a very peculiar education

The day after Fall for the Book Festival, I left for Australia with my sister Stephanie.  We were going to see my first grandchild, James Horatio, who was born in Sydney on September 1.

We stayed at an airbnb in Paddington and began each morning at the Ampersand bookshop cafe,  drinking flat whites, and surrounded by secondhand books.

My sister Steph with her morning coffee

Then we picked up pastries at the Trinity bakery further along Oxford Street, and took them to Alex and Katie's apartment where we had breakfast and worshiped the newborn baby.  Sometimes we held him and sometimes we watched him and sometimes we provided a little back up.  Sometimes all of us, baby included, ventured out to a pub for lunch or to a street festival or to take in the Sculpture by the Sea along the walk from Bondi to Tamarama Beach.  We walked through Centennial Park and into an Aboriginal sanctuary of flying foxes (the largest bats on the planet - they were up in the trees in the thousands, hanging there like enormous pods).

Alex walking the baby in Centennial Park

 My cup was running over, except that meanwhile I had a deadline approaching. The holiday newsletter at Politics and Prose back home was going to press, and as a result I was furiously reading and writing reviews for Karl Ove Knausgaard's Intermittent - Anne Tyler's Clock Dance -  and Tara Westover's Educated.

 I'm sure that by now you've heard quite enough on the subject of Karl Ove from me (and Anne Tyler too for that matter).  But it's the last book I want to tell you about now : Tara Westover's memoir Educated about growing up in Bucks Peak Idaho as the daughter of Mormon Survivalists.  This is the book that took up so much mental space while I held my beautiful grandchild in my arms. It made for a strange juxtaposition.

First of all, Westover's father was barking mad. He never sent her or any of her siblings to school or to the doctors, and she didn't even have a birth certificate until she was eleven. His world was his land, the church and his scrap metal yard. And in that scrap metal yard Tara Westover worked as a child,  all the while listening to her father ranting about the imposition of “west coast socialism on the good people of Idaho.”   She also helped her mother deliver babies across the county, and prepared her "head for the hills" backpack, full of supplies in case the End of the World came - that, or Y2K.    I mean, I've read Hillbilly Elegy - but this book goes way further in describing  the forgotten ones who live off the grid on the fringes of American society.

As I read Educated I found myself repeatedly drawing my breath in horror.  The odds were stacked so deeply against this woman - whose older brother liked to shove her face into the toilet and call her a whore, because her dance classes were part of Satan’s deception. They claimed to teach dance but actually taught promiscuity.  It wasn’t that she had done something wrong.  “so much," she writes, "as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.”

So while I held my six week old grandson in my arms, this pure little person with a lifetime ahead of him,  I couldn't help reflecting on human frailty.  How do so many of us make it out of childhood and into adulthood, I wondered, when we depend so entirely on others, not just for comfort, but for our survival. For mental and emotional health and balance. 

And yet, against all odds, Tara Westover turned her back on the life that was mapped out for her.  When she began her studies at Brigham Young University she was woefully unprepared.  She had never heard of the Holocaust and thought that Europe was a country. She had only vaguely heard the word Shakespeare.  But she wanted to learn “how the gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality.”   This hunger for knowledge and understanding led her to study at Cambridge University and from there to earn a PhD from Harvard - drawn to such “unwomanly” subjects as law, politics and Jewish History.

"Gosh Mand," said my sister Steph  as I gasped in horror at what I was reading, as Katie nursed James, and Alex prepared a risotto for our dinner.   "What's going on now?"  she asked.  Usually somebody was being abused - Tara was being beaten up by her older brother Shawn - or somebody had been severely burned at the scrap yard or had their teeth knocked out. Nobody cared. This was just life, and sucking it up was how you got by.

Let me just say here that Educated isn't the sort of thing you should read if you've just had a new baby.  I told Katie she couldn't possibly read it.  When you have a new baby you feel too tender for material like this.  I remember renting the film Nicolas and Alexandra  after giving birth to my daughter Rosalind. We were watching it on VHS in Caracas Venezuela where we lived, and when the part about Alexei having hemophilia came up, my mother asked, "Are you sure you want to watch this, darling?"

No - I didn't want to watch it.  I couldn't.  Couldn't bear to hear about children in danger, being neglected or abused. Such material was all but off limits for at least another decade.

Nevertheless, when I finished Educated I dearly wanted someone else to read it.  So I left my copy in Katie and Alex's apartment.  Perhaps Alex will pick it up at some point - or better yet,  maybe he will donate it to the Ampersand bookshop. That would make me very happy.

Ampersand Bookshop in Paddington

christian science and emily fridlund's history of wolves

 Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves poses some interesting questions.  What's the difference between what you want to believe and what you do? And what's the difference between what you think and what you end up doing?  I need to ponder these questions seriously. But when I chose History of Wolves for one of my book discussion groups this month, I had no idea it had anything to do with Christian Science.

You see, I was raised as a Christian Scientist, and was actively involved in the church for years. I know a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the religion, and although I left it definitively about fifteen years ago, I can see it from both sides.

