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Amanda Holmes reads Nizar Qabbani’s poem “When I Love You,” translated by Lena Jayyusi and Jack Collum. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “When I Love You” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
As an art student at the University of Texas Rio Grande, Josie Del Castillo came to appreciate the rich pigment of oils and how easily they spread across the canvas. “I didn’t get it at first, but it made me want to practice,” she says. “The techniques that I’ve developed now—I always go back to oil painting, even though I’ve tried other mediums.” A first-generation, Mexican-American artist raised in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Del Castillo produces self-portraits and portraits of her friends and family, her canvases depicting the landscape of her hometown, with its palm trees, resacas, and sunsets framed by tall clouds.
Growing up, Del Castillo and her family crossed the border often to visit family in Mexico. “I never really saw a difference between the two countries until I was older,” she says. “We always saw it as ‘going to the other side.’” Today she celebrates the similarities and differences between two cultures in her work, often by means of natural symbolism. The aloe plant, for example, “has healing powers in Mexican-American culture, so I use that to symbolize healing ourselves.” Del Castillo’s portraits often explore her own resiliency and that of her Brownsville community. “I’m intrigued by people’s personalities, how they present themselves, and what they do for the community,” she says.
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Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like a parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th century; and modern falconers have used their understanding of language to train them to do dog-like tricks. The other nine species of caracara that span the rest of South America are just as odd in their own ways. In his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature, Jonathan Meiburg follows their unusual evolutionary path across the continent and describes his encounters with these birds over the past 25 years. He joins us from his home in Texas to introduce us to some new feathered friends. This episode originally aired in 2021.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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The post The Falcon’s Odd Little Cousin appeared first on The American Scholar.
Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Heidi Julavits; Hogarth, 304 pp., $27
In his 1949 book of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argued that while the archetypal man’s journey is physical and outward, that of the woman is domestic and inward. Apart from the painfully reductive nature of this idea, what most annoyed me about the book was not so much Campbell’s distinction between genders but the implication that a journey inward is inherently less dangerous, less difficult, or less societally significant than a journey outward. In her new book, Heidi Julavits, a writer and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, rewrites that myth. Directions to Myself is about finding a way home in every sense of the word—and what it means to navigate there, not as Odysseus returning to Ithaca but as ordinary parents, teachers, writers, friends, and neighbors.
Julavits and her family split their time between school years in Manhattan and summers in Maine, and in Directions to Myself, she is concerned with finding a home in both landscapes. Each of the book’s sections opens with hand-drawn maps of places important to Julavitz—among them Small Point Harbor, Maine; Julavits’s childhood neighborhood in nearby Portland; and the neighborhood where she works and lives near New York’s Columbia University—complete with annotations like “do not climb” and “watch for broken glass.” The narrative moves associatively, rather than chronologically, through four years of Julavits’s life, documenting the effects of aging, shifting friendships, professional highs and lows, and the internal conflict she faces in preparing her children to go out into a world that feels increasingly destabilized.
Julavits’s central interest in geography is rooted in how our ability to navigate change allows us to feel at home, even if “home” is not a fixed place or concept. Realizing how she’s re-created the patterns of her childhood—moving to Maine, owning a sailboat—for her own family, Julavits writes, “Home is still defined by me as where I grew up, more or less, and so we bought this house, thus repeating the mistake of my parents, conscripting our children to spend summer vacations in a vessel that fills with water from below.” When she confesses that “as confusing and shameful as it is to be a homesick adult, homesickness becomes its own home after a while,” she is writing as much about the physical as she is about a period of her life that has slipped out of reach. “The older I get,” she goes on, “the more I understand [homesickness] as love that’s too big and has always been too big for one body to manage. That love is unbearable only when I’m not with the people who inspired it”—for Julavits, those people are her parents, her friends, and most of all, her children.
In a scene she returns to throughout the book, Julavits is approached by a famous writer who smugly “announc[es] that writers should never have children because each child represents a book the writer will not write.” Julavits offers a hypothetical retort: if she were his accountant, she’d ask him to run the numbers. Why is it children that this man sees as the primary impediment to his genius when bathing, eating, sleeping also must pull him away from his prolific and brilliant output?
And yet, Julavits acknowledges that she too sometimes falls prey to this belief. “For this reason, I kept my first pregnancy a secret,” she writes.” I’m ashamed now that I did this, even while I had what seemed like valid reasons at the time. … I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t serious about my career. If I were to visit a life accountant, my spreadsheet might reveal the following. … I have experienced the unceasing pressure of proving that, by having a child I’ve cost myself nothing, and this has cost me.”
As Julavits charts her journey through early motherhood, it becomes clear that having children has cost her something, in the way that any kind of care is inseparable from loss. When she spends a night laboring with and delivering her second child, a son, in her Manhattan apartment, Julavits evokes the language of Campbell’s hero’s journey and its cycle of departure and return with a gift:
People have been dying in childbirth for a thousand years and labor unites us. With my daughter, during the twenty-seven hours we lived between worlds, I felt more connected, as the pain swelled and ebbed, withdrew and revisited, to this lineage of strangers than I did to the human inside me that I hoped would choose life, and let me keep mine…I’m more confident, this time, that I’ll survive the trip. But she will never again be the only person with whom I’ve traveled through in-between places. And I’ll be bringing someone back.
Campbell, too, saw the abyss in childbirth—in part because of the very real potential for physical death—but Julavits seems to be alluding to a much less literal and much more ordinary death: having a child means losing the self who did not know the all-consuming love of motherhood. During labor, Julavits observes, “each completed orbit on this clock thins and thins the membrane covering the abyss where the self is annihilated and becomes the ghostly bridge connecting life with life.”
One afternoon, back on the ocean in Maine near where her son nearly drowned the previous summer, Julavits sees that he has grown increasingly independent. She guides her son, in a boat tethered to her own, as he makes his way through the same water she once navigated on long summer trips with her own parents. Recalling the night they spent together on that ghostly bridge of labor, Julavits writes: “I walked for longer than a day; I traveled a measurable distance through time and space to give birth to him.” Now, though, she is traveling a different bridge—the passage between her son’s childhood and adulthood. “I’ve been prepared for this day,” she explains, evoking the umbilical rope that connects their two boats: “His growing up is unfathomable to me, even as I can precisely mark the distance. My son is two fathoms away. He is three fathoms. He is four, seven, ten. As the tide rises and the beach shrinks, I start to lay the rope on the sand. I re-create the path the two of us took together before his cord was cut and our individual expeditions began.”
Directions to Myself is a book of dualities—about motherhood and childhood, birth and death, career and family, middle age and youth, the external and the internal. Even stylistically, it’s simultaneously serious and tender. Home, split both by time (childhood and adulthood) and place (Manhattan and Maine) is the book’s central duality—and it is Julavits’s ability to craft a cohesive narrative as she wanders through them that makes the memoir so striking.
By the book’s end, it seems that the real difference between the archetypal hero’s journey and the one that Julavits describes is that the latter is one on which all of us will embark—a natural consequence of caring deeply about our children, our work, and the landscapes we call home.
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The tallest house on the lane—the tallest of the seven structures that are houses, not barns converted into garages or workshops—is three stories. It sits with its back to the lane, a small faded green house huddled against it on one side and on the other side a freestanding old brick garage, a parking spot, and access to the front of the house. The house is painted bright blue, only not altogether bright. Something dark, a sort of warning note, is in the splendid color, as if the house is a peacock, tail spread, a single-color fan of attention-getting feathers held stiff as the bird glares over its shoulder at you, just daring you. The house holds a hint of that dark flashing eye. No need to shake and shimmer—not this dwelling with its back on you, the color unbroken except for two small windows in the rear and two on the side. The front of the house, with its wooden balcony and inviting porch, is not in view from the lane.
