How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? Read a Novel

I don't terribly often link to other sites, and it's not like my flagging an article that was already in the New York Times is going to earn said article any wider dissemination, but I just couldn't resist this one: Your Brain on Fiction.

So apparently reading fiction makes you smarter.  Kinda seems like something a lot of us already knew, but hey, we fiction writers, assaulted, staggering away from the hulking threat of obsolescence, need all the help we can get.  Maybe I should order up some bumper stickers: If you value your emotional acuity, thank a novelist.  

I figure as long as it fits on a ribbon it'll sell, right?

John Adams! St. Paul! America!

 
Nearing 90, well-advanced and suffering his dotage, without the powerful aid of his wife and great friend Abigail for many years, John Adams, the querulous successor to George Washington as president of the newly united states of America, supposedly stopped during a walk in the Massachusetts countryside to marvel at the intricacy and majesty of a wildflower.  He bid his companion admire the sight as well, and the two of them stood in the road quietly until Adams, overcome, shouted to the fields and orchards, and to the heavens, "Rejoice, evermore!  Rejoice!  Evermore!"  As played by Paul Giamatti in the HBO miniseries based on Adams' life, the old ex-president giggled and gripped his walking stick, tried to arrange himself into a position of worship on his knees.  He couldn't do it, he was too old and infirm, but by God he tried.  He tried to meet the moment with all the fervor of gratitude, appreciation, awe, engagement and bursting joy that it demanded.  He had life, and this was what one must do with life: Rejoice in it.  Rejoice!

Two hundred years later, I walk out each day into the Virginia sunshine with Adams and Whitman and Emerson and Saul Bellow and William Kennedy behind me, and with my papers and books and songs, all those consolations of learning and feeling before me, and I think, Yes!  Yes, John Adams, yes!  Rejoice!

Well.  What of it?  Such giddiness and overstatement.  Adams' exhortation was drawn from a letter of St. Paul.  And it occurs to me that had I encountered it in the context of scripture, I'd have bristled at it.  Why?  Why does it move me so as part of an impressionistic (if well-documented) biography, when it would've chafed as a doctrinal imperative?  Am I really so brazen, so completely unwilling to be instructed that I can't recognize or accept fine advice when it comes from any kind of (putative) institutional authority?  Apparently.  But of this growling cockiness I'm sure God is aware, and I suspect that in His better moments He's inclined to forgive me for it.  I am an American, after all, and certain things can't be helped.

The greater difficulty, as I see it, is in accounting for the very sudden luck in my life that has made it rather easier than it otherwise might have been to do all this exuberant hollering.  However cavalier I might be about preferring John Adams' visceral joy to St. Paul's admonitions, I at least can remember that in any event there are a great many people in my life, dear friends and readers of this blog, as well as untold multitudes in America and throughout the world who cannot but consider themselves more bound to heartbreak, emptiness and disappointment than to celebration.  I am not insensitive to the concrete sources of despair in people's lives.  I felt them acutely in my own life until very, very recently.  And I felt vexed and betrayed by joy--I had the strongest sense of it, I understood and venerated it, I felt the aching need of it everywhere.  But I couldn't grasp it.  Now I can.  I can swim in it, and I do, unreservedly.

But how did such a miracle occur?  My best (if still faltering) answer is that it isn't a miracle.  That in fact, it's a mistake to perceive discontinuity in my circumstances, or in any of our circumstances.  Better to understand experience as a spectrum, lived continuously and without end. At each pole of this spectrum is an almost incomprehensible fullness--at one pole, the fullness of joy; at the other, the fullness of anguish.  In their fullness, the two modes find a complimentary perfection.  This is the only way I can make sense of my current joy, by reference to my own (previous) and others' (current) sadness.  And it's the hope of the joyful man that by reference to his joy, others will be able make sense of their sadness.  That's my hope.  It's a blundering hope, this is a blundering post, and mine is a blundering life.  But it's mine now, in a way that it hasn't been before.  It's mine because of the blunders, and so I blunder on, rejoicing.  Rejoicing in fortune!  Rejoicing in art!  Rejoicing in human failure and error and ridiculousness!  Rejoicing in America and animals and the strange design of everything!  Everything!  Rejoice, everything!  Rejoice!

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

Let Them Be Incorruptible

A monk, an abbot, in fact, kneels, alone, and calls to mind those of his brothers who are soon to undertake a monstrously difficult voyage.  He thinks, about these brother monks of his, thusly:

They'd want much praying for; none was more susceptible than the wanderer to the ills that afflict the spirit to torture faith and nag belief, harrowing the mind with doubts.  At home...conscience had its overseers and its exterior taskmasters, but abroad the conscience was alone, torn between Lord and Foe.  Let them be incorruptible, he prayed, let them hold true...

That to which the abbot prays his brothers might hold true, is the way of their fictional Order, the Albertian Order of Leibowitz.  The abbot, of course, is fictional, too, this is from a book, and a rather remarkable one at that, especially considering that it's technically classifiable as a science-fiction book, taking place as it does over the course of nearly two millenia, and ending with a second world-wide nuclear holocaust in the year three-thousand, seven-hundred and some-such.  The book's imagined monks follow the rule of their founder, one Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a one-time nuclear technician who in the 1950s, after a first, incomplete, bout of international nuclear mayhem, undertakes to save what he can of recorded human knowledge from destruction -- the survivors on the North American continent are so traumatized that, in their grief and rage, they seek systematically to eliminate learning from their culture.  It is in defiance of this virulent anti-intellectualism that Blessed (later Saint) Liebowitz is martyred.  It is in defiance of later generations of this suspicious rabble that the brothers collect, preserve, reproduce, defend and study all extant texts from Leibowitz's--our--time.

The book's title is A Cantlicle for Leibowitz.  It was a sensation in its time, some 250,000 copies sold, even though it probably isn't a towering, preeminent achievement of world literature (whatever any designation like that might mean, if anything).  It is probably better described as a serious, often humorous, ultimately powerful engagement with a single question: what price security?  The answer to which comes: there is no security, at any price.  Security is unpurchasable.  Humanity is erratic, and the only protection against eternal doom is the ingenious, heroic surrender that is personal humility.

And, of course, adherence to the pre- and proscriptions of Catholic doctrine and dogma; Leibowitz is an explicit, if relatively nuanced and calm, defense of the doggedly objective universe of the Church (or at least that's the reading of the book that most readily suggests itself to me).  Even so, in its careful tracing of the paths of human confusion the book is unmistakably more literary than evangelical.  It may come down on the side of dogma, but it is not dogmatic.

None of which has anything to do with the quote with which I began, and I admit, the quote itself is not central to the themes or events of the book.  It's just something that caught me, which it would have done in any case, but which it did all the more so as the gentleman who recommended the book to me, a Foreign Service Officer from Nina's class of new recruits, is this week bound for Beijing to begin his first assignment.  Such departures well remind us that we're not to be in Virginia forever, or even for very much longer, and that in fact we're unlikely to be in any one spot for very much longer than a few years over the coming decades.  A fact which none of us much minds, but which can easily fall victim to our all-devouring myopia.  And while it's probably an overripe bit of romanticizing to imagine ourselves the noble, wandering objects of the abbot's prayers, it does not seem to me unreasonable to call out for whatever aid the cosmos might be able to provide to us and to our diplomatic colleagues as we trot off, wearing our various suits and badges of uncertainty -- what do we believe, and whom; who is Lord and who is Foe; what is conscience, where home?

In the service of human certainty, let us be unconvinceable.  That we might be free to believe, let us perfect our doubt.

Leibowitz's author, by the way, Walter M. Miller, Jr., shot himself to death in January, 1996, at the age of 72.

This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine

Says Prospero of savage, tragic and ill-used Caliban.  Of course there has grown up around Shakespeare's wizard and slave a rather intemperate notoriety, most notably of the sort that holds up the pair as a model of colonial oppression.  Which is fair enough so far as it goes.  But what to make of this last line Prospero speaks regarding Caliban?  This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.  It's shattering, no?  Absolutely shattering, heart-breaking, pregnant with aching regret and sorrow.  Or so it seems to me.  I can't get it out of my mind.

And to that end, I've been tinkering with the idea of doing a novel-length reinvention of The Tempest (because nobody's ever had that idea before).  With an ambassador, a woman, (thanks Julie Taymor and Helen Mirren for that inspiration: watch here) playing restlessly at the magic and misdirection of international relations, as the title character.  The following paragraph came to me, the opening:

The Ambassador, the Honorable Helena Whitaker (ne Prospejo) is a woman of incantations.  Also of elaborate, loud curses, prognoses, inducements.  Storms of reminiscence.  Finally, of bindings.  Each day, most often straightaway in the morning, in company of her ice water and mysteriously scented underthings, she is forced to acknowledge anew her connection with all the rigors of attachment and corrective orthodoxy that haunt her so, that define her.  She sees, in her inner projections and outlines, a universe of these bindings, damned bindings, bindings both tender and accursed, exquisite, necessary, destitute and unsustainable.


I don't know.  What do you think?