woman, but not, it turned out, in the same woman. Her haughtiness could make him ballistic, and then the fights were frightening, sometimes involving hotel management. Of course, to hear Carla tell it, Bob was ungrateful, delusional, and stuck on himself, which was nonsense.

It was Bob’s Theme again, as with computers and everything else: he loved something, and the thing he loved sucked. Except Carla was a person, not a thing, which made a surprisingly big differ-ence. And the parts of her that didn’t suck could be really great. Bob had finally mashed his ego down to the point where he could tell Carla that she didn’t completely suck, and that in fact he wanted to marry her, when she broke the whole thing off. She’d always insisted upon having her own room on the road, even when she didn’t use it, as during their enchanted first trip together. But now she used it. They no longer even took their meals together, Bob and Carla, out on their lucrative world tour of hell.

From above, Bob watched himself tell all this to Simile. Then he came back down.

“So she doesn’t know?”

“What?”“That you love her and want to marry her?”“She broke up with me. I stopped speaking

to her.”“What was that stuff she was saying about me

being a girl?”What it was was that in the depths of his exas-

peration with Carla’s shitty personality, Bob had taken comfort in the laps of a few of his fans. Just a few.

“Oh,” said Simile. She kicked off and zipped away from him, a mermaid on her porpoise. She swung to a stop before a building that resembled a gigantic lump of green sea glass. When Bob reached her, an aperture appeared in the frosted façade and they went inside.

The corridors of power at San Jose College of the Mind had gold-veined marble on the floors and purplish granite on the walls, and everything else was sea glass lit from within and finished to look like a green gumdrop after you’ve bitten into it. Bob and Simile escalated in silence through a spearmint-flavored atrium to the mezzanine. They arrived at Dean White’s glowing gumdrop door, her name etched upon it in holograms.

The door slid away, and the dean smiled and said, “Well done, Simile,” but she said it from 20 years before, a time when Bob was insanely in love with a woman (no, Carla was right, a girl) he lived with for a year after college, the two of them holding stupid jobs and talking about get-ting married and everything, until one day she dropped him for a guy she’d been screwing behind his back. It was the most brain trauma Bob could sustain without actually being struck in the head. For years he was sure he was over it, and then he’d catch himself thinking about her beneath all his other thoughts, like a computer process always running in the background.

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young and beautiful anymore.Simile punched him in the back and left, and

then Bob was alone with Dean White, whose name was Jen. Her door slid shut.

“ ‘Well done, Simile?’ ” Bob said.“Yes, I thought she’d be able to lure you over

here. Lovely, isn’t she? Even as marked up as she is. Why do they do that to themselves?”

“Because their whole world is one big lie.”“Oh, right. I don’t suppose you want a hug.”“No, thanks. You know, I did hear that you

married a guy named White, but then I forgot all about it. Or maybe I didn’t forget. I had a pre-monition on the way over here.”

“Never ignore premonitions, Bobby. They’re the spirit world trying to reach us.”

“Is that what we used to say?”“Something like that.”“This gig was your idea?”“Not at all. You were the students’ overwhelm-

ing choice. Funny how life works, isn’t it?”“Hilarious.” She had no rings on her fingers.

“You’re not married anymore?”“My husband passed away.”“I’m sorry. What happened?”“We had a fight, and he lost control of his car.”“And you weren’t hurt?”“I wasn’t there. It was a fight in our home. We said

horrible things to each other, and then Ken left for the track, upset and distracted. I shouldn’t have let him go. He was president of this place, you know.”

“You just said he was a racecar driver.”“No, Bobby. Racecars were his hobby. Ken was

a visionary of human destiny. This campus is his dream.” She glanced at herself in a mirror across the room. “Unfortunately, I’m having some prob-lems here, old pal. I’m not hitting my fundraising numbers, and I’m not particularly well liked.”

“Fundraising? You’re the dean of students.”“What do you think a dean of students does?”“ ‘The campus of the future,’ said Bob, ‘where

learning spaces and spaces for leveraging capital—’ ”

“Go ahead, rub it in. Maybe I deserve it. But not because I betrayed you. I didn’t. I want you

to believe that.”“Banging a cowboy and then running off to live

with him in Arkansas isn’t betrayal?”“Absolutely not. It had nothing to do with you.”“Thanks for clearing that up.”“No problem. As I was saying, especially now

with Ken gone, I have some challenges to my position here.”

“Maybe the market will sort it out,” Bob said. He walked over to Jen’s window wall. Down on the quad, some students were smoking antiwar cigarettes and making petro-turf angels. “They have these big chocolate reefers with the college seal on them.”

“Yes, I spent a large chunk of their activities budget on those.”

“What is it?”“Just a nice blend of natural ingredients to

promote thoughtfulness and fellow feeling.” She smiled at Bob. “There will be no riots at San Jose College of the Mind tonight, Bobby. I’m way too fragile for riots.”

The pile driver was throbbing like an abscess in the mouth of the world. “What in fuck’s name are they doing with that?”

“They’re building the culmination of this cam-pus, the thing Ken didn’t live to see. Pigbook world headquarters.”

Bob’s body tried to laugh, but it came out as dry heaves. He flashed on the remarkable con-nection he used to have with this woman, the great love of his youth, now the widow of Satan.

“I get it, Jen. San Jose Tax Haven of the Mind.”“You never heard me say that. This is an accred-

ited institution. We give bona fide degrees.”His phone started ringing in his pocket. It

was Carla.“Time to kiss the dean goodbye, Bob.”“That won’t be necessary, actually.”“I hear she’s pretty hot.”“Who told you that?”“Simile. She came back to see me. We’re hav-

ing a fascinating conversation. You said the dean was a guy.”

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He knew he had her with that one, even though in her place he would have been a bird dog on the dean’s gender.

“Simile says you’ve been meaning to tell me something.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”“When were you planning to get around to it?”“We’ll discuss it the next time I see you.”“Get your ass back here.”He hung up. “I haven’t seen my content

guidance.”“You’re getting it verbally. No brands, no

corporations.”There went half of Bob’s act. “You can’t do that.”

“Yes I can. The trustees are like the students. They get direct, literal references. If you don’t actually say the name of something, they don’t realize you’re talking about it.”

“Or they can deny it.”“Whatever. Who cares. Tell the kids they’re

farm animals who deserve the real tattoos they’re going to get. Tell them they’re coding the apoca-lypse. Say the government’s a mound of mag-gots. Say the rich are building a space colony for themselves after they turn Earth into a dog turd. Say you’ve seen hipper-looking headware on the Seven Dwarves. Anything you want. Just no brands or corporations.”

At least she had checked out his act. “I’m curi-ous about something. Why haven’t you ditched this fucking place? Surely Ken left you enough.”

“The estate’s frozen. His other wives will have it in court till I’m dead.”

“His ex-wives, you mean.”“No.”“Ken was Muslim? Mormon?”“Just a polygamist on his own say-so.”He turned to look at her one last time from

the door. “Did we ever eat marzipan together?”“We met in a marzipan shop. You don’t remem-

ber that?”“Of course I do. I was checking to see if you

did.”“Why? To verify that I’m not an android?”“Yes, now that you mention it.”

A pile driver shouldn’t be a hard thing to find, but Bob got totally turned around in Ken the Visionary’s labyrinth of mirror-boxes where echoes ricochet like madness. The pounding was coming from everywhere, and he couldn’t ask for directions because the campus was dead. Streetlamps standing in the shadows of build-ings were already on. Dusk was approaching. He went around in circles for 20 minutes before he reached the future site of Pigbook HQ, which turned out to be an insult to the planet’s surface the size of a meteor crater.

Well, thought Bob, world domination does demand a big hole.

His composure in Jen’s office had been a tem-porary warrior state. It was all hitting him now. He was trembling. But he felt huge. The Pigbook crater was somehow inside him. When he pulled open a chain-link gate and stepped into it, he was stepping into himself. Halfway down the slope, he sat on a rock to watch some pile driver por-nography. The monumental thrusting entered his crotch and bloomed in his brain. His headache vanished, obliterated by it.

Carla was right. He was just a party drug. He would never change anything.

He braced himself for the plunge into despair. He’d been sundowning again lately, slipping into space-void aloneness as evening approached. It was a lifelong tendency that got markedly worse when things went bad with Carla, and they’d had no choice but to continue voyaging together like angry astronauts. But here at sunset today, he didn’t go to the dark place.

He thought: something went terribly wrong in the development of animated matter on this planet. Everything was good until Homo sapiens, at which point a fatal bug somehow crept into the code, a crease in the patterning such that the dominant form of life on Earth was a glitched organism that did unspeakable things not only to its fellows but to every other organism, too.

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programmable. Their hardware was permanently bent, but they could still receive instructions. You could fix them in software. Or at least you could try.

Carla was partly right: his power with his fans worked only along certain axes, in certain dimensions. If he directly commanded them to stop writing code for the empire, they would not obey. He had tried that. They thought he was joking. If he told them to smash their mobiles, they would giggle at how crazy Bob was. But if he said he wanted to run for e-president, and he needed them to tribe-source him a peer-to-peer voting system, democracy in action on the Net, they would have it up and running in two days because it would just be such a cool thing to do. A people’s electoral bucket brigade.

And then, of course, they would turn out in great numbers for the election, like 100 percent, and they would all vote for Bob, and they would expect their votes to count. And if their votes didn’t count, well maybe then they would stop writing code for the empire. Maybe they’d crap up some of the code they’d already written, too.

He stood to climb back up the excavation. Carla was plowing down it with her walkie-talkie strapped to her hip. As if pulled by her radio energy, three campus security guards came flying over the lip of the crater behind her.

After they got him in the van, she said, “Life is a real fucking roller coaster with you, Bob.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say about you.”

Then he popped the question.“How would I like to be first lady?” said Carla.

“Well, let me ask you something, Bob. Were you aware that you’re the commencement speaker at this spook house?”

“No, how did that happen?”“They didn’t bother telling us that they hold

commencement at night in October specifically to save money on speaker fees. I would have charged four times this much for commence-ment. We got seriously stiffed here.”

“It’s the business logic of a guy named Ken.”“What was in the rider?”

“Nothing. She didn’t have one. She’s insane. This whole place is.”

Carla kissed him passionately. They were like the lock-and-key enzyme theory, Bob and Carla, not the most beautiful thing to witness up close, but the chemistry was undeniable.

He told her what he’d decided.“Fuck,” she said. “They’ll do this, you realize.”“I think that’s what I just said.”“Who are you running against?”“No one. It’s not a personality contest, is it?”“Not when you do it.”“If someone on the Net doesn’t want to vote

for Bob, they can just not vote. That will count as a vote against Bob.”

And plenty of his countrymen would do just that. And still it would be a landslide.

The van arrived at the Kenneth X. White Luxury Partnership Suites and Investor Agora. Bob hadn’t bothered to look at the building’s inscription before. The guards brought him in the back way. He heard the hive-thrum of the crowd assembling in Ken the Visionary’s gath-ering place. He wondered if they wore caps and gowns here at College of the Mind. If so, they probably had a robe for Bob. He was covered with mud, but he traveled with three identical suits, boxes of creamy shirts, multiple pairs of black socks and Italian loafers. It was unbeliev-ably liberating never to make a dressing decision. But he did like the idea of a flowing robe.

He was late for a very important date. He nearly killed himself shimmying to the bathroom with his underpants around his ankles, his stiffening sharkskin on the floor behind him like a murder victim. He turned fully nude to Carla and said, “It is of the utmost importance that we stop doing what we’ve been doing.” By “we” he had meant humanity, but Carla thought he meant the two of them and the way they’d been fighting, and she embraced him and hauled him into the bath-room. The hotel showerhead resembled a silver sunflower bent over by its own magnificence. Bob stepped into its downpour, every droplet hitting him like a seed. l


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ChatangNATHANIEL RICH

particularly cared to hear what he had to say. Most of all I despised his loneliness. Nearly 15 months had passed since he’d moved to Chicago, and he hadn’t made any friends or slept with a woman. There had not even been a single date—such a thing would be inconceivable—and he was too prudish for prostitutes. The only people who seemed to know his name were his boss at IDCorp; his half-blind, half-deaf landlord; and, of course, Mr. Head. I’d like to think that I’d never be friends with a man like Herman Chang. At least not in my old life. Now, however, I was stuck, because I was Herman Chang.

But I’d had enough. Herman Chang’s days were numbered. I determined to take it up with Mr. Head at our next meeting. I’d be willing to be reassigned to a different job, change

apartments—even move to a new city—whatever it took, so long as I could be anyone other than Herman Chang.

The following Tuesday I left IDCorp at one o’clock sharp and took the El to the Art Institute. I purchased a ticket, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and headed to Gallery 214. Why Gallery 214? I doubt you’ve been inside it, even if you have visited the Art Institute. It’s where they exhibit English porcelain from the mid-18th century. No one goes there. I’ve often wondered whether the room is underwritten by the U.S. State Department so that it can be used for clandestine meetings. It is the smallest gallery in the museum, and, crucially, it has a single entrance.

Mr. Head was there, as he was every Tuesday, standing before a porcelain sweetmeat dish made by the Bow Porcelain Factory in 1750. He was looking not at the dish but beyond it,

Herman Chang depressed me. The pathetic, loping gait, the cagey eyes, the purposeful drabness of his attire—navy trench coat, black ski hat, gray scarf pulled around his face. He spoke quietly, but his colleagues rarely asked him to speak up; no one

Nathaniel Rich is the author of two novels, The Mayor’s Tongue and Odds Against Tomorrow. B

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toward the doorway, anticipating my arrival.As soon as I entered, Mr. Head’s eyes focused.

He affected surprise.“I’m sorry,” he said. “But have we met

somewhere?”“Yes,” I said, with a sigh. “I’m Herman Chang.”This was Mr. Head’s little code. “I’m Herman

Chang” meant that I was alone, there was no one in the adjoining gallery, and I wasn’t being followed. If any of these things were not true, I was supposed to answer, “I’m sorry, you must be confused,” and exit the museum immediately. This was our 56th Tuesday meeting at Gallery 214 of the Art Institute. I’d never given an answer other than “I’m Herman Chang.” Tedious didn’t begin to describe it.

Mr. Head handed me an envelope. I had no need to check it. It contained a $20 bill and two singles—reimbursement for the price of admission to the Art Institute ($18) and my roundtrip El fare ($4). Leave it to the American government to figure out novel ways to waste taxpayer money. You would think that, given my weekly visits to the museum, they’d at least want me to buy an annual membership, but Mr. Head said that registering my name, even the false one, was an unnecessary risk.

“Have any strangers contacted you?” said Mr. Head.

“No,” I said. “Listen—”He interrupted me brusquely. I realized there

was no point trying to discuss my request for a new identity until we’d completed our weekly catechism.

“Have you noticed anything suspicious?”“No.”It occurred to me, for the first time, that the

ticker on the hygrothermograph in the corner of Gallery 214 was not moving. Maybe it never had.

“Have you departed at all from the routine?” asked Mr. Head, staring blankly at the sweetmeat dish.

“On Wednesday afternoon, I left work early and went to the movies. Landmark Century Centre, on North Clark.”

Mr. Head’s jaw moved in a subtle way.“What film?” he said.“The Melon Patch.”“Never heard of it. Describe.”I’d debated not telling him about the movie.

But if I were to be honest with myself, I had to admit that the only reason I bought a ticket was to irritate Mr. Head.B

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“A political documentary,” I said. “It’s Chinese.”He turned suddenly to look at me. A red star

had exploded in his cheek.“Are you insane?” He was struggling to maintain

his composure. He glanced at the doorway. Big surprise: no one had come to look at the chipped dessert basket or the dog-shaped teapot.

“I sat in the back row. No one saw me. There were only six other people in the theater. Nobody suspicious.”

“Do I need to remind you that your life is at risk? They have more than 200 agents in Chicago. If they found out that you were here, you wouldn’t last a day.”

“I’m sorry. I did enjoy the movie, though.”“Attending that film will be interpreted by the

department as a deliberate provocation.”“Mr. Head? I don’t want to be Herman Chang

anymore. I would like a new identity.”His voice tightened. “Do you have any

reason to believe that ‘Herman Chang’ has been compromised?”

I loved the way he spoke. It was like he had been programmed. I’d seen that before. I guess governments are the same all over the world.

“I have no reason to believe that my identity has been compromised.”

“Then we can’t do anything. We don’t have the budget.”

“I’ll change cities, jobs, anything.”“Do you know how much a transfer like that

costs? We’re stretched. If your cover is secure, there’s no reason to destroy it. It can only introduce unnecessary risk.”

“Can I at least change my character? Do I have to be such a loser?”

“I don’t follow.”“A slovenly dressed zero, a mumbler, a loner.”Mr. Head checked his wristwatch and made

as if to leave. He even began walking to the door. But then, as if something had just occurred to him, he pivoted and walked back to me. He came very close. I felt his whispery breath on my neck.

“Everything about Herman Chang has been designed to deflect curiosity,” he said. “Even if we

gave you a new identity, these aspects would need to remain the same. Certain character traits are shared by every informant. It’s for your safety.”

I nodded, defeated.“No more movies,” he said, and walked out.I was left alone in the gallery, staring at the

sweetmeat dish. To minimize the chance that I might be seen with Mr. Head, I was supposed to count to 100 before leaving the gallery. I was so upset on this day, however, that I stormed out at 58.

I have been trained to be suspicious of coin-cidences, so my first thought upon seeing Wen was to run.

It was the following weekend, and I couldn’t bear to spend another Saturday reading a book in Winnemac Park, which was my normal habit. Besides, it was early October and the weather was sharpening. On cold days in Beijing I had been in the habit of eating a yogurt called chatang, or “tea soup,” a kind of sweet sorghum-flour mush—fine, smooth, and sticky. The true test of an excellent chatang is that it will not become dislodged even if the bowl should be turned upside down. If you conduct this test on an inferior chatang, you risk dumping your breakfast on the floor, but devoted chatang enthusiasts will tell you that such slop isn’t worth eating anyway. The memory of the chatang I used to order at a stall on Jiaodaokou was almost enough to make me burst into tears.

I knew that they served chatang at Empire Chengdu on North Lincoln, but Mr. Head had expressly forbidden me from walking within three blocks of that restaurant, as it was a common meeting place for émigrés. He had never said anything, however, about the Wu Zhou Oriental Mart. It was several neighborhoods west, in Albany Park, a 40-minute walk from my apartment. On the Internet I had read that they made excellent hot chatang. Would this one excursion to a Chinese market kill me? If it did, no matter: I was in such a state that it seemed worth the risk.

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tinged with vinegar, that took me back to Jiaodaokou. I was so enraptured that I didn’t realize I had neglected to shut the door behind me.

I looked to the counter and almost screamed. It was Wen Huapeng. I was sure of it. His hair had receded, and his eyes were duller than I remembered, but he had the same funny pug nose, mournful posture, and orangutan arms, long enough for a man a foot taller. He was helping an older woman with her order, and he didn’t seem to have recognized me yet. I would have left then, but the sight of this familiar face from the Doomsday Computer Club was so improbable—and so joyous—that I hesitated. Not long, mind you. Just long enough for the chill of the Chicago air to reach the counter.

“Hello? Sir? We would like to avoid a draft.”I shut the door behind me, but I knew it was

too late. Wen had stared straight into my face. There was nothing to do but come out with it. Deep down, I admit, I felt a sense of relief.

“Wen?” I said.It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Wen. It’s me.”He turned sharply toward me then, a dark

film passing over his eyes.“Sir?” he said. “My name is Michael. But I will

be with you after I help this lady.” Those were his words, anyway. His eyes said another thing.

After an agonizing conversation over the differences between soy and sorghum paste, the woman made her selection. When she finally left, though it seemed that we were alone in the store, Wen maintained his act.

“Sir, you wanted me to help you select some lotus roots?”

“Yes,” I said, playing along, but unable to keep from smiling. Still, he appeared not to recognize me, though I couldn’t be entirely certain. It had been 15 years, after all, and I was just a child then. Older boys rarely notice younger boys anyway. It is safe to say that Wen had been a far more significant presence in my life than I had been in his.

He walked around the counter and led me to the far corner of the store, near a row of bins filled with dried persimmon and abalone.

“Wen,” I said, below my breath.“I don’t use that name anymore.” I noticed

he was perspiring heavily. He sighed. “You’ve come for me.”

It was the most reassuring thing he could have possibly said. The fear in his voice was the purest possible indication of his innocence. If he was afraid of me, I figured, then I had no reason to fear him.

“I didn’t come for lotus roots,” I said. “I came for chatang.”

“What?”“Chatang.”He smiled awkwardly. “You must really be

hard up.”“Doomsday,” I said. “The clubhouse on

Shanyuan Street.” I mentioned some of the projects we had worked on together. They were simple, trivial hacks, but significant ones, especially to a kid learning for the first time about basic techniques: Denial of Service, Man in the Middle, Trojan Horses. It was Wen, after all, who had taught me how to circumvent the great firewall and access the Internet’s forbidden cities. He had a subversive streak even as a teenager. As I spoke, his features softened.

“I left six months ago,” he said. “They arrested Pixian from the old gang. Nan too. Why are you here?”

“Why do you think? I was a dead man.”“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Of course. Me too.”I knew that after college Wen had stopped

hanging out at Doomsday and accepted a boring IT job for a firm in Beijing. But over the years I’d heard rumors from some of the guys at the club. They didn’t want to speak too openly, which was reasonable, since they knew I worked in the highest levels of the Ministry of Information. But I could glean that Wen was involved in some form of covert, antigovernment activity. If he was forced to leave the country, he must have been good at his work. That came as no surprise. I’d always thought that a corporate IT job was beneath him. I had privately hoped that he had been up to something bigger. Knowing Wen, I


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imagined that he was probably more helpful to the United States than I was.

“To think, the last time I saw you—”“May ’96. Right before you graduated from

university.”“You have a good memory,” said Wen uneasily. I grimaced. I didn’t want to scare him away.

“I was a kid back then. I looked up to you and the others.”

Wen was silent for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“I can’t really talk now. My boss is in the upstairs office.”

“Can I see you again sometime?”“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I can’t give

you my address.”“No, you shouldn’t. Nor your telephone

number.”“I don’t even have a phone,” he said, and for

some reason we both burst into laughter.I suggested we meet the following Sunday at

three o’clock, at the Columbus Park Refectory. It was the only landmark I could think of that was neither in my neighborhood nor near my office. He agreed.

I was so worked up that I forgot to buy the chatang, a fact that didn’t occur to me until many hours later, when I awoke in the middle of the night.

I arrived 10 minutes early to the refectory. Wen was waiting for me.

“I didn’t think you’d show,” I said.“To be honest,” said Wen, “I didn’t think I

would either.”We walked around the lagoon and avoided

discussing our past. We focused instead on trivial subjects—the high cost of living in Chicago, the impossibility of finding quality rou bing (even the ones at the Oriental Mart were shameful, the ground meat greasy), the long distances between places, the silence of the night. And, of course, the bonecracking weather. Having spent the previous winter in Chicago, I explained that the air would soon become even colder. It wasn’t even November yet. Just wait until January.

There was a grasping, tentative quality to our conversation; we both sought to assure each other of our good intentions, while at the same time trying to determine whether we could trust the other. But now we had reached an impasse. We were suffocated by the vastness of the things we were afraid to say. Three brown ducks glided in the lagoon beside us, oblivious to our presence. Only when I picked up a branch and hurled it at the ducks did they flinch.

“Do you have any friends?” I asked finally.He smiled. “They’re all dead. The ones I care

about at least. There are others, who I thought were my friends, but they might as well be dead. They are dead to me.”

I nodded. It was like he was reading my thoughts.

“This,” he said, pointing to the lagoon, the gray sky, the trembling trees, “this is an afterlife to me. An afterlife where I have to wake up at five in the morning and walk—” he caught himself here. He didn’t want to reveal how close he lived to the Oriental Mart. “Walk to the station and take the train to knead dough and cook overgreased meat.”

We had agreed to speak in English—it was safer that way, should someone overhear us. But the expression he had used for “overgreased” was a pun in Mandarin. Its secondary meaning was sexually profane; it described a part of a woman’s anatomy in an excited state. It was just the kind of dirty joke we used to make in the Doomsday Computer Club late into the grueling overnight hack sessions, when we’d become delirious. I grinned, perhaps too eagerly, but not because of the pun, which was a bit too vulgar for my taste and not even logical. I grinned because it was the first time I’d been addressed in Mandarin since moving to Chicago. Having received my college education abroad, I am fluent in English, albeit with a slight British squeakiness. This may sound silly, but being addressed in Mandarin, I felt an inward stirring that I can only describe as an awakening sense of fraternity.

