The Mayflower Hotel, Part II

Something else I learned, concretely, in the ballroom of the Mayflower: I hold beliefs and understandings that are in tension with each other.  Despite my best efforts at coherence and integration, it turns out I too am lost to emotional contradiction.  Because my every instinct tells me that what I felt at the Lithuanian Independence Day celebration on Thursday night isn't possible, that God, or the cosmos, doesn't move people or nations toward or away from each other, doesn't designate fates.  Such is not to say that there cannot be a great, even ultimate force of causality in the universe.  Only that if there is one, it must be infinitely richer, more complex than we can come to understand by trying to follow the illusory logic of our own experiences.

But that's what I think.  The question is what did I feel?  What did I feel?  Something new and frightening and very, very hard: connection.

At this event, in this magnificent ballroom that has hosted inaugural celebrations for a dozen presidents, a young Lithuanian-American director presented his film about the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, titled The Other Dream Team.  A fine film about a great story, the tough little tribe of Balts busting out, desperate, heroic, even a little hilarious, wearing their donated tie-dye all over Barcelona.

Well.  The thing is... I remember this.  I remember this.  And while that may not sound like shattering news, you have to understand--in Lincoln, Nebraska, where nobody even knew the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union, or cared that the latter no longer existed; in 1992, almost 15 years before I would become a Fulbright grantee to the country and live there for seven months, and 20 years before I would find myself sitting next to Lithuanian friends, speaking (badly) the country's secretive, mathematical language amidst the resplendence of official Washington--I was watching these guys, amazed, and rooting for them.  Basketball was my thing, and I was curious about the world, and here were these guys from this incredible, complicated place, playing my game.  I was fascinated by their names and worked hard to pronounce them appropriately: Marčiulonis, Sabonis, Chomičius.  These were my guys a lifetime ago.

Why?  I don't know.  Coincidence is implicated, but that too is facile.  Rather, there must be a relationship, indescribable, somewhere down in the gears and mystery of human intention, between what surprises and attracts us, and what we're later able to attain.  There must be something in the long process of learning about ourselves that leads to a build-up of personal history in a place or with a people, a build-up of associations, references, experiences, images.  But where is the spark?  Where and why does this movement toward connection begin?

It's not 1992 anymore, I'm not a kid.  I still romanticize wildly in my life, but I've endured as well all the usual disillusionments.  Perhaps with respect to no topic have I been more comprehensively disillusioned (though I can already imagine myself having to recant this, several years hence) than my potential usefulness to or in the nation of Lithuania.  I see pictures now of Kaunas, and I remember nothing but my own folly, paralysis, doubt and ignominious retreat from the place five years ago.

And yet...connection.  Maybe that's what connection is, a history of disillusionment.  Maybe that's the difference between the first inexplicable flicker of interest in a place or person, and the deeper, more challenging mutual knowledge that constitutes real commitment.  Put another way, the connection I felt Thursday night at the Mayflower was not a fated connection, but something far more sacred:  it was the true measure of the last 20 years, and of the distance between Lincoln and Washington and Vilnius.

The Mayflower Hotel, Part I

I once heard an immigration lawyer, in an address to one of my law school classes, ask what exactly we've got in this country.  Meaning, what have we had in our history that has made us worth anything to the world.  After all, he pointed out, that history is pretty short, and frankly quite shameful in spots.  All of our arts and architecture are just offshoots of European traditions.  Ok, we've got some pretty nice weather, he admitted, in the mountains and on the coasts, for example.  But mostly what we've had is openness.  A codified flexibility that has allowed us (or perhaps forced us) to incorporate into our culture and institutions all the strengths of all the people who've ever arrived here from anywhere in the world.

One such refuge seeker, we learned last night at a dinner in honor of Lithuania's declaration of independence from Russia in 1918, was the grandmother of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois.  Senator Durbin, one of the evening's several honored guests, informed the crowd of nearly 400, gathered in the stunning baroque ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., that his grandmother had come here from Lithuania early in the 20th century to escape Russian persecution.  She had with her, in Durbin's telling, little more than her three children (including Durbin's own mother, a young girl at the time) and a Roman missal printed in the Lithuanian language, the use of which language, for printing, had been banned by Czarist authorities.  Speaking no English and having virtually no money, this petrified woman somehow made her way from Baltimore to northern Illinois to meet with her husband, who had preceded her in leaving Lithuania and had begun to establish an American home near Chicago.

Nearly 100 years later, Senator Durbin, a strong supporter of and frequent visitor to Lithuania during its painful process of separation from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, took his grandmother's Lithuanian missal to Vilnius and shared his family's story with the triumphant Seimas (parliament) of a newly independent Lithuania.

Now, I'm aware of how perfect this story sounds, and I'm aware as well that it's very loveliness is a likely indicator of exaggeration or embellishment in its telling.  But I don't care.

I don't care because the exaggeration, though perhaps crass (perhaps not--who knows what's in the Senator's heart), is nevertheless an exaggeration in the right direction.  The exaggeration is what tells us that however mired we might be in antipathy or self-congratulation, however much we may either doubt or overstate our ability to live up to our own ideals, this is still at least what we want to believe: that the people we welcome will make us better, that the world will redeem us by asking us for help.

What Divides Us

"In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found.  In life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established.  If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself."

This is from an excellent article about the American penal system by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker of Jan. 30.  What struck me, though, was nothing about prisons or theories of punishment, but the general relevance of the kind of thinking Gopnik does in this passage.  What struck me is that an article about a great divide (one among many, as we hear so often these days) in American culture and society, is actually in itself representative of the thing that constitutes perhaps the greatest divide of all: the ability and/or inclination to engage in the sort of subtle parsing and problematizing (sorry to use such an egregious English major word) that Gopnik deploys above.  In my experience, neither class, nor race, nor gender, nor religion, nor age, nor even education level attained is as divisive as the willingness (or not) to perceive and, even more, to engage complexity.

There are entire tomes, it would seem, that could be written about this.  Entire tomes, no?

Read the article here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik