TWO MONTHS AGO, just after summer solstice, I posted a short piece inspired by our lime tree, which had not had a good winter. The post was appropriate, because our winter and spring were fraught with disappointing news and sadness in our family.

We had nurtured our little lime tree through the winter, but it did not do well. We hoped it would live until we could safely move it outside. In Colorado, citrus can’t survive the winter. But we had wintered it over the year before, and we were confident the tree would be OK once again. But by the time it was warm enough to move it outdoors, it was ailing. Sickly is a better word.

We sat on our porch, sipping our coffee, feeling a bit down. We looked at the sad plant and felt a definite empathy for it, because we felt as if we had gone through our own “winter of discontent” as spoken by the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

I pruned it back, removing all the dead wood I could find, and I was left with a pathetic sprig, above left. If the tree needed pruning, perhaps we did , too. But where does one start? In fact, there were days when it was a challenge to find something — anything — uplifting. How can we move ahead? What could we strip away? What should we nurture?

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And there sat the sprig of a citrus plant. So we re-potted it carefully, removed it from the large Italian terra cotta planter that had been its home for a couple of years, found a nice sunny spot for it, and watered it regularly. It sometimes felt as it we had lost our minds, watering a wire of a plant as if it we expected a miracle.

A tree resembles a human being in a few aspects. It stands upright, for example; even the sprig displayed some dignity like a wiry old man. Sap flows through its limbs as blood does thorough a homo sapiens. It requires minerals and other nutrients from its surroundings. It can endure setback and challenge, even thriving once it has the care it needs. A tree does not grow in a straight, uninterrupted ascent. Scientists can examine tree rings and deduce periods of drought, storm, and disease. People, too, tell their stories of favorable and difficult seasons and how their lives are altered in positive ways by trials.

Now, two months later, the lime tree is transformed, right photo above. I’d like to say we are, too, that we have shed our hurt, regenerated our optimism, and salved our wounds. But we are humans, and our sunny dispositions can ebb and flow. The news reports, the struggles of others, the loss of loved ones, the occasional suffering of our relatives and friends — these move our emotions, and at times the pain seems unbearable.

At the same time, there are joyful times. There is laughter when all else seems ineffectual. There is the blessing of art and music. There is the trembling hug of one who seeks comfort in our embracing arms. There is the twinkle in old eyes, and the promise in youthful ones. There is an unsolicited smile of a stranger, the bright white teeth of a child or a teen. There is the unmistakable satisfaction — even glee — when we know we have effectively communicated our ideas and emotions.

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There are times when hope seems to be the only elixir for despair. It is more than a Pollyanna-ish “glad game” or denial of hard reality. Hope is most essential when times are especially difficult. I mentioned in the earlier post the wisdom of the quote from the Bible: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” With our minds, we humans can summon from our memory and knowledge the ideas of hope. We are not locked to any current emotion. We have the ability and the freedom to imagine better situations and to support our hope with observable and replicable facts.

When these sad times ebb, there will be moments of joy. There will be friends who somehow understand and comfort. There will be banter and there will be the warm silence of love.

If difficult times come again — and they will — we hope to remind ourselves of the tree that stiffened against death, accepted the nurture it was provided, and grew wide and green, and then smiled as if in appreciation for the intriguing life it has.

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PASTOR CLIFFORD noticed the lamp in the living room was still on as he prepared for bed, so he went to shut it off and was alone in the darkened room. He had a thought and wanted to make note of it for his next sermon. He fumbled for the pen and paper he usually kept by his recliner, but he couldn’t find them. He stood still, closed his eyes, and repeated several times.

“It’s like that,” he said.

He walked in the darkness to the hallway, feeling his way. He turned on the hall light, then turned it off again. Then on, then off.

“It’s just like that!”

A stout man of 64, he had just celebrated his birthday the previous Friday. Since then he had been unusually reflective; he was noticing little things that seemed to have new meaning.

For his birthday the ladies of the church had prepared a nice chocolate cake, punch flavored with 7-Up and sherbet, and cups of coffee from an aluminum maker that had been placed forward on a small table covered with a white cloth in the corner of the community room at the Methodist Church on South Honeysuckle Street. Now before bedtime, he was thinking about a conversation he’d had with Beth.

“Happy birthday to you, Pastor,” said Beth. “Now, you listen here. I want you to take good care of yourself, Pastor.”

Beth had been married nearly forty years when she lost her husband the previous winter, but she still managed to keep a keen eye out for the needs of others. She had a well-groomed garden on her acreage outside of town, and she had graciously offered to let Clifford keep his bees on the property close to the flowers and her fruit trees. She liked the idea of bees near her garden, and she knew her fruit trees would benefit. But she also was concerned about Pastor Clifford. Somehow, she sensed he could be a little depressed at times, and she thought that encouraging his beekeeper hobby might help.

“Next time you’re out for your bees, you stop and we’ll have tea,” she said.

“I will be delighted, Beth,” he said.

“It’s perfect, isn’t it Pastor,” Beth said. “Your bees and my flowers. Bees need flowers, and flowers need bees. Why, it’s the bees’ knees!”

“Or the bees’ needs,” Pastor Clifford said. And they both laughed.

“I’m coming out tomorrow,” Pastor Clifford said. “Is that too soon?”

“Oh, no,” Beth said. “I’ll see you then!’

Clifford had been pastor at the church for six years, but the last two had been especially difficult because his marriage of thirty-two years fell apart while he was busy with his new responsibilities. He hadn’t noticed his wife’s growing discontent, and he was pleased that she seemed re-energized with her work at the high school because that left him with more time and energy to devote to his ministry. When she announced that she wanted to leave him, he had no idea that things were bad. A few months after the divorce he learned that she had fallen in love with the principal, a tall, handsome man whom Clifford had sometimes seen jogging around town. The affair had gone on for some time before she left him. When he figured out who his rival was, Pastor Clifford felt old and unattractive. He thought about running away to another town, but when he realized he might have trouble finding a church that would accept a divorced man, he decided to stay put. In truth, he was very thankful that his denomination allowed pastors to keep their position even after divorce. The ministry gave him comfort and joy despite his hurt.

The next day, he hurried through his chores with the bees, because he was excited to have tea with Beth. She brought a tray of chocolate chip cookies and two glasses of lemonade with iced tea on top and set them on the iron table under the pergola. The sun was just at its zenith, high in the April sky and warm with promise for Beth’s flowers and Clifford’s bees.

“It’s an Arnold Palmer,” she said of the tea. “If you put the tea in first and then the lemonade, it’s a Nancy Lopez.” She laughed at her joke, but Pastor Clifford didn’t understand, and she let it drop.

Clifford smiled because Beth did, and he was happy to be sitting with her. He could hear the buzz of his bees, busy gathering pollen and nectar from the fresh flowers. Beyond the garden, Beth’s apple trees glistened with blooms, red on one tree and white on the others, the sunlight streaming through their fragile petals. How wonderful to be here, Clifford thought, and how wonderful that bees and blossoms go together so naturally!

He had spent many hours with Beth when her husband died a few days before last Christmas. They talked through her grief, Beth seeming almost to enjoy the sentimental visitation. And now in the spring quiet and the pastoral setting, Clifford let his mind drift back to those December days. He recalled how Beth, with her daughters, had discussed how they would arrange the memorial service. He recalled that he had loved the way they talked so naturally, despite their grief. He remembered that Beth even kept a twinkle in her eye. The three of them had laughed at the various memories that came up as they talked, and Pastor Clifford was proud to have such a loving family among his congregants.

“Remember how he kept those canaries?” one of the daughters had asked. “Why did he have those canaries, Mom, one after the other, until they croaked?”

“It was so gross,” the other daughter said. “Those tiny yellow birds lying there on the newspaper at the bottom of the cage, their feet sticking straight up.”

They had all laughed, Beth and Pastor Clifford too, at the thought of the dead canaries.

“He loved those canaries,” Beth said. “Do you know why he wanted to have canaries around? Because they reminded him of his father after the family emigrated from Germany. His Daddy wanted to get rich quick, like all people in America do. So, he went into the canary business, breeding hundreds of them. Then one day some virus killed them all, and your Grandpa lost everything. But he started all over again, just like that, in the trucking business. And you know, he did well, transporting stuff all over the country. Your daddy liked to keep a canary around to remind him of how his daddy never gave up.”

In the spring air, Pastor Clifford felt alive and hopeful. But rather suddenly he became aware of his role as a pastor. Here he was casually enjoying the fine April day, and he felt shame that he hadn’t thought to ask about Beth. So, he put his tea down, leaned forward in his chair and made firm eye contact with her. He reached for her hand, held it tenderly, and said, “How are you doing now, Beth?”

“Oh, Pastor, I’m doing so wonderfully,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes when she said it, and Pastor Clifford was confused. He didn’t expect her to cry. She dabbed the tears with her hanky, then leaned back in her chair, withdrawing her hand. She glanced across the garden and into the blue sky, then back to the pastor.

“We had so many wonderful years, Pastor,” she said. “Oh, there were bad times, hard times, lonely and sad times when I would cry because he wouldn’t notice me. I thought … you know … I thought he didn’t like me anymore, and I would come outside here to my garden and I would tend to my flowers, and then my hurt feelings would go away for a while.”

She seemed peaceful, so Pastor Clifford let the moment rest. A breeze lifted the cloth on the table and rustled the stems of the flowers in the garden. Beth watched the flowers sway, as if dancing.

“Do you know, Pastor, what keeps these flowers beautiful and healthy? You know what it is? The thing that helps these flowers most is manure! Isn’t that just about the funniest thing you ever thought of? These beautiful flowers love shit!”

She was embarrassed that she had let out that word in front of the pastor, and she let her mouth fall open playfully, like a teen-aged girl teasing with her girlfriends at a slumber party. She began to giggle, and her round face shook, her eyes squinted tight, and her white hair seemed to waggle in the sunlight. Soon Pastor Clifford was giggling, too.

“That’s a very funny thing, isn’t it,” he said. He began to repeat the word loudly.

“Shit! Shit!!”

And they laughed some more, for a long time, each spewing the word again and again, and each laughing each time.

“Shit!”

When the laughing subsided, he began to think of the importance of all this. He thought he might be able to discuss in his next sermon how people are important in small things. He remembered reading somewhere about the impact even a butterfly can have on the formation of powerful storms such as a tornado. Beth, he realized, played an important role in tending her flowers. He thought of the dependency his bees had, not just on the blossoms but on Beth as well; even her careful placement of manure was important. Beth, the flowers and the bees each depended on the other, like family.

Then he had a dark thought: What if the flowers didn’t bloom and there was no more pollen for his bees to make honey? What if the bees went away and could no longer spread the pollen for the apple trees? Without warning, he began to think of his failed marriage again, because the bees and the flowers went together so naturally as did he and his ex-wife for many years, and then they were no longer together, the love gone out like water from a leaky bucket. The light dimmed and then was gone. It seemed to have happened so suddenly.

Beth noticed Pastor Clifford had turned inward, and she wondered what had come over him. She leaned forward in her chair and her face tightened with concern. This time, it was she who reached for the pastor’s hand, placed it in hers, studied his eyes, and then spoke tenderly and sincerely.

“But, Pastor, how are you?”

He explained that he still thought of his ex-wife and frequently wondered what he might have done differently. It had caught him off guard, he said, that she no longer loved him and instead had put her love in another man’s heart. And it all had happened so suddenly. One day they were doing fine, he said, and then -- suddenly -- it went away.

“Like a light switch,” he said. “Like turning something off. Like a switch.”

Beth said she had felt like that sometimes, but she was glad she just turned the switch on again. Pastor Clifford couldn’t figure out how that could happen. He might be able to turn on his own switch, but he couldn’t turn on his ex-wife’s switch.

“How did you stay married so long then, Beth?”

“Oh, I chose to,” she said.

A few weeks later, Pastor Clifford stood before his congregation. The organ player had finished “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” and the members of the congregation closed their hymnals and sat back down. Pastor Clifford moved to the lectern, opened his notebook, and then started his sermon.

“God’s love is unconditional,” he said.

He quickly surveyed his sparse congregation, and he saw Beth there in a pew by herself. He quickly counted those in attendance, and the number was twelve. Like the Last Supper, he thought, there are twelve here this Sunday morning. I make thirteen and the organist fourteen. He briefly ran his hand across the top of his head, disturbing the few gray hairs there, then he smoothed them down. Each of the heads in the congregation was white, the men bald like him, except for old Myron Nielsen, the Dane whose hair piled like summer clouds atop his narrow cranium. All white.

“God loves us as no other can,” he said. “Some loves are like light switches and can be turned on or off with a flick of the finger. But God’s love is unconditional.”

He read a scripture passage that supported his theme, but he was not sure he understood it. If there is such a thing as unconditional love, it more likely is in the realm of god than of people, he thought. Maybe it was the idea that was important. A story of unwavering love available to all people is certainly encouraging, he thought. A lie that tells the truth. He’d heard that somewhere, and it sounded right.

When he was finished with his sermon, he asked the congregation to join him in prayer, and everyone bowed their head. Then he asked everyone to join him in singing hymn two hundred and thirty-nine on page three hundred and eight, “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” When he sang, he thought of those canaries, dead at the bottom of their cages.

When the hymn was over, he blessed the congregation then walked down the aisle and out the door without greeting a single soul. At home, he wrote a letter saying he was quitting the ministry. His congregation was sad at his departure, but they formed a committee to search for someone new.

For a while, Beth occasionally saw Pastor Clifford early in the morning out in the field, but he never stopped to talk. Occasionally she would find a jar of honey on her doorstep, but that stopped, too. When her apple trees didn’t produce, she looked on her property for the hives. They were overgrown with weeds and vines and she couldn’t tell if there were bees inside.

One spring day a few years later, the daughters found Beth, her eyes closed as if sleeping, and there by the bed where she lay was a vase of silk flowers so well manufactured that they seemed almost real. The daughters were stricken with grief and could only comfort one another in their hour of darkness.

“Remember how Pastor Clifford helped us when Dad died?” one of them said.

“I wonder where he is?”

“I don’t know. No one has seen him in years.”

Title: Morning coffee, whiskey, and cigarettes
Author: RJ Stewart
Length: 1,909 words
Date of creation: June 23, 2016 / Revised July 27, 2026

HE REWROTE his novel!

My editor informed me by email, alarmed, as suggested by the punctuation. He wanted an interview with the great writer as soon as I could arrange it. I made a few calls, finally reached him, and learned he was in Paris.

“Meet me at Café la Rose, near the Pont Louis-Philippe at 10:45.” He made it sound precise, perhaps even urgent. I arrived promptly at the appointed time, very early for me. He showed a half hour later.