We started meeting every week, always on a different day, at a different time, and in a


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different neighborhood. We told ourselves that we were exploring the city, and I found myself spending many of my free hours researching whatever neighborhood we were going to visit next. I enjoyed this—learning about Jane Addams, Catherine O’Leary and her cow, Louis Sullivan and the other architects who designed the city’s magnificent buildings. But on a deeper level I knew that in my sojourns with Wen I was rediscovering something that I’d thought had been lost forever: my inner architecture.

“Peace be with you, Gan,” he would whisper to me as we said our goodbyes. That’s my real name, by the way: Gan. Li Gan.

“I’m sorry. But have we met somewhere?”“Yes. I’m Herman Chang.”“Have any strangers contacted you?”“No.”“Have you noticed anything suspicious?”“No.”“Have you diverged at all from the routine?”“I’ve been visiting different neighborhoods,”

I admitted.“Which ones?”“There’s no real logic to it. Bucktown. Ukrainian

Village. Old Town. Wherever strikes my fancy.”“That’s good. Better to keep your movements

unpredictable.”“I thought you might think so.”Of course I wasn’t going to mention Wen to Mr.

Head. He would have disapproved and forbidden me from seeing Wen again. But it had also occurred to me that Wen was most likely enrolled in the same relocation program for federal informants that I was. If he hadn’t discussed me with his agent—and he hadn’t, for if he had, I’d surely have been punished by now—then I’d return the courtesy. Why get him in trouble? We were being extraordinarily careful, besides. As the weeks went on, and we each filled in the details of our stories—tentatively at first, then with increasing candor—nothing happened. Nothing detrimental, at least. Even Mr. Head noticed the change in my demeanor.

“You appear to have adjusted to life at IDCorp, Herman,” he said, in his toneless voice.

I was in such an altered condition that when he said my false name I actually had a moment of confusion. It was as if he were talking to someone else.

I shouldn’t say that Wen and I were extraordi-narily careful. Or rather, we were careful until the Wednesday evening in January on which we had agreed to meet at Graceland Cemetery. It was a stupid idea, and I have only myself to blame.

On recent outings Wen and I had gone to look at Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive apartments and his buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Wen appeared to admire Mies greatly. So when I learned that the architect was buried at Graceland, it only seemed right to visit his grave.

I arrived at Graceland 30 minutes early and, with the help of a cemetery map, reached Mies’s grave marker—a minimal, unadorned black granite rectangle that lay flat on the ground. Wen was always punctual, but by six o’clock, the agreed-upon meeting time, he was nowhere to be found. I cursed myself. How could I have expected him to find this place? All around me the slate slabs stood in their tidy rows, but I could see nobody living. And it was nearly pitch black: a starless night, no fresh snow, and the nearest lamp roughly a hundred yards distant, beyond the cemetery fence. I began pacing up and down the aisle, the air arctic, sweat trickling from the hem of my ski hat and freezing when it caught in my eyebrow.

After nearly 20 minutes, I saw a form approaching, flickering in the gloomy slits between the graves like a stop-action figure. I exhaled: it wasn’t Wen. The person was too slumped over and walked convulsively. I saw that he was coughing. But then I recognized Wen’s orange parka. I waved.

“I’m so sorry, Gan,” he said. “I got lost. And I had a late start. Flu.”

“It’s my fault—”“I didn’t want you to think I stood you up.” He


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wiped his nose with a green handkerchief on which there was printed a map of Chicago’s main tourist destinations: Sears Tower, Hancock Building, the silver lima bean. These handkerchiefs were cheap items, sold in every novelty store in the city. “I count on our meetings,” he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder—our first physical contact. It was one of those things that just happen, a kind of behavioral spasm, I suppose. I don’t think it violated any of the unspoken rules that governed our relationship, yet Wen seemed uncomfortable. I withdrew my hand. I wanted to apologize, I felt guilty, but more than that, I felt an amorphous yearning. I wanted to help him. I owed him. His friendship, I felt, had saved my life.

“I live nearby,” I said, and felt myself skidding past some invisible border.

He waited, patient.“In Ravenswood.”“Good,” he said, nodding. Then, as if surprised

by the eagerness in his voice, he turned away and blew his nose powerfully into his handkerchief.

During the 10-block walk to my apartment we didn’t speak. I’d like to say that we were silenced by the cold, but it was the illicitness of our transgression that stymied us, and the anticipation of what would come next.

As we turned onto my block, I wavered a final time. What if, indeed, it had all been a charade—if Wen had been corrupted by the Party, or even blackmailed, and he was hoping gradually to win my confidence before disposing of me? But one look at his hunched form and runny nose, and I wiped the thought clean from my mind.

“Is this it?” asked Wen outside of my building.“Let’s see if the key fits,” I said.The stairwell was muggy and thick with the

smells of domestic evenings. The family in #2A was cooking chicken, and there was also the burnt odor of the industrial heater, which the super seemed to have turned all the way up. When we paused on the landing in front of my apartment (#3B: Chang), I noticed that Wen’s face had been disfigured by a strange, sad smile.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s just—this is nice. I didn’t expect this. I didn’t really want this. But it’s nice.”

“I’m glad,” I said.“I haven’t confided in another person for so

long. Without human contact—well, you can get confused. You can get so you don’t know what’s right anymore.” He laughed awkwardly, a hitching kind of chuckle that I’d never heard before. “But you know what that’s like.”

I smiled, waiting. I could tell that he wanted to say something else.

“I have been withholding certain things,” he said, growing serious again. “But I won’t any longer.” His lip trembled. “I’m done with this, Gan. I want to tell you everything.”

“Very well,” I said, laughing. “I’ll make a pot of tea, turn on the heating, and we can have a real conversation.”

He nodded vigorously, as if trying to convince himself of something.

That’s what I try to remember when I think of Wen now. His face shadowed by the staircase, the balled-up handkerchief in one hand, his watery, compassionate eyes.

But I can never hold the image very long. For as soon as I opened the door his face fell, as from a cliff.

“But it’s too late,” he said. He lowered his face, so that I couldn’t see his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The coward didn’t say anything else. He just pushed the door open the rest of the way. There, sitting in my armchair, facing the door, was Mr. Head.

“Thank you, Michael,” said Mr. Head, to Wen. “You can leave us now.”

Wen, without so much as a final glance, vanished down the stairwell. It was the last I ever saw of him. He was transferred the next day. I have no idea where. I’d prefer not to know.

“I don’t understand,” I said, but already I was beginning to make it out.

“Don’t you?” said Mr. Head, with a disappointed frown. “Li Gan is dead. Your name is Herman Chang. You are Herman Chang.”

And it occurred to me that Mr. Head was right—at least about one thing. Li Gan was dead. l


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ARTSo r c h e s t r a s

Musical ChairsA veteran cellist with the National Symphony takes a close look at

the entrances and exits of world-famous conductorsJANET FRANK

Janet Frank has written for the Scholar about conduc-tor Leopold Stokowski and composer Leroy Anderson.

When the National Symphony Orchestra appointed Antal Doráti music director, the Hungarian-born conductor brought with him a distinguished musical pedigree that included years as head of the BBC and Stockholm orches-tras as well as a series of heralded recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony (now known as the Minnesota Orchestra). As his tenure in Wash-ington wore on, however, Doráti’s relationship with the NSO board of directors deteriorated. Doráti exuded Old World serenity and reserve (he was always elegantly coifed and dressed, some-times in a Bela Lugosi cape), but when the board refused to go along with yet another project he had initiated, Doráti would vent his frustration without subtlety. “We’ll show those shitheads!” he once cried out to us orchestra players in his high-pitched voice (around F above middle C). For seven years his bravado worked—until it no longer did and he was suddenly going to be out of a job. Soon thereafter, he was appointed music director of the Detroit Symphony.

That was in the 1970s, a decade after the era when leading American orchestras and a conduc-

tor’s name were inseparable—George Szell meant Cleveland, Eugene Ormandy meant Philadel-phia, Fritz Reiner meant Chicago, and Leonard Bernstein meant New York. Today, most music directors have multiple orchestras, and turnover is frequent. Everyone wants to hire a perfect superstar who will revive all fortunes, and when one disappoints, another arrives fast.

These past few years have seen an unusual amount of churn in orchestra leadership. The recession has played a role, having brought some organizations—including the Philadelphia Orches-tra—to or near bankruptcy. But most of it has had to do with comings and goings. Several major orchestras, including those in New York, Chi-cago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, are, or are about to be, led by someone new on the job.

The NSO, in which I play cello, has had six music directors, and I have played under five of them. Each arrived under different circum-stances. The two most recent hires, Leonard Slatkin and Christoph Eschenbach, were chosen on the recommendation of search committees that included board members, management staff, and musicians, the last having veto power.


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Slatkin’s selection in 1996 was the first time NSO musicians were involved in such a search. No one wanted a repetition of what happened in Cleveland in 1972, when the majority of the players did not want Lorin Maazel and made its displeasure known to the press. In a vote, all but two musicians were against him, and board members also expressed dissatisfaction with the choice. In his book, The Cleveland Orchestra Story: Second to None, Donald Rosen-berg describes the unrest at the hiring of Maazel. He quotes Berton Siegel, a violinist: “We do not like his music-making. It doesn’t fit in with the leg-acy of the Szell tradition.” More recently, in 2005 in Baltimore, the musicians resented not being part of the hiring process and publicly complained about Marin Alsop’s appointment. Since then things have quieted down, and her contract has been extended to 2015.

The title conductor is often used inter- changeably with music director, but they are not synonymous. A conductor waves the baton, but a music director must also hire and fire, decide what to perform and what to commission, launch special projects, and raise funds. Whether anyone can play all these roles well has sometimes been a topic of controversy. Erich Leinsdorf, long a freelance conductor and a one-time music direc-tor of the Boston Symphony, was an outspoken skeptic of the post of music director, telling New York magazine in 1988, “No one can handle an administrative post these days and be an active performer,” adding that most musicians “aren’t temperamentally suited to it anyway.” Orchestra boards, however, tend to feel otherwise.

The NSO’s most recent searches began with a set of needs, some listed and some just under-stood. Among the requirements were renown,

fundraising ability, reputation as an “orchestra builder,” and availability. Unstated was that the new music director should be a superb musician with new insights into the standard repertoire and an understanding of every instrument in the orchestra. Candidates should also have the ability to discern the quality of a new piece of music and, better yet, commission new compositions from great composers. Sometimes the NSO list included

a reaction to the previous music director. After the 17-year tenure as music director of Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a significant requirement was that candidates should be American. After Los Angeles-born Leonard Slat-kin’s 11-year tenure, dur-ing which he programmed

pieces on subscription concerts that normally would be played on pops concerts as well as new music considered difficult to listen to, a main requirement was that his replacement should be a person of renown with a strong background in traditional repertoire.

The first music director of the NSO, Hans Kindler, had a talent for evaluating new works. As a cellist he had performed the modern works of the day, pieces by Arnold Schoenberg and Mau-rice Ravel, who were his friends, and he advised Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a famous patron of music who sponsored Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, and other composers. It was in premiering such a commission, Stravinsky’s ballet Apollon Mus-agète in 1928, that Kindler first appeared as a conductor in Washington, with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Deciding to devote his time to con-ducting, he founded the NSO in 1931. I suspect that his relationship with Mrs. Coolidge went beyond ordinary friendship, but I admit to hav-ing no good evidence. Certainly, though, Kindler exerted a strong influence on Coolidge’s choices for commissions.

Kindler saw to it that many new works were

During a performance of Antal Doráti’s 95-minute-long cantata, The Way of

the Cross, I kept seeing the concert hall doors opening and shutting as more and

more people left.


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performed by his fledgling group. Our NSO library numbers each piece of music on file according to the chronological order in which it was acquired. In Kindler’s repertoire, Richard Strauss’s Don Juan is number 19 in the library, ahead of most of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Brahms’s Sec-ond Symphony is number 77. Because of Kindler’s desire to champion the works of modern compos-ers, the NSO owns many works by Aaron Copland from the 1940s. That means that when the NSO wants to perform works by Copland, it doesn’t pay rent for orchestral parts and conductors’ scores.

Sometimes music directors may be com-posers themselves, and since they select what’s played, they can often perform their works with their own orchestras. The New York Philhar-monic has had three such men at the podium: Gustav Mahler (1909–1911), Bernstein (1958–1969), and Pierre Boulez (1971–1977). The National Symphony has had one such leader, but his skills as a composer were not appreci-ated. A performance in the early 1970s of Doráti’s 95-minute-long cantata, Le Chemin de la Croix (The Way of the Cross), was one of the most unpopular concerts in NSO history. From the cello section I kept seeing the concert hall doors on all sides opening and shutting as more and more people left. By the time we had finished, hundreds of audience members had fled. We in the orchestra nicknamed the piece “Exodus.”