Muslims feel that others just don't get it, when they judge the faith by extremists. Catholics  looking at the extent of sexual abuse in the priesthood, must wonder how the faith that guided their lives became so twisted and contorted.  There are terrible and tragic flaws in fundamentalism of any kind. I feel the same when I think about Christian Science.

Emily Fridland's description of the Wednesday evening testimony meetings really made me laugh. The old fashioned colors in the church sanctuary, the little old ladies, the long silences.  In other descriptions of how her characters follow their faith, she does use a lot of buzz words. But she uses them like a foreign language, in a way that tells me her understanding of Christian Science is superficial.   She cannot possibly know what it has meant for those who have grown up in it and been transformed by its precepts.  I have been on my knees in gratitude for many a healing - physical healing but mostly metal, psychological and emotional healing.

There are universal truths in all religions, I find. And I recognize the universal truths I loved in Christian Science when I read such books as Letting Go by David Hawkins, or The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer,  The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle or The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. In these books - not to mention in the Bible and the Koran - I have found spiritual guidance and buoyancy which has directed my life. 

Emily Fridlund writes about a child who dies as a result of Christian Science treatment - or rather - who dies because the parents don't recognize his symptoms as serious enough to take him to the doctors.  I know there are such cases, they've been highly publicized, and they are terrible, unnecessary tragedies.  But the pat dismissal of pain as unreal is a gross oversimplification of Christian Science treatment.

Not to get too far into it, I will say this.  In England where I was brought up, the law mandates that children be taken to doctors if a sickness continues for more than a short period of time. Thus, Dr Morgan treated me for ear ache,  and when I had the chickenpox, and once when I had an infected finger. Those were the days when doctors made house calls.  Christian Science practitioners still make house calls today.

I would also like to mention a little known fact. There's a whole branch of the Christian Science church devoted to nursing.  Christian Science nurses delivered all my siblings and cared for my father in a Christian Science nursing home when he was in the final stages of dementia.  I cannot imagine more practical, loving and solicitous care than what he received.  He even had a private nurse!  And when he died, I will never forget those in attendance. The genuine love and care he received couldn't have been better.

So why did I leave the faith, you may wonder?  Well frankly - it was the church I left, not so much the spirit of Christian Science teachings.  I became fed up with the busy work of church organization in sparsely attended services that sucked up hours of my time and ultimately was neither spiritually uplifting nor rewarding as a community activity.   Even so, it was another member of the church who had herself left for many years who gave me a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. In that book we both found echoes of Christian Science - in the Hindu concept of a causal, astral and physical plane of experience, for instance. He uses different terminology, but the essence is the same.

"The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with Divine Love," writes Mary Baker Eddy. Elsewhere in her book she explains that the Spirit comes only in small degrees, and that without Love,  "the letter is but the dead body of Science, pulseless, cold, inanimate."  

So, only those who misinterpret her message (and yes, I acknowledge that many do seem to get the wrong end of the stick) would behave like the characters in History of Wolves.  And I have to say here, that although it might seem clever to call the first part of her novel Science and the second part Health, I didn't see a connection between the narrative and these subheadings in History of Wolves.

Of course there are funny and sometimes quaint practices which Fridlund alludes to, connected with the church. They make me smile when I recall them now. The many little old ladies with benign smiles, the phrases like "animal magnetism" and "knowing the truth" and all the references trotted out to Mrs Eddy's church manual. Even the fact that we always called her "Mrs" Eddy makes me smile. It's so Victorian!

 I do have tender memories though.  Every Sunday afternoon after church, my father would sit with his books - his Bible and his Science and Health - and he would clean out the markings from last week's lesson and mark his books with blue chalk - outlining citations in next week's lesson -which comprised six sections - Bible verses and correlative passages from Science and Health.  Many a weekend my father visited prisoners in various correctional facilities.  He also spent hours ministering to people in nursing homes. Nobody could have known the Bible better than he - and he made it come alive for me. He made me think about it every week - and put Jesus's Sermon on the Mount into practice.

And this brings me to another point.  The Bible (King James translation) was the most important book of my childhood.  I know it inside out.  I read it not only weekly in the Bible lessons we studied but from cover to cover twice!  Yes  - all those rules in Leviticus - all the wars in Joshua - all the begats....who begat whom ad infinitum. But I also read the book of Ruth, Song of Solomon, the Psalms, Isaiah and the gospels... and the inspired passages in those books are living and breathing in my heart today. I can call them up any time I need them.  They offer comfort, guidance and support.  I have Christian Science to thank for my knowledge of the Bible. I firmly believe that most people who follow a faith - any faith really - are simply trying to lead good lives. 

Did the practice of Christian Science leave me with any lasting damage?  Maybe I'm too tender hearted with those who behave badly or have been unkind.  I'm too susceptible to charm.  Too willing to see the good in people. I can be naive. But hey, maybe that's also just my personality.

