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?