The concept of orchestra builder, aside from developing an orchestra’s overall sound, is a tricky one: it is considered by some an excuse for firing people so that the seats can be filled by players of the conductor’s choosing. Doráti was considered an orchestra builder, but ironically, soon after his arrival in Washington, the great clarinetist Harold Wright left to be principal in Boston. Firings are rare, and most people who leave orchestras do so for more attractive jobs (like Wright, to work in one of the so-called Big Five orchestras with more salary), or to retire.

As an effective orchestra builder, Doráti did increase the NSO repertoire to include many works that were standard elsewhere. Two such

“new” pieces, both by Bartók, who had been one of Doráti’s teachers when in Budapest, were The Miraculous Mandarin and Bluebeard’s Castle. Doráti also arranged for the NSO to record La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, a gargantuan, 14-movement work for choir and orchestra by Olivier Messiaen. Though the con-ductor may have deserved accolades for idealistic effort, the board was unimpressed with the sales

totals after the first sev-eral months—rumored to be 88 copies.

Rostropovich, the NSO’s music director

immediately following Doráti, was hired by Mar-tin Feinstein, who was executive director of the Kennedy Center, the orchestra’s home. Fein-stein had arranged for Rostropovich to conduct the NSO in a phenomenally successful concert that included Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Backstage after the show, Feinstein was saying to anyone who would listen, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have him as music director?” My answer—the perspective of a cellist—was yes.

Timing was perfect for the NSO board, whose members, feeling that they had tangled enough with Doráti, jumped at the opportunity to grab R

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When Russian Mstislav Rostropovich’s tenure ended, the National Symphony sought an American conductor.


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the world-famous Rostropovich. During that late-1970s Cold War period, the prospect of hiring a Soviet exile to lead the orchestra in the nation’s capital must have been hard to resist. The news was delivered to Doráti right before he was to conduct Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. He gath-ered the musicians before the concert and said he was so upset that he would be unable to lead the performance. He could only conduct such a difficult work from memory, he explained, and relying on the printed score that evening would do him no good. We in the orchestra urged him to go ahead with the program and promised to do everything we could to assure a fine perfor-mance—no matter what happened on the podium. We made good on our promise, and that night the Rite was a memorable success.

Before taking control of the NSO, Rostropo-vich had almost no track record as a conductor. But he easily overcame this potential handicap in other ways. His concerts were exciting, and creating excitement is certainly one of the cru-cial, if unspoken, qualities of a successful musical leader. He had friends who regularly dropped by to perform: artists such as flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, trumpeter Maurice André, tenor Peter Pears, violinist Isaac Stern, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He could count great composers as his friends: Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Bernstein all wrote pieces for him because, as one composer put it to me, “Rostropo-vich has the knack of getting the notes off the page and into the ear better than anyone.”

Boards in search of a conductor of renown naturally look for a mature musician. Orches-tras in Chicago (Riccardo Muti) and Washington (Eschenbach) have chosen older conductors who made their reputations elsewhere. Some selection boards, however, are more adventurous. In Los Angeles, the most recent two choices, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel, were young (34 and 28, respectively) when appointed. Now East Coast orchestras are following the trend toward youth on the podium. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is 38, and Andris

Nelsons, named music director designate of the Boston Symphony on May 16, is only 34.

A candidate’s country of origin may play a role in Chicago and Philadelphia, where boards have yet to pick a native-born American. The New York Philharmonic, on the other hand, is already on its third American conductor, Alan Gilbert.

Fundraising ability is also a big part of the pedigree that boards of directors look for, but not all music directors do it well. Daniel Barenboim couldn’t stand the fundraising and socializing component of his job and eventually felt he had to leave Chicago. By contrast, Slatkin has said that he enjoys the development part of being a music director, and he’s happy socializing and talking about sports and movies. Last September, Nézet-Séguin was spotted at the box office greeting ticket buyers, which The Philadelphia Inquirer compared to an airline pilot taking beverage orders.

Orchestras themselves have personalities, too, and this plays into the choice of music director. Ensembles can be lumped into two types: those that play with an established identity no matter who is conducting, and those that change accord-ing to the conductor. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam falls into the first cat-egory. The American Symphony, when I was in it with Leopold Stokowski as music director, fell into the second. Many of the world’s great-est orchestras are in the first category, but the second category is increasingly common and, I fear, desired. Many boards want the orchestra to be a pure extension of the music director, and so do many conductors. This does, however, place heavy demands on the conductor. It takes a spe-cial musician and manager to work with a group of a hundred or so superb musicians, each with a point of view, and convince them that his or her interpretation is worthy of pursuing. But I have come to know that the best conductors inspire the players and are, in turn, inspired by them.

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ful critic, will say. You might expect the influence of a critic on a daily newspaper to be nonexistent, and indeed most performers deny that they ever read criticism. But they all do, or they hear about it from someone else. Doráti had such a difficult time accepting the harsh criticism from George Gelles in The Washington Star that he refused to conduct if Gelles was in the hall. In a 1975 letter to Joe Albritton, owner of the Star, the conduc-tor wrote, “Personally I have decided to distan-tiate [sic] myself from Mr. Gelles, because I do not wish to contribute to making him an ‘inter-esting’ figure. From Mr. Gelles’ vicious, abomi-nable performance … it is clear that he is a path-ological case. It seems to me that he belongs either in a hospital, maybe in jail, I do not know which.”

Rostropovich under-stood the political influ-ence of critics, but his attempts to outmaneu-ver them were not always successful. Word at one point went around that he had made a false move and tried to persuade Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, to hire Ted Libbey (later the author of an NSO history) as the lead music critic. She refused. Rostropovich, however, did know exactly how to handle Paul Hume, the longtime Post music critic known to journalism students as the one who panned Margaret Truman’s singing and, as a result, received a furious letter from her father, President Harry Truman. (Hume sold the letter in 1951 for enough money—$3,500, according to the Truman archives—to cover the down payment on a house in an upscale section of Northwest Washington.) Once,

we were rehearsing a piece with the University of Maryland Chorus, of which Paul Traver was the conductor. Traver was seated in the concert hall, and so was Hume. From the podium, Rostropovich turned around to ask, “Paul, how is the balance?” When Traver started to answer, Rostropovich interrupted, “No, no, not you. Paul Hume.”

Looking back over the tenures of the past four music directors of the NSO, I am convinced that Washington’s music critics played a large part in hastening the departures of each of them. Howard Mitch-ell, who preceded Doráti, was “provincial,” Doráti was “awkward and lax,” Rostropovich was

“only good with Russian music,” and Slatkin was

“uninvolved.” Never mind that Doráti went on to a successful tenure with the Detroit Symphony or that Rostropovich’s interpretations of non-

Russian music seem to have been perfectly satisfy-ing to Britten and Henri Dutilleux, both of whom wrote pieces specifically for Rostropovich to debut. In recent years, critics have, if anything, become even harsher. I sometimes wonder if perhaps they prepare for live performances by listening to recordings that have been heavily spliced together and balanced by engineers.

There is no science behind pairing an orchestra with a compatible conductor. Doráti once said that a conductor should not stay with an orchestra for more than seven years, although he seemed unhappy when the board wound up agreeing with him. And yet Zubin Mehta, who has held several concurrent posts in the United States and Europe, has been in charge of the Israel Philharmonic since 1969.

After all, if there were a formula, would it be art? l

The expressive con-ducting style of Gustav Mahler, as captured by the Austrian silhouette artist Otto Böhler


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E s s a y

Hannah Arendt on TrialThe 1963 publication of her Eichmann in Jerusalem sparked

a debate that still rages over its author’s motivations DANIEL MAIER-KATKIN and NATHAN STOLTZFUSS

Fifty years ago, The New Yorker published a series of articles that became one of the most controversial books of the 20th century: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The articles dealt with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who co-ordinated the logistics of transporting millions of European Jews to their death during World War II. Arendt portrayed Eichmann and other Nazi criminals not as hate-filled, anti-Semitic monsters but as petty bureaucrats and spoke openly about the role played by Jewish councils in the deportation and destruction of their own people. Arendt’s central insight into what she called “the banality of evil”—that great crimes can arise from mindless conformity and thoughtless-ness about the humanity of others—came paired with sharp criticism of Israeli insensitivity to legitimate Palestinian claims and disregard for the rights of minorities and neighbors.

Arendt suffered ferocious personal attacks that

continue today, 37 years after her death. Criticism of her Eichmann book inevitably incorporates some variant of the assertion that she felt herself to be more German than Jewish and was a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew—a strange charge against a woman who worked on behalf of Jewish organizations most of her life. The 50-year battle over Arendt’s reputation has pitted her defenders against those who would deflect her criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish, thus turning people away from her ideas about democratic pluralism and regional coopera-tion without having to discuss them.

Soon after the Eichmann pieces began to appear, civil rights activist Henry Schwarzschild warned Arendt that Jewish organizations in New York were furiously planning a campaign against her and that she should expect to be the object of great debate and animosity.

Siegfried Moses, a friend from Arendt’s youth who had immigrated to Israel and risen to the position of state comptroller, sent a note to Arendt on behalf of the Council of Jews from Germany, declaring war on her and her Eichmann book. Moses then flew to Switzerland to meet with

Daniel Maier-Katkin is the author of Stranger From Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. Nathan Stoltzfuss is the author of Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosen-strasse Protests in Nazi Germany. Both are on the faculty at Florida State University. E

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Hannah Arendt on Trial

Arendt and demanded that she stop the book’s publication. She refused, warning him that the intensity of criticism was “going to make the book into a cause célèbre and thus embarrass the Jew-ish community far beyond anything that she had said or could possibly do.” Indeed, literary critic Irving Howe would describe the vitriolic public dispute that ensued as “violent,” while novelist Mary McCarthy would liken it to a pogrom.

It began on March 11 with a memorandum dis-tributed by the Anti-Defamation League alerting its members to “Arendt’s defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi Holocaust,” by which they meant her reporting that evidence at the trial showed that leaders of Jewish commu-nities across Europe had negotiated the orderly demise of their communities with Eichmann. The ADL followed up with a pamphlet, “Arendt Nonsense,” which called the Eichmann articles evil, glib, and trite.

On May 19, 1963, The New York Times published a highly critical review of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Michael A. Musmanno, a retired Navy rear admiral who had served as a judge at the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals and was then a sitting justice on Pennsylvania’s supreme court. Musmanno had also appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the Eichmann trial. In her book Arendt had disparaged Musmanno’s testimony that Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told him at Nuremberg that Hitler’s madness had come about because he had fallen under Eichmann’s influence. Even the prosecution knew this was a fabrication. Musmanno wrote in the Times that Arendt was motivated by

“purely private prejudice. She attacks the State of Israel, its laws and institutions, wholly unrelated to the Eichmann case.”

That summer New York intellectuals weighed in. A review by playwright and critic Lionel Abel in Partisan Review accused Arendt of having por-trayed the Nazis as more aesthetically appealing than their victims. Journalist Norman Podhoretz’s review in Commentary concluded that Arendt had exemplified “intellectual perversity [resulting] from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatu-

ated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” Zionist activist Marie Syrkin wrote in Dis-sent that Eichmann was the only character who came out better in the book than he went in and accused Arendt of manipulating the facts with

“high-handed assurance.” Arendt had published often in all three journals.

In July, when she came home from Europe, where she had been traveling since the articles

appeared, Arendt wrote to a friend, the German philosopher Karl Jas-pers, that her “apartment was literally filled with unopened mail … about

the Eichmann business.” Much of it bordered on hate mail, like the letter from a woman in New Jersey who began with a declaration that she had never read the Eichmann book and “would never read such trash” and concluded with the hope that “the ghosts of our six million martyrs haunt your bed at night.”

More measured criticism came in a letter from Gershom Scholem, a friend from Arendt’s youth E

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Hannah Arendt, pictured in the early 1960s, around the time her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann was released, touching a nerve in Jewish politics


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and then a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He affirmed his

“deep respect” for Arendt but characterized the tone of her book as “heartless,” “flippant,” “sneer-ing and malicious,” replacing balanced judgment with a “demagogic will-to-overstatement.” He could never think of her, he wrote, as anything other than “a daughter of our people” but admon-ished her for insufficient Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people: “In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the Ger-man Left, I find little trace of this.”