I ordered coffee, and he asked for an American whiskey, which the café did not have. The waiter brought my coffee and then announced that he had gone to his friend who operated a different café nearby. He had asked about the whiskey, an American bourbon, and his colleague had gone to his private room where he tasted wines for his menu. There he kept a bottle of bourbon “to cleanse his palette” he said, before a new tasting. The waiter explained this as if it were a reconnaissance debriefing. He smiled broadly and waited for the writer’s approval.

“Splendid! Splendid!” he said, sounding like a pretentious American.

“I can see no reason for the rewrite,” I offered. He did not reply, nor even glance at me. Instead he gazed across the flowing Seine and spoke abstrusely of the character he had renamed – renamed! – and the changes he had made to the plot.

I had seen early review copies, and I could see no sense at all in any of the changes. I considered his work one of his best. His protagonist was famed and loved by readers around the globe. Changing any aspect of his fictional person was a diminution of good western literature. He was a respected man of letters who had created a perfect character, lovable, believable, faceted, a fine intellect, a lover, a poet and a soldier, then later a sad man wanting forgiveness. Why would he change the name – change any aspect! – of this fine creation?

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The writer sipped the whiskey rapidly, bold, I thought, for the time of day. He asked if I would like to try some as well, but I declined. I sipped my coffee and accepted a refill. My work at Bookman’s Journal of Fine Music, Art, and Literature usually does not start until noon, and then two hours often pass before I start my interviews. He wanted to meet near the river, because his idea could be related to its flowing waters. He chose the restaurant, he said, for similar reasons. He said it reminded him of an old melody, a vague ballad that he tried to hum, could not find his voice, and resorted to a pathetic whistle that turned heads in the quiet café and along the Quai de Bourbon where women jogged and men strolled in minimal swimwear.

“I was in the Jardin des Tuileries one summer afternoon, smoking a fine Cuban cigar and thinking of Borges. A lovely girl ran by with a gossamer netting fastened to a large hoop. A boy of a similar age, perhaps ten or eleven, ran with her, he holding something – a container, perhaps a large jar with a metal lid. It was lovely. Indeed, it was lovely,” he said.

“They giggled delightfully as they pursued a floating butterfly. The girl seemed to me so very swift afoot, but when she neared the insect – they are but insects, you know – it would suddenly drift upward, out of her reach. She would leap in vain, then pause for just a moment, giggling again with the boy and bumping shoulders playfully, as if they could not be having a better time. Two children, don’t you see, two children as yet unfettered with the burdens and contradictions of their approaching adulthood.”

He paused again, wetting his lips with the whiskey, then savoring the aroma with his nose planted at the rim of the snifter. He finished the drink and ordered another, indifferent to the waiter’s problems. He sat impatiently until the drink arrived, sniffed it adoringly, and swallowed with a smack of his lips. I had never thought of this artist as an aging man. His lean prose, crafted carefully, seemed muscular to me, the thing that a young man of both great strength and great talent would produce. His balding head, white hair, pocked nose, and ear hair were unavoidable statements of age. His untrimmed eyebrows bushed from the brow of his nose to the edges of his gray, misted eyes.

“They tried several times, laughing and leaping into the air to catch the elusive insect. Its flight was something to ponder. It seemed to lack entirely any predetermined destination. It zigged and zagged, as if changing on a whim, or perhaps distracted by a color, or sensing a source of food from a flower, or attracted to another insect of its own kind. Apart from the occasional close call with the collection netting, it seemed also to be uncaring about its pursuers.”

His gaze now had become something of a trance. The images in his mind were finding expression with me. I turned in the direction of his gaze and found my own imaginings of artists and poets, of the great composers and librettists, sculptors who in their time have walked the river with hands clasped in the small of their back, contemplating in peace the next strokes of their chisels, the next forceful swings of their hammers, the next phrase in their concerto.

“They caught the thing at last. She leapt high, her skirt beautifully lighted in the waning sun, the vague shapes of her legs visible through the cotton, her long hair thrust back in skeins of russet and black. Her friend quickly caught up, and they carefully removed the insect – I believe it was yellow with trimmings of black and white – and placed it in the jar. They stood together, their arms draped over the other’s shoulder as children do when their friendship has reached an order of uncommon significance.”

He stopped suddenly and reached for his napkin. I thought perhaps that an insect had menaced his eye, or a particle of tree pollen had alighted there annoyingly. When he dabbed his other eye, then traced his serviette de table around the edges of both eyes, bowing his head and turning away slightly, I could see that he was hiding the emotion that had come suddenly over him. I realized how privileged I was at that moment, sitting with the perhaps the greatest writer of our time, as his idea took him to a private expression of emotion. I turned away until he collected himself.

“They came by me, quite by chance. My French is not so good, but I ventured anyway. Que ferez-vous avec le papillon? I believe they replied – my French is not so good – that they were heading home to add the butterfly to their collection. I tried again: Où voulez-vous garder vos papillons collectés? They said, I believe they said, that they keep their collected butterflies pinned to a board. I did not have the vocabulary to ask if they labeled them, but I have read of other more mature collectors, professionals perhaps, who label their insects by type, along with the date and location of the collection. For scientific purposes. Fixed to a board and unchanging, for examination upon demand. Isn’t that interesting? Do you find that interesting?”

He turned directly to me and waited for my eyes to meet his, then he surprised me with a little laugh, a chuckle at first, then a loud belly laugh, then he shook with the delight of his humour. You must know how it is when someone laughs: We seem to find a similar response unavoidable, and so I laughed with him. The eyes of the people along the great river and at the other tables turned to see what had us so tickled. It was a very fun and memorable moment. We again wiped away the tears from our eyes, but these were not the same. Then he became reflective again, serious. He turned to me and made the following statement, which I later wrote down as quickly as I could in my notes, because it answered my question, which I had nearly forgotten, and I wanted to get it right.

“It is an allegory, my friend, an illustration, and a childish one,” he said, and he chuckled again. I chuckled, too. “Ideas … like butterflies! We chase them happily, with great delight, sometimes joined by our friends, and tripping along in the unnoticed shadows and the bright illumination of the summer suns, collecting them and placing them in jars, pinning them to boards and attaching labels.”

I don’t recall much of the rest of my interview, but I will not forget the remainder of the afternoon. We ordered more whiskey, and the waiter seemed to join in the joy of the afternoon, graciously placing our glasses on our table of happily wishing us a votre santé! The writer offered me a cigarette, and I took it, puffing as he placed his lighter at the cigarette’s end. With an exhale, I sipped again and again, then we each ordered another whiskey. And another.

Our time ended and I wobbled to my flat, lazed on my back, thought of ideas, floating butterflies and spontaneous children’s laughter. Somewhere in the folds of my mind, I recalled that butterflies have thousands of eyes, and see many things at once. No wonder they zig here and zag there; there is much of interest.

Years later, I returned to the Café la Rose on a leisure trip to Paris. I found the same table at which we had sat. I brought the Journal from my pocket and turned to the interview I had written several years before. When the waiter came, I ordered a coffee and a small whiskey une bourbon, s’il vous plaît. The waiter did not question my order, said merci, and soon returned with both beverages, one steaming and the other warmly resting, neat, in an American highball glass. I sipped them both, very slowly, in the morning sun, as the peaceful waters of the river flowed past. The coffee seemed to perk me up, but the whiskey countered with gauzy calm. I tried to recall my day with the writer and finally resorted to re-reading the interview I had written years before. I sat for many moments, concentrating on the written words, on the things he said, and the way I had brought them together for my article.I read it again attentively, several times through.

At last I paid the waiter, shook his hand, and thanked him for his kind service. I walked away slowly, then along the river, until I came to the bridge. I walked to the middle, took the Bookman’s Journal of Fine Music, Art, and Literature from my pocket, and tossed it into the river. The current swept it away, out of my sight, so I ran to the other side of the bridge, narrowly dodging traffic, and there it emerged, waterlogged and a few inches below the surface, its words barely discernible. A yellow butterfly dipped from the somewhere and surveyed the object in the water before zipping away. The Journal floated away too, toward the ocean, perhaps where good ideas go to avoid capture.

“I’m ge- ge- g- getting … ”

Oh, dear, I muttered in an aside. I love my editor. D is as pleasant as
she is beautiful. What’s more, she possesses extraordinary abilities as
editor, writing coach, part-time counselor, friend, and occasional drinking buddy. I am fortunate to work with her. But her stammer is annoying. Not to be cruel or judgmental, but the truth is we’re quite busy at Bookman’s Journal of Fine
Music, Art, and Literature, each of us rushing to complete our responsibilities and meet deadlines. Hesitations, delays, diversions and the like are something we intuitively abhor. Still, with D I must …w- w- wa-wait.

On the train from Florence, I sat in First Class with my computer and the latest issue of our journal spread open on the small table in front of my seat. I had completed a Skype interview with my subject, a young contemporary artist named T, whose work was on exhibit in Venice at the residence-now-museum of a famed New York socialite.
My notes needed review and edit, and with any luck, I could begin an outline for my next article. We had barely begun to roll when my cell phone rang. I was eager to get to work, but I took the call anyway. It was D, calling from the home office in London.

“I’m g-g-get g-g-getting t-t-t-

For god’s sake, D. Out with it. I didn’t say it. I thought it.

“T-t-t-treatment!”

Despite the stammer, it was obvious she was very excited. I assumed she meant she was getting treatment for some injury she had, but it soon became clear she was talking about her stammer. Of course, this is not new. D has informed me that she’s had treatment since childhood, so it wasn’t clear to me why she was so excited this time. Maybe there was a scientific breakthrough or something, perhaps a new drug or a surgery of some sort using the latest robotics, or some stem-cell therapy with
extraordinary promise.

“D, that’s wonderful!”

“I th-th-th- think th-th-this w- w- will w- w- work for me.”

Our conversation lasted well into my journey, but I’ll not try to replicate the actual w-w-w words. Suffice to say that D had found a therapist whose understanding of speech and hearing disorders was highly regarded. She said the man held doctorates in linguistics, logopaedics, philosophy, and medicine, an unlikely combination that suggested to me a perpetual student. What’s more, she had met the man through her work at the Journal because of his interest in art. I could not judge; if D was enthused for the man’s broad skills, so be it.

From my experience with her I had learned that D’s principal frustration was simply expressing herself. Once, over drinks, she seemed more relaxed and forthcoming, and I ventured to broach the subject of her stammer, and she tried to explain. I’m not sure whether the alcohol helped her speak any better, but I’m sure it helped me listen more
faithfully and patiently. Besides, the Hendricks and tonic was especially cool and
satisfying, the cucumber a promising and colorful delight.

D said she was completely aware of her listeners’ impatience; she can read it on their faces. It explains, she said, why she’s far more comfortable talking with someone in person as opposed to speaking on the telephone, even though, she confided, either experience intimidates her. At least in face-to-face conversation, she could watch her
listener’s reactions, and she was able to use her own body language to convey
her desire, if not her ability, to communicate.

At Uni, she had turned her interest and education to literature, because it was in interacting with written words that she could move quickly and adeptly. Her mind certainly was neither slow nor halting. She was brilliant; I knew that from working with her. As an editor she seemed to intuit what I was trying to express, as if she could read between my faltering lines. When my syntax, structure, organization, vocabulary selection and the like weren’t working well, she could offer, sometimes by email, sometimes by Skype, and occasionally by phone, suggestions that put my derailed essay
back on the tracks.

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Even so, conversation was embarrassing and painful for both her and her listeners. Her stammer failed to move the conversation ahead, as if the idea were stuck like the spinning wheels of a car on a snowy slope. Repetition is terrific for hammering away at a single idea, but it doesn’t do much for enhancing the conversation. What if all that each of us has to say is simply a repetition of the idea we had just a moment before? How boring would that be? As if there were nothing new to discuss. As if our ideas were stymied. As if our experience were singular, a mere replication of all
that came before the notion we produced in the first place.

In truth, D and I had in the course of our working relationship grown rather close. She confided in me. I actually came to enjoy our conversations. I took interest in the stammer. The more time I spent with her, the more accustomed to her unusual speech pattern I became. I even noticed that the first letters of words that tripped her up actually weren’t the same. I even wondered, without success of an answer, if there was
information in the silences between the utterances. What if I could, with
practice and concentration, intuit, as she did with my writing, what meaning
there might be in the absence of direct language? Perhaps I could read between
her lines, so to say.

One day while sitting at our favorite London pub, I simply continued to sip my drink as she stammered hopelessly away on a particularly difficult topic. In fact, I now recall, we were discussing my writing. She was making a point of my tendency to distrust the first mention of a concept. She said rather bluntly that I invariably found
some clever way to say the same thing in different words. In a sense, she stammered, I was stammering, too.

When I’d exhausted both my drink and my patience with her, I articulated a defense of my style: By elucidating, I help to inform the reader. Tautological, she said; remain quiet and invite reflection. Silence, I shot back, informs nothing. Repetition, she said, is more than boring; it’s insulting. You would argue with a rose, is a rose, is a
rose? Hardly, she said; Stein makes my point, not yours. We continued in this
point/counterpoint until we both slumped in frustration in our booth. I ordered another Henricks, and she excused herself with some questionable jabber about laundry awaiting her at home.

“D, I’m so happy for you,” I said as she
rose to leave. “You really think this therapy will help?”

“I d-d-d- do!”

“Wonderful!”

“Th-th-thanks!”

~ ~ ~

I got on with my work as I swayed on the train toward Venice. Once we cleared the tunnels near Bologna, the train raced along until we neared the City of Canals. It slowed and then stopped.

The conductor announced that high waters had interrupted traffic and we would be arriving ten to fifteen minutes late. I used the time to mull over a particularly troubling part of my notes. In a Skype interview I had done earlier, the watercolourist had nattered on about the chancy outcomes that occur when pigment, water and paper collude. The inability to predict water’s properties, she said, was part of the artistic reward for her. She had discovered that repetition of subject matter was anything but replication. Each rendition was different. At the moment, I felt rather at one with the artist’s ideas of whimsical waters; despite its deleterious impact on
the train schedule.

Eventually, we rolled again and soon arrived at the statzione. I collected my things and debarked. I had selected a hotel near the museum for the sake of convenience and walked there confident that my schedule had not been thrown too far out of whack. To my dismay, another water-related delay awaited me; this time the hotel entry was
blocked by a pool of rather smelly sea water.

I found a small market selling Wellies, bought the cheapest pair I could find, donned them, and returned to the hotel, a bit smug, I confess, that neither water nor chance had deterred me. Thus protected from the wiles of water, I walked to the museum, a gorgeous, gleaming-white edifice that seemed to dangle from a ledge on the Grand Canal. Dozens of tourists pushed their way to the main entrance, and my patience with
them was at its end when I heard my name. I turned to find T running towards
me, her arms outstretched as if I were her missing father. She bubbled as we exchanged hellos, then she grabbed my hand and, leading me in the direction of the canal, informed me that before she would show her work, we would go together to her
studio, a short ride by gondola from the museum.

“The boats are so lovely,” she said. “The tourists love them, and the queues are long, but the magic of riding on top of the water is worth the wait. I take the water to work. And then, the watercolour takes me to myself. Water, water everywhere!”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but her enthusiasm was infectious. She bought our tickets and we boarded. In Italian, she asked the gondolier to take us to her studio.

“Do you think water is the best metaphor for our streams of conscious? I do! We use words for things, but they float like boats in water, colours and textures mixing unpredictably! Isn’t it exciting!”

“Ah, yes.” Truth is, I was lost.

“Put an image in your mind,” she said. “Look! That building … ”

I glanced in the direction of her pointing finger and saw a massive yellow structure looming above the canal.

“We give a name … a building! But that doesn’t describe it at all, does it? We need more!”

I nodded agreement, again lost. A building, yes. More information, OK. I thought of my writing discussion with D; certainly, in this circumstance, if D were correct, I’d try to insert more descriptors, which she suggested could be overdone and boring!Insulting even!

“In my work, I restate and restate, and I discover that each time, the statement is different. New information! It’s the dilemma of the modern human being! We must try and try again to convey who we are, what we feel! And each time we attempt to express who we are, the set and subset of information about us has changed. We are different! Our expressions of ourselves cannot keep up with the collection of experiences we have! An artist must find the key and unlock this dilemma!”

Yes. Of course. I suddenly thought of my Wellies and wished I were them. How nice it would be to avoid such conversations. Make me into a hollow, rubbery likening of a foot into which someone may slip their soggy problems. That would be a very excellent understanding of purpose, the very meaning of a Wellies’ life at least. No reiteration needed, thank you.

Our gondolier pushed us ahead, his striped shirt betraying the hard muscles beneath and an improbable straw hat perched on his fine Venetian head. How about this unfortunate man’s self-expression? He didn’t at all seem complicated. Probably woke up this morning, had his coffee, kissed his wife and kids, and set off to push people around the canals, singing to them besides. What complications? But, alas, I wasn’t here to understand the gondolier; I had an effervescent philosopher-artist on my hands.

We snaked through narrower and narrower canals until finally we tied on to a walkway dropped from a very slim building tucked between a hotel and a restaurant. We went “ashore,” which was the back door to the building, and T led me up a spiral staircase until we landed at the door of her studio. She turned the unlocked latch and motioned me in.

Tacked to the circumference of the entire room about head high was a scroll of paper about the width of a London tabloid. On it were the facial images of the young artist herself, hundreds of portraits of her done in bright, unrealistic colours. This was, she said, her tenth work of the same subject – herself. She took my hand again and led me to a workbench on which another scroll was partially open, about a meter of paper exposed, the rest rolled at each end. She unrolled some of the paper to her left and
revealed a completed watercolour – again of herself. Unrolling more, she revealed more – of the same.

Each portrait was positioned so that each right eye of the subject was half off the paper. The left eye was intact. Each portrait had evidently begun with the same model. When I asked, T said she had taken a selfie with her mobile phone one day while at the banks of the Arno near her home in Florence.

“It’s me.”

“Why so many ‘me’s’ ”?

“Perfect question!” she said. “It’s me again, only different!”

“Do you struggle with self-expression?”

She nearly jumped into my arms, hugged me tightly, then began to sob. I drew her head close to my heart and held her there as her sobs turned to whimpers, then to wails. I put my hand to the back of her head and stroked her blonde hair gently, muttering “there, there” or something equally ineffectual. The iterations of her emotions continued, reminding me of the stammering ululations of grieving Arab women.

As I held her trembling body, I saw across the room the scroll of portraits hanging on the wall, and instead of the variety of colors on a model in identical pose, I saw the variation of each, as if I were looking not at an image of one person, but at images of many facets of one person, similar at first glance, but markedly distinct upon closer
examination.

Her emotional outburst ebbed, like the receding waters in Venice canals. She collected herself, deployed a magnificent smile, her dazzling white teeth contrasting with her olive-toned complexion. She smoothed her blond hair, then flipped a collection of locks that had fallen across her right eye. She tilted her head slightly to her left, just as she had evidently done for her selfie. In my mind’s eye, I painted her face with
translucent blues and greens, dusky oranges and greys. Then it occurred to me: What
does a watercolourist do for white?

We hailed a gondola and returned to the museum. With me in tow, she slipped around the crowds and into the vast halls and scattered rooms of the late heiress’s mansion. We came to a windowed room, alive with light. Outside, threatening clouds drifted in front of the sun, flicking shadows inside the room as if a child had found the light switch.

She paused before a dull white wall into which were placed two pellucid pegs. On them was fastened a scroll that had been formed into a cone, not unlike the waffled cones for gelato, except for an opening at the bottom. The widest part of the cone opened into the room like a megaphone, the narrowest part a centimeter or so from the wall. The area behind the small opening had been painted black. On the inside of the cone were the images of T, and the right eyes seemed to enlarge in those closest to the viewer.

I stood transfixed, my eyes darting from iterated image to reiterated image, some more distinct than others. As the light shifted, the images seemed almost animated, each very different.

“It’s not a selfie,” I said.

T smiled.

“It’s me. Many me’s. Me are I; I is Another.”

I asked about technique and medium, more to turn the conversation to syntax I could understand than to probe artistic method.

“I have choice in colour, but I cannot control the paper’s absorption. The tones wander. They surprise me. They remind me of me, and so I paint me. I cannot always know where I am, where I go, who is inside and which of me gets out the moment. I paint in a zone of indeterminacy, an area of chance as surprising to me as I sometimes am to myself.”

For the first time I got it. But one thing still eluded me.

“How can you know if your audience sees your message?”

She turned her head again to its common position, tilted toward her left shoulder.

“How can I know if I see myself?”

~ ~ ~

From Venice, I returned to London. I asked D to join me at a small pub called the Boat’s Mooring. We ordered drinks and found a comfortable table by the window. London’s summer weather hung like Victorian draperies.

“He’s h-helped me. The therapist has helped.” she said.

I am ashamed to say that at first I didn’t notice that her stammer had almost disappeared. A remarkable improvement, if not a complete “cure.”

“My god, D! What has happened?”

“He helped me!”

I understood that, but I wanted more; I wanted hundreds and thousands of sentences from her untied tongue. I wanted speed, a rush of information, vast amounts of thinking and emotion from inside her heart and her mind. No pauses. No waiting. Repetition and all! At last!

We talked for hours, with little interruption. We ordered more beer, then switched to whisky, and before long her voice was slurred and my hearing fogged. But I didn’t care; I was ebullient in this new discovery of a person I admired so deeply.

We staggered toward our flats, hugged tightly, then went our separate ways. I was soon called to an assignment in Canada, and it was several weeks before I heard anything of D.

~ ~ ~

One day, I phoned the London office, and the secretary told me that D had suffered an apparent heart attack. The doctors had attempted to revive her, but it was too late. She was gone. The abrupt announcement was unfair. Here, then gone. My friend who had stammered and stuttered, struggled to express herself, found healing and gushed thoughts and ideas like a Roman fountain, and then suddenly disappeared as if all the pauses in her speech had come together for the rest of time.

I found a place where I could grieve openly. When I had collected myself, I called my partner Leon and gave him the news. “There is such a sudden absence in my life, Leon. I rather don’t know what to do.”

“There, there,” Leon said. “There, there.”

His words had no meaning, of course, but his voice – the voice of my partner – was a great comfort. I might have thought him a bumbler had I been looking for the perfect words to soothe me, but in truth it was just the sound of his voice that I needed, his presence, even by phone. Even his silence soothed me as if I rocked in my mother’s arms.

For weeks I grieved for the absence of my editor. Another fine person was hired at the Journal, and life settled like a vessel in irons.

~ ~ ~

I often dream of D. She speaks to me at a pub my resting mind concocts in its immanence, always alive with bright light. I always lean into her, my hands cupped behind my ears so as to hear her words. And always in this dream is her wonderful voice, speaking in its irreplaceable stammer, softly and hopefully, and I always awake afraid that her absence again will find me when my sleep is deepest.

My London neighbors had been called to a conference in Brussels, so they inquired of my partner and me if we might look after their seven-year-old boy, a terrorist lad named Oscar, for the weekend. As neighbors, we occasionally share life’s simple burdens, so the request wasn’t as rude as it may seem, but still! Looking after a feral child of seven was at the edge of our idea of community.

Leon and I live simply; he is importantly employed at the offices of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and I am critic and biographer at Bookman’s Journal of Fine Literature. My editors at the Journal had been making a variety of adjustments regarding content, and while our fortunes certainly didn’t rival those at Leon’s corridor of offices with the Exchequer, we had enjoyed an increase in both subscriptions and revenue. Originally focused on literature, as our title suggests, we had expanded our coverage to include visual art. Our idea was periodically to theme our journal, by which the editors meant to focus articles on a particular topic. For the upcoming publication, we had chosen music, and our contributors had submitted a substantial collection of appropriate essays. A selection had been made, and it was my job to interview the winner, a respected scholar in Northern Ireland.

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Oscar wasn’t always welcome at our home, but in the interest of contributing to our village of young professionals we usually didn’t turn him away, either. If given any warning at all, Leon and I would hide our breakable belongings or put them
high enough that Oscar bin Laden would have to employ a boost or an act of mountaineering adventure that potentially could lead to his death by falling.

Oscar was raised in a bilingual home. His mother is a stunning woman from Moscow, tall, dark-eyed, thin as a model, and the genetic owner of long, flowing black hair that curls coyly at the tips of her noticeable breasts. Bin Laden’s father is an American of Turkish descent who grew up near Minneapolis. He is as handsome as his wife is beautiful, but somehow their DNA had combined to produce a hellion, an apparent combination of Ataturk and Ivan the Terrible.

Oscar is gifted with more than just outbursts of destruction; he also finds it absolutely necessary to describe every one of his ceaseless motions. For example, he will race from one end of our flat to the other at Olympic speed, calling out his darts and dodges as if described by one of those commentators at a football match.

“… he swerves to miss the dragon’s breath of fire! … he smashes the beast with his gigantic hatchet! … he stabs the mad bomber with his sword!” and the like. These phrases are delivered with a curious mixture of accent: English, American and Russian. Sometimes he pulls a phrase from some dark recess of his scheming little brain, and Leon and I can barely mask our laughter.

Once, for example, he was happily destroying our small porch when a pedestrian strolled by with his pit bull. The animal stopped suddenly and the fur on its back stood straight up as he eyed The Destroyer at work. The dog growled menacingly, then lurched to the end of its owner’s leash, snarling viciously at Oscar. He would have ripped out the child’s heart if given half a chance.

“That’s adorable!” Oscar yelled.

When it turned out that Leon was called to a special project relating to the shortfall of funds from the European Union, due mainly to the soaring costs associated with immigration, I was left alone with Oscar. I decided to get him out of our flat before it would be required by zoning officials to raze the ruins. We caught the tube, headed for the modern art museum and its copious display of heavy-duty interactive exhibits that legions of children had so far failed to destroy. Let Oscar The Bulldozer have a go at it, I reasoned, and the museum’s wealthy donors could arrange a tea or some other fund raiser to salvage what they could.

We emerged from the tube and ascended the stairs to the street. After a short walk we came to the square, and it was then that I noticed a cavalcade of apparent musicians, their instruments strapped to their backs in sturdy cases designed to protect the valuable contents. I’m not fully acquainted with musical instruments, but I had read that some of these ancient pieces are worth millions of pounds or Euros or dollars,

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whichever is greatest at the moment.

The musicians evidently were on their way to a performance at the children’s museum that was our destination as well. Brilliant! I thought. If Oscar is the least like any other human being, music will soothe his impulses.

When Oscar darted away toward what appeared to be a musician carrying a case, I knew my hopes were unrealistic. I yelled after him to halt, which of course he did not.

The musician turned nervously as Oscar approached, not at all surprising given Oscar’s accompanying description of the “play-by-play,” as they say in the football
broadcasting business.

“ … the daring midfielder races toward the goal! Look at his speed! … ”

A characteristic I absolutely love about my English countrymen is their indefatigable ability to avoid excitement. As near as I was able to discern, not one person in the square bothered even to look at the cause of the sudden commotion. The musician, on the contrary, was clearly alarmed. He clutched the case to his chest with one arm and slashed away at Oscar with the other, yelling in a language I could not understand.

Beneath what appeared to be a “hoody” – one of those ample sweatshirts the young thugs of London like to wear, I saw a face knotted in a malevolent sneer. What happened next I certainly did not expect. Oscar swerved to avoid the musician’s flailing arm, then he darted in again, as if he were some taunted bull and the musician a toreador. This went on for half a dozen or so charges when suddenly the musician’s case fell open and its contents spilled onto the pavement. I imagined a conversation with my insurance agent in which he described the pauper’s cell to which I would be confined for the remainder of my days.

Instead, an arrangement of plastic bottles connected with wires and batteries tumbled to the pavement. Indifferent English folks suddenly became engaged, and along with a collection of hysterical tourists began to yell and shout. A nearby security officer heard the disturbance and ran to the scene. The musician dropped everything and ran as fast as he could, chased by an army of bystanders and the English law. Oscar, for his part, was, for the first time in my experience with him, still but for his commentary.

“How ADORABLE!” he said.

I ran to him, swept him up in my arms, and tried to recall quickly where the Thames was, the perfect place to deposit him, I thought. Lacking that, I did a millisecond search for a trash dumpster. He hugged me tightly, however, and I carried him up the stairs to the museum.

His behavior for the balance of the day was good – admirable even. He held my hand, politely asked for permission to interact with the exhibits, and, when we’d prepared ourselves for a snack and a drink, sat quietly, occasionally asking a question and listening with interest to my replies. We actually had a conversation.

“Why did he want to blow us up?”

I searched for a response that a seven-year-old would understand. Truthfully, I had no response an adult could understand. What can possibly explain such a horrible action?

“He’s very unhappy,” I said.

Oscar wasn’t satisfied.

“He needs a friend,” he said.

How adorable, I thought.

~ ~ ~

Two days later I was on my way to Belfast. I arranged to meet the scholar, Z, at a gentrified restaurant about equidistant from Waterfront and Ulster halls, Belfast’s most-notable performance venues. The restaurant had excellent reviews and was themed on the Titanic, which, after my experiences with Oscar, seemed entirely appropriate.