Does this color have a name? Electric occurred to me, as did royal. Bright blue, called añil for the plant whose berries provided the color, is the shade of the lower half of the whitewashed houses in traditional villages in La Mancha. The whitewash served to keep the houses cool in summer and to sterilize the homes, and the blue disguised the dirt and dust kicked up by horse or cart. No terracotta tones for those homes as you find across much of Castile. But that blue is not quite so bright and deep, and those blue and white houses, a whole tribe of them, do not individually demand your attention, as this house does in its setting, faded green cottage on one side, dull red brick garage on the other, and mostly cream and yellow buildings, weathered wood, and tan and gray stone along the street.
The color is one you noticed even before the recent paint job after some roof work. Now, freshened up, the house doesn’t so much draw your attention as seize it. I feel a bit wary of it. Imagine a teenager, big for his age, invigorated after a can of coke or a chocolate bar, poised to make a move. That is this house. The color is not a mix of electric and royal but the most of both. It’s an eye opener.
When I took the shortcut and stepped through my window onto the lane the morning after the house was freshly painted—the shortcut to the street, a neighbor had wonderingly informed me, favored by all the previous tenants too—the birds were just starting their chirping. A breeze was rising. I looked down the lane. The house, like a sunrise, was just coming into its own. It seemed to occupy more than its allotted space in the lane, as if it had just inhaled. How firm, how strong it appeared. A big block of blue. Not threatening, exactly, but ready to give orders. How long would it remain the prince of the street? All that day the house held its own and then some. But it couldn’t last. After two months, the other houses on the street and the oddly placed garages that go with them have resumed their regular low-key communion. The peacock house, like a flashy bird, or a brazen youth, or even an aging adult determined to stay in the game, may still think it’s to be reckoned with, and it may still impress a newcomer, but we others on the street know that despite its preening, it’s just a house.
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Take any international trip, and the tourist-trap restaurants near the must-see landmarks will all be hawking the “national dish” you simply can’t miss: Greek souvlaki, Japanese ramen, Italian pasta, Mexican mole. Leaving aside the question of whether a restaurant with a laminated English menu could possibly serve good food, we must ask what makes a dish “national”—must it be an old recipe? A common one? Unique to that place? Anya von Bremzen poses these questions and more in her new book, National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home. Beginning in Paris with the 18th-century inauguration of modern French cuisine—and searching for the invention, or perhaps congelation, of pot-au-feu—von Bremzen travels across oceans and continents in search of what defines a country’s cuisine, unraveling notions of identity, nationhood, and politics in the process.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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The post Imagined Cuisines appeared first on The American Scholar.
For American farmers, life changed dramatically in 1937. That year, electricity began flowing to hundreds of thousands of rural households, including some 12,000 in Wisconsin. The Rural Electrification Act (REA), which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed into law the previous year, provided stimulus for utilities to install poles and wires where, until then, it hadn’t been economical to do so. Most farmers were thrilled. One who lived near Janesville, Wisconsin, said of the power company crew, “I thought sometimes that they weren’t ever goin’ to get here. The organizers told us we’d have juice by spring. But we finally did get it, and, by golly, I’m goin’ to shoot the works.” He showed a city reporter every electric light in his barn. His newspaper profile reads like REA propaganda, and it might have been. To persuade skeptical farmers—who were still feeling the effects of the Great Depression and balked at the prospect of a monthly electric bill—REA advocates mounted a forceful public relations campaign. Agents traveled across the country demonstrating electric appliances. Theaters presented a popular film, Power and the Land, which touted the benefits of electricity for agricultural operations and concluded with the line, “Things will be easier now.” Part of the campaign focused on convincing women. Electricity would give them lights, refrigerators, ovens, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and irons they could plug into an outlet. It would end their drudgery, the government promised.