These days I practice Bikram yoga several times a week.  Like Christian Science it is always challenging.  Often when I go into the studio and lie on my mat, I'm reminded of going into church because I have that same sense of community at my yoga studio. It's a gathering of people who have little in common except for the practice and yet because of the practice they share what matters most.  We used to call it a practice in Christian Science as well. 

Am I aware that Bikram Choudhury has been charged with sexual misconduct? Indeed I am.  Am I appalled by his behavior?  Of course.  But am I put off the practice of Bikram yoga because of  these allegations? I believe that whatever his personal shortcomings,  Bikram Choudhury founded a practice which touches every part of my body and spirit.  And like Christian Science it is a practice which helps me grow, so long as I follow it with humility, and so long as I practice it honestly. So long as I don't try to walk on water before I am sure I can swim.

I just discovered I still have a Bible with chalk markings in my library!

his struggle and his shame - on karl ove knausgaard

"The smiles, the friendliness, the admiration I encounter when I sign books is unbearable, not because it isn't well meant or honest, but because it is on false premises. Deep down, I have to reject it." 

Early in the final volume of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his daughter Vanya going on a fun run.  He and another father run alongside their daughters and every time Vanya stops, her friend waits up.  But near the end of the run, the other little girl trips and falls, grazing her knee.

And instead of stopping to help, Vanja runs past, so that she can come in first.  “While she, the little girl who had stopped and waited for us along the way, sat bleeding on the ground!” writes Knausgaard.

           

The other father cannot believe it, and Karl Ove blushes with shame.  “They could understand a four-year-old not being able to show empathy with a friend her own age,” he writes.  “But the idea of a nearly forty-year-old man being equally incapable was naturally beyond their imagination.  I burned with shame as I laughed politely.”  

“On the way home I told Linda what had happened," he continues. "She laughed like she hadn’t laughed in months.  ‘We won, that’s the main thing!’ I said.”

This atrocious confession is only one of many such confessions in My Struggle.  But the tension between the audacity to write it, and the shame Knausgaard continues to feel even while confessing, somehow compels you to keep on reading. 

Volume 6, the longest and most ambitious of his books, is mostly about the fallout of having published Volumes 1 and 2. An uncle threatens a lawsuit. His wife Linda has a nervous breakdown. Having written in stark terms about their marriage in Volume 2, Knausgaard now goes on to inflict further damage in writing about her mental breakdown. And yes, he continues to be ashamed of himself. "To write these things you have to be free," he says, "and to be free you have to be inconsiderate to others.  It is an equation that doesn't work.  Truth equals freedom equals being inconsiderate ..."

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. Maybe it's habit - that feeling that I was getting to the heart of something which I experienced while reading his earlier books.  Maybe if I keep on reading I can get to the heart of truth and the nature of shame. Or maybe Knaugaard’s act of writing, and my act of reading, is the act of questioning shame.

Over lunch with a couple of friends last week, we talked about this. One friend felt that Knausgaard's appropriation of Hitler's title was too loaded.  She said he demanded too much of his readers.  Rachel Cusk, she reasoned, has also written autofiction but hers was a mere trilogy in three slender volumes.

Another friend made a different observation.  She hadn't found it an effort to read My Struggle. In fact, she found Rachel Cusk heavier going, and although she initially thought she had read only three of  Knausgaard's six volumes, later she realized she had actually read more.  Because the writing moved so briskly and she had been engrossed, she hadn't realized how much of it she'd read.

Over these last several days, after finishing 3600 pages, I'm asking myself what has been so fascinating about all the exhaustive detail.  He writes about his children, feeding and bathing them, taking them to daycare. He writes about meal preparation.  He writes about books.  But while he does this, he connects you to his inner life.  In between all the exhaustive detail, he dives so deeply into his innermost thoughts and his shame. 

But in the middle of Volume 6 he switches up the mood, devoting several hundred pages to an extraordinary analysis of Hitler's early life. He juxtaposes passages of  Mein Kampf with passages from Jack London, Karl Marx, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud as well as the memoirs of Hitler's one and only friend Kubizek.

His thoughts on the gap between Hitler's inner and outer selves are fascinating. Evidently Hitler was unable to recognize his mediocrity as a painter; he was so proud, so stubborn that he found it impossible to hold himself up to serious scrutiny. It was typical of Hitler to blame his teachers for his own weaknesses. When, for instance, he decided he wanted to play the piano, he scorned the finger exercises.  This was about art not about practice!

"Self-insight," writes Knausgaard, "is the ability to apply the outer perspective to the inner, it is the presence in the ego of the voice or gaze of the indefinite other, and if that is prevented, then the two will be unconnected, there will be no accommodation within the ego, which then will be left to its own devises, and this abandonment means that interaction with, and understanding of, others essentially becomes an external phenomenon, occurring outside the I, without empathy, without involvement of the inner self, which is empathy's first and to all intents and purposes only condition."