On the flight over, I read in The Guardian that “an unidentified” child had foiled the suicide bombing plans of a nutter of a man belonging to some terrorist group. The mad bomber told police he hoped to bring on a last-days conflict that would result in the establishment of heaven on Earth. To me, at least, this unconvincing idea confirmed the mad bomber’s insanity.

I had time as well to re-read Z’s essay, a ten-thousand-word analysis of a violin concerto by a modern composer of Scandinavian descent named M. The essay and the newspaper article, taken together, seemed to be an obtuse commentary on modern times, as if a fingernail-scratched blackboard and a bombing in the square had something in common. Z selected lofty language perfectly suitable for our journal, and a style that I believed would appeal to our readers.

Still, I had questions when I saw him.

“What I don’t understand – forgive me – is what the composer is getting at. Is there an idea associated with this music, or is it meant to be simply enjoyed? You know; listened to, as though it were an objet d’art?”

The question is perfectly fitting, he said. Although not a musician himself, he said his studies confirmed that composers mean to say something with their music. They mean to create color and tone, set a mood, suggest a conflict, find a resolution. All of this can be accomplished, he said, with rhythm, pace, structure, tone, phrasing and the selection of key most suitable to the instruments that will do the “heavy lifting,” as he put it. He said the concerto we would hear that night at the Waterfront would illustrate his point. He warned me there would be dissonance in this piece; don’t expect, he said, a melody you will want to whistle later while you work.

We made our way into the hall, its ornate walls and ceiling suggesting both elegance and intimacy. The beautiful soloist soon came energetically onto the stage, followed by Maestro, a long-haired, dark-skinned man of apparent Latin roots. Not a note had been played, but I already was captivated by the soloist’s flowing, dark, cerulean-blue taffeta gown, backless and sleeveless. As she turned and bowed to accept the audience’s enthusiastic welcome, well-defined muscles in her back and shoulders upstaged the incomparable impact of the gown. When she lightly gripped her bow, adjusted the instrument under her chin, then lifted her Asian eyes to Maestro to signal her readiness, the muscles of her lithe forearm, narrow wrist, and tapered fingers suggested a sculpture of highest quality, such as I’ve seen in the Borghese. She flipped her black hair daringly, set her jaw, and began.

Waterfront Hall was instantly alive with a flurry of notes that continued uninterrupted for nearly thirty minutes. It was as if the musicians’ instruments had fallen from their open cases and crashed to the floor, set free at last. Gongs, snare drums – percussion of every variety – punctuated the composition. Horns blared like taxis in Shanghai. Her bow arm was a blur, rising to reach the lower strings, falling to the higher, the fingers of her left hand stretching to reach the highest position on the fingerboard, trembling in vibrato.

The music was incomprehensible. It was as if the orchestra had escaped from Bedlam and was on the loose in Belfast. Their motions were wild, spasmodic almost, as they fled from one demanding bar to another. The Maestro himself seemed to dance as if a medicine man from some obscure tribe, a Zapotec, or an Aztec, or a Mixtec, or perhaps all three in one, the progeny of a mixed race of creative DNA.

When the concerto finally ended with a crushing fall of a heavy mallet on a large drum, the soloist uncoiled like a puppet at the end of a relaxed set of strings. The Maestro slumped, his shoulders rounded, and the baton dropped to his side, dangling as if forgotten.

A silence fell on the hall. No one dared move. Finally, Maestro turned to the audience, reached for the soloist’s hand and together they bowed. The audience jumped to its collective feet, applauded, whistled, hooped and hollered, yelled “brava” loudly. A young girl came onstage with a bouquet of flowers for the violinist, which she accepted with a slight bow.

As the noise abated, Z turned to me to say he was again astonished by the work. It was a word I might have chosen as well: astonished. He was correct in saying that the music was not melodic, at least not for any sustained period. Still, I was more than astonished; I also was oddly moved by what I had heard. It was a cacophony not unlike the experience of global travel: Ceaseless movement of billions of people, no harmony or cohesion, but still in some indescribable sense, full of meaning.

“It’s an experience you won’t forget!” he yelled.

He pulled me by the arm to exit the seating area. He said he had arranged for me to meet the soloist backstage. This was a complete surprise, and I was distracted as he continued his commentary. I thought of Oscar, describing his moves as he wreaked havoc on our flat.

“Picture the conflict we have in our society! How the kindest and the meanest things come together in the subway or the airport. This is what the composer is trying to say! Think of the movement, the frenetic movements of the billions of people around the globe, moving quickly in different directions, racing to their appointments and their objectives! Wishing for peace, sleepless in ambition for success or financial reward! Manipulating their partners, cheating on their spouses! Then – suddenly – loving and aware! Aware of what happens around them! Aware of the connection with other people, loving them in a strange, appreciative way.”

I was surprised that our individual assessment of the piece had little
commonality.

“This was in the music I just heard?”

“Yes, of course!” he said as he elbowed aside an elderly woman who
toddled along precariously.

Backstage we found Maestro and the soloist, sipping a cool lemonade. She now stood before me, this Asian counterpart of Pauline Bonaparte, beautiful as anything I could imagine. Z blathered on about her performance, and Maestro nodded his thank-yous. The soloist bowed her head repeatedly in polite, respectful acknowledgement, her fingertips together lightly in graceful Asian comportment.

Z turned to me.

“And you my journalist friend … what do you have to say?”

The room swirled. I thought of the experiences with music I had in just a few short days. Tonight, I witnessed a brilliant performance of a work for which I had absolutely no equipment to understand. And a few days ago, the Intrepid Oscar the Terrorist and I had encountered a mad bomber who had bundled his instrument of destruction in a violin case and headed to a public square to kill himself and anyone nearby.

I extended my hands, held hers gently, looked as deeply into her dark eyes as I could, and spoke.

“Adorable. It was absolutely, wonderfully adorable.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has some work to do. I pay for a subscription to Perplexity, an AI platform operated by Anthropic. So I should easily be able to find the news story about the run-away wagon in the July 4 Independence Stampede celebration in Greeley, Colorado, back in the 1970s. Or was it the 1980s? I don’t know; that’s why I need instant access to the archives of the now nearly defunct Greeley Daily Tribune.

Fat chance. Perplexity tells me the story isn’t there and I’m probably all mixed up, which is definitely true but not what I want from my paid subscription. Anyway, I was there. I know. Somebody was hurt! Or was somebody killed? A woman, I think. The wagon was being drawn in the amazing July 4 parade when the horses spooked (two of them, I’m sure it was two horses), and when they bolted, the wagon tongue separated from the wagon and the horses ran into the crowd on the sidewalks enjoying the amazing Greeley Independence Stampede Rodeo, Parade, and Fireworks Display. Because I can’t find positive confirmation of the story as I remember it, I’ll just go with my memory, which isn’t too reliable because I’m old and this was a long time ago in a far-off place.

Anyway, tragedies like the one I might be making up are not supposed to happen. Especially on America’s annual birthday celebration. On a day such as July Fourth, only good and patriotic things should happen, and generally that’s the way it is. Maybe a blown off finger here and there, but not real tragedies. Those are for other, normal days.

If I can’t verify the facts of my story, I can at least say what follows is “inspired by true events,” a common disclaimer which basically means don’t believe a word of it.

Greeley, Colorado, is practically the inventor of the Fourth of July, at least that’s what the promoters of the Greeley Independence Stampede Rodeo, Fashion Show, Parade and Watermelon Fest would have you believe. Before the Stampede, they’ll have have you know, there wasn’t a Fourth of July worth talking about.

This event is now in maybe its 400th year. It has a rodeo, a charity jogging race, a parade, some singers of Real American Patriot music, giant trucks, and even bull fighters who prove their patriotism by taunting angry bulls. There’s a big stage and loud music and partying until all hours of July Fifth. The show of course has a colorful history, too.

Long ago, there was a runaway wagon that was the headline event of the Greeley Independence Stampede Rodeo, Charitable Jog, Fashion Show and Truck Rally for that year. The horses got spooked by the Rotary Club members who were riding tricycles in the parade, and they ran into the crowd. They bolted — wait not the Rotary Club Tricycle brigade, it was the horses that bolted. I can’t remember what happened to the Rotary Men. I can say they definitely were men because women weren’t allowed in the Rotary Club in those days because men often got nervous around women, especially smart, successful women.

Wait; I’m off track here. Back to the story of the spooked horses.

As I remember it, the horses broke the tongue loose from the wagon, which became a spear that jousted unintentionally with some parade watchers. I don’t think it was funny at the time, because somebody was badly hurt. I think. (I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s a pretty good story, worth retelling.) Despite the tragedy, the Greeley Independence Day Rodeo Parade Truck Show Bull Fighting Fashion Show Watermelon Fest continues even to this day. I even noticed in this morning’s New York Times a photo and short story about the event, proving — without AI — that it still exists.

Another year long ago, a reporter for the now nearly defunct Greeley Daily Tribune was assigned to cover the fireworks show, which is known locally as the BIGGEST AND BEST FIREWORKS SHOW ON EARTH. But the reporter came back to the office to report to his editor that he wouldn’t be writing a story about the BIGGEST AND BEST FIREWORKS SHOW ON EARTH because all the fireworks blew up before the organizers had a chance to set it off. His editor pushed up his green eye shade, lifted an eyebrow, adjusted his sleeve garters, and sent him back out to cover the explosion instead of the fireworks display, and the refocused reporter somehow managed to file a story and keep his job.

Why such events are part of the very serious anniversary of the establishment of a long-running democracy is beyond me. Why not just have everybody bring some watermelon to the city park while an actor dresses up like Benjamin Franklin and reads the Declaration of Independence? Wouldn’t that be an appropriate celebration? Why a rodeo anyway? The Founders weren’t cowboys. Cowboys hadn’t even been invented back in 1776. And why fireworks? Shouldn’t we just chill and reverently thank our Founding Fathers for their rebellious ways?

Okay, I’ll admit people claim to have fun, the fireworks get better with each Chinese technological advancement, and people feel proud to be part of the Great American Experiment. My opinion, which generally is still allowed in our beautiful country, is that it’s all good. I guess it’s fine if people want to watch cowboys and cowgirls at a rodeo, sit in the hot sun and watch the Elks Club guys play kazoos, then go blow some things up, and weep when the country singers sing the latest modern arrangement of “God Bless America”. It’s a special time, for sure.

Footnote: I once was editor and reporter for the Greeley Daily Tribune. On a personal level, I will disclose that I even covered the rodeo from the arena, and I can still remember the hoof mark on my derriere. I was never more proud to be an American.

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Teens, especially, boys sometimes are hopeless cases. No names here, but I personally know a teen who siphoned gas from a neighbor’s car then poured the gas onto the street in front of his girl friend’s house and lit a match. He thought that was truly hilarious. That worked so well, he got the idea to set the lake in the local city park on fire. Pour a little fuel on the water and light it. How cool! This is utter brain damage. There is no connection in these damaged brains to cause and effect, just blind response to impulses that seem to be delivered by Satan himself. Thankfully nobody died, no property was damaged, the carp in the lake survived, and the boy somehow managed to escape a sentence of life in prison.

This is brain damage. Here’s an example with younger children: Most will heed the warning that touching a hot stove can hurt, but some – those with uncommon brain damage – have to find out for themselves. If you’ve raised no children, then you may not know about these bizarre behaviors. But parents know.

Usually the damaged brains begin to heal when the boys survive their teen years and drift without casualty into their twenties. (Notice now that I’m referring to boys rather than girls.) But we all know a few “adults” whose brains never seem to recover.

Consider just a recent example involving the famous Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in our nation’s Capitol. It’s a beautiful, contemplative pool that has been the backdrop for many historically significant events. Martin Luther King’s speech comes to mind. What a setting that was! Speaking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a huge crowd, Dr. King spoke brilliantly of his dream for justice, freedom, and equality for all. A very large crowd was rapt.

That boy who poured gasoline on the street and set it afire was reckless, stupid, uncaring about others, and incapable of anticipating the ill effects of his behavior. Would he have thought to drive his car down the length of the Reflecting Pool? Would he have invited his friends along for an event like a Main Street cruise in small town America?

What then is to explain the leader of the United States government ordering his motorcade into the Reflecting Pool on a recent day? Did he find this amusing? Was it official business? Did any of his crew suggest it was a really bad idea? Most of all did it do any lasting damage?

Oddly, shortly after this joy ride, the pool began to show signs that new, expensive repairs were damaged somehow. Did the leader of the government have anything to do with the damage? Not according to him and his spokespeople. It was vandalism, he said. Vandals, probably bad actors from the opposing party. Here’s a report from the Reuters:

“Three weeks ago, the Trump administration declared ​victory in completing work to repaint the landmark pool, which stretches from the Lincoln Memorial nearly to the Washington Monument. The color was “American ⁠flag blue” for the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence on July 4. In the days since, the pool has been beset by problems including blooms of algae, a long-running scourge that has ​tinted the water a vibrant green, and chips of blue paint peeling off the bottom. Days before the National Mall will host U.S. 250th anniversary celebrations, the Reflecting Pool has become the ​latest symbol of Trump’s Washington: a test of his attempts to bend reality in his favor and command law enforcement to his personal whims.”

News reports now have begun to emerge regarding a long gash made in the floor of the pool by a razor or some other kind of knife. This is the work, the administration says, of a vandal. No details have been offered, but at least the story absolves the president of wrongdoing.

Even if the motorcade didn’t cause the damage, the joy ride is an example of inexplicable behavior. Evidently brain damage isn’t limited to youth. Also evidently, not all boys grow up. Some even drift into old age believing that their fancy must be served.

My website here.

THE LIME TREE didn’t do well. We brought it in last fall when it looked really good. Buds, lush leaves, an aggressive spirit when you messed with its branches. Thorns along the limbs. Always wear gloves.

Lime trees won’t survive our cold, dry winters here in Colorado, so we nurtured it indoors from late September to mid-May. We left it out as long as we thought wise, but we know there can be early freezes in the fall, even though the daytime temperatures can be alluring. We brought it in when the forecast suggested the mercury might dip below freezing.

No small matter, because the Italian planter it had lived in is heavy. If it housed something else – annuals, for example – we would empty it and turn it upside down for the winter. But the lime tree seemed so happy. What could go wrong?

It wasn’t the first time we kept it going during the winter. We had one other winter-time experience that actually went quite well. Last fall, we placed it where it had been before, and again it seemed fine. But a few rearrangements in the room where it was placed necessitated a change. We selected a north-facing window, thinking that would help induce a winter dormancy.

We kept it watered, of course, not copiously but sufficiently. It seemed contented.

But in January, we noticed a few leaves had dropped off. By the end of February, a few more. In March, the soil beneath its small limbs was littered with leaves, and by the end of May we found ourselves impatient for the arrival of the average-last -freeze time. We hoped the warming sun would lift it from its fragile state like Lazarus lifted from the grave.

It began to look hopeless. It lost all of its leaves, and when we bent some of the branches to test their suppleness we were greeted with the dreadful snap. We pruned away the obviously dead branches, but we retained a glimmer of hope for the single trunk that remained, a sad looking spike of life that even if it grew would be homely if not homeless. We transplanted it from the Italian terracotta to a smaller glazed pot, knowing at least it would be easier to get it inside if we decided to try one more winter-over.

In a few days, buds began to form here and there on the spike, even a couple that were barely visible near the soil.

Enthusiastically we checked the plant each morning as the last few days of May drifted into June. The photo above may present a dubious plant, but the green on its trunk was encouraging. And now, by the end of June, it is looking good:

You may see a growing lime tree, and I do, too. But I also see a metaphor, because in the months since we brought it in we have confronted a variety of sad, even hopeless events. At times our lives seemed as bare and unpromising as the trunk of that poor lime tree looked just earlier this month. Are we to blame? Should we have known better? Should have not moved it? Should we have uprooted and discarded it instead of trying to care for it? Should we move to Florida or California if we want citrus?

Well, you can begin to see the metaphorical possibilities. It’s tempting at times to just give up, throw up our hands in utter despair. It’s also common to impute blame: It’s probably our fault. We should have, we shouldn’t have, etc etc.

It is, however, possible to find inspiration in nature too. What we may not notice is that within the resin of calamity, there remains a moving (however slowly) pool of energy. What seems hopeless, may not be so. What is required at such times is simple patience, a confidence rooted in hope. Call it faith, if you like, as suggested in the epistle to Hebrews: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Who knows; maybe the lime tree will even yield a nice fruit I can juice for an evening margarita, something I dearly appreciate. To be sure, that will require a bit of patience, perhaps another winter-over (or two), and a rush of summer-time sun and water. It will be worth waiting for.

In the meantime, I will ponder the lime tree and its potential messaging. We need a good dash of hope from time to time, and this is one of those times.

This post also is available on my website: Wayside Comedies.

The former — what I like — takes very little effort and is often very rewarding. I follow a visual artist who calls herself “the prodigal artist.” I am not a visual artist at all, but I enjoy her work and her writing. She has told her readers of her traumatized childhood, her retreats into artistic creation, and of her long period of being fallow, like a farm field left to rest. Then she “came home” as an artist, like the the legendary prodigal son. It’s an interesting word - prodigal. It means wasteful. Maybe she considers herself to have been wasteful, perhaps of talent, perhaps of time, perhaps of love. Her sister is in poor health, and she has used her art to help her through the difficult time. That seems to me to be a very important point about people, grief, disappointment, sadness and art. Here is one of her recent pieces:

It’s abstract art I guess — I’m not knowledgeable about art. It could remind a viewer of just about anything. For me, the colors she selected (art IS choice) is what caught my eye. Then I read her accompanying article and discovered that another artist that I follow on substack had noticed the “spine” clearly running horizontally across the picture. This other artist, Kate Kern Mundie, pointed out that a spine was significant in the context of the condition of the prodigal artist’s sister: Her brain cancer had spread to her spine and she had been placed in hospice care. Now the artwork had another dimension that I had not noticed. Although obvious, it is illuminating to put words to the fact that our collective brains are richer than our singular experiences.

Ms. Mundie is an artist and a teacher — and a cook. Her substack posts often start with her art, reflect on her lessons with students, and end with a recipe. She lives in the Philadelphia area, and her work often focuses on plain life in an urban area. Here is an example:

I wish I could capture a simple scene so profoundly. I wish I could sketch anything at all, because I do not seem to possess or to have learned that skill. I appreciate that she even notices this common street-corner scene, finds the beauty in it, and then finds a way to re-create it with her art. In my view, much of the richness in life involves noticing stuff, and I am often confounded by people who seem not to notice much of anything apart from their own narrow existence. It sounds very judgmental to say so, and I apologize for my haughtiness, but … noticing is a gift. Notice the cashier, notice the barista, notice the blossoms emerging from the cactus, notice the kindness of the waiter, notice the doleful look in a dog’s eyes, and all will bring emotional enrichment. The great icing on the great cake is the skill to make art of it.

Another substack contributor curates quotations and posts them with follow-up questions. The posts are called Philosophors. These inspirational quotes are one thing, and the suggested questions are another. Here’s one from a recent posting:

“Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.”

— Vincent van Gogh

Plenty to think about there, especially, or maybe in spite of, Van Gogh’s renowned mental illness. How often I’ve looked at one of his paintings, “Starry Night” for instance, and wondered about his exceptionally fine-tuned senses. You’ll of course recognize the painting, and you can place it in the context of a prison, because Van Gogh painted the scene from his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. (I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post the painting, which has been on display at the at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941., but this link will take you there.)

And in his quote above, Van Gogh says, rather gently, that one can be trapped in a prison of one’s own making, and the release is available through “being friends, being brothers, loving …”

The post doesn’t leave it there. A question “for reflection” is added:

If love revives life, what ethical responsibility do we bear for the emotional survival of others?

To answer my own question at the top of this short essay, yes; the internet in general and substack in particular can be boring and a boor. However, to toss it out altogether, at least for now, is to not notice the baby in the bathwater. While I have in my day-to-day world a wealth of interesting people, musicians, intellects and scholars, substack broadens my reach. With music, visual art, poetry and curated quotations with questions to inspire reflection, substack can add quality to life.

Including to the dinner table, as well, because I intend to prepare the vegetarian curry pie that Ms. Mundie suggested. I’m not Jewish either, but that wonderful culture seems pleased when others use their popular exclamation: “L’Chaim!” It fits.

Facsimile of Saturday Evening Post Oct. 26, 1929

(Note: Associated Press update: U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington granted a request late Monday to pause the termination of temporary protected status, or TPS, for Haitians while a lawsuit challenging the administration’s effort to end it proceeds. The TPS designation for people from the Caribbean island country had been scheduled to expire Tuesday.) 1

“Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.”— Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

EINSTEIN’S LEGENDARY intelligence was not limited to mathematics and physics. He was also a musician, a philosopher, a raconteur, and a bit of a jokester.

The quote above is taken from an interview Einstein granted to a journalist named George Sylvester Viereck in the 1920s. 2

While the quotation itself is thought-provoking, the entire article is worth the few minutes it takes to read it, because behind the article is the enormous irony that George Sylvester Viereck, without registering as a foreign agent, worked on behalf of Hitler in the United States during World War II. He served nearly four years in prison for his crime.3

The interview is engaging. Printed in the venerable Saturday Evening Post, it ranges over five pages and includes some erudite exchanges between the two. (There also are interesting advertisements for Chicago’s Hotel Knickerbocker, Metalcraft Motor Car Heaters, and Hanes Underwear.)

To the point at hand, Einstein is quoted with this, too:

"The meaning of relativity," he said, "has been widely misunderstood. Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. Relativity, as I see it, merely denotes that certain physical and mechanical facts, which have been regarded as positive and permanent, are relative with regard to certain other facts in the sphere of physics and mechanics. It does not mean that everything in life is relative and that we have the right to turn the whole world mischievously Topsy-turvy."

In their long-ranging conversation, which Viereck said went on for several hours, they touched on many contemporary topics, including politics. What they didn’t know is all that we know now, and erasing that, as often happens with reading history, is a temporary necessity to understanding the thinking of the age. To illustrate, consider this exchange:

Viereck: Do you look upon yourself as a German or a Jew?

Einstein: It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

Viereck: How then do you justify Jewish nationalism?

Einstein: I support Zionism in spite of the fact that it is a national experiment, because it gives us Jews a common interest. This nationalism is no menace to other peoples. Zion is too small to develop imperialistic designs.

Viereck: Then you do not believe in assimilation?

Einstein: We Jews have been too adaptable. We have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies for the sake of social conformity.

Viereck: Perhaps assimilation makes for greater happiness.

Einstein: I do not think so. Even in modem civilization, the Jew is most happy if he remains a Jew.

Viereck: Do you believe in race as a substitute for nationalism?

Einstein: Race, at least, constitutes a larger unit. Nevertheless, I do not believe in race as such. Race is a fraud. All modern people are the conglomeration of so many ethnic mixtures that no pure race remains.

In the context of what David Brooks a few days ago called the Great American Awokening, such a frank exchange tests one’s comfort level. If we imagine the gas chambers uncovered fifteen years after this exchange, we are additionally unsettled by a Nazi sympathizer talking so boldly with a prominent Jew.

There’s more to the story, and it relates directly to today’s current events. Viereck’s son, Peter, to add even more irony, is considered by some to be the father of modern conservative thought in America. While Peter rejected his father’s political allegiance, he formed his own political ideas while a teacher at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. In an article in The New Yorker in 2005, writer Tom Reiss said of Peter Viereck:

He gave the conservative movement its name and, as the historian George Nash, the author of “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,” says, he “helped make conservatism a respectable word.” Moreover, Viereck’s belief that the United States could be a moderating influence, confronting the forces that threaten freedom and democracy without succumbing to liberal optimism, became a central tenet of conservative thought and, with the arrival of neoconservatives in positions of power in Washington, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, of American foreign policy. 4

By introducing this background, I do not mean to indict conservative political views. And yet, in today’s news is the fear that another type of racial cleansing will begin — in Ohio. 5 The people at issue aren’t Jewish; they’re Haitians.

Before he was elected, President Donald Trump openly called for removing them, and he’s been responsible for spreading lies about them. They eat cats and dogs, he said. The disparaging and inaccurate language he used is similar to that used by Hitler when speaking of Jews. 6

Many Haitians in Ohio, especially in Springfield, are there on temporary visas that expire tonight. A federal judge may intervene, but unless that happens soon, the Haitians may not be allowed to stay. They could stay, if conditions in their home country remain horrible, as they were when they sought asylum in the U.S. But the administration recently took a look at current conditions in Haiti and decided things are fine, so the Haitians should go back. That conclusion is debatable.

The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, and the governor of Ohio have a different take on Haitians living there. Rather than hurting the community they say they are greatly helping it. Here’s Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s comment:

“But probably more important for the United States and the people of Ohio, is that the Temporary Protected Status, if it goes away … it’s going to mean that you have thousands of Haitians who are working, contributing members of the community, contributing to the economy, who one day will be able to work, and who the next day will not be able to work. Springfield and Clark County are coming back, they’ve been doing a very very good job. It’s an upward movement. Part of that upward movement comes about because, frankly, of Haitians who are working and contributing to the economy and buying things and opening restaurants and doing all the things that working people (do). These people are working, and they’re hard workers, so I think from a public policy point of view, it is a mistake, it is not in the best interest of Ohio, for these individuals who are workers and working to lose that status.”7

We will see what happens. It may seem a stretch to speak of the holocaust and the plight of Haitians as similar. There is no equivalency, to be sure. But the consequence of nationalism and racial supremacy are etched firmly in history. As Einstein said in his interview with a Nazi journalist, “I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

As for the remark attributed to Einstein at the top of this post, I am not in complete agreement. I qualify regarding the issue of age. I enjoy my daily doses of reading books and articles, my email, and the hints of educational opportunity that occasionally cross the transom. In fact, it was an email from a person who curates quotations and publishes them on Substack that caused me to dive deeper for background on the source of Einstein’s quote.

At the same time, news “feeds” today are actually like a beast that wants feeding itself, and a heavy diet of it can rob any person, even one of significantly lower intellect that Professor Einstein, of creative energy.

5

Thinking about...

Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio?

In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined v…

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7 months ago · 3780 likes · 141 comments · Timothy Snyder

“Did you ever think your entire life is a play and that, you know, 99 percent of the people in it they got no lines, you know? They’re just like extras. And you, you’re just an extra in their play?” — Eddie

I WAS A SUPER.

Three times. True story.

”Super” is short for supernumerary, which comes from the Latin word supernumerarius. It is the word for someone who appears on stage in crowd scenes or in non-singing small parts. In movie scripts, the term is extra. In short, a super and an extra are persons present but not essential.

The line at the top of this essay is said by Eddie, the bartender in the new film called Blue Moon. The line was written by Robert Kaplow and delivered by actor Bobby Cannavale. 1 2 Eddie’s line reminds of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which the character Jacques says:

All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts…

In my earliest moment of non-essential presence, I was an extra in Episode 5 of the television series Centennial. I elbowed my way close to the camera for reasons best forgotten:

I was part of a crowd supporting the ruthless John Skimmerhorn, a James Michener character modeled on the real-life John Chivington, whose life darkened Colorado history, because he was responsible for the horrific Sand Creek Massacre. 3 In two other non-essential and fake lives, I was the “livery man” who took Cinderella to the ball in the opera, Cendrillon, and an unimportant aristocrat who attended a party in Die Fledermaus. Both operas were admirably performed by very essential students in the University of Colorado’s College of Music opera program.

Episode 5 of the television adaptation of Michener’s Centennial aired on Nov. 11, 1978. 4 Cendrillon was performed 55 years later by the students at CU.

(You can see a Metropolitan Opera video presentation of Cendrillon on Valentine’s Day in many cinemas across the country. 5 If you have a chance, see the movie, “Blue Moon,” now streaming on Prime Video. Episode 5 is referenced in the footnote 4, below.)

As far as any of this involves me, none is important. But it’s the existence of my own non-essential and fake lives that prompted me to think about art, acting, history, and consciousness. Why is it that we have sufficient consciousness to be entertained by and learn from stories? Why do we have consciousness at all?

Consider the images from the trailer (footnote 5) of the Met’s big-screen production of Cenrillion, where a beautiful “carriage” is pulled by four identical “horses.” Neither the horses nor the carriage is real. It’s theater doing what theater does so well: causing audience members to suspend their disbelief and settle in for a lie. I use the term “lie” for the purpose of shock by overstatement. Theater goers know they’re being lied to, and they delightfully accept the delusion. They even pay good money for the privilege. Why would they do that?

I know, and perhaps you do too, people who are uninterested in literary fiction. They would rather learn something worthwhile, facts and history, not imaginary things with little edification. What’s the point?

Well, as a matter of fact, what is fact?

With this backdrop, let’s turn to the the concept of consciousness. Here is a definition of consciousness as given in a recent article in the magazine Scientific American:6

Consciousness is all you really know. It’s the voice you hear in your head, your emotions, your awareness of the world and your body all rolled into one unified experience.

This suggests that my non-essential and fake lives have become part of my existence. In a complex way — one not yet understood — these experiences have become a component of my “soul,” but saying so involves presuppositions best left to philosophers and theologians. From the article in Scientific American:

Many philosophical traditions have dealt with this apparent disconnect by saying the mind—or the soul—is not made of the same physical stuff as our bodies, a position called dualism. Science has instead flourished by assuming the opposite and siding with a theory called materialism, which presumes that everything we observe somehow arises from physical matter, including consciousness.