But Jennie Harebo, a 64-year-old woman from central Wisconsin, wasn’t having it. After her town’s rural electric cooperative set eight poles and lines on her property, she sawed down one of the poles and parked her coupe on the downed wires. She stationed herself in the car, armed with a shotgun and a hoe. Newsmen called it a “sitdown strike,” a “vigil,” a “blockade.” Her husband, an “invalid,” brought her food. At dusk, she gathered blankets around her shoulders and lap and cradled the shotgun. One night, two nights, three nights she stayed. A sign on the windshield read, NOTICE: NO TRESPASSING. Harebo allowed no negotiating, entertained no tit-for-tat. Months earlier, she and her husband had won a case in the state’s supreme court that saved a riparian corner of their property from being seized by men who wanted to build a dam. The government’s lawyer must have suspected that his client’s case was doomed.
I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers—the wonderment, the wisdom, the privileged views. Maybe she was simply cantankerous in the original sense of the word, which is rooted in the notion of “holding fast.”
What could she have seen in her three nights’ vigil? North Star, both dippers, crescent moon’s shine on the pump handle—the fixtures of haiku masters. Also, quotidian country lurkers and skulkers. Her night vision undefiled by electric shine, she surely saw scavenging raccoons, ambling possums, scuffling skunks. Maybe a lynx’s glassy gaze. She heard more, too, than her city relatives in their wired homes with their humming lights and fans and blathering radios. She could have made out the lawyer’s Pontiac approaching from a distance of 10 miles. She had plenty of time to aim her Remington out the driver’s side window.
Eighty years after Harebo’s stand, I took up wandering my rural Wisconsin property after nightfall. I longed for whatever sights diurnal living denied me. Trail cams mounted in the forest or by the creek had offered only glimpses: beavers adding branches to their dams, stock-still deer staring straight into the lens. The cameras, I was sure, didn’t reveal a fraction of the night’s secrets.
On clear nights, I stood under the Milky Way’s sprawling, splotchy canopy. I saw planets, constellations, comets, and once, a meteor afire and dying as it plummeted to Earth. The darkness of my rural township, an hour’s drive from the Harebos’ farm, was rare for modern times. In 2005, our town board passed a dark sky ordinance (whereas, whereas, whereas … and so, lights must be shielded, directed downward, calibrated, kept modest). Nevertheless, a yard light down the road, a sign at the corner bar, and the glow of a distant city interfered.
I sought deeper darkness. I found it at the nature preserve halfway between my place and the Harebos’ farm. One night, a self-made astronomer and his telescope met me and others at the preserve for a moonlit hike. Inside the visitors center, I discovered my friend Liz in the crowd, and we sat together. The occasion was a penumbral lunar eclipse. The astronomer began his program with canned, corny jokes. He introduced his two assistants, women who knew the trails and would guide us on the night hike. He must have mentioned the alignment of heavenly bodies, how Earth’s shadow would fall on February’s full moon, the snow moon, once it rose. But I’ve never retained stargazing facts. I’m slow to make out asterisms. I can’t recall which planets appear where and when or what temperaments the ancient Greeks assigned them. I merely love to bask under them.
We were all traipsing outside into the snow when, unexpectedly, the astronomer announced that hiking would be too dangerous because of ice. Instead, he would talk to us during the half hour before the moon rose. The group groaned, and Liz and I looked at each other. Like the astronomer’s assistants, we knew the preserve’s trails, at least the main ones. We backed away from the others and stole into the darkness.
We padded slowly and quietly over the glazed snow, keeping our eyes on the ground, gathering scant reflected light from unknown sources. The woodland trail was icy only on rocks or railroad ties. In those spots we braced ourselves and reached out to steady each other. Soon we joined the wider trail, formerly the old state highway. There, the snow was ridged from snowmobiles’ belts. As we walked on the crusted ridges, Liz told me about living in Dharamshala a few years earlier. I pictured her humid quarters in the mountains of northern India, the buildings’ bright colors, the Buddhist pilgrims surrounding her. I sensed the peace she had felt there and nowhere else. I shared her desire to return to Dharamshala, although I’d never been there. While visualizing that faraway place, I kept my eyes on my surroundings. Moving in the dark was a balancing art. I felt most adept when I looked out with a broad, allowing awareness, when I didn’t fix on fine details or make assumptions about the terrain. Liz and I arrived at the path’s apogee precisely when the clouds parted, the full moon rose orange, and as if cued by the shifting light, coyotes began howling.