This analysis makes me wonder about Knausgaard himself, and his own capacity for empathy.  He has stripped his psyche bare for all to see. There is no mannerism.  There is no mask. He even lets us see him  when he does put on the mask - as he prepares to give a reading and tries on outfits in front of the mirror.  But loyalty to his wife Linda and protection of her privacy is also sacrificed. He lacks the moral instinct to put her privacy ahead of his writing.  Naturally he's full of shame. We always feel ashamed when we act out of selfishness rather than empathy.  It's an old fashioned quality empathy, but Knausgaard is missing it.

"What is living?" he asks. "It is doing things and being at the center of the world.  If you are deprived of that, of acting, doing , being at the center of the world, a distance develops between you and the world, you observe it but you are not part of it, and this estrangement is the start of death.  Living is being greedy for days, no matter whether they are good or bad.  Dying is being weary of days, when they no longer matter or cannot matter because you are no longer inside them, but on the outside."

When I first read that I thought to myself YES.  But since then I've had several conversations with colleagues at the bookstore and with my son - about compassion.  The compassionate narrator has not made an appearance in most books that have been published of late.  If I think about it - only Lincoln In the Bardo stands out as compassionate.  And after all, compassion is what makes you feel warm towards your characters.  It makes you feel warm towards the world because it allows you to feel empathy.

Knausgaard's hunger for life and truth is compelling. I'm no longer sure it is admirable. I'm trying to decide.  My bullshit detector tells me that yes, I am in the hands of a reliable narrator with him.  I love his lack of artifice. I want to trust that lack of artifice.

As Werner Herzog has it, "The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate [my dreams]. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or film making is about ... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are."

I love those words - the inner chronicle of what we are.

 But I return to the story of Vanya on her fun run.  The lack of empathy disturbs me. Yeah - he's won. Is that really the main thing?

free to a good home

This short story first appeared in Phoebe Magazine in spring 2003.  It was workshopped in an MFA class at George Mason University with book critic and author Alan Cheuse, who suggested I expand the story to let it have more breathing room. I took his advice, and the story turned into my 2014 novel I KNOW WHERE I AM WHEN I'M FALLING.  Interesting how I experimented with a different voice here. I was finding ways into the material I later explored in more depth in the novel. 

 

Manfred busses tables at a restaurant in Quincy Market.  After Nicky went to jail, I started going to Cityside after work, and Manfred would stare at me and smile while wiping down tables and filling a basin with dirty dishes.  So after a few months I found myself going past this restaurant on my way home from work, or walking Gnasher past the restaurant just in case I bumped into him.  Manfred would come out and pet the dog.  I thought he was a professional busboy, until one day he said, “I passed the bar exam this week.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

“Going to be,” he said, giving me that smile.

“Start with me,” I said. “I need a divorce.”

“You’re a pretty strong lady,” Manfred said, after my shortened down version of the Nicky story.

“Not strong enough,” I told him.

“You know what you’re doing,” he said one night, several months after this. “You’re making me fall madly in love with you.” So we walked Gnasher around Waterfront Park at the end of his shift, and there was nowhere but where we were touching.  Manfred had green eyes, beautiful teeth and silky hair.  He was fluid, and I knew he could effortlessly fill any space I gave him.

He said,” If you hadn’t been married, I’d have snapped you right up.  I’d never have waited all these months to kiss you.” My lips brushed his face, his wrists, oh the tenderness and strength in those wrists. “Why did you marry that guy?” he asked.

Back in my apartment he pushed up my shirt and kissed my breasts. He said he could come just looking at me. “This part of your body is really pretty.” I was soaking wet down there, not having done it since Nicky went to jail.  Then Manfred was inside me, pressing to the center of me, and even now when I remember the way it happened, the energy sinks to my crotch and my head gets light just thinking about him.

So I get home from work one day, and unlock my door, and Nicky is standing in the living room. “Hey Jules, I just got out of jail.”  He’s picking my things up, turning them over, and he must have been working out.  No one normal looks that substantial, like he’s in front of a painted back drop and the apartment is diluted compared with him.  Then I notice that Gnasher is missing.

“That was your dog?” he says. “I think he ran out when I came in.”

I haven’t seen Nicky for almost a year, but inside a minute I’m seething. “How did you get in? Wait a minute, how long have you been here?”

“Forget the dog,” he says, moving towards me with a flat-eyed grin. “Hey, I missed you.”

Don’t you hate the smell of alcohol breath when you yourself have not been drinking?  Well, that’s what I was thinking when Nicky got close and had his finger in a loop on my jeans.  Gnasher might be in the middle of city traffic, or ingesting rat poison from some dumpster.

“You’ve got a fucking nerve, breaking into my place like this.” And now I’m really angry. Whatever I feel for this guy it’s always extreme.  He jerks his head back, laughing, and part of me could almost laugh too. He moves like a boy with trouble to get into. Trouble looks so good on him, which is why I can’t imagine him without it.

“Come on, Jules. I thought you’d be happy.”

“We’re getting a divorce, remember?”

“So where did you expect me to go?”

I have to get out of here. I’ve got to get away from him and find my dog.