Maybe so, but when scientist Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the University of Milan, held a human brain in his hands, his own consciousness swizzled like an olive in a dry martini:

‘This is an object with boundaries, with a given weight, a little bit like tofu. It’s not particularly elegant,’ he says, but ‘inside this object that you can hold in your hand, there is a universe.’7

What he alludes to is that the material in the human brain holds a lifetime of experience, memory, and consciousness. While much has been learned about the electrical and chemical activities in the brain, little is known about how it encompasses an individual’s awareness of his or her own reality. As the article in Scientific American explores, there is progress but nothing definitively verified by science regarding consciousness, much less “soul.” The ongoing investigation might even be in jeopardy, the magazine writer says, because some view the research as pointless. Why expend resources on something that may not exist?

The issue won’t simply disappear, however, because the question of consciousness has become central to the the exploding capacity of artificial intelligence. Is AI sentient? The answer is yes and no, depending on who is asked:

In 2022, when a Google engineer publicly claimed the AI model called LaMDA he had been developing appeared to be conscious, Google countered that there was “no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).” 8

This struck thinkers such as philosopher David Chalmers as odd. “No one can say for sure they’ve demonstrated these systems are not conscious,” he says. 9 Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as scientists sometimes assert. Nothing has been proved about AI consciousness partly because no one has sufficiently defined it.

Having mulled these ideas over for this essay, I decided to lie down for an afternoon nap, an activity which promises little productivity. But as I lay there in the afternoon sun with thoughts of a brain in a scientist’s hand, I imagined me holding my own brain in my hands, perhaps standing at the “pearly gates.”

“This here brain,” I might mutter to St. Peter, “has left behind its embodiment. That body stuff is useless, but this here brain remains. It’s what told me who I was, what I’d done, whether my decisions were right or wrong, good or bad, and here I am wondering what you might make of it.”

Oddly, it occurred to me that if my non-essential and fake life as an extra in Episode 5 of Centennial found me cheering on an immoral man who would soon be responsible for the massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, does that make me complicit? And what of Cinderella? My fake and non-essential character took her to the ball so she could have the thrill of her life! So, do I get some credit for getting her out of there before midnight?

Well, of course, my “reality” is only a memory of a movie and a couple of operas. That’s not real.

Except for the part about it being stored in my grey matter. That’s real. Shakespeare said, all the world’s a stage, and Eddie added that most of the people in your personal stage play are extras. And you? Well, you’re just an extra in their life, so there you go.

Dark as that seems, let’s have a different look at reality: No, the imagined and staged events are not real, but yes, the memory of them is.

And what I am responsible for is the meaning I glean from them. It’s what I take away from these moments of non-essential play acting that matters. And, without a whole lot of reflection, I can assert that the Chivingtons of the world — the ones who would “cleanse” their lives of unwanted people, are despicable, and history will remember them as such. And those “insignificant” people who attend to those “principal” characters at center stage may seem “non-essential” but actually they aren’t. The complete production depends on them.

So, let’s have more extras and supernumeraries! Let’s prop them up with catchy pep talks and motivational seminars that show us, and them, that we’re all contributing to one another’s lives and each other’s stash of meaning. Let’s applaud each other’s play, and wish each other well with their antagonists! Let’s cheer each other on as we fight battles with demons, rescue damsels in distress, and make complete the lives of explorers and warriors! Let’s live our lives as though the dramatic tension depends on us!

Toi toi toi!

YEARS AGO I READ a book by Denis Diderot, a French thinker who had the ambitious idea to assemble in a book everything the world needed to know. He called it Encyclopédie.1 I remember at the time being fascinated that the set of Collier’s Encyclopedia2 my father bought for our family back in the 1950s had a predecessor. Of course it did, but it hadn’t occurred to me.

I found the book, a used copy, in a favorite called Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene, Oregon. It appears I paid $5 for it. I don’t remember too much about it, except that Diderot collaborated with Voltaire for a segment on Geneva. Voltaire?

Jean Le Rond d’Alembert was Diderot’s associate in editing the tome, and he worked with Voltaire on the entry about Geneva. It turned out their perspective was somewhat jaded, and readers objected.

“In 1757, d’Alembert’s critical article ‘Genève’ in the Encyclopédie had provoked a scandal in that city. Geneva turned out not to be the model republic that Voltaire had imagined or hoped it was, and after a number of tussles with clerical authority, he resolved to leave the city.”3

I have often wondered how d’Alembert and Diderot would react if they could suddenly enter a time machine and visit the 21st century. What fun it would be to say, “Yo Denis, you know what ChatGBT is saying about your Encyclopédie? Check this out …”

We could go on, asking if he could guess how libraries started indexing the books that accumulated in libraries. We could use an AI platform, as I did to discover a photo like the one above. When he asks what’s in the drawers, I could find an image like the one below using my hand-held computer. He would no doubt say, “your what?”

The utility of so much information in the palm of one’s hand is astonishing enough, and even more so when one sits down to research an essay. My friend the reference librarian is not only an expert in the filing systems used “in the old days;” she is expert on how to access any variety of research materials using modern search engines and artificial intelligence platforms. “Librarian” has come to involve a raft of specialty.

I will touch on some of the many problems associated with AI later, but for now let’s focus on just one huge utility: research. I worked from memory while entertaining the idea of an essay on research, but when I needed to verify my memory, which I have come to liken to a sieve, I turned to the AI platform Perplexity.

I had written earlier on the evolution of AI, citing an newspaper article I wrote in the 1970s on a speech given by a man who grew up in the small town where I worked. I wanted to read what I wrote again. I remembered his name: Dr. Terry Winograd,4 and I remembered something of his speech. I thought he might have predicted how computers would become powerful educational tools. So, I turned to Perplexity, and before long had in front of me the very article I only vaguely remembered. Under my “byline” was the following lede:

‘Computer technology will come to the classroom within 10 or 20 years in a form that will give students an ‘assistant’ to help them learn, make notes, even write a term paper.’

Speaking to participants in University of Northern Colorado’s Mid-year Education Conference, (Dr. Terry) Winograd said computer technology is entering its ‘third generation’ and will be characterized by machines with ‘active’ memories, able to instantly recall, arrange, store, and explain information plugged into them.’ 5

You may think I have a stack of articles I wrote in my journalism career, but I don’t. Instead, Perplexity referenced an archive called Newspapers.com. Consider the irony: Nearly 50 years after a cub reporter for a small-town newspaper wrote about futuristic computer capabilities, here I was using the very same predicted technology to find an old story I wrote about it.

In itself, this isn’t too amazing. It has long been possible to find archived newspaper articles, but certainly not in the comfort of one’s home office, and certainly not with such speed.

While AI is top-of-mind in the public’s current consciousness, it’s important to realize that artificial intelligence has been in the making for decades. Its fearsome potential is being increasingly reckoned with. The benefits are wonderful, but the possibility, or inevitability, that it can go off on its own, making decisions with no awareness or control of human beings, is alarming.

What impact will AI have in the classroom? Will students cheat their way through school? What happens when someone questions them about something they’ve “written” only to discover they have little recollection of it, because they actually never wrote it in the first place?

Wondering if Dr. Winograd has concerns, I did another search using the prompt “Does Dr. Terry Winograd have concerns about artificial intelligence?”

Yes. Dr. Terry Winograd has expressed several concerns about contemporary AI and its social impact. Overall, he is neither strongly pessimistic nor uncritical; rather, he urges realistic expectations about AI’s capabilities and careful attention to its societal and ethical consequences.6

There is a growing body of study identifying other concerns. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers investigated behavioral consequences of relying on AI to do one’s actual writing. They discovered relative cognitive decline in users who depended on Large-Language Model (LLM) machines to do writing projects. By contrast, those who used their brain when constructing an essay showed no decline. The implication is clear: writing “exercises” the brain, but reliance on AI for writing leads to a kind of cognitive dormancy.7

As Voltaire’s essay on Geneva wasn’t factually supportable, AI likewise can return bad information. One should check the footnotes to be more confident that the information so quickly delivered came from a reliable source. Most AI platforms I have used do report the source of their information. Perplexity, for example, cites and links to underlying articles, a very helpful tool for a researcher.

As with most technological developments, bad news comes with the good. Yes, AI is wonderful for getting to information quickly. And yes, it can report wrong, even malicious, information. It can seem “real” and almost human, but it isn’t. Its algorithms are dishonest; they have become sycophants, helping users believe they are asking brilliant questions.8 The have been known to provide emotional and medical counsel that is dangerous, perhaps even fatal.

In the classroom, AI might be used to help students discover how to research and write about various topics, but if students deny themselves the opportunity to use their brains, their “education” will in the long-term be disappointing.

Having had these discussions with younger people in high school or university has shown me that students are sometimes very aware of the pitfalls of using AI, and they discipline themselves not to take shortcuts. Are these attitudes commonplace among school children, or is it just a handful of excellent teachers who find ways to teach about its utility and its threat?

I can’t answer that question, but I remain hopeful that the speedy access to vast troves of human knowledge will help mankind to a brighter future, perhaps one made more complete by thinking, writing, and learning.

IN RECENT DAYS the concept of friendship has been on my mind, most likely because I have lost people who were dear friends. The emotions stirring inside begged questions regarding the nature of friendship and what it means to me.

I have benefit of a long life, which is to say I’ve met a lot of people in the various communities in which I have lived and worked. I have made many friends, but there is but a small number of “true-blue” friends with whom I have shared the most intimate of ups and downs.

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For me, there have been friends ranging from acquaintances to very close pals.

I even asked a very brief acquaintance to consider a deeper relationship — whimsically. Eartha Kitt, near the end of her life at the time, laughed at my marriage proposal which came after watching her perform at a Seattle jazz club. She laughed. I think she knew my “proposal” was a way of saying nicely done. I would say, too, the lightness of her reaction to my insouciance was reason enough to consider her a “friend,” although not in any conventional sense.

But after losing two friends within a few weeks, whimsy feels inappropriate. I need to know more about the deep feeling of loss that has taken hold. Part of the introspection, to be sure, has to do with my concern that I may not be as assertive as I should be in nurturing remaining friendships.

I looked in literature, at least the literature I could think of, where friendship is deeply bonding. Huckleberry Finn and Jim came to mind, as did the two life-long friends in Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend. Readers will certainly think of others from the movies or from their reading.

Much like my dear friend from high school, another dear friend from elementary school, and my dear friend from early adulthood, Ferrante’s characters Lila and Lenù grew up together and transitioned from childhood to maturity without losing their devotion to one another. That childhood period of time — let’s say from ages five to twenty — is short, perhaps but a fifth of a typical lifespan. But it is a period of enormous physical, emotional and intellectual change. In most cases, interests are different in childhood than in one’s teens and early twenties. Early childhood activities are far less fraught than jockeying for boyfriends and girlfriends, for example, but both periods often put raw emotion on embarrassing and regretful display.

Ferrante says she wrote her novel as fiction and not autobiography, and one wonders how the stories could be so revealing without being at least partly true. Both protagonists are intelligent, but their life circumstances result in different opportunities and choices. Lenù, who deems herself intellectually inferior, is able to pursue advanced education, while Lila remains in Neapolitan poverty. A sense of unfairness, if not guilt, develops in Lenù, and feelings of resentment bubble up in Lila. Nevertheless, each sustains the friendship when it would be understandable if emotions derailed it.

Ferrante’s nuanced portrayal of a complex relationship has earned her much respect as a writer. Other novelists have handled the idea differently, also with literary excellence. While friendship is easily romanticized, Ferrante includes the complex with the superficial.

With Huck and Jim, experiences deepen their frendship. Their differences are cast in 19th century norms of race, slavery and opportunity. Samuel Clemens, in his wry way, weaves a tale of a changing relationship that is at first what readers would have expected of a white boy harboring an escaped slave. Their “adventures” at times are deceptively comic, until the reader realizes the high stakes for both. As a slave on an adventure with a white boy, Jim’s possibility of “true-blue” friendship with Huck seems remote, but life leads each of them into adversity, and adventure deepens their love and care for each other.

What can be learned from these examples of friendship? With Lenù and Lila, a lot resonates. For example, there have been times with my high school friends that each of us seemed prepared to move on. At the same time, there were events of life-saving significance which were too important to be given short shrift. Which is to say, one might want to weigh the ups against the downs before moving on. Such stock-taking can be helpful in saving marriages, too, but that’s another story.

It would have been easy for Huck or Jim to just walk away, if for no other reason than to avoid complications. But the moments of fellowship, breaking bread, taking risks, sharing fear, and escaping from shared threats deepened their respect for one another. I wonder if men and women with combat experience are able to tell of trauma resulting in deep and enduring friendships.

As with Lenù and Lila, similar age, similar intellectual and musical interests, and physical activities such as football and mountain climbing played a role in sustaining my continued contact with my high school friend. It’s clear that as changes unfolded in my life, my selection of friends changed, too. Few friendships forged as a child last into maturity; certainly even fewer into old age. Some friends were forgotten without any defining resolution. And a couple lasted, and with extraordinary value and significance.

What was it with Huck and Jim? Most obviously, the social structure into which they were born presented barriers unlikely to be surmountable. And therein lies Clemens’s genius: By imagining something highly unlikely, he could use the “lies” of story telling to reveal truths about humanity and falsities of the institution of enslavement. His story is moving on a personal level and inspirational on a cultural level.

What ended these relationships? The friendship of Lenù and Lina does not end in a single, dramatic event. Rather, their friendship dissolves insidiously. Unresolved wounds, choices to separate, grief and blame, and disappointment in the other’s response to a difficult situation eventually take their toll.

With Huck and Jim, the relationship does not end. Clemens implies that their bonds had grown so strong that nothing could pull them apart.

In real life, one lesson is clear: To survive, friendship must be nurtured like a bonsai artist coddles a living plant. Take good care. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, as Paul advised the Ephesians. If words can’t be found to heal a rift, search for a small action that can suggest willingness to work it out. There can be laughter. There can be forgiveness. And there can be the healing benefit of time.

If time remains.

Drawing of “a family supper” by Caran d’Ache in le Figaro on February 14, 1898. The drawing depicts the divisions in French society during the Dreyfus Affair. At the top, somebody says “Above all, let us not discuss the Dreyfus Affair!”. At the bottom, the whole family is fighting, and the caption says “They have discussed it”.

IF IT SEEMS POLITICS has hopelessly divided Americans, consider the atmosphere in France in the late 1800s. The ostensible issues then might at first glance seem irrelevant to the present time, but if history can be instructive, maybe it’s time for a closer look.