What I have seen by the light of celestial bodies: rabbit prints as lavender shadows in the snow; bare, black elm branches waving; the red glow of varmints’ eyes at the compost heap; stars in puddles and brooks; my lover’s silhouette moving beside mine.
What I have not seen in the night and been surprised by: knee-deep muck; a snorting, thundering herd of deer; a frog on a door handle that I smashed under my palm as I hurried to get indoors during a rainstorm; a pickup truck without headlights barreling down the road—and the drunk young man at the wheel who, after nearly running me over, reversed and asked, “Are you okay? Geez, are you okay?” in a tone that told me his real question was, What are you doing walking out here after dark?
To be moon-eyed is to keep your eyes wide open and to be awed. But to be moony is to be absent-minded, loony, or at least naïve. With better night vision, I thought, I could steer my life toward more moon-eyed moments than moony ones. Maybe I could take in more good surprises than bad and live with heightened awareness, less delusion. Seeing what I’d been missing all along might grant me new, original insights.
Humans are born with the ability to see in low light. But compared with that of other animals, our night vision is feeble. We lack the nocturnals’ giant pupils (think doe-eyed ) and their tapetum lucidum, a structure at the back of the eyeball that acts as a mirror, amplifying starlight into floodlight and reflecting it back onto the retina. Our natural night vision can be eased into—it takes a while for our sight to adjust to dimness—but in general, it can’t be enhanced. Using lubricating eye drops or eating more beta carotene, for most well-nourished Americans, won’t improve it. Other habits, such as staring at computer screens or the sun, can degrade it. Unfortunately for Harebo and me and others past their physical prime, night vision also diminishes with age.
To compensate for human deficiencies, engineers developed night vision goggles during World War II. Now every optics store sells them. Some years ago, craving a clear view of the outdoors after sunset, I bought a pair. I stood on our deck, held the goggles to my face, and scanned the horizon. Deer in the field glowed an unnatural phosphor green. Nothing more. No portal opened to a secret world. No mysteries were revealed. In the years following my purchase, I rarely picked up the goggles when I set out in the dark. What I really wanted was something innate and unencumbered, a better version of what I was born with.
Scientists have researched ways of improving human night vision. A chlorophyll derivative called chlorin e6 has shown promise in mice. In 2015, Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbets, self-styled biohackers with a group called Science for the Masses, gained notoriety for trying the substance. A solution of chlorin e6 was dropped into Licina’s eyes. Two hours later, he and others, acting as controls, were taken to a place where “trees and brush were used for ‘blending’ ”—presumably, an attempt to create a uniform backdrop for all participants. Licina and the control subjects were asked to identify letters, numbers, and other symbols on signs. The experiment appeared to have been successful. Controls correctly identified the objects a third of the time, while Licina did so 100 percent of the time. Afterward, he acknowledged to a journalist that the experiment was “kind of crap science.” Without knowing the potentially harmful effects of chlorin e6, the biohacker had been willing to risk his everyday vision for the possibility of gaining night vision, if only for a few hours (the drops’ effects wore off by sunrise). But Science for the Masses lacked sufficient funding to conduct the sort of extensive, ethical trials that more esteemed researchers require.
In photographs from that night, Licina stares at the camera like some mad alien, his eyes watery and opaque with their larger-than-life black irises—a consequence not of the chlorin e6 but of the oversize light-dimming contact lenses he wore. His creepy appearance and the report’s description of him roving in a dark wood made me think that the young men had especially enjoyed the homemade horror-film aspect of their experiment. Maybe they lusted after superpowers that would allow them to recognize and slay the dark’s monsters. After all, night vision is one superhuman capability that’s nearly achievable. Unlike time travel or leaping tall buildings, it’s only just beyond our grasp.
“Darkness, pitch black and impenetrable, was the realm of the hobgoblin, the sprite, the will-o’-the-wisp, the boggle, the kelpie, the boggart and the troll. Witches, obviously, were ‘abroad,’ ” journalist Jon Henley wrote of life before artificial lighting in a 2009 article in The Guardian. Real monsters coexisted with the fantastical. In the London, Munich, and Paris of the early 19th century, thieves, rapists, and murderous gangs roamed freely. According to Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, humans were never more afraid of the night than in the era just before gaslights illuminated the cities’ streets. Murder rates then were five to 10 times higher than they are today. And yet, Erkich adds, “large numbers of people came up for air when the sun went down. It afforded them the privacy they did not have during the day. They could no longer be overseen by their superiors.”
Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. Past sunset, oppressors needed artificial light to point out their symbols of country and religion, to run factories and enforce conforming behaviors. For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom.
Jennie Harebo’s vigil attracted reporters and photographers from across the state, their cars lining the roads near her farm. The visitors, she said, treated her courteously. A deputy sheriff persuaded her to put down the shotgun. And the REA’s lawyer finally relented, having decided to circumvent the Harebo farm after neighbors agreed to accept the poles and lines on their properties. The utility paid Harebo $25 for her trouble and removed the eight poles that it had installed on her land. “With nothing left to fight for,” a newsman wrote, Harebo ended her vigil after about 96 hours. “Storing her formidable hoe in the woodshed, [she] claimed victory today.” She abandoned her coupe, “her husky frame sagging a little with weariness.” The crowd that had gathered to watch the three-day standoff dispersed. “Ultimately,” another reporter mocked, the family’s “need for kerosene lamps continued.”
In opposing electricity, Harebo was a rare exception. Some farmers didn’t even wait for the REA. Two decades before her blockade, men who once lived along the road between my home and the nature preserve were so eager to have electricity that they collected their own poles and wire. They used tractors, shovels, and muscle to run lines from the nearest village. Theirs was the nation’s first farmer-led electrical cooperative. It functioned independently for 20 years, disbanding only in the early 1930s, when the state butted in and began interfering in its operations.
Although she opposed lines on her own property, I imagined that Harebo would have admired the farmers’ refusal to comply with state regulations. As one farmer remarked on the public service commission’s successful attempt to set his cooperative’s prices, it “was a good example of the chair-bottom warmers’ insatiable desire to run everything.” In the years since I learned about Harebo’s vigil, she’d become a minor heroine in my eyes. Here was a tough woman who had fended off the establishment. She had battled for her rights—to the darkness and the freedoms it brought her, to the preservation of her night vision—even if she was weary and sagging.
Standing on the groomed snowmobile route, Liz and I watched the full moon fade to yellow and shrink behind clouds. Then we left for the narrow forest trail. We picked over rocks and logs and a trickling, perennial creek. Farther on, we listened to our breathing and footfalls, nothing more. We found the meadow next to the parking lot of the visitors center. Ahead, clustered around the telescope, stood the astronomer and part of the group we’d started with.
The clouds disappeared again. I looked up to watch the space station dash a diagonal across the sky. The astronomer invited me to view the moon in the telescope. “Lean into the eyepiece,” he told me. “Don’t touch anything.”
Singled out in close-up, the moon nearly blinded me. The penumbral eclipse, a subtle shading on the moon’s surface, was too faint for me to detect. I kept my eye to the telescope only long enough to assure the astronomer that I’d made an effort. I didn’t like the way the instrument isolated the moon. Without its complement of stars and planets, it was a flattened, vapid object. I felt as if I were ogling it but not really seeing it.
Liz took a brief turn at the eyepiece, too. Then we walked to our cars, agreeing to meet again for more nighttime hikes.
People soon will be able to choose better night vision like they can choose to eliminate forehead wrinkles. Professional scientists—not only biohackers—are working on it. In 2019, Gang Han and his fellow researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced that they had enabled mice to detect near-infrared light by injecting nanoparticles into their eyes. After the injection, the mice could see phosphor-green shapes in the dark, as if they were wearing night vision goggles.
Not surprisingly, safety and security, national or personal, are often cited as reasons for such research and its funding. What if soldiers, for example, could see enemies after dark without the hassle and weight of equipment? In one article, Han suggested testing the eye-injected nanoparticles on dogs next. “If we had a ‘super-dog’ that could see NIR [near-infrared] light,” he told a reporter, “we could project a pattern onto a lawbreaker’s body from a distance, and the dog could catch them without disturbing other people.” As if criminals wouldn’t dodge behind obstacles; as if police with their natural night vision could make out the perpetrators well enough to project shapes onto them; as if dogs wouldn’t be distracted by all the marvels their new night vision revealed and dash away from their handlers.
The delivery method—an injection into the eye—also makes this night vision technique impractical. Recently, though, when I spoke with Han, he told me that his lab might soon begin testing a wearable device, such as a patch or contact lens, on humans. He imagined an application in which a security agent wearing a night vision patch could see details in facial recognition software that others could not. But for this, more funding would be required. Of the lab’s many projects, night vision research has received the most attention in the media. But not from industry or government. People at the big granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, Han told me, “can’t recognize its importance in daily life.”
Months after fixing Jennie Harebo’s image in my mind, I found an article about her that I hadn’t seen before. It included a photograph, likely taken after she ended her vigil. She looked nothing like the newsmen’s descriptions. Although the image was dim from age and poor scanning, I could tell that her hair was curled and styled. She wore a buttoned-up overcoat with a contrasting collar, maybe fur. She struck a movie star’s pose beside the coupe—jaw set, chin lifted, face turned slightly, gaze fixed on the middle distance. She was beautiful. Her frame was upright, not sagging. She showed no sign of weariness after 96 hours in the car. Shotgun held at her side, she looked ecstatic and carefree. Seeing the photograph chastened me. I had allowed the newsmen’s descriptions of Harebo to deceive me. I’d been willing to accept that she was crabby and exhausted from her ordeal. But the word vigil, after all, is rooted in “lively” and “strong.” Maybe she didn’t consider it an ordeal at all. Maybe she relished the standoff.
Harebo’s proud posture reminded me of when I lived in Lansing, Michigan, during college and joined friends to march down the middle of the street. We held posters or candles and shouted, “Women unite, take back the night!” We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed any policies. But it changed me. Marching to reclaim the dark brought me a sense of solidarity among women that school, work, and family had not. Even so, I thought as I studied Harebo’s photograph, my efforts hadn’t gone far enough. I hadn’t fully imagined what we would do with our freedom after we won the night.
During the summer after our first moonlit hike, Liz and I took more late-night excursions to the middle of nowhere. What I saw with my natural, flawed night vision: shooting stars, swooping bats, slumbering farm machinery, and the lift and dip of a rare, blue-glowing firefly. What I felt, as I listened and shared more stories with my friend: a keener attunement, an ease among shadows, and the assurance of being fully seen—so much of what daylight’s glare had been hiding.
The post Night Vision appeared first on The American Scholar.
