Reflections in the Forest

While walking with Nina and the dog through some nearby woods today, the following notion came to me, unbidden: Adulthood is the sadness of understanding that feelings, grandiose and overwhelming, ultimately mean very little.  Adulthood, that is, consists in the unavoidable primacy of mere behavior.  When what you do is more important than what you hope or intend or can imagine, you're officially old.

Where did that come from?  I have no idea.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that a character in a story somewhere is going to have a similar revelation very soon.

In any case, wherever, whoever you are, here's hoping your Christmas has been decidedly child-like.

A Pit Bull Named Chaos

It was his idea, my compatriot.  Call him Ewan.  He wanted to visit the Occupy DC camps in downtown Washington, and just...hang out, meet and greet, feel around for the funny lumps and angles of the whole "Occupy" idea.  He wanted to pass out cigars and hand-warmers, by way of both ingratiation and condolence.  He said he didn't want to provoke, and I know what he meant, and I believe him, but you have to know him; next to "twinkle" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Ewan's left eye.

In any case, we went.  We stood in the cold, first on K St., at McPherson Square, and then in Freedom Plaza, across from City Hall, where the respective Occupy camps are sprawled, with their uproar of tarpaulins, cardboard, and sad artwork, their predictable air of grimy disorientation.  We did hand out cigars.  Or, rather, Ewan handed out cigars; in the traditional manner of socially baffled writers everywhere, I smoked my own and listened as Ewan endeavored to draw out the various protestors.  Few were reticent, though some were incoherent.  One became unresponsive in the process of attempting to, it seemed, devour his gifted cigar.  I don't know how to explain this better; he appeared crazed by something--hunger, cold, boredom, heroin, indifference, something--and simply seized on the tobacco.  We left him to his deepening inscrutability.

We talked to a shaggy portraitist who told us he'd volunteered to leave his apartment so as to spare his landlady the sad business of evicting him.  This was not ironic.  She was kindly, and he didn't want her to suffer the misery of legal proceedings against him.  He, flat busted, didn't want her to suffer on his account.

We heard from another occupier that somewhere on site there was a pit bull named Chaos.  Chaos lived, apparently, in "Camp Chaos", his own little fiefdom within the larger assembly, and was helping the roving cats and sanitation committee members chase off rats.  We looked for Chaos, but to no avail.

Through all this, not surprisingly, perhaps, words swam at me.  Descriptive words which nonetheless remained discrete, refused to coalesce into any sort of explanatory narration.  There was, simultaneously, too much and not enough to report on.  Leaving me to fall back on the few fragments that suggested themselves: decency, futility, inchoate rage, debasement, waste, betrayal, helplessness.  The same fragments experienced and embodied by the protesters themselves, I suppose, even if most of the protestors don't have names for them.

American Augie

I cannot imagine a more electric opening for a novel than the one I've just read.  It is from The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, and it goes like this:

     "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.  But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
     Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

My God.  I mean, my God.  Such juice, such recklessness.  Who does this anymore, who has the courage to be so brusque and essential?  I'm only fifty pages into the book, I don't know yet what Augie's going to grow up to do or be (if you know, please don't spoil it for me), but he seems to announce himself here as a kind of butcher.  The frankness, the almost rude clarity of his formulations--whoever else he is, or will be, Bellow seems to indicate to us, Augie will cleave.

Of particular interest are the first four words: I am an American.  I can't get over it.  It feels like just about the most audacious thing anybody could ever say, it feels just berserk with irony, guts, muscle, regret, paranoia, almost disbelief.  But here's the question: did it feel that way to readers in 1953 when Adventures was published?  Did it feel like that to Bellow?  Or were we all a little more matter-of-fact back then?  How much, if anything, can we understand about ourselves by trying to understand the difference between what Augie's proclamation meant at mid-century, and what it might mean now?

Maybe I'm making too much of this.  As I'm working through it, it's beginning to sound a little like, I don't know, rehash Tom Brokaw or some such.  And I have to admit the chapters that follow Augie's opening salvo seem to me already to have taken a detour or two down the side alleys of their own rambunctiousness and rather herky-jerky enlightenment.  (All of which is, of course, entirely forgivable--the fifty pages of Adventures are the only fifty pages of Bellow I've ever read, but his restless mastery thus far earns him precisely what every author must earn: the right to follow his or her own inner dictates.)

