Quo Vadimus, or The Long Bridge

Two years ago around this time I had 30 staples in my side after a pair of nasty surgeries.  The day before Thanksgiving I had the staples out.  One of them didn't want to let go - the doc had to twist and tug, and I almost passed out.  Then I rode down a couple floors in the hospital elevator and had a bone marrow biopsy.  A few days later I flew from Nebraska to Washington, D.C. to start chemotherapy at Georgetown University Hospital.  When we landed, my wife and I checked in at our passable extended-stay hotel in Crystal City (Arlington, VA), and went for a walk on the nearby Long Bridge.

I've no idea why it's called the Long Bridge.  It's not especially long.  It runs out past the Reagan Airport runways, along a marshy part of the Potomac where Eagles sometimes circle, fish, and land in the trees.  The Pentagon sits to the left, across I-395.  A glassy, brand-new Boeing facility is set near the start of the bridge, and at the far end is a rise from which one can see the Washington Monument, the Capital building, and much of DC's leafy, northwesterly spread.  As I was beginning chemotherapy, I went for walks out to that elevated end of the bridge, and stared off into the cold late-fall dusk coming down on the city.  And wondered if I would live.

This past Sunday I flew to the Washington, DC area again, and checked in to a hotel very near where we stayed two years ago, during my treatment.  This time I'd come for the final stage of the Foreign Service entrance exams, the Oral Assessment; if I passed, I'd be (almost) a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps.  I passed.

The next morning, having time to kill before my flight out, I walked to the end of the Long Bridge to look again at the unchanging city.  The day was warm and dry.  Waist-high native grasses along the side of the bridge rustled in the breeze, and I reached out to touch their bristled tops with my palms.  I'd lived after all.

The overwhelming sensation on this day, however, was of the same unhurried, inscrutable presence of the eternal that I'd had two years prior, in a much more dire condition.  Though then I'd been supremely vulnerable and now I was (in my small way) triumphant, I was in each case most aware of the ineradicable uncertainty that underpins all human experience - having now achieved a high goal, I no more knew where I was going, what I was doing, what would happen next, or even if I would live much longer, than I had understood those things back in 2012 when I faced cancer.  The through-line of history is precariousness.  Around this axis revolves a cycle of aspiration and despair, conviction and dismay, hope and then ultimate surrender to the unknown.

I am of this human lineage, and I am intimately familiar with these regular orbits of human emotion.  And I cannot resist the too-perfect metaphor of the Long Bridge as the defining vector of my personal uncertainties.  How many times will I stand at its peaceful terminus and ask, invoking God, and my loved ones, and everybody else too, Quo Vadimus?  Where are we going?

If I'm fortunate, many, many more.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, or The Future of New York

I've heard that various of the rulers of Rome, parading through the streets of that imperial city, would position a subordinate behind them to whisper in their ear, at intervals, sic transit gloria mundi.  As best I can tell (and who knows, I may not have it right), this is an ambiguous phrase.  It can mean, in a general sense, that the glory of the world is transitory, and will pass away.  Or, as a more immediate, concrete, and grandiose admonition, it can mean something like, Look up, O great Caesar, for that which we behold in passing is no less than the glory of all the world.  To the wisest of those ancients, this double meaning, the moral reverberations of the duality, surely evoked all the responsibility, thrill and sadness of preeminence.

Well, whatever wisdom I have or haven't managed to accrue in my time, that ultimate ring of melancholy is what a recent trip to New York evoked for me.  Why?  Not because of historical parallels with ancient Rome, but because the New York we know, the New York of everyone from O. Henry to Leonard Bernstein, and J.P. Morgan to Joseph Mitchell, Duke Ellington, Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Edward Hopper, and all those Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, etc., the New York of that great early- and mid-century public flowering, has so conclusively passed into the all-consuming private mundanity that is the present and likely future of the city.