Arendt replied that she came not from the German Left but from the tradition of German philosophy and that of course she was a daughter of the Jewish people and had never claimed to be anything else: “I have always regarded my Jewish-ness as one of the indisputable actual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as basic gratitude for everything that is as it is.” But you are quite right, she told him, in what you say about Ahabath Israel. “I have never in my life

‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the Ger-man people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”

In the full flush of the attack, Mary McCarthy stepped forward as Arendt’s champion. Writing in the Winter 1964 issue of Partisan Review, she observed that the hostile reviews and personal attacks on Arendt were written almost entirely by Jews. She dismissed Lionel Abel’s assertion that Arendt made Eichmann aesthetically palatable:

“Reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the Jews who died in the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not my impression.”

Fevered discourse continued to rage across the pages of Partisan Review’s next issue. Marie Syrkin accused McCarthy of intellectual irresponsibility and ignorance, and writer and historian Harold Weisberg characterized her defense of Arendt as

wholly lacking in charity and logic. Poet Robert Lowell countered that Arendt’s only motive was a “heroic desire for truth.” Journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald called Eichmann in Jerusa-lem a masterpiece of historical journalism and defended McCarthy’s “brilliant” observation that the split over the book was between Christians and Jews, especially “organization-minded Jews.”

In 1965, Jacob Robinson, an adviser to the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, published a 400-page denunciation of Arendt’s scholarship, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eich-mann Trial, The Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative. With the assistance of teams of researchers in New York, London, Paris, and Jerusalem, Robinson scoured Arendt’s book and found 400 “factual errors,” including such minu-tiae as the misspelling of a first name. Some of the things he listed, it turned out, were not errors at all. Nevertheless, an essay by historian Walter Laqueur in The New York Review of Books asserted that Arendt lacked the factual knowledge needed to make a scholarly contribution. Laqueur char-acterized Robinson as “formidable,” an eminent authority on international law, an erudite poly-math with knowledge of many languages and unrivalled mastery of sources. Robinson’s moti-vation for undertaking a full-scale refutation of

“Miss Arendt’s” flippant display of cleverness, Laqueur wrote, was the natural “resentment felt by the professional against the amateur.”

Arendt had been reluctant to react publicly to the controversy, preferring to let her work speak for itself. In January 1966, however, she responded, in The New York Review of Books, to Laqueur’s essay. Laqueur, she wrote, was so overwhelmed by Robinson’s “eminent authority” that he had failed to acquaint himself with the facts. For a start, she had not written a narrative about the Jewish catastrophe, but only a report about a trial. She criticized the prosecution for repeatedly raising questions about why there had not been more Jewish resistance during the Holocaust—a line of questioning she dismissed as Israeli militarist propaganda. She also pointed out that Robinson


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was not a historian but a lawyer who had published practically nothing prior to his book. The honorific of “eminent authority” had been attached to him only after he joined the chorus of critics attacking her. What is formidable about Robinson, Arendt concluded, is that his words were amplified by the Israeli government with its consulates, embassies, and missions throughout the world, along with the American and World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the ADL, in a coordinated effort to character-ize her book as a posthumous defense of Eichmann and her as the evil person who wrote it.

Arendt worried that the backlash against the Eichmann book had blown the controversy out of proportion and that partially informed peo-ple would believe “all the nonsense” critics were spouting. At the height of the scandal, however, Jaspers assured her that she would emerge with her reputation intact: any fair-minded person who read the Eichmann book would see her serious-ness of purpose, honesty, fundamental goodness, and passion for justice. “A time will come that you will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monu-ment to you in Israel, as they are doing now for Spinoza,” he wrote. “They will proudly claim you as their own.” Now, as the debate began to subside, Jaspers wrote that though she had suffered greatly, the critical uproar was adding to her prestige.

Arendt wrote back that she had been warmly received by the mostly Jewish students who had turned out in substantial numbers for her lectures on politics at Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and other universities. “The funny thing,” she told Jaspers, was that after speaking her mind openly about “the formidable Mr. Robinson,” she was once again “flooded with invitations from all the Jewish organizations to speak, to appear at congresses, etc. And some of these invitations are coming from organizations that I singled out to attack and named by name.”

In the next few years she would collect a dozen honorary degrees from American universities and be inducted into both the National Insti-tute of Arts and Letters and the American Acad-emy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded her

its Emerson-Thoreau Medal for distinguished achievement in literature. In Denmark, where Jews had been heroically protected during the Nazi occupation, Arendt in 1975 received the Sonning Prize (worth the equivalent of roughly $200,000 today) for “commendable work that benefits European culture.”

For a long moment, which lasted another quarter-century after her death in 1975, Arendt had beaten back her detractors, with her repu-tation intact. New Yorker editor William Shawn wrote that Arendt’s death had removed “some counterweight to all the world’s unreason and corruption,” that she had been “a moral and in-tellectual force that went beyond category,” and that her influence “on intellectuals, artists, and political people around the world was profound.”

More recently, though, the battle over Arendt’s reputation and the value of her work, especially Eichmann in Jerusalem, has been joined again, rekindled by evidence in Arendt’s papers that as a young woman, she had a love affair with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It was known that Arendt had been Heidegger’s student, but the posthumous revelation of their romantic relationship by Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, came as a bombshell.

Arendt and Heidegger were lovers for about six months, beginning in November 1924. She was an 18-year-old philosophy student; he was 35, mar-ried with two children, and was in something of a creative frenzy writing Being and Time, the all but inscrutable masterpiece that established his position as an existentialist. Arendt thought she was his muse. The love affair cooled by summer, when Heidegger withdrew into family and pro-fessional life, and there was less and less contact. Arendt appears to have suffered the bittersweet longings of unrequited love.

What seemed a final break between them occurred when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Arendt fled Germany, and Heidegger very publicly joined the Nazi Party and was elevated to the posi-


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tion of Rektor at Freiburg University. He resigned after one year, having fired the Jewish faculty, dis-banded the university senate in favor of a Führer system of governance, and exhorted students to military service, often ending his speeches, right arm stretched out and up in salute, with “Heil Hitler,” repeated three times. After the war he downplayed the significance of all this and told transparent lies about the past, claiming to have done it all in an effort to protect the university.

Nevertheless, five years after the war, Arendt reconciled with Heidegger. She was in Ger-many directing a State Department project to preserve and distribute unclaimed Jewish cul-tural property looted by the Nazis—mostly books and religious artifacts—to synagogues and Jewish museums, libraries, and universities around the world. Passing through Freiberg, she sent a note to Heidegger, who came to see her. A lifelong friendship and affectionate correspondence ensued. After the affair became public, Heidegger’s reputation as a Nazi seeped into the Eichmann controversy, giving new shape to the old calumny that Arendt was a pathologi-cally self-hating Jew, whose opinions about Israel and Jewish politics were not to be taken seriously.

Arendt’s latter-day critics maintain that she was so blinded by schoolgirl love that she either could not see what a bad man Heidegger was or did not care; that she so adored him and the German intel-lectual tradition he represented that she was driven to forgive him; that her affection for Heidegger and everything German explains how she could distort Eichmann into something banal and display such shocking insensitivity toward Jewish victims.

It is as if Arendt’s detractors conflate Hei-degger with Eichmann, a mass murderer whose execution Arendt supported. Whatever his sins, Heidegger was not one of the leaders of the Third Reich, nor was he involved in planning or execut-

ing war crimes or crimes against humanity. He was, after 1934, an increasingly irrelevant profes-sor of philosophy. Despite his early enthusiasm for Nazism, there is little evidence suggesting Heidigger was ever an anti-Semite. Granted, he was never forthcoming about his past, not even in a final interview published by prior agreement after his death. Still, he was not Adolf Eichmann.

Arendt understood the distinction, once refer-ring to Heidegger as a man who lied at the drop of a hat in order to manage a situation. Heidegger nurtured fantasies of power as the foremost Nazi intellectual and had grandiose ambitions

to restore philosophy to a state of grace not known since the Greeks, but his ignorance of the world, Arendt concluded, pre-vented him from seeing that the Nazis were inter-ested only in people who thought as they did. In a public address honoring Heidegger on his 80th

birthday, Arendt referred to his Nazi time as a mistaken “escapade,” spent primarily in “avoid-ing” (which implies willfully looking away from) the reality “of the Gestapo’s secret rooms and the torture cells of the concentration camps.”

Her critique was not strong enough for Hei-degger’s most severe critics, nor for Arendt’s. Heidegger scholar Emmanuel Faye asserts that Heidegger’s texts reveal an inveterate Nazi not only during the Hitler years but before and after as well. Faye finds that even Being and Time, writ-ten 10 years before the Nazis came to power, is so thick with veiled proto-Nazi messages that it should be shelved next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Literary critic Carlin Romano, in a 2009 review of a book Faye wrote about Heidegger, laid the philosopher’s guilt at Arendt’s feet, identifying her among the acolytes who venerated the “pre-tentious old Black Forest babbler.” Journalist Ron Rosenbaum adds that it will never be possible to think about Arendt or her “intellectually toxic

In the right circumstances masses of otherwise ordi-nary, decent people can be transformed into collabo-rators and perpetrators of

reprehensible crimes.


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relationship” with Heidegger the same way again because of her “lifelong romantic infatuation with the Nazi-sympathizing professor.” He dismisses the “banality of evil” as the “most overused, mis-used, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language” and finds Arendt’s use of it “deceitful,”

“disingenuous,” and “utterly fraudulent” in relation to Eichmann, concluding that the man responsi-ble for the “logistics of the Final Solution” simply could not be “a banal bureaucrat.”

Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial (2011) concludes that Arendt was just plain wrong about Eichmann. On the basis of “new” evidence that Eichmann was a bully, braggart, and liar, Lipstadt proposes to supplant Arendt’s image of the banal bureaucrat with a hate-filled, mad-dog, anti-Semitic monster.

Arendt was wrong, Lipstadt declares, to think that Eichmann “did not really understand the enterprise in which he was involved.” But this is certainly not what Arendt meant when she con-cluded that the trial had been a “long course in human wickedness [that] had taught us the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banal-ity of evil.” Lipstadt’s insight into Arendt’s supposed misjudgment of Eichmann is based on the report-ing of a French journalist, Joseph Kessel, who was present at the trial on a day when Arendt was not. When damaging depositions of SS officers were read aloud, Kessel could detect “the passion and rage of the true Eichmann” beneath the “hollow mask” of a bumbler that he held up to the world.

Why does Lipstadt think Arendt was unable to detect Eichmann’s true character? Because, she tells us, Arendt was writing for only one person, the only person whose approval mattered to her: Martin Heidegger. A more plausible understand-ing of Heidegger’s significance in the history of the Eichmann book is that during her first postwar encounter with her former mentor, in 1950, Arendt intuitively recognized the banality of evil: Martin was still Martin. He had behaved despicably, but she recognized his humanity and admired his genius. The epiphany when she saw Eichmann a decade later was that, even at that

level of culpability (so far beyond Heidegger’s), the motives for direct participation in mass murder were still fundamentally banal: not blood lust but ambition to advance one’s career, to enjoy status and opportunity, to fulfill an oath of loyalty, to be regarded as capable, a leader, a good fellow, perhaps to have a place in history.

The more recent battles over Arendt’s reputa-tion and her criticism of Israeli policy and Jewish politics have taken a desperate turn with their focus on her love affair with Heidegger. Everything else about their relationship was known in 1963. The assertion that Arendt was hard-hearted and uncaring is supported by nothing new and is no stronger now than it was 50 years ago.

Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil remains undiminished: human character is mal-leable, not fixed; in the right circumstances masses of otherwise ordinary, decent, law-abiding people can be transformed into collaborators and perpe-trators of reprehensible crimes against humanity.

Likewise, her depiction of the Eichmann trial as political theater is still cogent. Arendt was not alone in her criticism of the prosecution: the Israeli judges also complained that the prosecu-tor relied on survivors’ inflammatory testimony about the horrors of the Holocaust without show-ing a connection to the defendant. What Arendt hoped to learn in Jerusalem was how Eichmann had done his work, how the mass murders had been organized and implemented. Who had said and done what with and to whom? But the pros-ecutor’s ambition was to capture the imagination of Israeli youth and world Jewry with a retelling of the suffering of the Holocaust.