Red is slumped on the stoop downstairs with a paper-bagged bottle in his hand.  I’ve been letting him sleep in the hallway at night, which is fine by me because the building is empty except for some guy on the top floor. Our building is slated for demolition because it’s a neighborhood in transition.  Red and me will soon be transitioning out.  Red is like my doorman. No problem, sure, he says.  He’ll look out for the dog. In the street there’s a whiff of rotten garbage and exhaust fumes, but at least the sun is shining.

Beyond the overpass, a hundred yards away is the developed part of the neighborhood, the boutiques and outdoor cafes, and that’s where Manfred works.

So I search for Gnasher around Waterfront Park and head towards a triangle of crab grass near the tunnel. It’s where I sometimes walk him in the mornings, but now he’s nowhere in sight. And I really am pissed off. I waited for Nicky for two whole years before giving up.  I really gave him the chance to clean up his act.  Weekend afternoons I sat on a plastic chair in the visitor’s room at MCI Norfolk.  Is that what girls do in their early twenties?  But he fucked up again.  He managed to order all this weird equipment and have them send the bill to me.  He phoned from the jail and billed it to my house, all kinds of crap like that.  That’s when I finally gave up.  The stupid part is, I might have waited forever.  Which means the good part would have been breaking into my place and letting my dog out.

I’m thinking about Manfred the Good and Slick Nick the Bad. I’m crying and looking for Gnasher.  That’s when I step off the curb, and there’s a car with a gleaming hood shooting up from the Callahan Tunnel.  I guess I’ll never know what I looked like, flying over traffic and landing on my head.

Suddenly my ears are screaming and I’m hot and greasy like blood and motor oil mixed up together.  It’s not like the next thing you know.  It’s more like life ends here and a new reel of film begins in a bright ambulance, my neck in a brace and a paramedic checking vital signs.

“Where’s Gnasher?”

“Gnasher?”

“My dog.”

“You had a dog with you?”

I got Gnasher in Harvard Square.  Someone had him on a rope with a sign saying “Free to a good home.” He looked so intelligent sitting there with his paws crossed.  It was the crossed paws that did it.  I’ve always had a weakness for German Shepherds, and with Nicky in jail, I figured I could use the protection.

I stopped to admire him.  A girl had rescued him from the pound because he was about to be put to sleep.  “Do you want him?” and I said, “I guess so.” I thought, if I didn’t take him, who would? The girl goes, “This dog is super intelligent, but he doesn’t know who he belongs to. Don’t let him off the rope whatever you do, or you’ll never get him back.”

With Gnasher it was his crossed paws.  With Nicky, his black curly hair and the way that he kissed.  It felt like I was floating. I remember him buying me a pair of gloves at Saks Fifth Avenue.  We sat on stools at the glove counter with these stupid grins on our faces because we were so in love, and the salesgirl was going, “This pair is really her.” I don’t think Nicky even looked at them because he was too busy getting a kick out of me.  All my memories of Nicky have this big fault line through them.  They’re built on stolen money.

I’ve been hit by a car and the technician is holding my hand and they trundle me out of the ambulance and they’re wheeling me down a hall and I feel like I’m at the end of a telescope. I feel them turn me from side to side. Something cold on my face.  And nurses talking.

It feels like I’m tilted, so that most of me is spilled into the side of my face.  They don’t want me looking in the mirror.  I can only see through one eye anyway.  At some point, Manfred appears with a bunch of Black Eyed Susans. He’s bobbing around in the background, earning his right to be loved by me.

Manfred drives me back from the hospital in his second hand Pontiac with the worn out shocks, but he has to pull over on the way so that I can throw up.  But in my head I’m slipping, sleeping, running away in one of those dreams where you want to run but your legs don’t work.

I’m lying on a sofa, Manfred’s sofa, I guess.  The air is light and fragrant.  Gnasher’s wet nose hits my cheek.  I hear the tail thump.  He’s panting, and I can tell that if a dog could smile, Gnasher would be smiling. Manfred goes,” Red found him trotting down Milk Street in the financial district, and when you didn’t come back, he brought him to the restaurant.  That’s how I knew something was wrong.” Good old Red. Damaged yes, but he has a heart.  Most people think that damage is a bad thing.  But I can’t decide that it’s totally bad. At least, not all the time.

Manfred wants us to move to Plymouth, thirty miles from town.  He thinks it will be good for me to get away from Boston.  Summer convalescence by the ocean.  He’s got it all planned.  You can live pretty cheaply in Plymouth, he says, and he’s found a job at a living museum where you dress up like pilgrims in a village, pretending that history stopped in 1620. He’ll chop wood and thatch while conversing with tourists in pilgrim dialect.  The job pays as much as bussing tables, only without the tips, and I can work as a waitress at the Inn for all Seasons.  The last stupid jobs of our lives, because everything will change when he starts to practice law, and the first thing he’s going to do is get me my divorce.

So we rent a three room cottage on Billington Sea Road.  You walk past a lopsided row of mailboxes and up a dirt lane beside the lake.  There’s a deck in the back surrounded by scrubby trees.  The air smells like pine. I string up fairy lights and Japanese lanterns.  I do it in stages because I still don’t have much energy.  My face throbs.  There’s a scar from my lip to my nose, a lump on my cheekbone.

In Plymouth, they have herbal shops with names like Sun and Moon. In the checkout line with my aromatherapy candles and vitamin E (for my scar), I feel people staring, but they look away suddenly and don’t ask any questions.  When Manfred is with me, he gets dirty looks because they think I got the scar from him beating me up.

“Hey Julie, do you want to know how this lake got its name?” Manfred is showing off because now he’s an expert in pilgrim matters. “One of the first settlers, a guy named Billington, thought he’d found the coast.  But what he’d actually found was a lake. He was very short sighted.” While Manfred talks, he looks at my mouth and then back up to my eyes and smiles as if we have an inside joke that goes beyond the story.  “So the pilgrims teased him, by naming the lake Billington Sea.” We’re sitting on a big rock overlooking the water.  Manfred pulls off his boots and woolen pilgrim socks. We’re twenty-five years old, but me, I feel like a hundred.  He wants to make me happy.  Happy, I think? I forgot about happy.

“Come on Julie, let’s go for a swim.” So we take off all our clothes and Manfred swims to the middle, and when he’s nothing but a little head bobbing on the water, he nods to Gnasher, and Gnasher bounds out and paddles towards him with his tongue lolling out.

I’m swimming and the trees around us reflect on the water.  Gnasher trots off into the beach plums, but now he always comes back. At night he barks beneath our bedroom window. “Hey guys, let me in.”

Every day I walk him down a woodchip path and worry about Nicky.  He’s just too intelligent to go to waste.  I thought I could save him and all he needed was a good home. I made an unusual connection with him, and I thought I’d get something unusual back.  But being fucked over is sometimes the price you pay for unusual. Unusual is good. At least, this is what I think as I walk past an Indian totem pole, down a path that comes out at the cranberry bogs.

My face is almost completely better and I decide to telephone Nicky, just to see how he is. He took over my apartment and I’m hoping it got him started on the right foot. He lets the phone ring for a good long time, and who knows why, but my heart is thumping.  Then the ringing stops and it’s silent. “Nicky?”

“Jules?” He sounds half asleep. “Hey.” Then, “You really let this place go. The apartment was filthy.  And that old bum who slept in the hallway? I mean, what the fuck, Jules.”

“You mean Red?” I say. “He was like a doorman to me.”

“Not anymore,” Nicky answers. I think he hung up, because it goes so quiet and then I hear him crying.

“What’s wrong, Nicky?”

“I’m scared.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what to do, Julie.  I fucked up big time.”

“Not again.”

“What am I going to do?”

The screen door bangs and Manfred walks in from work, wearing this stupid pilgrim hat, which looks terrible on him.  He blows me a kiss and reaches into the refrigerator for a six-pack.  I’m listening to the silence between Nicky and me, and now Manfred’s out on the deck under the lanterns and fairy lights, socializing with a bunch of pilgrims from the plantation. “I don’t know, Nicky,” I say at last. “I don’t know what you should do. One thing right, I guess. Just one thing right after another.”

And that is our last conversation.

enabling the clown - fear by bob woodward

By now, everyone knows the choicest tidbits from Bob Woodward's Fear. But the relentless chaos and nightmare of Trump's administration only really comes across when you read the whole book.  I finished this weekend, and Steve Bannon's observation really sticks in my mind. "He doesn't like professors.  He doesn't like intellectuals.  Trump was a guy who never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C.  And that's good enough. He's going to be a billionaire."

So now he's won - he's king of the castle.  And the experts, the thinkers, those who have spent their lives in public service have to pretend that he's in charge.  And guess what -  he IS in charge - in charge of dismantling everything they stand for and everything they've done.

Damage control is all they can hope for now. They must scramble every minute to avert disaster, recover from random tweets or some improvised insult inserted by Trump into his official talking points. And even after he's walked it back, it's useless. In the case of Charlottesville, Trump calls the correction (you can't even characterize it as apology) the worst mistake of his presidency.

Mattis and Gary Cohn have frequent hushed conversations about  The Big Problem:  "The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military its economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments."  But not only does he not understand them, he repeatedly sets out to undermine and dismantle these alliances.

"Trade is bad" he writes across the page at one point.

It would be one thing if Trump knew he was ignorant and thus relied on the expertise of others.  But only flattery and 100% loyalty matter to him. In spite of the evidence - on the importance of trade for instance, repeatedly put before him, Trump's mantra is "if you disagree with me you're wrong." And why wouldn't he think that? He's their boss - king of the castle. He's got the big prize and you work for him. He is president.  He reminds me of Yertle the Turtle.

The big takeaway from this stunning book: Trump is not only ignorant, but he believes that his strength lies in ignorance. Woodward writes "He acted like doing too much advance preparation would diminish his skills in improvising.  He did not want to be derailed by forethought.  As if a plan would take away his power, his sixth sense."

So the real question is why everybody continues to enable him.  When you give your notes to the class clown you do it for a reason.  There's some kind of self preservation or warped logic behind it. Usually it's because the clown is also a bully or has some kind of persuasive charm - and you don't want to get on his bad side.  Since he's full of bluster he can make life unpleasant, and you don't want his scorn turned in your direction.  But actually in giving him your notes, you undermine your own integrity.  The work you did, the things you know may go unseen to the casual observer.  The so called prize - that degree or accolade that comes at the end - is actually not the prize at all.  It is only an outward indicator of success.  Real success comes from integrity and what goes on inside.  In letting the slacker off, in covering up for him and enabling him, you have undermined  not just yourself, but what your institution or country stands for.

Wish I felt that when Mueller issues his subpoena for Trump to testify this will all come to an end.   But the last chapter of Fear throws this hope into question.  Trump is a liar and a loser and everybody knows it. But his lawyers are working day and night to protect him (not us) from this truth.

finishing war and peace: on love and death

There are so many layers to Tolstoy's descriptions of love throughout War and Peace - and this is why his writing stands the test of time.  I've written about earlier episodes already,  about the young love between Sonya and Nikolai and about Natasha's early love for Andrei.  But as the characters mature, so do their expectations and needs in love.

When Nikolai Rostov falls in love with Princess Maria, he recognizes that he should not have been in such a hurry to solidify his young love with Sonya.  It's only down to Tolstoy's understanding of character that we never are tempted to pity Sonya.  By the end of the novel, Sonya has become too virtuous to be relatable.  She is good, but she's also untouched by passion.  Natasha describes her as "a barren flower."

Sonya's simplicity as a girl, when Rostov himself was also young, naturally made them fall in love.   But when he is older and more complex there is less to explore between them. By the time Rostov meets Princess Maria, she has had many deep struggles. Throughout the book she has struggled to be good, but without reward, looking after her difficult father Nikolai. She has done all this without the benefit of charm on her side because she isn't beautiful.  By the time Rostov encounters her, she has faced the loss of her father and his transformation in death,  but her efforts to help the peasantry on their estate have backfired.

But Nikolai Rostov falls in love with her, and when he does, Tolstoy gives us this remarkable insight. He "had long ago pictured to himself the future with Sonya and it was all simple and clear just because it had been thought out and he knew all about Sonya; but it was impossible to picture a future with Princess Maria, because he did not understand her but only loved her."

 Tolstoy knows it is difficult to imagine what we do not understand. But with his skillful use of point of view here, as in the passage with Pierre at the Battle of Borodino, he enables us to both imagine and understand.

Much is always made of the tragic life and death of the most noble and upstanding character, Prince Andrei - and I've resisted reading other critics and commentaries, because I'm just putting down ideas here before I forget them - mostly so that I'll have something to refer to when we have our book discussion this month.

Andrei has had premonitions of the end all along. There's the episode moving his battalion through familiar terrain, where he finds himself close to his estate at Bald Hills and decides to make a detour.  But his estate is abandoned, overgrown and in disrepair.  He encounters a few familiar peasants, one sitting on a family bench weaving a sandal,  but his home has been destroyed. It has become a place of the past.

When he later encounters Pierre out of place at the battle scene, he cannot disguise his irritation with Pierre's cluelessness. Their perspectives are so different. When they part, Pierre feels (correctly) this has been their final meeting. But Andrei has tasted the knowledge of good and evil and already seen too much.  He has the seeds of tragedy planted within him. He's had them all along - right from the first, with his first marriage and death of his first wife.

Now, when he meets Denisov, he has painful recollections of Natasha. "This recollection at once sweet and bitter carried him back to those painful sensations over which he had not lingered lately but which still found place in his soul..."  And here, Tolstoy gives us a contrast to Rostov's love for Maria, which is without understanding.  Andrei's love for Natasha includes understanding.

When Prince Andrei compares his love of Natasha to Anatole's love for her,  he thinks "Not only did I understand her but it was just that inner spiritual force. That sincerity that ingenuousness - the very soul of her which seemed to be pinioned by her body - it was that soul I loved in her - loved so intensely, so happily -"  while Antatole cared nothing for this - he only saw a pretty girl he wanted to seduce.

But then, later when Andrei is wounded, Tolstoy shows us what it feels like to encounter death. It feels like an abrupt confrontation with the profound,  in the center of triviality.  He does the same in  his novella The Death of Ivan Illych.   Only a few moments before he is struck down, Prince Andrei had been idly noticing the dust on his boots and walking the fence line.  Now, mortally wounded and in the clinic, there is a man dying on the cot next to his. It turns out to be Anatole - the one who seduced Natasha and destroyed their love.

In his heart, Andrei can now forgive Anatole. He can even love him.  In his extremity Andrei sympathizes with Anatole as his brother and is filled with love for those who hate. All that matters to him now is the love "God preached on earth".