Well, enough with the snooty parsing already.  I suppose the distillation of all this, the point, is to note, for the benefit of...whoever might benefit from it, that Augie's opening is no less than the reason any of us are in this literature business to begin with: the peril, the responsibility, the thrill of self-definition.  I am an American.  Beat that.

People Live

I want to say something about Ukraine, and it is this: Ukraine is exactly like where you live.  Exactly.  And I don't care where you live.  You live in California?  Ukraine is exactly like California.  You live in Dublin?  Just like Ukraine.  Omaha, Chicago, Pretoria, Rome.  You get the idea.

What do I mean?  I mean that in Ukraine, just like everywhere else, people go about their daily lives with the bedrock, usually implicit conviction that those lives are the only normal lives in the world, and that the lives being lived in other places around the globe are the ones that are dangerous, spectacular, backward, or otherwise incomprehensible.

Think about that: wherever you live, whatever you're doing right now, there's a Ukrainian for whom your life is dazzlingly strange.  Keep thinking about that.

Why do I want to say this about Ukraine?  Well, I want to say it about everywhere, it's a topic that obsesses me as a writer and as a human.  But I bring up Ukraine here in part because it's close to my heart, and in part because George Weigel, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center here in Washington, D.C., wrote, about a month ago, a rather uncharacteristically (for him) breathless article about the arrest, trial and sentencing of Ukraine's former Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko to a prison term on some pretty patently trumped-up charges.  (You can read Weigel's article here).


Though any number of sources have tended, terribly incorrectly, to equate Ms. Tymoshenko's victimization in this particular case with a personal and professional saintliness on her part (she was at one time Ukraine's Energy Minister, in which capacity she was deeply implicated in the extremely, extremely fishy sale of gas transit rights to a Russian company, among other somewhat less drastic but no less exasperating transgressions), they are all correct in identifying the Tymoshenko affair as a preposterous one.

What they all miss, however, is the extent to which all this politico-legal flummery is viewed by Ukrainians as completely normal.  For Ukrainians (if I may be so foolhardy as to speak for them), Ms. Tymoshenko's fate is not the menacing herald of some resurrected totalitarian instinct.  It's just good old-fashioned stupidity; and furthermore, as such, it's barely news.  East or West, North or South, most of us have long since caught on that politicians are, in crucial ways (though perhaps not in every way), just dopes.  Complete boneheads.  Thus, Ukrainians quite rightly view President Viktor Yanukovich, (one of the men responsible for Ms. Tymoshenko's prosecution), as a typical political idiot, tone deaf to the likely consequences of his actions.  Though it may seem paradoxical to the West, it is precisely because Ukraine has put up with external domination for centuries that it tends not to perceive every knuckleheaded pronouncement from Kyiv as cause for hand-wringing.

And here we come, finally (I know, I know), to my particular response to Weigel.  As my wife puts it, the average Ukrainian's understanding of the cosmos hasn't changed much over the last, say, 1500 years.  As pagans, they reckoned that there were forces in the world greater than them, which forces had to be, somehow, survived.  When Christianity came, they reckoned that God was a force in the world greater than them, Who had to be, somehow, survived.  And so on through the centuries.  Droughts, Mongols, Russians, Jesus, the souls of the dead, etc.  Mysterious and dangerous, all, to varying degrees.

And so, in my experience, it remains with Ukrainians.  The world is to be shrugged at and kept a wary eye on.  Ukraine, Mr. Weigel, is neither Catholic, as you'd like it to be, nor Russian Orthodox, as Russia would like it to be, nor neo-Soviet, as you fear it could become.  It is pagan.  It is superstitious and a little goofy.  I know neither how to make this point strongly enough, nor how to make the fact of it more palatable to my Catholic friends and family: I have never, in my decade of involvement with the country, met a Ukrainian who knew or cared anything about religion.  Church weddings are for pretty pictures, and that is all. 

Because I understand this to be true, because I've come very deeply to understand and even (to a point) to identify with the Ukrainian world-view, I have a further complaint against Weigel, and it is this: to suggest, as he does, that "In keeping alive the idea of a free and independent Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church played a role similar to that of the Catholic Church in Soviet-occupied Poland", is to do precisely what he accuses Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church of doing, namely, claiming Ukraine for himself.  I am sorry, Mr. Weigel, but you, as a Catholic, do not get to take credit for Ukrainian independence.

As I mentioned above, there are a thousand nuances, caveats, and clarifications that should be added here, but to which the blog format is particularly unaccommodating.  I'm sorry that I can't paint a fuller, more accurate picture.  But even if I could, the take-home message would be the same, and it would be summarized brilliantly by Isaac Babel, the early 20th-Century Ukrainian short-story writer and novelist.  In response to the West's furor, it's trembling reportage, analysis, prognostication, outrage, and so on, I would offer a four-line dialogue from Babel's Diary of a Red Army Cavalryman, between an itinerant soldier from Odessa and a resident of the town in (then) Poland which the soldier's regiment has entered:

"Where are you from, young man," the man asks.
"From Odessa," the soldier answers.
"And what is it like in Odessa?"
"People live."

What the Artists Know

Dr. Timothy Snyder is an eminent historian, Yale University professor, and author of the much-celebrated 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

The bloodlands of Dr. Snyder's title roughly correspond to the expanse of Eastern Europe between Berlin in the West and Moscow in the East (though he refines the area further than that) and running from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.  Since more than 100 of us at the Foreign Service Institute are currently preparing to depart for posts in this region (present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia), our regional studies instructor (former University of Nebraska professor, Bill Gleason) prevailed upon Dr. Snyder to speak to us about the theses of his work, and it was our tremendous good fortune that he agreed.

Though Dr. Snyder is clearly a unique thinker and a gifted speaker, he is first and foremost a historian (or, if you prefer an historian).  This means, of course, that his ideas exist within the contexts and traditions of academic historiography.  His innovations are improvements upon and responses to the way that historians have thought in the past.   Thus, most of us in his audience who are not historians will have relatively little to say about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of his several revolutionary postulations.

But one particular moment during his address stood out to me, mostly due to the fact that it was so much like so many other moments I've experienced in my life while listening to scholars of whatever caliber.  It was this:

During a discussion of "collaboration," i.e., work (sometimes banal, often heinous) performed by non-Nazi or non-Soviet populations on behalf of either the Nazis or the Soviets (and forgive me, historians, if this definition takes too many liberties with "collaboration" as a term of art), Dr. Snyder reported that scholars have too often focused on ideologically-motivated collaboration, and too little on economically-, or socially-motivated collaboration.  He averred that quite likely the vast, vast majority of collaboration was indeed motivated by very simple social and/or economic exigencies; i.e., that everyday Latvians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, etc., acquiesced to the ghastly demands of Nazi or Soviet soldiers simply because that seemed at the time like the only way to survive.

Well this seems uncontroversial.  And indeed, as I understand it, it's not so much that academic historians have denied that this is the case, but rather that they've tended to write it off as unworthy of much concerted study (or as too difficult to study because so often undocumented, or what have you).  Dr. Snyder, though, appeared to me to be suggesting that in as much as each "common" or "unexceptional" life constitutes a kind of universe unto itself, a comprehensive and utterly inimitable mode of being in the world, those common lives are proper subjects of inquiry every bit as much as the unexceptional lives--the farmer offering eggs to a Nazi patrol tells us as much about the nature of war, deprivation and betrayal, as does the spy trading in secrets about troop movements or supply routes.

And it was at this point that I thought of a book I recently re-read.  Written by a young gentleman named Jonathan Safran-Foer, it's titled Everything is Illuminated, and among its many subjects is a Ukrainian grandfather haunted by memories of a night in 1943 when a German solider gave him a choice: identify your best friend as a Jew or witness the murder of your wife and infant son. 

I thought as well of South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, in which a local authority in a far-flung corner of an unnamed, vaguely post-apocalyptic empire is forced either to repress the residents of the settlement for which he's responsible or face personal ruin.

I thought of Chilean novelist (and recent Nobel laureate as well), Mario Vargas Llosa, writing about (among so many other things) the machinations in which so many Dominicans were caught under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the 1940s and 50s. 

And so on. There are of course poems, films, paintings, songs, and any number of other artistic forms as well which treat of this topic.  It's an all but biblical theme.  The question is, why has it been missing (to a greater or lesser extent) from the discipline of history?  Why has it taken a Timothy Snyder to bring into the academy what the artists have been talking about for millenia?  And why does it always take a Timothy Snyder?  Because it always does.  Any curious, perceptive lay person paying attention over the years will have noticed that academia is forever atwitter over ideas that have been abroad for decades.  The pompous, oblivious professor agog over his discovery that water is wet, the wheel round, etc., etc., is all but a trope in popular culture.  Why?