Now.  This is not a political commentary, but a civilizational lament.  The terms 'public' and 'private' do not here denote the facile government-business dichotomy now rampant in our political discourse.  Instead, what I'm trying to get at is the pervasive sense that the culture which gave us this greatest of art deco and neoclassical cities, has entered an utterly graceless state.  This probably happened long ago, it can't really be news.  But it took on a special poignancy when a friend who's deeply involved in the New York real estate market described the city as 'out of control.'  Where once the pinnacle of industrial success would have led to the construction of a landmark that would become the inheritance of all Americans, the city's elite now bestir themselves only for the raising of steel and glass condo towers with $100 million penthouses.  Where once the towering achievements of New York enterprise seemed integral to American life, they now have a kind of archival feel about them.  They're still used, in some cases more than ever, at least statistically speaking, but they haunt us now, and shame us.  We're not living up to them, and some part of us, however small, knows that the spiritual dynamism which produced the New York everyone is always falling in love with has given way to the mere technocratic mastery which is now ascendant.  America can still plan as brilliantly as ever, but it can no longer imagine.

Or, put another way, New York may still be glorious, but the glory of the world will pass away.

Russian Civilization

To the extent that Russia's Ukrainian adventure is a civilizational challenge to the West and the established international order, keep in mind this note:

"According to 2006 figures, “overall life expectancy at age fifteen in the Russian Federation appears in fact to be lower than for some of the countries the UN designates to be least developed (as opposed to less developed), among these, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Yemen.” Male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compares unfavorably to that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia." 

Read Masha Gessen's exploration of Russia's century-long demographic catastrophe here.  The phenomenon is one of the things careful observers are likely to have in mind when they say that Russia's assertiveness is indicative of weakness, not strength.

Three Sentences

Three sentences, from three different sources, each encountered in the course of a single day.

The first:

"The endless struggle of statesmen [is] to rescue some permanence from the tenuousness of human foresight."

-Henry Kissinger

The second:

"[This book is] one more attempt to freeze the flux of life into the icy permanence of print."

-John Updike

But then, the third:

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor yet does bread come to the wise, nor riches to the discerning, nor favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all."

-Ecclesiastes 9:11


Is the third a rebuke to the first two?  I don't know, I can't figure it out.  I've been thinking about it for hours...

Toronto: First Read

Last summer, having no idea that within a year I'd be moving to Toronto, I read Michael Ondaatje's ethereal novel, 'In the Skin of a Lion,' about the construction of Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct, and the city's water works.  Of course it isn't really about those things, or isn't only about them.  It is also 'about' the city's immigrant communities in the early 20th century, and about political greed and convulsively warring ideologies, etc.  I can't remember the exact details.  But what stays with me is the vision of dreamlike, incomprehensible life.  Loosely connected events, randomly beautiful, violent, hilarious, impossible.  It's the kind of book which, no matter what time its subject matter is taking place, always seems to be happening at night.  I wonder if any of it can possibly mean anything to the present-day city...

Stone Street Interview with Nicolas Ortiz

Nicolas Ortiz has a remarkable past - his great-grandfather was hugely successful in the tin-mining industry in Bolivia in the 19th century, his grandfather became Bolivia's ambassador to France, and his father established one of the world's foremost collections of ancient art.  Ortiz himself attended elite schools in England (Eton) and the U.S. (Penn), and served in the Belgian military.  With his brothers, he came to Lithuania in 1991, shortly after independence.  Together, they started the first Western-style, self-serve supermarket chain, and created the now popular 'In Your Pocket' guidebook series.  Today, Ortiz retains some of his business interests and sits on various boards of directors, but devotes more of his time to charitable and philanthropic activities.  Though he scrupulously avoids media attention, he is unfailingly generous, perceptive and wise in conversation.  He is a great asset to Lithuania and the region, and I can only hope that I'll have the chance to cross paths with him again soon.

You can listen to my interview with him here, or via the RSS feed on the right-hand side of this page.

Sullivan 1999-2014

Sullivan, our indefatigable partner even before Nina and I were married, developed a limp in late winter.  Back in Lincoln, at his old vet's after three years away, in Washington and Lithuania, they recommended pain medication.  Yesterday, the meds having proved ineffective after 10 days or so, we took him in again.  Initial x-rays revealed a pathological fracture, that is, a small break in a left front leg bone caused by a cancerous tumor.  When they attempted to reposition him for a second set of x-rays, the fracture separated, making the leg even more painful, and essentially useless.  Our choice was to amputate or euthanize.  We chose the latter.

Nina's metaphor for Sullivan's (and all dogs') greatness: an arrow, flying, untroubled by any concern for either bow or target.

 

 

Clouds

In the spring and summer the Baltics have a brightness to them, a crystaline quality much like the sharp, cold air one can see out an airplane window at 30,000 ft.  This leads to a feeling of being at the end of something, at a boundary or portal.  It is also in contradiction to the common conception (in so far as there is any common conception) of the region as dank and gray.  To be sure, the low skies of winter are never lower around the world than they are in Vilnius, or Riga, or Tallinn when the great, dense masses of Baltic clouds shoulder in.  However, it is precisely this contrast between electric clarity and misty gloom that gives the place its unmistakable if subtle air of drama: there is potential there, and opportunity for outstanding growth, richness, dynamism, but there is also a maddening provincial inertia.  During my time there as a (quasi-) diplomat, I witnessed both the heady progress toward real European integration, even leadership, as well as the exasperating intransigence of an often dull and hunkered-down mindset - of course, healthy skepticism is important, but glum disinterest is just unworkable.

On balance, though, what I will remember about the place are its more exquisite characteristics.  The Nordic lines and planes of the people's faces; the bright, defiant streak in the national culture and politics; the white light remaining in the air at dusk in summer.  As our departing flight left Vilnius for the last time earlier this week, we ascended through a layer of thin spring fog and rain.  After a moment we broke through into a brilliant, hard, clear and open sky.  I looked back, but the clouds had closed beneath us, and the city was gone.

Quote of the Year

From former Ukrainian Defense Minister Anatoly Gritsenko, regarding the rifts in Ukrainian society between East and West and the prospects for a unified future:

"We will never agree if we think of Ukraine as the land of our fathers.  But we can easily agree if we talk about Ukraine as the land of our children."

Self-Conscious Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend

"You know, it's funny, I look back at some of this writing on my blog over the past few years and I think, oy.  How preening and insufferable I could be.  My only hope (and it seems, from looking at the dates of the posts as they progress, that there's some evidence for this) is that cancer finally (finally!) beat all that useless, adolescent shit out of me."

Stone Street Interview: The McDuffie Project

What to say about Robert McDuffie?  How to introduce him?  Maybe better to introduce the interview.  I'll start by saying I didn't do a very good job with it.  The recording quality isn't terrific, a hilarious final sign-off from Mr. McDuffie was inadvertently edited out, while some of the other edits are confusing and don't give enough context for the conversation.  For my money, the questions aren't thought out enough to elicit the really complex connections and insights that one would want to discover along with one's interview subject.  And it's several months late--Mr. McDuffie (who, by the way, would want us to call him Bobby) came to us in Vilnius in mid-October.  All of that is my fault.  What can I say?  Mea culpa.

But, what I hope comes through anyway is the utter irrepressibility of the man, the sheer force of his experience, intelligence and humor.  The example: when my wife and I first conceived of the plan to bring McDuffie to Vilnius (after hearing him on NPR's Performance Today), he responded to our emailed invite with an email of his own: "Great!  The last time I was in Vilnius, I was 19 years old, touring the Soviet Union, and I was smuggling gold for Rostropovich!"  I said to my wife, we have to have this man here, and interview him for Stone Street.  Well, at least we did get that story out of him, and it is predictably hysterical.  Enjoy it here, or via the RSS feed to right of this post.  Please listen.  It's worth it.

For more on Mr. McDuffie, his very famous (and expensive) violin, the +Rome Chamber Music Festival , and the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University, see Bobby's website here.