It is also sadly poignant that he and Natasha can only really have each other when Prince Andrei is dying. Maybe some loves are like this. It is only when he is dying - and before he finally goes beyond feeling altogether, that Natasha and he can love each other.

reading war and peace - war and pierre's transformation

"Have you got to the Battle of Borodino yet?" one of my bookstore colleagues asked. I was again in the break room reading War and Peace, and as he began to talk about Napoleon - whose grey horse was called Marengo, my mind wandered. I'd been glossing over Tolstoy's insights into the Napoleonic Wars while I read.  Tolstoy goes on and on about military strategy, the characters of Napoleon and Czar Alexander, and how historians have misrepresented events. But as far as I'm concerned, nothing would have been lost if those pages had been cut.*

It's really through his characters that Tolstoy gives us the war.  At one point he uses an extraordinary device, by putting Pierre in the heart of the battle. The bumbling Pierre, who knows nothing about military strategy, decides to satisfy his curiosity by riding into the most hotly contested piece of land in the Battle of Borodino.  He's not a combatant but an observer, fearless and unaware and in this way, the reader becomes Pierre - an observer who doesn't belong there, who can't comprehend what's happening.  This is how Tolstoy gives us inside access, letting us imagine the battle we don't understand.

And from this point on, Pierre plays many parts. He dreams on a pile of blankets in the back of a cart;  he disguises himself and flees Moscow. Later, after rescuing a child from a fire, he's captured by the French as a prisoner of war.  Only once is he briefly recognized, when everybody is packing up and leaving Moscow. Natasha Rostov identifies him as he hurries across the square.  I doubt it's a coincidence that Tolstoy gives Natasha this role, since she is the most transparent character in War and Peace, never disguising any of her feelings, even when disguise might be expedient (as in her interview with Prince Andrei's father Nikolai and Princess Maria).

Tolstoy writes extensively about the destruction of Moscow. Sometimes he goes on too long, like a man at the head of the table, pontificating after a dinner party.  But I love his description of Napoleon entering Moscow. The sight of the city's strange architecture, Tolstoy writes, must have filled him with  "the rather envious and uneasy curiosity men feel when they contemplate an alien form of life which ignores their presence."

Tolstoy develops this theme.  Napoleon's declarations and proclamations are powerless, since he can do nothing to stop the looting and pillaging of Moscow.  "[He] was like a child holding onto the straps inside a carriage and imagining that he is driving it."

So Moscow is empty - "in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty. In a queenless hive no life is left, though to a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives".

Again, it is Pierre's journey and Pierre's transformation that matters to us most. He gradually becomes less clumsy, more at ease with himself and at peace with the world.  He witnesses executions, traveling with the French as a prisoner of war. He sees how at the point of death people were "incredulous because they alone knew what their life meant to them and so they could not understand, could not believe that it could be taken from them."  Finally Pierre begins to understand that God IS.  That love is.  This is all that matters. And he comes to understand that being financially ruined has made him spiritually richer.

It's a remarkable journey to read this book - through war, through life and love and death and most of all, through Pierre's transformation.   Without Pierre's transformation there could be no resolution after the war - and no love between himself and Natasha.  She is never anything other than herself, although her character also grows. There is never any pretense about her, even as she nurses Andrei on his deathbed.  And although at times she might be annoyingly at the mercy of every emotion she feels, Natasha gives so much of herself to everybody around her, that we always want her to come out on top.

Tolstoy describes the tender reunion of Princess Maria, Natasha and Pierre after the end of the war. In their loss, the three talk deeply into the night and early morning, revealing their true selves, so that when Pierre leaves for St Petersburg, Natasha's parting words I shall look forward very much to your return   "are the source of all joy, so many interpretations of feeling and exquisite day dreams over the next several months.  'Oh how happy I am? What is happening. How can I be so happy,' said Pierre to himself."

Pierre's happiness is described as a form of insanity  Only, it isn't insanity. It's the truth. When he looks back on these days, he realizes he was so happy and in love, that he never tried to find a reason for loving others or seeing the good in them. "I was not so mad as I seemed," he thinks. "On the contrary. I was wiser and had more insight than at any other time; and I understood all that is worth understanding in life... because I was so happy."

My son Alex standing on one of Napoleon's canons at the Kremlin in 1993

*Tolstoy tells us that the Battle of Borodino did nothing but bring Moscow closer to destruction and the French closer to the destruction of their army - outcomes dreaded by the Russians and French above all else.  But they were caught up in it - and it was destined to play out and there was no going back once it had begun.

 In the last pages he pontificates about history - the causes of historical events the nature of power  and the collective will of the masses vested in one person.   "On what condition is the will of the people delegated to one person?" he writes.  "On condition that that person expresses the will of the whole people.  That is, power is power.  That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand."  He also he talks about collective consciousness, about the laws of necessity and free will.  I will leave this analysis to others, because for me the novel ended pretty much with the marriage of Pierre and Natasha.