I don't have an answer, really.  I have inklings, suspicions, some of which, probably inappropriately, border on grudges.  In asking the question, though, I'm actually less interested in the intricacies and interrelations of various academic pathologies (we all know about them, and we all know that they are legion), and more interested in exactly what it is that artists are doing so presciently and boldly and sensitively.  I should probably better ask what it is, after all, that our artists know, what they're able to intuit and reveal.  If historians catalog and compile, and then deduce; if scientists hypothesize and then test, and then report (and I realize, many would suggest that those are big ifs); then what are we artists doing?  Do we even know?  And if we did know, would our knowledge render us unable to go on doing it?

The Month of the Flying Hemp Fibers

Spalis, in Lithuanian.  Means October.  And it's the same word as the word for the little filaments of hemp that float around (I'm told) when one makes rope.  Apparently, for whatever reason (the harvesting of plants presumably having something to do with it), autumn was the time when the ancient Balts sat down and made all their hemp into rope, in the course of which, a million tiny threads of the stuff were sent drifting into the air.  Such that later, when somebody thought to fix events in time and memory, when somebody asked when somebody's daughter was born, or when the bear got into so-and-so's hut and ate all his plums, the answer came, you know, when we were making the rope, when there was all that hemp dust in the air.  Spalis.  October.

Likewise Lapkritis, or November: the month when the leaves fall.  A little obvious, that one, but still.  And May: Gegužė, meaning cuckoo, the month when, between the lengthening days and the stupid freaking cuckoo birds who won't shut the bloody hell up, you're just going to start getting less sleep.

I don't know what it is, but something about this appeals to me, to an ancient element in me.  Lunch is pietus, which is the same as the word for South, lunch being the meal you eat when the sun is in the south.  Tomorrow is rytoj, the same root as the word for East; tomorrow is what will happen upon the new sunrise (and now I'm suddenly imagining Annie being done in Lithuanian...).  

This is basic stuff, not all that uncommon among world languages, and there are volumes upon volumes of theory out there on the handling of natural phenomena in different Indo-European tongues, but for some reason (probably only because Lithuanian is the language that's happening to me at the moment), through these linguistic quirks and underpinnings, I'm beginning to feel a unique connection to the deep, historical mind of Lithuania.  I feel like I get that medieval Lithuanian Mindaugas or Vytautas or whomever, sitting on his rock in his forest, roasting his pietus over a fire.  Watching the light change.  Watching the hemp fibers settle in the sun.

And what would Rachmaninov think?

On the off chance that anyone ever doubted how genuinely pretentious and insufferable I really am, I offer as evidence of my folly, well, the title of this post for one, but also a description and discussion of the events that occasioned it:

Recently, during lunch in the cafeteria at the Foreign Service Institute, surrounded by some hundred or so of the various students and instructors, the recently repatriated bureaucrats and grandees, the defense contractors, trophy wives, functionaries, do-gooders and sundry other wandering souls who daily populate the campus of this country's premier foreign affairs training center, I decided to listen to some Rachmaninov.  I don't know Rachmaninov's oeuvre especially well (of course, I don't know any composer's oeuvre especially well), and I only own one of his pieces, but it's a piece so surpassingly beautiful, so rich, so deft and fragile and desperate all at once, that I find I can go to it under almost any circumstance, in any kind of mood, for any reason, and find in it the holy uplift I seem eternally to need.  Nor was this instance in the FSI cafeteria an exception--immediately, upon hearing the introductory burst of complex harmonies in the first movement of the work (which I came to know as the Vespers, but which is apparently also referred to as the All-Night Vigil), I had the following thought: This work requires me to celebrate even those who would denigrate it.  Because of Rachmaninov, I must love those who do not love Rachmaninov.

I wrote those sentences down in a notebook, despite their clumsiness.  And then I had another thought: This is a uniquely Christian formulation of meaning and order and essence.

The question though: is this last true?  Was my thinking on the topic inescapably Christian?  Is the instinct in question an instinct that transcends spiritual practices, religious institutions, sacred doctrines and dogma, and so on?  Or is it possible that the idea of such enlightened magnanimity is the singular insight (I know some would say revelation) of Christianity, and one that has come definitively to shape our consciousnesses in the 21st Century western world?