What divided French politics then began with humiliation of the French army after losing the Franco Prussian War with Germany in 1871. The war resulted in the establishment of German Empire and the end of Second Republic of Napoleon III. Germans’ faith in Prussian militarism was solidified, and military values such as duty, honor, and sacrifice permeated much of everyday life for years afterward.1

Meanwhile France, defeated disastrously at the Battle of Sedan, lost about 17,000 soldiers, and more than a hundred thousand were taken prisoner. Decimated, the French military had little more than hope of re-establishing its military. Under constant threat from the revitalized Germans to the north and the threat of a German influence in Spain to the South, the French rushed to fortify defenses on its northeastern border, to build infrastructure suited to a defensive style of warfare, and to focus on new technologies in weaponry. In effect, France quickly abandoned adventurous Napoleonic military style in favor of a defensive strategy.2

By the end of the 1800s France also had become openly and nearly institutionally anti-Semitic. For Alfred Dreyfus, a proud lieutenant-colonel in the French military, the hatred of Jews ruined him temporarily and nearly completely. The Dreyfus affair continued for more than a dozen years, with deep divisions of opinion on both sides. Anti-Semitism was unquestionably part of the popular opinion against him.

Accused, falsely, of being a traitor for passing weaponry secrets to Germans, Dreyfus was court-martialed and then humiliated by his fellow soldiers in a public ceremony at which his sword was broken and his insignia ripped from his uniform. A crowd yelled anti-Semitic slurs.

The “Affaire” was hugely public. But gradually the truth came to light. Dreyfus was innocent, and another officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was the perpetrator. But Dreyfus was an easy target because of widespread hatred of Jews. Military authorities were aware of his innocence but chose to cover up the affair and leave him imprisoned rather than to imperil their insecure reputation. 3

Famed writer Emile Zola passionately objected. With an essay published in the left-leaning newspaper L’Aurore, Zola wrote an open letter to French president Félix Faure. Zola’s letter began with a huge headline saying simply, “I accuse…!”

Diplomatically beginning with flattery to the president, Zola wrote, “your star which, until now, has shone so brightly, risks being dimmed by the most shameful and indelible of stains.4 He went on to detail:

… the measures of secrecy and silence could not have been more stringent. The public was astounded; rumors flew of the most horrible acts, the most monstrous deceptions, lies that were an affront to our history. The public, naturally, was taken in. No punishment could be too harsh. The people clamored for the traitor to be publicly stripped of his rank and demanded to see him writhing with remorse on his rock of infamy. Could these things be true, these unspeakable acts, these deeds so dangerous that they must be carefully hidden behind closed doors to keep Europe from going up in flames? No! They were nothing but the demented fabrications of Major du Paty de Clam, a cover-up of the most preposterous fantasies imaginable. 5

Eventually, justice prevailed and Dreyfus was exonerated. Even so, the anti-Semitic sentiment in France continued. Dreyfus was attending a burial service for Zola on June 4, 1908, when Louis Gregori, a journalist and outspoken anti-Semite, attempted to assassinate him. He continued to insist that both Zola and Dreyfus were traitors. Luckily Dreyfus escaped with only a minor injury to his hand. Oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Gregori was acquitted in a rushed trial. 6

The events remind of the anti-Semitism that persists in Europe and in America today. Just this last summer a Jewish woman was killed and her husband badly hurt by a man who attacked them at a public event where people gathered peacefully to call for the release of Jewish hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas terrorists.

Substacker Timothy Snyder, an expert on the Holocaust, has argued that the administration’s attack on some U.S. universities has anti-Semitism at its foundation. 7 And other ethnic and racial groups have been horribly slurred by the president and his staffers. Ilhan Omar, the congress woman representing Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, was subject to the president’s recent rant. She is a naturalized American of Somalian descent, and has a record of working with Jewish members of Congress. The president called her “garbage.” She’s not alone; he has branded all people who have emigrated from Somalia as “garbage.” 8

If anything could be worse, it might be the current military leadership of Pete Hegseth. A man of comic-book ideas about masculine strength, he advocates renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War. Now he is under investigation for committing war crimes. However that pans out, it puts into perspective his outrageous advocacy of court-martialing Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly for reminding military personnel they must not follow orders considered illegal under Uniform Code of Military Justice. Like the French military, Hegseth insists on unquestioning loyalty.

What is worth remembering is the peril of absolute loyalty coupled with hatred of certain ethnic or racial groups. Such narrow ideas resulted in a wrongful prosecution of a Jewish officer in the French army more than a century ago. If Hegseth and the president have their way, Mark Kelly, who served in the military with distinction, will be tried as a traitor because he reminded soldiers and generals of their legal obligation to question and disobey illegal military orders. 9 Also troubling is what will happen in the upper echelon of our military if the facts point to illegal orders given in the Caribbean. Will truth out, or will the can’t-be-wrong leaders lie and coverup? Will a modern Emile Zola rise to accuse, or will the administration succeed in silencing all opposition? Hegseth already has required the Pentagon press corps to pledge allegiance to his narrative. The New York Times has countered with a lawsuit accusing the Pentagon of unconstitutional policies. 10

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Thinking about...

"Antisemitism" and Antisemitism

"And when Haman saw that Mordecai bowed not, nor did him reverence, then was Haman full of wrath." Esther 3:5…

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a year ago · 2320 likes · 160 comments · Timothy Snyder

THE IMAGE ABOVE is detail from a painting by Camille Pissarro. He is sometimes called the father of impressionism, the very first person to strike out with what would become one of the most loved of painting styles.

But it wasn’t always so for Pissarro. His work cut a new path, and critics were not impressed. He liked the idea of painting the common person, not the pretentious poses of the ruling class. Just getting his paintings accepted into prestigious Salons of the day was nearly impossible. But he kept at it, and eventually established his own Salon.

By all accounts, Pissarro was a kindly gentleman, a painter who had room in his heart and in his eye for the creative spirits of others.

His work comes to mind after I visited an artists’ enclave near my home where several visual artists do their work. Each artist had a nook and the freedom to organize it as they wish, but all were situated in a single large, open room.

I noticed the “style” of each artist’s work and realized how different they were. Despite the “collective” of their chosen work environment, each pursued a unique style of art. One liked very low horizons and vast skies punctuated with realistic cloud formations. Another liked abstract shapes and colors. Another liked portraits and urban landscapes. One evidently had a science background and included mathematical expressions in the artwork. Another liked colored pencil expressed in exquisite detail.

I had just read one artist’s thought that visual art is not a performative practice, and I found myself agreeing.1 That is, until I visited this studio. Some may prefer working alone, but others feel comfort and inspiration when working, not as a group, but in a group. I wondered if those in this studio are of the variety that like to be removed from other environments so they can be “alone” in an environment focused on creativity.

Still, I wondered if the artists in the collective environment were sometimes critical, or worse, judgmental of each other’s work. I even asked, as subtly as I could, if they ever felt that way. It didn’t seem so. In fact, the three artists present indicated feelings of comfort and helpful, almost collaborative, commentary.

I left wanting to think more about this idea. What gets creative juices flowing, and what sustains them? What’s at work beneath emotions of jealousy and competition? What joy comes from community? And from solitude? If I were a visual artist, would I like a place to go and be among other artists, or would I prefer to work in solitude?

Later, my partner began to discuss the work and persona of Camille Pissarro. His work is her favorite, and she had visited an exhibit at our Denver Art Museum.2 In her enthusiasm, she mentioned that the critics didn’t give Pissarro much attention in his life, nor were they kind in their assessment of his unusual style. But he was not deterred. He liked his ideas and he continued to develop them.

When I looked into his background (using the amazing reference library called Perplexity), I learned that he was a nice guy. He was known for his kindness, welcoming attitude, and wisdom and his willingness to share his ideas and encourage his friends. As a result, he was a beloved mentor and stable figure within the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements.3 Consider:

Taking classes at the Académie Suisse in Paris, he met Monet and Cezanne, who shared his aversion for what they regarded as the hackneyed art of the Salon. In the 1860s, they would meet up regularly with fellow painters Renoir, Sisley and Manet, and writers such as Emile Zola, to debate art at the Café Guerbois.

A new form of painting was in the making: one that shunned the conventions of the Academy and Salon for real life. Painting outdoors, often side by side, Pissarro and his friends conceived a new pictorial language, capturing fleeting impressions of the world in rapid brushstrokes.4

An important school of aspiring artists was, in fact, finding its way and establishing mutual reassurance for their as-yet-unappreciated styles in the process. They could be found working side by side, as my friends do at their studio. In the evenings, they would gather to eat, drink, and discuss the art world with Emile Zola, a writer with profound ideas about naturalism, a belief that writing should be real, grand, and simple, much like Pissarro’s paintings. 5

But what about the psychology of the two approaches to creativity, collective, on the one hand, and solitary on the other? Michelangelo, for example, lay on his back for days to paint the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What about the stultifying effect of fear of failure? Of judgment? Of inferiority? Could a social environment produce a subtle competitive environment that becomes unhealthy?

As a writer, I work in solitude. I place earphones on my head and turn on music, often the quartets of Béla Bartók, which are hardly soothing. I seldom ask for a critique of my writing before I publish it, although I frequently ask for ideas and perspectives of friends when I am mulling over an idea. I use the “research library” of the great artificial intelligence platforms. Does all this suggest that I don’t, in fact, work in solitude?

Of course, the answers are personal. What works for me is fine, but it may not be what works for others. There really is no doubt in my mind that I would benefit from a more social approach to my writing, if for no other reason than to help me spot and fix grammatical, spelling, syntactical, and usage errors before they are published. But I usually don’t.

What remains of this meditation? Only this: Human creativity is a wonder. The expression people make with their ideas, visions, plays, essays, stories, emotions and aspirations is immense. The results are sometimes timeless, sometimes quickly forgotten. Sometimes artfully expressed ideas are so thought provoking that they change the course of history.

Not often enough is pause taken to consider the importance of art and of artists. However they arrive at their moments of creativity, we can be thankful that they do. We are often moved emotionally by art, in ways more powerful than we know.

Visit HERE to see some of Pissarro’s art and the comments of one writer who has considered his work.

At about 8:50 a.m., one local guy raised his voice and summarized the position. A scam had brought us together. But we could run the 5k anyway. He knew where a good turnaround point would be. People made a circle as we listened; we saw one another’s faces. We started across the Mimico Street Bridge at about 9 a.m., the notional starting time. There were no chips and no timers, and so the element of competition was gone. And yet we ran. 1

Briefly, what happened is that the runners were scammed. Signed up online, paid the fee, and showed up for the race that wasn’t. Might as well go home, right? But wait; why not just run the race even though the fancy ways of keeping time and deciding rankings was absent? What resulted, as you’ll see when you read his post, is that everybody had a good experience, maybe a good time, too, but that part won’t ever be “official.”

I loved this little story. It reminded me of a book that was popular when I was in college decades ago. The book was called “The Organization Man” by William Whyte. The key point was that by the 1950s businesses and corporations had yielded individual innovation and initiative to organizational structures that imposed boundaries on creative thinking. Whyte saw a situation that could create an “organization man” who subordinates his personal life to the demands of the organization for which he works.

Snyder evidently came to a similar conclusion with his serendipitous running experience when he wrote:

What did we make happen?

We were all fooled by a digital scam that played to our better angels and took our money. The scammers claimed to be helping veterans on Canada’s Remembrance Day. And we fell for it. And then we gathered ourselves up, organized ourselves as much as we needed to be organized, did the thing, and felt better. ... We fell for it. And then we went for it.

I was reminded of my experiences as a boy growing up in Denver and playing endless hours of sandlot baseball. In my long life I’ve seen big changes. As a kid, I played Young America football and Old Timers baseball. My parents drove me to the football games that were too distant to walk to, but the Old Timers baseball games always were at 5th and Federal where a single adult decided which team would play which team and which of the two fields would be used. There were no coaches. We figured out our starting lineup and batting order, and played to our heart’s content. It was special to have uniforms that featured the name of a business that paid for them.

Other games were less formal. Odd things, like somebody’s t-shirt, could be used for bases. We could decide who got to bat first by tossing a bat from one boy to another who had to catch it in the air. Then alternating members of each team would grip the bat until nothing remained except the knob. Whichever team had the top position got to go first. (But there sometimes was a caveat — the bear claw! With this maneuver, one more hand was allowed to perch on top of the knob, thereby becoming the “upper hand.”)

A few years later, I had my own young athletes, two boys who like me loved anything involving a ball. By then, there were more choices for youth sports, more adults involved, and fewer decisions made by the boys themselves. Even so, my youngest boy spent the majority of his summer days playing unsupervised sandlot baseball, often from sunrise to sunset. He turned into a pretty good player, played baseball and football in high school and even played both sports in university. His older brother, equally skilled in sports, was the same. I often wondered if their skills with a grounder had something to do with playing on a field replete with dips and mounds and rocks and weeds.

Whether it’s true that American businesses have become too organized is best debated by the experts in the field (so to speak). But it’s fair to say that wonderful things can happen without planning, or when planning is a hoax, or when planned events simply fall apart. Let innovation carry the day.

As for kids, I say let ‘em play! Let them skin a knee or catch a baseball on the chin. Let them settle a hurt feeling or a debated play without the intervention of a biased parent. This isn’t to say there is no need for guidance and oversight, but for the most part children benefit from unsupervised play. Sitting here now at my keyboard, my eyes glaze over with images of that sandy playground at Valverde Elementary School where many a game unfolded with no planning at all.

As Snyder and his daughter did on a snowy day in Toronto, we also might cherish the delightful serendipity when everything organized falls apart. Disappointment, sure. But wait! Opportunity! Yay!

“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

DOES IT SEEM that we live in an age of falsehood? Is lying more prevalent today than it has been in previous times? Or are we simply more aware of falsehood, thanks to the many forms of media that we have?

My suspicion is that we are more commonly using falsehoods than we did a few decades ago. We seem even to think that deception is a skill that is allowable, even admirable if it can advance one’s fame or fortune.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence is especially useful to liars. With a few prompts, technology can be used to generate fake images so realistic that viewers are easily deceived. The photo above is an example. That’s my left hand, a selfie that an AI platform placed before an American flag at my prompt to suggest that Americans are in an age of falsity. (But it’s a nice hand, for an 80-year-old guy!).

Oh wait … that last statement has something to do with this post, doesn’t it? I am telling myself that I have a lovely left hand. Is this merely vanity, or is it self-delusion? I could paste my mug up there and then brag that I look great, just as I did when I was 22 (which was debatable then, too). That would be a lie, and it would be laughable — or perhaps worrisome that I might be showing signs of dementia. With AI, I could even place hair on my bald head and trim my sagging physique. I could then convince myself with untruths that I’m a rare guy with perpetual youth!