Real justice, in Arendt’s view, requires full disclosure, including self-disclosure, not only retribution for Nazi crimes against humanity but also an effort to understand how political sys-tems can produce the complicity of perpetrators, bystanders, and even victims. If evil is banal, it can turn up anywhere, even among victims, even among Jews, even in Israel. l


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R e v i e w s

The Bombmaker’s BurdenWinning the atomic race failed to bring him peace of mind

REVIEW BY SHIRLEY STRESHINSKY

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER A Life Inside the Center By Ray Monk Doubleday, 825 pp., $37.50

Sixty-eight years into the atomic age, North Korea routinely threatens a preemptive nuclear attack on the United States, while a nuclear-armed Israel warily eyes Iran’s efforts to build its own weapons of mass destruction. That we live on the edge of apocalypse is surely one of the reasons that American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, father of the first atomic bomb and symbol of its moral ambiguities, remains such a tantalizing subject for biographers. The latest to weigh in is Ray Monk, a philosophy pro-fessor at England’s University of Southampton, whose Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center charts his subject’s path from outsider to quintessential insider—the polymath at the heart of some of the most crucial events of the first half of a brutal century.

Monk gives us the basics: Oppenheimer was born in 1904 into a wealthy, secular Jew-ish family in New York. Discovering physics in high school, he described the field to his younger brother as having “a beauty which no other science can match, a rigor and austerity and depth.” He raced through Harvard, Cam-bridge, and Germany’s University of Göttingen before returning to the United States to build its leading center of theoretical physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Like many

Shirley Streshinsky is the co-author, with Patricia Klaus, of “An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer’s Life,” to be published in September.

intellectuals in the 1930s, he closely associ-ated himself with leftwing politics and had numerous Communist friends, including the woman who became his wife, though he himself never joined the party. During World War II, Oppenheimer led the secret effort to build an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, but after Hiroshima and Nagasaki he declared that physicists “had known sin” and determined to lead the way to international control of nuclear weapons. He went on to be labeled a security risk during the McCarthy era and was effectively expelled from government service. Oppenheimer would spend the final 18 years of his life as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

But as Monk writes, personal and politi-cal details like those ignore the science that informed Oppenheimer’s life. As a case in point, he cites Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize–winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppen-heimer, which he calls “a very fine book indeed, a monumental piece of scholarship.” That it was published to rave reviews eight years into Monk’s 15-year labor gave him pause. Happily, he soldiered on, for his Robert Oppenheimer is a fine book and a monumental piece of schol-arship in its own right. Monk adds another dimension to the story by interpreting the physics that was, after all, Oppenheimer’s cen-tral preoccupation.

Monk’s grasp of the science heightens the drama, as it places his subject squarely in the middle of the quantum mechanics revolution. He writes, for example, about the first two E

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papers Oppenheimer published as a student at Cambridge, even while battling depression. They won him a spot at Göttingen, where he regained his emotional balance and became part of a band of “boy” physicists who rocked the world of nuclear physics. Many of them would join him on the mesa in New Mexico and later in Princeton, where Oppenheimer mixed the now-older “wunderkinds” with a new generation of boy wonders and in the process facilitated breakthroughs that would earn some of them Nobel prizes.

In the writing, Monk occasionally ladles on too many details or wanders into lengthy digressions. A long first chapter tells the his-tory of German Jews in New York near the turn of the 20th century, assuming that Oppen-heimer’s Jewishness was a major influence in his life. Monk is better when he focuses on the philosophy behind the Ethical Culture Society, whose school the young Oppenheimer attended. Founded by Felix Adler, who broke away from a Reform Jewish synagogue, the society was based on moral principles and was “open to

both worshipper and infidel.” Monk traces its roots to Adler’s version of Immanuel Kant’s moral law: “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.” Monk clearly connects how these early influences affected Oppenheimer’s worldview.

Elsewhere Monk simply offers a more elab-orate account of some well-known episodes—such as when the American bomb project was floundering, and British physicists intervened to convince the Roosevelt administration that the bomb could be produced in time to win the war. But he often unearths new details that add clarity to these old stories and moves the reader by degrees to a better understanding of his subject.

Monk is less interested in Oppenheimer’s private life, which may explain his haphazard approach to personal details. He does not dwell on the alcoholism that plagued his wife, Kitty Oppenheimer, and wreaked havoc with the fam-ily. He also repeats without challenge the tropes

J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project and father of the atomic bomb

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about her self-proclaimed background as a Ger-man princess with connections to the royal houses of Europe, except to say that if her father was a

“princeling,” it is a mystery why he would be an engineer seeking work in America. Occasionally he makes an outright mistake: he writes that Kitty spent her last five years with close friends Robert and Charlotte Serber, but Charlotte committed suicide only weeks after Oppenheimer’s death in 1967. Kitty did live with Serber, who after Kitty’s death would cheerfully repeat the stories she told him about her royal roots.

Monk writes well, and the errors do not amount to much in the great expanse of the story. But I hope Oppenheimer’s next biogra-pher might consider starting from the end and moving toward the beginning. Oppenheimer worked almost until his death, yet Sherwin and Bird gave only 22 pages to everything after the 1953 government hearing that robbed him of his security clearance; Monk does better with 46. Oppenheimer was not silent during those last years; he traveled the country and the world, giving speeches to which both scientists and nonscientists, myself included, flocked. Even when the subject of a lecture was purely scientific, Oppenheimer emphasized his central message of how, in the atomic age, it could be possible to preserve a life worth living. At a 1963 Chicago symposium called Challenges to Democracy, he put it this way: “What we do have is an increas-ingly wide and deep understanding of the terror and horror and wrongness of war, of the irrevers-ibility of the powers acquired by our knowledge of nature.” He spoke of mankind’s responsibili-ties, said that the need to love the past and cher-ish the future was not enough, that what we must come to understand was that “evil is the monopoly of no people, that we can and must see it in ourselves and even in our own country.”

North Korea and Iran, he would seem to say, notwithstanding.

By tracing the far reaches of Oppenheimer’s mind, Monk comes closest to finding the center he sought—and takes readers with him.

Bad MedicinePsychiatry’s mistaken manualREVIEW BY ALISON BASS

THE BOOK OF WOE:The DSM and the Unmaking of PsychiatryBy Gary GreenbergBlue Rider Press, 403 pp., $28.95

SAVING NORMAL:An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life By Allen FrancesWilliam Morrow, 314 pp., $27.99

In May, the American Psychiatric Associa-tion (APA) published the fifth revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as DSM-5, the bible of modern psychiatry. To mark the occasion, two new books attack the DSM system and the harm it has wrought over the years. One, The Book of Woe, is by an outsider, psychologist Gary Green-berg. The other, Saving Normal, is by a consum-mate insider, Allen Frances, the former chair of Duke University’s Department of Psychiatry who spearheaded the DSM-4 revision in the 1990s. Greenberg and Frances both argue persuasively that the DSM has contributed to an explosion of questionable diagnoses and has encouraged the massive overuse of dangerously addictive drugs. They likewise agree on why patients and doc-tors (including primary-care physicians) have embraced a manual that defines people’s psycho-logical distress according to specific symptoms. As Frances puts it, “Society has a seemingly insa-tiable capacity (even hunger) to accept … newly minted mental disorders that help to define and explain away its emerging concerns.”

For his part, Greenberg would like to see the

Alison Bass is the author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial and an assistant professor of journalism at West Virginia University. P

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DSM thrown out and for psychiatrists to admit that they lack the scientific evidence to back up the manual’s 300-odd diagnoses. He recounts the story of a 19th-century physician who invented a condition called drapetomania to describe “the disease causing Negroes to run away.” Though Greenberg acknowledges that doctors were quick to consign this diagnosis to the “dustbin of medi-cal history,” for him it stands as an example of how medicine has been too willing to create false disorders. Homosexuality is a more recent example, included as a mental disorder in the DSM’s first two renditions. It was removed only in 1974. Frances is less draconian, arguing that the manual retains at least some clinical value, though he wishes that doctors would treat it less as gospel than as a loosely written guidebook.

So how were the myriad disorders in the DSM arrived at? Despite pronouncements from the APA that the DSM-5 would be based on new and scientifically verifiable findings, the asso-ciation updated the manual using the same old method: by assembling groups of psychiatric experts who couldn’t agree on definitions for

even the most estab-lished diagnoses, like major depressive dis-order and general-ized anxiety disorder.

What have been the consequences of what Greenberg calls “a compendium of opinions masquerading as sci-entific truths?” Both he and Frances argue that medicine has ignored safer and longer-lasting methods of healing and addicted entire genera-tions to pills that, in many cases, are no more effective than placebos but a lot more harmful. Worse, overreliance on the DSM and the rush to resort to drugs has led to “false epidemics” in autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, social anxiety disorder, and pediatric bipolar disorder, among others, and contributed to a public health crisis of widespread prescrip-tion drug abuse. As Frances reports, there are now more overdoses in the United States from prescription drugs than from illicit ones. I see this problem firsthand as a college professor: with so many students diagnosed with ADHD

Greenberg (left) and Frances (right) agree that entire generations are addicted to pills that are often no better than placebos and a lot more harmful.

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(about 30 percent, according to Frances) and taking stimulants like Adderall, we have sold a generation on the fiction that prescription drugs are safe to abuse. The truth, of course, is otherwise—stimulant abuse can lead to depres-sion, anxiety, and even suicide. Ditto for pow-erfully addictive antianxiety drugs like Ativan, Xanax, and Klonopin, which, when combined with prescription painkillers or alcohol, often cause overdoses. The toll extends beyond the number of lives lost because of overdoses to the “massive but hidden costs” of treating com-plications caused by these drugs, be it obesity, diabetes, or heart disease.

If you have time to read only one of these books, I would recommend Saving Normal. Frances possesses the more authoritative voice, especially in his call for reform, recommending that the DSM be taken out of the hands of the APA and suggesting a dozen ways to tame the power of the pharmaceutical industry. Among them would be bans on direct-to-consumer advertising on TV and on drug-company jun-kets, dinners, or continuing medical education paid for by Big Pharma. He further recom-mends criminal penalties for drug company executives convicted of malfeasance. He rightly notes that if this country had the political will, it would be easy to curtail prescription drug abuse because, unlike street drugs, they are dispensed by pharmacies and tracked by com-puters. Overprescribing doctors could also be identified and penalized—something that is already happening in some states, but much too infrequently, since pharmacists and state medical boards rarely check databases or report errant physicians.

But it’s Greenberg who explains more con-cisely why psychiatrists are unlikely to come clean about the DSM. “An honest psychia-try,” he says, “would have fewer patients, more modest claims about what it treats, less clout with insurers, and reduced authority to turn our troubles into medical problems simply by adding the word disorder to their description.”

True NorthYankees and their slaves REVIEW BY FERGUS M. BORDEWICH

FOR ADAM’S SAKE: A Family Saga in Colonial New EnglandBy Allegra di BonaventuraLiveright, 441 pp., $29.95

Slavery was never as simple as our archetypes would have it. The image still lingers of men and women on a Deep South plantation, bent in broil-ing heat, plucking at rows of low-growing cot-ton plants, stuffing the harvest into long sacks, plucking and stuffing, plucking and stuffing ... In fact, the cotton country of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana developed late in the history of industrial slavery, just a generation or two before the Civil War. But slavery in other forms was all-American from the earliest years of settle-ment: slaves performed just about every kind of unskilled, semiskilled, and occasionally highly skilled work that there was to do—as watermen, metalworkers, blacksmiths, long-distance haul-ers, valets, nursemaids, cooks, waiters, barbers, and of course farmhands.

Moreover, slavery was not just a southern phenomenon but a ubiquitous part of northern life, too, until well after the American Revolution. In New York, even 20 years after the Revolution-ary War, the number of slaves was increasing, as growing affluence enabled more families to acquire them as a form of conspicuous display.

In recent years, scholars have chipped away at the stereotypes. Graham Russell Hodges’s 1999 Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey 1613–1863 delineated the wide use of slave labor in the colonies and, later, in the states. Jill Lepore’s 2006 New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan deftly unpeeled an alleged

Fergus M. Bordewich is the author, most recently, of America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union.

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plot by New York slaves to torch the city, and Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s 2009 Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend illu-minated the precarious life of a black couple in Vermont, where it was long assumed that slavery had never existed.

To this growing body of literature Allegra di Bonaventura has added an impressively researched and fine-grained account of the inti-mately intertwined lives of several families and their slaves who lived in the New London, Con-necticut, area from the late 17th century to the mid-18th century. Her account is rooted primar-ily in a close reading of the remarkable diary of Joshua Hempstead, a shipwright, farmer, and justice of the peace who recorded, sparely, his daily activities and personal encounters over almost 50 years. From the diary, court records (early New Londoners were a litigious lot!), and other period sources, di Bonaventura teases out a tangled skein of intersecting lives: in addition to the yeoman Hempstead, an assortment of hardscrabble farmers, churchmen high and low, a pocket of semiheretical “Rogerene” zealots, sundry “gentlemen” (including a black sheep of the illustrious Livingston family), several snob-bish Winthrops, and the enslaved Jackson family. Less clearly visible are the remnants of shattered Algonquin tribes who peppered the coastal towns, some enslaved, others free, mostly working as servants or at other unskilled jobs, partially Chris-tianized, but not quite members of the white communities in which they lived.