Further, is this an empirical question?  Can comparative religion scholars tell us what certain texts, the dates of which are generally well-established, say on the matter and thereby determine for us who thought what first?  Will that get us past the slipperiness of all my quasi-mysticism and pseudo-neurology?

And what would Rachmaninov think?  Probably nothing.  Or, to put it better, probably this:

Polo

Polo, undeniably, is a sport played by and for wealthy white people.  The markers of class and attainment which surround it are clear, if not always entirely flagrant.  And no doubt where there exists that aura of material ascendancy there will exist as well all the striving, scrambling and jockeying that constitutes a rather breathless game in itself, a kind of unctuous polo of the audience.  Hence the (often justified) cliches of pretension and debauchery that pervade many of our conceptions of affluence.

But.  But.  Having yesterday attended a real-live, honest-to-God polo match, I feel compelled to offer a theory of at least one way in which it might not be entirely indefensible to exist in this otherwise ridiculous realm of excess and ostentation.  And it has to do with boots.

How much do the boots these polo players were wearing cost?  $700?  $900?  Who knows.  Conceivably enough to pay rent for two months in most mid-sized Midwestern cities.  Enough to offend the sensibilities of most everyone I grew up with.

But here's the thing: nobody who's ever played polo buys them because they cost that much.  Rather, they buy them because they're worth that much.  Stand next to a man standing next to his polo pony, as we did yesterday, and you'll realize what a sophisticated bit of equipment he's wearing on his feet.  The zipper, in the classic Argentine design, is on the front and covered with flaps:

Or, sometimes the boot is even covered with "over-chaps" to prevent wear from rubbing against stirrup irons, or the rider's horse, or his opponent's horse should there be contact:

And about that contact--it is repeated and sustained, these boots must endure the press and grate of horse hair, the seep of horse sweat.  These boots, magnificent though they are, are not show pieces.  Rather, they are made in anticipation of mud, salt, shit, and yes, frequently spilled beer or gin.  They are something that seems to have become strangely rare in our time: they are both beautiful and used.

Now, what the brief and rather tame essay above is not, is an unqualified apology for the aristocratic classes such as they continue to exist here in Northern Virginia, or wherever they might be lurking in the Western world.  Rather, it is a proposition.  I know from my own experience that what might smack of pretension to some is in fact experienced as an earnest and profound engagement by others.  I know that when I wonder out loud about some abstruse question, say, whether or not Chinese trade and investment in sub-Saharan Africa constitutes a 21st-Century reincarnation of colonialism, I'm not doing so in order to impress anybody (because, really, who would ever be impressed by that question?); I'm actually thinking about it.  And though we do well always to keep a wry eye on our own aspirations, whether they be aspirations to eloquence, expertise, gentility, or what-have-you, we need nevertheless to be free to aspire fully, desperately even.  If we are not thusly free, if we allow our skepticism to inhibit our curiosity, or allow our instincts toward moral disapprobation to overwhelm our patience, then we risk missing so much and being the unhappier for it.  As you can see below, Nina and I, deeply in touch with our own pretensions, had a blast at that polo match.

Homes

Because in my estimation George F. Kennan (Milwaukee native, cold war diplomat, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian) has said most things better than most of the rest of us will ever say anything, I offer here, on the occasion of Nina's and my re-engagement with Lithuania, a quote from Kennan's incomparable memoirs:

“If Wisconsin, then, was not ‘home,’ what was?  Well, there was now Princeton, and the farm in Pennsylvania, and the cottage in Norway.  But there was more than that.  There were those curious places…where I had felt so overpowering a sense of familiarity as to evoke the mystery of a former life.  Home, then, was the whole great arc of the northern and western world, from Moscow across Scandinavia and the British Isles to Wisconsin.  One was, in other words, a sort of Nordic cosmopolitan, truly domiciled only in the natural beauty of the seas and countrysides of this northern world; in its seasons and its storms…”

Sentence of the Day

In case, like me, you're not having any fun with your sentences these days, here's one of William Kennedy's:

It was dark now and I was wet to the underwear, standing in the middle of desolation, maybe about to be buried in a landslide, giving traffic directions to a bleeding, one-eyed psychopath who was, with one hand, trying to drive a mythic vehicle backwards up an enchanted mountain.