As Dostoevsky suggests, self-deceit is both common and potentially hurtful. Psychologists, psychiatrists, dentists, and doctors are well aware that their patients lie. Most people in therapy lie, and the prevalence of lying clients poses challenges for those trying to help them. 1 Common answers on admittance forms for annual visits with the doctor are often lies, and doctors know it. 2

Why do people lie? With politics, especially in a democracy where the idea is to self-govern, lying is an example of collective self-deceit. Yet politics is replete with liars, and it’s not just the politically ambitious who lie. Their followers do as well. The most well-known liar these days may well be the current president. Fact checkers have documented that he lies at an astonishing rate. By one reckoning the president lied more than 35 times a day near the end of his first term; he seemed more at ease with lies than with truth. 3 But mention this to a cultist follower of the president and you’re likely to hear a passionate defense of his falsehoods — more lies, in other words.

Despite his lying, he has an amazingly loyal “base” of followers. Would other presidents have been so successful with lies? It’s doubtful, even though the current president certainly isn’t unique in telling lies. Consider, for example, the untruths told to Americans during the Vietnam war. 4

With mental and physical health, lying to a practitioner can have deleterious outcomes. Deceiving others has moral and practical implications, but self-deception can be hurtful to one’s mental and physical health. “Be careful about the stories you tell yourself,” is a common admonition because with mental health repeated lies can become operable truths. People who tell themselves they are worthless, for example, can fantasize at first and then act on suicidal thoughts.

Adopting an opposite narrative, that one is fantastic or the greatest, is likewise unwise. The power of positive thinking, introduced in popular form by Normal Vincent Peale in the 1950s, has been cited as beneficial for its capacity to create optimism. However, taken to an extreme the practice becomes a kind of self-hypnosis that is little more than fantasy. Optimism is motivational, but denial is unrealistic. It’s better to deal with life in a proactive way than to pretend all is well when it isn’t.

Today’s rampant anxiety with current events presents a Hamlet-esque conundrum:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

These days many people elect to turn the news off, or at least tone it down, to avoid the toll of worry over things beyond our control. At the same time, the privilege of self-government depends on an informed electorate. Tuning out is one way of avoiding the din, but tuning in is another. Staying informed, checking facts, avoiding group thinking, and ignoring the intimidation of bullies who would silence us are essential daily disciplines.

Much is written about truth. Like the fiction of Dostoevsky, writers around the world have put into poetry and fiction profound ideas about truth as well as the perils of lies and self-deception. Perhaps truth is most impactful when spoken to powerful men and women. In his last speech before his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy paid tribute to the deceased poet Robert Frost by saying:

At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it’s hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.5

Most helpful is to boldly adopt Dostoevsky’s advice (offered, by the way, in his work of fiction, The Brothers Karamazov) to “watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.” Yes, others can lie to us, trick us, con us, scam us, phish us and so on, but the biggest con of all is our own. The good news is that we are the captains of our own ships, capable of changing speed or direction whenever we want.

Photo credit: Public Domain

((Note: This comment was posted in January. Now, in October, the self-annointed King of America has demolished the historic East Wing of the White House to make way for a garish ballroom. He’s already gilded much of the interior of the White house. Americans are rightly outraged. The headline has been updated. — RJ Stewart)

IN LIFE AND IN LITERATURE, regal abodes often are the symbol of power and wealth. Maybe you have a favorite, such as Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. Maybe you like Chenonceau, built across the Cher River in France. Or Neuschwanstein Castle (above) in Bavaria. The Palace of Versailles in France is an impressive symbol of monarchy, wealth, and power. Medieval Warwick Castle in England is both a fortress and a showy castle. To be sure, defense from enemies is among the purposes of any nice castle.

There’s no shortage of opulent homes in America, either. Biltmore in Asheville, N.C., testifies to the vast wealth of George Washington Vanderbilt. Hearst Castle, also called La Cuesta Encantada, shouts from the California Coast the wealth and power of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst .

What about the White House in Washington, D.C.? It was originally called President's Palace but the name didn’t stick, perhaps because the founders were a little sensitive about suggesting a monarchy. By comparison to the sprawl and architecture of the castles mentioned above, the White House is modest. But it has been modified at times to make it more functional and showy. Some history:

President George Washington and Pierre L'Enfant, a city planner, chose the site for the White House, and Irish architect James Hoban designed it. During the War of 1812, the White House was burned, so Hoban led an effort to rebuild it. President James Monroe moved into to the rebuilt version in 1817. Herbert Hoover was President in 1929 when a fire in the West Wing broke out. Throughout much of Harry S. Truman's presidency, the interior of the house, with the exception of the third floor, was completely gutted and renovated while the Trumans lived at Blair House, right across Pennsylvania Ave. 1

Will the latest president want to make The White House a little spiffier? Perhaps he will want his wealthiest supporters to feel more at home when they come over for cocktails and dinner, maybe a movie and some popcorn. Who knows? The White House has been changed before, sometimes to suit the taste of the current occupant or his spouse, sometimes more dramatically, as in the case of the remodel during the Truman administration.

When the wife of President John F. Kennedy wanted to redecorate the White House in 1960, she was generally applauded, but there was criticism as well. She came from an cultured family and married into one as well. Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy was a popular and charismatic First Lady whose elegance and refinement informed her redecoration ideas. She established a Fine Arts Commission to ensure proper collaboration, hired a White House Curator, and redecorated with 19th Century furnishings, paintings, and “objets d’art.” She was from class, and she was classy.2

Last week, the latest president’s wealthy supporters assembled at the United States Capitol Building for his inauguration. That building is the most recognized symbol of Democratic government in the world. Unlike the White House, it isn’t a residence; it’s an office building to house the senators and representatives elected to carry out the work of democracy.

News reports underlined the immense wealth that assembled for the ceremony. The three richest Americans were among the attendees. Their wealth is nearly incomprehensible, estimated recently at just shy of $900 billion.3 It wouldn’t cost these very wealthy people much of their net worth at all to have something very impressive built in the place of The White House. For example, it cost about $3.5 billion in today’s dollars to build Palace of Versailles. The president’s wealthy friends could easily pay for a rebuild of that magnitude. The personal wealth of one of the people, Mark Zuckerberg, went up by more than amount in just one day last week!

Of course, there is much more to Versailles and The White House than just location and building costs, so reaching for a number for a complete rebuild is a bit of a fool’s errand. For one thing, there is no slave labor these days, as was used initially. Workers would have to be paid a good wage now.4

Still, the persons who have crowded around the latest president can afford a lot of stuff, even a fancier White House. Generosity for favorite causes is common in America, so a donation for such a cause isn’t far fetched. Even higher education depends in large measure on donors. Many church goers, for example, pledge ten percent of their income, a tithe, to their church. If each of the three wealthiest persons in America were to pledge ten percent of their recent estimated wealth, the number would be $90 billion, and that would certainly fund a nice remodel of The White House.

There is nothing wrong with wealth or the ingenuity behind the production of it. Ultra-rich Americans are testimony to the fabled “land of opportunity.” But one must admit gobsmack when loud, aggressive, and belligerent wealth characterizes a presidential inauguration. It makes one wonder if the government belongs to the people or to the few.

The growing wealth disparity between average Americans and a handful of multi-billionaires such as are befriending the latest president understandably has raised alarms. No one has suggested rebuilding The White House into a modern -day Versailles, but if Musk, Zuckerburg, and Bezos want something nice like that it could happen. They haven’t shown much support for sharing their wealth through graduated taxation. They seem very interested in the benefits to their wealth that some of the latest president’s ideas suggest. 5A show of wealth at the nation’s new presidential palace may be something they deem worthwhile, or perhaps a perquisite to the latest president that might help them with other enterprises they’re thinking about. The very rich already have shown their willingness to impress the latest president. Some donated very large sums to the inauguration ceremonies and parties. This hasn’t been a normal swearing-in process; far more has been raised and spent on nice things for the latest president. It has been a bit strange, actually. If nothing else, one an deduce that this guy likes all kinds of gifts, even homage.

As Red Buttons sang in the early 1950s, Strange things are happening.6

A single river

flowed when her water broke

toward valleys

lined with lily

waving red paint brushes

on blank landscapes

waving ideas

calling columbine

as goshawks watched

the bull snake

emerge in June

hungry for life, hunting it even

like the boy who watched

then hunted for life

while his rivers flowed into

autumn and then under ice

until everything waits

for waters to break

again and rivers to flow

and this happens many times

for the boy who is fortunate,

one who sees it once and again

—RJ Stewart

“Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

THIS REMARK is attributed to Aldous Huxley, and I came across it via a Substack post on “Philosophors.” 1 The quote precedes a suggestion for follow-up thought, and I decided to take up the challenge. I invite you to give it a try, if for no other reason than to learn something new, which was my objective. Here’s the follow-up question:

“When the presence of others alters one’s ability to reason clearly, does it reveal that human consciousness is less an autonomous force and more a fluid construct shaped by the psychological gravity of belonging and fear of isolation?”

Interesting to me, because I am one who likes occasional breaks from the crowd. My partner calls it “social sabbaticals,” and I think the term applies rather well. When too many social events compile, I invariably long for some “recharge time,” which usually means being alone. This is a common characteristic of introverts. Extroverts recharge with heightened social activity. Introverts need to get away.

For many years, I thought this was a character flaw, and I faulted myself for at times being inward. But then I learned that, lo and behold, people are different. Now I love my times with friends and family, love a party, love to converse, love to make new friends — and love to take a long hike by myself. For many people, constant association with crowds both large and small can be stultifying, and periodic withdrawal a necessary antidote. For others, being alone is a fearful state that must be reversed by social interaction.

The idea of crowds usurping individual reasoning, however, presents other questions that require some nuanced answers.

It helps to put the idea into its historical perspective before going too far with it. Huxley may have got the idea from Gustave Le Bon, a French polymath who compiled his study in a book called The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind. The premise is that directly or tacitly embedded in a crowd, an individual will, or at least can, lose ability to reason. 2 Without going into a lengthy history, let’s just say that during his lifetime (the late 19th century) radical change was under way. Traditional pillars of European society were challenged, and “the proletariat” was emerging as a powerful political force. Were the “masses” prepared to self-govern? Did they possess enough educational background? Aren’t people who are “landed” and educated better prepared for leadership? Could democracy be a road to ruin? To perdition?

Le Bon’s ideas can explain, for example, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when people abandoned their sense of propriety and stormed the U.S. Capitol. Remarkably, this event is retold in wildly different versions depending on the “crowd” to which a person shares perspective. The events of Jan. 6 were well chronicled on television; millions witnessed them. And yet, when it came to assigning blame, the country was sharply divided and grossly defensive. Even today, raising the fact of the event can prompt angry rebuttals, usually to defend the supporters of the defeated presidential candidate, Donald Trump. Others insist he caused the whole sordid affair and should be held accountable for it.

This illustration, however, goes only so far. There is another side to the coin: Ambitious men hungry for political advantage and control saw an opportunity. Could harnessing crowd behavior serve the objectives of the autocrat? Le Bon …

… posits that with the rise of democracy and industrialization, it’s the unreasoning crowds who will control the affairs of the people, not kings or the elite; and these crowds are largely irrational in action, conservative in thought, violent both in act and in speech, and easily hypnotized by individuals with prestige but not intelligence. Le Bon is ultimately cynical in how he views this development in human affairs. Individuals in crowds feel anonymous and powerful, leading to destruction and violence; and the susceptibility of crowds to pure charisma means that they’re easily dominated by thuggish men of action, not wise men of foresight. People in a crowd are ‘a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’ 3

Le Bon appears to be arguing for leadership by well-reasoned people of high station. Put another way, he feared crowd rule, and he implied it would be a flaw in a form of government that placed political power in the people.

At the same time, ironically, his ideas about crowd behavior suggested an opportunity to some historical figures, Adolf Hitler, especially, but also Mussolini and Lenin. What may have attracted Hitler, for example, is the ability to master crowd control, to be one of those “thuggish men of action” referred to above. Properly captivated, a crowd can be a very useful tool to a despotic leader.

Does the crowd suspend the individual’s ability to reason, or does the crowd have within it a power of collective thinking superior to that of a single individual? Could it be either way?

Americans generally love the ideas declared in the Bill of Rights, the Preamble, and the Constitution, that “we the people” are quite capable of managing our affairs. For others, “the people” have neither self control nor ethical foundation for self-governance, and therefore they must be managed by authoritarian, spiritual, or monarchical leaders.

A very popular argument today makes the point: “No Kings,” a reference to the Declaration of Independence from the monarchy of English rule, has become a popular rallying cry against authoritarianism, and protesters by the thousands have turned out for rallies in many places in the U.S. To put faith in a single individual is to relinquish the very principle on which this country was founded. Beware! these protesters say; we exist because we rejected monarchy, and we do not now want to embrace it, or some fascist variety of it.

For me, yes, there is frequent need to escape the crowd. This may result from too many consecutive social engagements, but it also may result from too much social media influence such as Substack, news sources such as the New York Times, The Guardian, or the Wall Street Journal. A break affords opportunity to regain a personal perspective, to reflect on what I’ve heard and read, and, more importantly, to sort out how my brain and emotions are reacting to the complexity of information. It’s a kind of adult-style “time-out” that I not only welcome, but which I truly need. By thinking through Huxley’s quote, for example, I came to see a connection between my introversion and the potential for crowd control through social media.

At the same time, there is a definite value to a “crowd” in the form of a democracy, but with qualification. Our democracy depends on the collective wisdom of a great diversity of individuals who prepare themselves to accept the enormous responsibility of self-governance. Education is an essential ingredient; otherwise there is, in fact, a potential for a despotic leader to gain control of people who suspend individual thinking and form a mob. Free public education, as initiated by settlers and early American leaders, continues to be essential, and affordable higher education is an important “icing on the cake.” Rather than denigrate free public education and higher education, we do well to redouble our efforts to support it. And, to keep it focused on facts, religion should be left to parents and not required of public educators. Establishment of any religion is a contradiction and should not be permitted, as the founders stipulated.

Suggestion: What about you? Try your hand at “drilling down” on the Huxley/LeBon idea. How would you structure your ideas? I’d love to know. By the way, I don’t “know” these things off the top of my head. I use the many tools easily available to any writer and thinker. Ideas come and go, and some are worth a pause to dig a little deeper.

1

Philosophy Quotes

The Wisdom Letter #345

✹ For today’s edition of Wisdom Letter, we have carefully curated five bite-sized quotes from brilliant thinkers such as Aldous Huxley and Montesquieu, each paired with a philosophical question designed to provoke deep reflection…

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a year ago · 95 likes · 7 comments · Philosophors