All of them struggled to survive in a world where measles epidemics swept away hundreds of people at a time (Hempstead lost two otherwise healthy adult sons in one week), children died young and suddenly, mothers were lost in child-birth, sailors fell overboard and disappeared, and enslaved families were abruptly separated with scarcely a thought by their owners. Di Bonaven-tura’s lucid prose sometimes reaches something close to poetry. Describing the Connecticut land-scape, for instance, she writes,

Stone walls were just one facet of a deeply embedded stone culture that engaged New Englanders like Joshua and [his slave] Adam throughout their lives. For men who worked the land, as most did, stones were a constant refrain to the day’s labor, punctuating the pitch of the shovel, the thrust of the hoe, and the steer of the plow. ... All around, stone trimmed the edges of New Englanders’ domestic environment, providing a last bul-wark between the destructive forces of nature and the decay of less permanent materials.

Her account is mostly preoccupied with the quotidian events of life in what was then a small community. But the larger world sometimes impinges. Her account of the First Great Awaken-ing, the spiritual firestorm that hit North America in the mid-1740s, is particularly vivid. In a mat-ter of months, hundreds of parishioners flooded out of mainstream Congregational churches to mass outdoor evangelical revivals, where roaring

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preachers hurled their rivals’ printed sermons into bonfires and exhorted swooning crowds of men and women. On one occasion, a preacher became so emotionally agitated by his own reli-gious passion, Hempstead noted in his diary, that he tore off his “plush breeches” and cast them into the flames before his startled congregation.

Di Bonaventura’s portrayal of Yankee slavery is acute and sensitive, without being sentimental. Although slavery was a reality of New England life, it was not as fundamental to the region’s economy, or to whites’ sense of their own identity, as it later became in the South. Few New Englanders owned more than a couple of slaves, and often just one, who, like Adam Jackson, lived in the household and worked alongside whites at the same tasks.

“If Adam was forever an elusive asset on a run-ning balance sheet, he was also his master’s most consistent companion in his home and his work,” di Bonaventura writes. Indeed, Adam, though enslaved his entire life, was frequently put in charge of less skilled white workers, including Hempstead’s grandson.

Adam—who died around 1764, a few years after Hempstead—remains elusive, but di Bonaven-tura unearthed troves of material on his parents, John and Joan Jackson, who eventually won their freedom. It’s an illuminating tale. With the aid of friendly, well-connected whites, John waged a series of lawsuits through the colonial courts, which eventually ruled in his favor. Against lon-ger odds, he won Joan’s freedom as well, though he failed to gain liberty for Adam, whose owner simply refused to relinquish him. For the Jacksons, freedom may have been exhilarating, but it did not mean ease or security: they were acknowl-edged as members of their community but never rose out of poverty.

That John even as a slave was able to lodge law-suits, let alone win them, makes clear that although colonial New Englanders accepted slavery, they did not as a matter of principle discount either the humanity or the legal rights of blacks. As an institution, however, slavery in New England did not really start its decline until the 1770s, under

the influence of Enlightenment values, and later Revolutionary ideology, with its spate of legisla-tion, judicial decisions, constitutional measures, and individual manumissions that permanently disabled the institution by the end of the cen-tury. That said, gradual emancipation, though accomplished peacefully, left thousands of black Americans still enslaved for decades. Connecticut did not formally abolish slavery until 1848, just 13 years before the Civil War.

For Adam’s Sake is well peopled with men, women, and children for whom slavery is but one aspect of an economically challenging and morally complex world, but the labored odys-sey of the Jackson family conveys an implicit—di Bonaventura is never polemical—message that the American future bends ultimately, if not always clearly, toward the wavering light of freedom. In telling the Jacksons’ story, she has recovered from centuries of oblivion people of colonial America’s lowest order, restoring them not just to history, but also to their individuality and humanity. It is a mighty achievement.

Out of AfricaA writer says goodbye to all thatREVIEW BY GRAEME WOOD

THE LAST TRAIN TO ZONA VERDE: My Ultimate African SafariBy Paul TherouxHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 353 pp., $27

Paul Theroux’s globe, if it had a pin stuck in it for every visited city and town, would bristle like a frightened porcupine. The west coast of Africa has remained one of its last barren patches, and for good reason: hostile governments, tropical disease, ravaged environments, and predators, both human and non. In 2003’s Dark Star Safari,

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he traveled bumptiously down the east coast of the continent, which, compared with Africa’s left coast—to say nothing of its interior—is virtually Scandinavian in its safety and ease of movement.

The Last Train to Zona Verde advertises itself as Theroux’s “final African adventure,” and few who read it will doubt his promise never to return. In his previous Africa book, he wrote convincingly of the destructive effects of foreign aid and how it robs Africans of the ingenuity and initiative they displayed when he taught in Malawi (then Nyasaland) as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. On this return journey, he begins where he left off, in Cape Town, deeply perturbed and skepti-cal about the future of the continent. He heads for points north and west, first to Namibia and Botswana, then to Angola. I spoil little by saying that Theroux’s original plan to proceed to Tim-buktu is thwarted, and the total mileage covered in this book is the least of any of his travelogues.

Theroux’s great realization—starting with The Great Railway Bazaar in 1975—was that travel writing didn’t require, or even reward, the sort of quasi-omniscient narration that one finds

in guidebooks, or the inhumanly sunny dis-position of magazine writing. Instead, the pleasures of the genre could be character-driven (“I sought trains; I found passengers”) and leave in the bits about hassles and inconvenience that make up the bulk of the experience of getting from place to place. No depiction of Kabul would be frank if it included Babur’s gardens but omitted the city’s daily horrors and bloodshed. The result of this method, which has distinguished forbears in Mark Twain, Robert Byron, and Nicolas Bou-vier, is a remarkably faithful mirror to reality. Theroux correctly identified the fanatical reli-gious undercurrents in prerevolutionary Iran, for example, when the secular authority of the shah appeared uncontested, and the rumblings of revolt against an oppressive government in China before Tiananmen Square.

In The Last Train to Zona Verde, Theroux’s bit-terness toward Africa congeals to a concentrated and unpalatable bile, unaccompanied this time with much love for the land, its past or future, or

In Angola,“a country financially, politically, and morally wrecked,” Theroux quit his journey.


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its people. In South Africa, he visits townships and complains to his guide about the filthy streets, pointing out indiscreetly that any community too lazy to put in a few minutes of broom work must be profoundly sick. He lashes out at the country’s politicians, who have squandered Nelson Man-dela’s moral capital by dignifying as “political vio-lence” what is really just murderous hooliganism. In Namibia, he admires aspects of the life of the Bushmen but concedes that their hunter-gatherer ways have been lost and that their communities are “badly in need of rescue,” though the West-ern donors rushing to help often do harm instead.

But Theroux reserves special disdain for Angola, run by a corrupt bureaucracy that wel-comes foreigners only if they come to extract the country’s abundant oil. When I was rejected for an Angolan tourist visa in 2001, I quizzed fellow backpackers to see whether anyone had man-aged to go; I found just one: a Japanese kid who received his visa through a clerical error, only to have it canceled (“ANULADO,” read the ink-smeared stamp in his passport) when he flew in and was immediately deported. Theroux gets in legally, invited to guest-lecture at local schools.

He finds a country financially, politically, and morally wrecked. Its wealthy expatriate oil work-ers pay $7,000 per month for terrible housing and $47,000 per year for their children’s education. Meanwhile, nonbillionaire Angolans, a major-ity of the general population (though not of the president’s cabinet), live miserably as a permanent underclass, locked into a condition of criminality and turpitude that will lead—predicts Kalunga Lima, Theroux’s one trusted Angolan friend—to a political crisis and perhaps a return to war. By the time Theroux reaches Luanda, the capital, having gamely attempted an overland route from Cape Town, he is exhausted and dispirited, and ditches the rest of his planned trip through the Repub-lic of Congo, Nigeria, and Mali, having decided that wading through another thousand miles of West African ordure would be as unedifying for readers as it would be for him.

His decision was surely a wise one. (West

Africa is one of my favorite places, but “things improved when I crossed into Nigeria” is a sen-tence that has never been written.) In Angola and Namibia, three of Theroux’s friends and inter-viewees, including Kalunga Lima, died violently or unexpectedly soon after meeting him—one crushed by an elephant, another bludgeoned to death in bed, and Kalunga Lima of a heart attack. A touch of pessimism is warranted.

Still, it’s sad to hear the note of surrender in Theroux’s farewell to Africa. In his China, Oceania, and railway books, which will be read and loved long after this one goes out of print, Theroux emerged with unique and wonderful charac-ters who, in spite of their singularity, seemed to explain the places where they lived. You learned something about the Marquesas or Chengdu or Peshawar, and discovered that the world was a more interesting place than you ever supposed—the cardinal delight of all travel writing. No one doubts, of course, that equally rich characters populate hellholes like Cabinda and Lagos. There is perhaps not enough oil money in all of Angola to pay Theroux, now 72, to go find those charac-ters himself. But that is our loss more than his.

Say AnythingThe stories we tell ourselvesREVIEW BY JENNIFER SINOR

THE FARAWAY NEARBY: By Rebecca SolnitViking, 259 pp., $25.95

In Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1938 painting From the Faraway, Nearby, a many-antlered skull seems to rest on the slope of a far-off mountain. Like much of O’Keeffe’s work, this piece ignores


Jennifer Sinor is the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University, where she is an associate professor of English.


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Weekly letters, from our mailbox to yours. Letter writers include Dave Eggers, Tao Lin, Aimee Bender, Steve

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the middle distance. By juxtaposing the very

close and the very far, she asks viewers to see, to really see, what would normally be passed over—a flower, a broken skull, a shell from the shore—and to frame that attention with the possibilities of the horizon. O’Keeffe’s art, her creativity, arose in the far away, a place she continually sought. In the exacting attention to the near, however, O’Keeffe knew she could arrest the gaze of her viewers, make them “see what I see.”

Rebecca Solnit, author of 13 previous books of nonfiction that center on art, politics, and the environment, is engaged in a similar project of seeing in her latest book, The Faraway Nearby. Through a series of closely linked essays, she offers readers a tale within a tale within a tale ranging from her mother’s dementia to Che

Guevara, Frankenstein, and the color white. Like Scheherazade’s Thou-sand and One Nights, the stories that Solnit threads together pulse with the urgency of a woman trying to save her life. The book arises from an emergency, or a series of emergencies—her mother’s removal to a facility for people with dementia, the end of a relationship, and Sol-nit’s own battle with can-cer. This confluence of events threatens Solnit’s understanding of her life, the map she has long fol-lowed. Rather than move inward toward self-pity and isolation, she moves outward toward others. Much as she did in A Field Guide to Getting

Lost, Solnit uses moments from her own life as springboards to larger questions. “One of the arts of perspective,” she tells us early on, “is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you … to tell stories rather than be told by them.”

Empathy is the path she follows out of the autumn of her unmaking. And empathy begins with story—“to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” Solnit enters others’ stories and brings them near to us. We watch as monks immolate themselves in Burma, as a two-year-old is pulled from a well, as a man suffocates in the ice cave of his own breath. In each essay, Solnit finds the humanity that allows a stranger—the reader, the writer—to connect, and in connecting, to


Rebecca Solnit

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become enlarged. We see, really see, what is brought close to us, and we can’t help but care. What is most captivating about the stories Sol-nit tells, though, is not their many-antlered details but how from a distance they are all connected. She writes, “A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.” Every story told becomes a metaphor for Sol-nit’s life and for our own. The pattern charts a journey out of suffering.

Ultimately the book’s form is Solnit’s most compelling argument for the powers of empa-thy. In her wide-ranging narrative, everything connects—Frankenstein, Yoko Ono, Iceland, a premature baby who lives, a good friend who doesn’t. They connect because they first con-nected inside Solnit herself. What Solnit offers us, I think, is the future of memoir. Not the story of the self—after all, she says, “my own story in its particulars hardly interests me now”—but the ways in which one’s story opens into other stories, stories that can be followed, sat with, explored. In meeting those other stories, your own becomes understood. “Empathy is a journey you travel,” Solnit tells us, and then she shows us in great detail what you find if you are willing to take that journey and pay attention.