Now if that don't put the gnats back in your herb garden, what does, huh? ;)

Memorials

What are memorials for, what are they about?  Take Abe, above.  The stern, but probably not quite admonitory gaze.  The impatiently clutched left hand seemingly intended to suggest the impact of those fabled emotional and intellectual burdens which, nevertheless, have failed to degrade the subject's posture or general aura of rectitude.  All wonderful, as far as they go.  Likely accurate, and therefore evocative.  But is that it?  Mere evocation?  Isn't that a bit obsessive, the constant imperative to remember, remember, remember?  Remember what?  It almost doesn't seem to matter.

Viewing several of DC's memorials last night with friends who were visiting from, well, Lincoln (NE), I couldn't help sensing a desperation behind our society's drive to remind itself of everything horrible and astonishing.  Why?  Are we really afraid we'll forget?  I don't think so.  I think it's more complicated.  I think we're afraid we'll lose control of the meaning.  We're terrified that what we think we understand today about Abe Lincoln, or the Korean war, will be undermined or reinterpreted.  So we try to fix the significance of people and events in time and place.  Memorials--always made of stone, or steel.  Right?

It's insufficient, of course.  People are dynamic, wars unfathomable.  We have to know them as we know everything--conditionally.

Ultimately, I don't suppose any of this amounts to a defensible objection to memorials.  Indeed, their very insufficiency is probably important.  But why can't that insufficiency, then, be our starting point?  Why aren't memorials about the insufficiency of memory?  Or are they?

Of Bids, and of Lists, II

Though as we're quickly learning, a general amenability to sudden change is a key asset for a Foreign Service Officer, our bids seemed really to coalesce today, after I spent several hours in a suite at FSI (the Foreign Service Institute) known as the OBC (Overseas Briefing Center).  The OBC contains gems such as post videos made by officers and their families at each of the posts, and the so-called Personal Post Insights form (PPI), which is a survey that post personnel can fill out anonymously, and on which they can list the grievances, grudges, regrets, exasperations, and conspiracy theories they've accrued during their time at post, as well as the satisfactions and delights of the post.

After poring over these for hours today, and then conferring with Nina, I think we have a pretty firm setting on our high and medium bids.  They are as follows:

High--Astana, Kazakhstan; Belgrade, Serbia; Bogota, Colombia; Geneva, Switzerland; Krakow, Poland; Kyiv, Ukraine; Vilnius, Lithuania.

Medium--La Paz, Bolivia; Nicosia, Cyprus; Oslo, Norway; Rome, Italy; Sofia, Bulgaria; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Washington, DC.


Now.  Several of these may seem perplexing, even downright counterintuitive, or just plain bananas to those who know Nina and myself well.  And several of them, if anyone's counting, did not show up on our first list of likely high/medium bids.  So, there follow selected explanations.

Bogota: This posting was added a few days after Nina received the initial list of open posts.  Not well known, I suspect, is the fact that though near the equator, Bogota sits at an elevation of more than 8,000 ft. above sea level.  Due to this elevation, Bogota has an extraordinarily mild climate--high temperatures in 'winter' are rarely below 55 degrees, and high temperatures in 'summer' almost never rise above 75 degrees.  Indeed, it is said about most of Colombia that there are no seasons, only elevations.  In addition to this pleasing climate, there are many very positive facets of a Colombia posting.  First, individuals who, like Nina, speak Spanish receive incentive pay for going to a post at which Spanish is required.  Second, the post fulfills the Junior Officer requirement of doing a Consular tour in one of the first two assignments.  Third, the PPIs report that spouses at the Bogota embassy have ample opportunity to work if they choose.  Fourth, security in Bogota itself is of minimal concern--little more than the usual big city issues with pick-pocketing, purse-snatching, and the like.  In general, all available information indicates that Bogota is an overlooked jewel of a post.

Ulaanbaatar:  There's no getting around it, Ulaanbaatar is considered by many to be an irredeemable dump in the middle of nowhere.  But.  But.  The job there is a particularly appealing one, having to do with several science and technology issues related to climate change and agriculture.  Furthermore, it's a new position which will likely allow the holder of the job considerable leeway in shaping her work.  And the landscape surrounding the city is breathtaking, an unimaginable sweep of mountains (the Altai range, if I'm not mistaken) and grasslands.  The biggest question here is taking a pet to a post that's so far away and so hard to get to.  For that reason, we still need to do some investigating before we rate this position medium, but it is interesting in its own impenetrable sort of way.

La Paz: Like Bogota, La Paz sits at an extraordinary elevation (some 13,000 ft.), and has, therefore, extraordinary weather.  Such extreme altitude does give one pause in considering one's health and the health of one's pet (and in fact the State Dept. requires special medical clearance, which, I suppose, either Nina or I might not receive if we're tested and found wanting).  But it has its charms as well, and the post holds many of the same inducements as Bogota.

Nicosia: This may also get downgraded to a low ranking in the end.  They drive on the left side of the road.  They endure occasional extreme water rationing.  Etc.  But it's a relatively wealthy European city on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.  Mountains, beaches, and no humidity.

Rome: Pollution, crime, gridlock.  But, a fairly interesting job in the economic section of the embassy, dealing with the full range of international economic and foreign policy issues in a G-8 country.

Oslo: Obviously much in the news of late.  So much so as to make it the butt of jokes.  So much so that foreheads will surely be slapped in disbelief upon finding it a part of this list.  But the recent incident there is a red herring, and everyone has to know this.  Oslo is no more dangerous now than it was a month ago or a year ago, and it is no more dangerous than any other place on the list.  What happened there could happen anywhere.  Could happen in California or Canada, or Kyiv, or even at, say, a shopping mall in a place like Omaha.  Right?  C'mon.  Is Oslo dangerous?  Yes.  The world is dangerous.  Life is dangerous.

In the end, though the ways of the Foreign Service are inscrutable, they tend to put people where those people fill needs.  And for that reason, I truly, truly can't imagine them putting Nina someplace other than a) Eastern Europe/former Soviet Union, or b) a Spanish-speaking country.  Now, one last caveat is that Mexico is a Spanish-speaking country.  And there are probably at least a dozen posts in Mexico on the full bid list.  Which means that, yes, Nina could conceivably get sent to any one of them, despite the fact that she's ranked them all low.  I'm not sure what to say about that possibility.  We may know more after we meet with Nina's Career Development Officer tomorrow.  We may not.  In the end, we signed up for worldwide availability, and that's a promise we'll fulfill.  If doing so means landing in Ciudad Juarez, well, one just has to keep in mind: it's only for two years, we can drive the dog there, and the flights back to the States will be short and cheap.

Of Bids, and of Lists

Raise your hand if you've heard of Ouagadougou.  Or Lome.  I hadn't.  All the others posts on Nina's 162nd training class bid list I'd heard of.  Doesn't mean I wanted to go to very many of them, but I at least knew that they existed.

Let me back up.  "Bid list": the list of open positions which Nina and the 97 other new recruits in her training class will be filling when they finish their training.  The class gets the list, each trainee confers with his or her spouse/partner/family/guinea pig to rank each open position either High, Medium or Low priority, and then turns those rankings in to the Career Development Office, which ultimately makes the assignments (presumably taking the trainees' rankings into consideration).  As I understand it, the CDO tries to match people up with their stated preferences in making the assignments, but at least theoretically would not hesitate to assign a trainee to a post with which their skills and time frame match up, even if the trainee has ranked that position as a low priority for him or her.  This contradicts my previous understanding that it was quite rare for someone to get sent to a post s/he had ranked as a low priority.  Anecdotally, however, we've still not met anyone from previous training classes who was sent to a post they'd ranked low.

So, what were some of those other posts, those places I'd actually heard of?  The most relevant (that is, the ones we've ranked either high or medium) are: Astana, Asuncion, Belgrade, Geneva, Krakow, Kyiv, La Paz, Sofia, Vilnius, and Washington DC (for a one-year domestic post).  Beyond these, there were more than a dozen posts in Mexico, two in Caracas, and two in Santo Domingo, to which it's at least conceivable that Nina might be sent, given her Spanish proficiency; this despite the fact that we've ranked them low.  The rest of the posts were either in Africa or Asia, to which I can't imagine even the Federal Government would send us.

All that said, the list itself is not set in stone.  Posts get added and subtracted--indeed, posts can be changed even after assignments have been made, and even, occasionally, after a good chunk of language training has been done.  Thus, we still know relatively little at this point.  The Kyiv post fits time-wise and, obviously, language-wise, but is not a position in Nina's particular job track.  (Another side-bar tutorial--there are five career "tracks" in the Foreign Service: Political, Economic, Management, Consular, and Public Diplomacy.  Nina's track is Public Diplomacy, the Kyiv position is Political.)  The Vilnius post is a Public Diplomacy post, but requires functional Lithuanian--Nina obviously doesn't speak Lithuanian, though she could by the time the position starts, roughly a year from now...

And so on.  You can see how many moving parts there are, and how rarely any one position will match up perfectly with any one candidate; the CDO describes the matching process as "chess in 3-D."

Not surprisingly, this business of bidding is what has been preoccupying us for the last 24 hours or so, since Nina brought the list home last night.  It's a strange kind of obsession.  On the one hand, it is undeniably a great spur to the imagination, and rather an electrifying new reality with which to grapple.  On the other it's all perfectly bureaucratic, a nightmare of tedious scheming to get what you're after.

I don't know.  That sounds too conclusory.  I suppose that like any writer worth his laptop, I'm over-eager for a grand and punchy summing-up.  The trick (if I've learned anything from J.D. Salinger) is to subdue the instinctive desire for impact, without defusing it.  Needless to say, I'm working on that.

And how did this turn into a post about writing?

Two Books

In 1452, a monk (or scribe) living in the city of Mainz, in the southwest of Germany, began work on a tremendous bible, a Biblia latina, which would take him 15 months to complete.  That bible, seen in the top picture, above, is now known as the Giant Bible of Mainz, and sits encased in glass to the right of the entrance to the main reading room at the Library of Congress. 

In that same city of Mainz, at the same time (roughly), Johannes Gutenberg was perfecting the process of printing with movable type.  Among Gutenberg's innovations (many of which were also tinkered with by other printers, metal-smiths, etc. around Europe) were oil-based ink, and a hand mold for casting metal (rather than wood) type.  In at least 1450 Gutenberg's press was operating, producing Latin grammars and, later, indulgences for the Church.  In 1455, the press produced 180 copies of the "42-line" (so-called because each page comprised 42 lines) Gutenberg bible.  Of those 180 copies, 30 were printed on vellum.  Of those thirty, three remain: one in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, one in the British Library in London, and one which sits encased in glass to the left of the entrance to the main reading room at the Library of Congress.

Obviously volumes have been written on the impact of the Gutenberg revolution.  Time magazine named Gutenberg its Man of the Millenium.  The sudden diffusion of ideas occasioned by the availability of mass-produced printed materials made possible the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution.  Before Gutenberg, no one read because there was nothing to read.  And there was nothing to read because no one read. 

I stood today between those two bibles at the Library of Congress.  I stood thinking that I'm likely to spend a good chunk of my life having nothing to do, and knowing no one in whichever city Nina's diplomatic orders have landed us.  Why?  Because of books.  Because I can read.  Because through reading I can come to sense a world around me about which I might write books.  Because the books I read and write will make the cities of my life holy and true.

I have staked my life on books.

And I stood there looking at the reason I'm able to do so, and I cried.  I am who I am because of that bible.  I cried.  I'm crying now.

Silence

Silence, Mother Teresa says. The fruit of silence is prayer. The fruit of prayer is faith. The fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service. The fruit of service is peace.

An astonishing sequence, this. I've been thinking about it for months, since a wise counselor shared it with me. It continues, every time I come to it, to surprise, and challenge. It's a surprise, initially, to consider that silence does not automatically or immediately equal peace. We think of the two as being linked so closely, as following so completely each from the other, that they are at least functionally synonymous. We think, peace and quiet, and don't see Mother Teresa's intermediaries coming. That said, those intermediaries are themselves surprisingly intuitive. Each step makes a kind of unexpected, yet obvious sense, irrespective of how much work it might take to make said step, or how easy it might be for the progression through them all to break down at any point. And there is work, and there are breakdowns. And that's surprise no. 3: despite the clarity of the formulation, despite that obviousness, there's nothing pat or facile about it. It's complicated, and hard.

Surprise no. 4: Mother Teresa, a tough little thinker.

Well. Why lead off a blog with this topic? Because today, after more than a month of frantic activity, of upheaval and noise, there is a fifth-floor apartment in Falls Church, VA, that has fallen blessedly, blessedly silent.

And since the fruit of silence is prayer, and since writing is a kind of prayer, well... Watch this space.