Solnit’s latest book is a deeply moving account of why we create—why we make stories, why we write, paint, draw, photograph, preserve, and store. It is full of contradictions, knots that won’t easily come undone. But Solnit isn’t interested in the knotting. She is interested in the thread itself. “What if we only wanted openings,” she muses toward the end of her book, “the immor-tality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?” The answer, we realize, is the very book we hold in our hands: a book of our wounds and the threads that are wrapped around us. The Far-away Nearby is a complicated telling that never shows its seams. Literary nonfiction doesn’t get more beautiful and compelling.JI

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Sam Kean is the author of two books on science his-tory, The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist’s Thumb.

Science, Right and WrongThe evolution of knowledgeREVIEW BY SAM KEAN

CURIOSITY:How Science Became Interested in EverythingBy Philip BallUniversity of Chicago Press, 465 pp., $35

BRILLIANT BLUNDERSFrom Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mis-takes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe By Mario LivioSimon & Schuster, 341 pp., $26

Aristotle called it aimless and witless. St. Augustine condemned it as a disease. The ancient Greeks blamed it for Pandora’s unleashing destruction on the world. And one early Christian leader even pinned the fall of Lucifer himself on idle, intemperate, unrestrained curiosity.

Today, the exploration of new places and new ideas seems self-evidently a good thing. For much of human history, though, priests, politi-cians, and philosophers cast a suspicious eye on curious folks. It wasn’t just that staring at rainbows all day or pulling apart insects’ wings seemed weird, even childish. It also represented a colossal waste of time, which could be better spent building the economy or reading the Bible. Philip Ball explains in his thought-provoking new book, Curiosity, that only in the 1600s did society start to sanction (or at least tolerate) the pursuit of idle interests. And as much as any other factor, Ball argues, that shift led to the rise of modern science.

We normally think about the early opposi-tion to science as simple religious bias. But “nat-ural philosophy” (as science was then known) also faced serious philosophical objections,


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especially about the trustworthiness of the knowledge obtained. For instance, Galileo

used a telescope to discover both the craters on our moon and the existence of moons orbit-ing Jupiter. These discoveries demonstrated, contra the ancient Greeks, that not all heavenly bodies were perfect spheres and that not all of them orbited Earth. Galileo’s conclusions, however, relied on a huge assumption—that his telescope provided a true picture of the heavens. How could he know, his critics protested, that optical instruments didn’t garble or distort as much as they revealed? It’s a valid point.

Another debate revolved around what now seems like an uncontroversial idea: that scien-tists should perform experiments. The sticking point was that experiments, almost by defini-tion, explore nature under artificial conditions. But if you want to understand nature, shouldn’t the conditions be as natural as possible—free from human interference? Perhaps the results

of experiments were no more reliable than tes-timony extracted from witnesses under torture.

Specific methods aside, critics argued that unregulated curiosity led to an insatiable desire for novelty—not to true knowledge, which required years of immersion in a subject. Today, in an ever-more-distracted world, that argument resonates. In fact, even though many early critics of natural philosophy come off as shrill and small-minded, it’s a testament to Ball that you occasionally find yourself nodding in agreement with people who ended up on the “wrong” side of history.

Ultimately, Curiosity is a Big Ideas book. Although Newton, Galileo, and others play impor-tant roles, Ball wants to provide a comprehen-sive account of early natural philosophy, and that means delving into dozens of other, minor thinkers. In contrast, Mario Livio’s topsy-turvy book, Brilliant Blunders, focuses on Big Names in science history. It’s a telling difference that whereas Ball’s book, like a Russian novel, needs an appendix with a cast of characters, Livio’s characters usually go by one name—Darwin,

“Brilliant blunders,” like alchemy, ended up benefit-ing science overall.

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Kelvin, Pauling, Hoyle, and Einstein.Livio’s book is topsy-turvy because, rather

than repeat the obvious—these were some smart dudes—he examines infamous mistakes they made. He also indulges in some not always con-vincing armchair psychology to determine how each man’s temperament made him prone to commit the errors he did.

For those of us who, when reading about such thinkers, can’t help but compare our own piti-ful intellects with theirs, this focus on mistakes is both encouraging and discouraging. It’s encour-aging because their mis-takes remind us that they were fallible, full of the same blind spots and foi-bles we all have. It’s dis-couraging because, even at their dumbest, these scientists did incredible work. Indeed, Livio argues that their “brilliant blunders” ended up benefiting science overall.

Take Kelvin’s error. During William Thom-son Kelvin’s heyday in the later 1800s, various groups of scientists had an enormous row over the age of Earth, in large part because Darwin’s theory of natural selection seemed to require eons upon eons of time. Unfortunately, geologists provided little clarity here: they could date fossils and rock strata only relatively, not absolutely, so their estimates varied wildly. Into this vacuum stepped Kelvin, a mathematical physicist who studied heat. Kelvin knew that Earth had prob-ably been a hot, molten liquid in the past. So if he could determine Earth’s initial temperature, its current temperature, and its rate of cooling, he could calculate its age. His initial estimate was 20 million years.

For various reasons, Kelvin’s answer fell short by two orders of magnitude (the current estimate is 4.5 billion years). Worse, Kelvin used his calculation to bash Darwinism, a vendetta that ended up tarnishing his reputation. Nev-ertheless, his precisely quantified arguments D

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forced geologists to sharpen their own work in order to rebut him, and eventually they too began to think of Earth as a mechanical system. A nemesis can bring out the best in people, and Kelvin’s mistake proved a net good for science.

Ball’s and Livio’s books help answer an impor-tant question: why bother reading science history? Scientists themselves, after all, are notoriously uninterested in the subject, probably for good rea-son. Science proceeds by discarding unworkable ideas, and every hour spent poring over arcane

theories is time not spent refining your own experi-ments. But as Ball points out, old debates have a way of reemerging in modern guises. For instance, early objections to natural phi-losophy—the “unnatural” experiments, the prodigal waste of money on expen-

sive toys—echo modern objections to, say, geneti-cally modified food and the Large Hadron Collider.

Similarly, Livio shows how Einstein’s blunder has risen, phoenixlike, in recent years. In forming his theory of general relativity, Einstein added a so-called cosmological constant to one of his field equations: a repulsive force that countered gravity and (somewhat like air pressure) kept the universe from collapsing in upon itself. Einstein later struck the constant out, discarding it as ugly, ad hoc, and unnecessary. But two teams of scientists resurrected it in the 1990s to explain why our universe is expanding faster than we once realized. On cosmic scales, Einstein’s once-discarded constant may be the dominant force in the universe. (See how frustrating this is? Even when he was wrong, Einstein was right!)

Reading science history might not fix the bugs in your equipment or help you secure a new grant, but it can provide a larger perspective on what scientists do and why we need them. Sci-ence history doesn’t give all the answers, but it does help explain why we seek the answers in the first place. l

Reading science history might not fix the bugs in your equipment or help

you secure a new grant, but it can provide a larger per-spective on what scientsts do and why we need them.


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COM MON PLACE BOOKCollected by Anne Matthews

ConquestEvery gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Change for Peace” speech, April 16, 1953

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

—Stephen Hawking, “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking,” 2010

He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.

—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908

Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnam-ese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards

imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990

Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.

—W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” 1919

He had never read a book. He had never writ-ten a line worth reading. He had never said a prayer. He cared nothing for humanity. He had sprung out of some Californian gully, was perhaps ignorant of his own father and mother, and had tumbled up in the world on the strength of his own audacity.

—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875

New Yorker Eugene Schieffelin, wishing that all Americans could hear each kind of bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare,


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Commonplace Book

introduced sixty starlings to Central Park in 1890, and another forty in 1891. Like many introduced species they found their new cir-cumstances, if anything, better than the old. Aggressive, gregarious, and highly social, they reproduced rapidly, displacing native species such as the American Bluebird as they spread across the continent, to the point where their flocks now darken the skies as Passenger Pigeons once did.

— Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, “Warbling Invaders,” Ecocritical Shakespeare, 2011

Ever since I quit hanging out in Baltimore dive bars, the only place where I still regularly find myself in hostile confrontations with my fel-low man is Amtrak’s Quiet Car … the battle-field where we quiet ones, our backs forced to the wall, finally hold our ground. The Quiet Car is the Thermopylae, the Masada, the Fort McHenry of quiet—which is why the regu-lars are so quick with prepared reproaches, more than ready to make a Whole Big Thing out of it, and why, when the outsiders invari-ably sit down and start in with their auto-nomic blather, they often find themselves surrounded by a shockingly hostile mob of professors, old ladies and four-eyes who look ready to take it outside.

—Tim Kreider, The New York Times, November 17, 2012

“Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” They thought the old man had gone out of his mind. He had been the meekest of men.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

When yesterday Sophia and I were rowing past Mr. Prichard’s land, where the river is bordered by a row of elms and low willows, at 6 P.M., we heard a singular note of distress

as it were from a catbird—a loud, vibrating, catbird sort of note, as if the catbird’s mew were imitated by a smart vibrating spring. I saw a little black animal making haste to meet the boat under the osiers. A young muskrat? A mink? No, it was a little dot of a kitten. … I took it up and dropped it in the boat, but while I was pushing off it ran the length of the boat to Sophia, who held it while we rowed homeward. Evidently it had not been weaned—was smaller than we remembered that kittens ever were—almost infinitely small; yet it had hailed a boat, its life being in danger, and saved itself.

—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, May 1853

Working into the mountain, the two streams drew closer to each other until the divide between them broke down and they were now confluent, one stream changing direction, captured. In this manner, some thousands of streams—consequent streams, pirate streams, beheaded streams, defeated streams—formed and reformed, shifting valleys, making hun-dreds of water gaps with the general and simple objective of finding in the newly tilted land-scape the shortest possible journey to the sea.

—John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, 1983

He had been extremely necessary where money was concerned. Peggy herself had been enabled to live in high style which her father could never have provided, to have everything she wanted, to cut a splendid fig-ure in society; her brother had been main-tained in a fashionable regiment; her father’s estate had been rescued from bankruptcy—the great Clayton revival had been financed entirely by him. Two of the family—he could acquit Sir Charles—had even been able to take up gun-running on the money he had sweated out of the Tonopah mud. Jesus, the English landed gentry! No wonder they’d taken over a quarter of the globe.

—George MacDonald Fraser, Mr. American, 1980


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THE PBK PRESIDENTS POLL


College’s Raison d’êtreBritish literature or software engineering?

For our third poll of the 255 college or university presidents whose institutions have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, we asked,

essentially, what is college for? Should students study HTML code or Shakespeare? Most of the 33 respondents vouched for the value of a lib-eral arts degree over vocational training. (The response rate was 13 percent: May is a busy month at universities.)

“Good professional training must include the kind of intellectual scope and imaginative flexibility that one develops only through liberal learning,” said Brennan O’Donnell, president of Manhattan College. “I’ve heard many times from graduates of our school of engineering (all of whom take required liberal arts courses) some version of the following: ‘My engineering courses got me my job; my arts courses got me my promotions.’ ”

But when faced with a choice between finance and Faulkner, some respondents balked. “It should never be one or the other! That’s how small minds

work,” wrote John Dunn, presi-dent of Western Michigan Uni-versity, who answered “no” to our narrowly posed question.

Besides, the job students train for may not exist in a decade, several presidents pointed out. “The more nar-row the ‘training,’ the shorter the shelf life,” said Philip Glotzbach, of Skidmore Col-lege. Linda Hanson, president of Hamline University in St. Paul, suggested that a liberal arts degree can serve as a safety net: “Having knowledge

and skills that are one dimensional, as in prepa-ration for a specific profession, puts graduates at greater risk of market volatility than graduates who are prepared more comprehensively, with the ability to adapt over time to jobs that in some cases, have not yet been defined.”

The consensus was that college should teach you to think clearly, whether about Proust or poli-tics. As Taylor Reveley of the College of William & Mary summed it up: “Whatever your job (and most young people will have several different ones over their careers), if it’s at all sophisticated, you’ll need to be able to think rigorously, solve prob-lems creatively, communicate effectively, have a breadth of perspective rooted in familiarity with ideas and cultures different than your own, and know how to keep learning for life. A first-rate liberal arts education helps get you in gear on all these fronts, and more.” —MARGARET FOSTER

Q.Andrew Delbanco, in College, warning that liberal arts educa-tion is at risk in America, says college should be “a place where young people fight out among and within themselves contend-ing ideas of the meaningful life.” At the moment, the most pop-ular college major is business administration.

Given the job market, can you make a persuasive argument to your students for a liberal arts education over professional training?

To read all the responses to our question, go to theamericanscholar.org/presidents-poll.

A.YES: 97% NO: 3%


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The American Scholar - Summer 2013

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