The affix en was the subject of the lesson. Only one student had shown up, a young woman, 23, with a sturdy, athletic body, long dark hair, and a round face, who brings to mind my best friend in fourth grade, a skinny girl whose hair was blond, not dark, and who had her mother’s high cheekbones and a long, angular face, not a round one. But as a girl and later as a college student and then as a grown woman, my friend often had the same expectant expression as this student, equally confident and hesitant, as if she were waiting for the right moment to jump in with a joke or a funny story. It was a self-conscious look but without a trace of embarrassment or cunning. I remembered that about my friend, and here the exact same look was on this very different face. It was strange. I tried to forget my fourth-grade friend, but how could I when she kept reappearing with each subtle adjustment of my student’s expression? Here my friend was in different guise, across the room, waiting, alert but not wary, ready but not impatient. I almost expected the student’s shape and coloring to disintegrate and fall away and reveal my friend, laughing at how long it had taken me to recognize her in her getup. We might both be 10 again, playing hide-and-seek, and my friend hiding in plain sight. “I knew it was you!” I’d want to say when she shook off the disguise. “I guessed!” My friend would laugh merrily. No wonder I felt so inclined to like this student.
There comes a point when a student who has aroused my curiosity no longer fascinates me. It’s not that I discover I was wrong in my opinion and am now disappointed, but that I get used to the student. So far, however, this student has continued to intrigue me, even after five months of class. That evening, I watched her ponder the textbook’s questions designed to encourage (encourage) the use of words with the affix en. The first was whether a shortened work week with a longer workday was preferable to a lengthened work week with a shorter workday. I expected her to choose the shorter week of, say, four 10-hour days rather than the six-day week with shorter hours. She did. “By lengthening the workday and shortening the work week, you have more free time to enjoy yourself, even if it’s just sleeping,” she said, smiling.
I chuckled because I knew how much she likes sleeping. I had already learned that she sets five alarms to wake up, and still she often lingers in bed too long and has to pull on her clothes and run out the door, no breakfast, no shower, to avoid arriving late for work. I know her boyfriend is still slumbering in bed, having learned to sleep through the barrage of alarms, I know he doesn’t do housework, and I know that when she comes home at the end of a long day and gets into bed, the bed is unmade.
“I couldn’t do that,” I’d said when she’d shared this private detail earlier. “I couldn’t get into an unmade bed.”
My student had nodded. It seemed too silly, she’d explained, to make the bed before dinner only to mess it up again just an hour later. It was my turn to nod, showing that I understood the reasoning, though it didn’t seem silly to me at all. Making the bed isn’t only to have it neat all day, but to provide that precious moment of drawing back the covers, akin to removing the paper from a present. Or the lid from a Tupperware container where the leftovers are stored instead of on a plate shoved into the fridge. It’s about starting the night afresh, not just taking up where you were when you crawled out in the morning. It’s about having things right. She ought to understand—she likes her clothes folded just so and because her boyfriend doesn’t do it the way she likes, the laundry is her chore. So is the shopping, the washing up, and the housecleaning. “What does he do?” I’d asked when I learned this.
“The cooking,” she’d said, her face showing that wonderful combination of surprise and satisfaction. “He does the cooking. All the cooking. I hate cooking. And he does it all.”
Of course. The cooking done, the meal ready. You’d be grateful to come home to that and wouldn’t make a fuss about the unmade bed. “Besides,” she said, “I don’t care.”
And yet, I pointed out, she cared about how a T-shirt was folded. You’re going to wear the T-shirt, so let it be satisfactorily folded. You need to go to bed, so let it be inviting.
“But I don’t care,” she repeated, almost nervously but with that characteristic quick surprised laugh, adding that by that point, any bed, made or unmade, is inviting. Her smile was full of promise and quiet gaiety. If a smile were a footstep, hers would be a hop and a skip. Not a forceful stride, a leisurely stroll, a saunter or amble or march, just a happy, self-conscious hop, and then it’d be over. Until she did it again. Just like my friend.
In “Friend of My Youth,” Alice Munro’s narrator tells of seeing her mother in a dream. In real life, her mother had died after years of a debilitating disease, but in the dream she looks good—so much better than the narrator remembers that she is astonished. In the dream, her mother makes light of the signs already appearing of her coming infirmity. “It’s nothing much,” she assures her daughter, with her old liveliness and humor. How, the narrator wonders, could she have forgotten this? As I turn to my student to ask her opinion about one question or another in the book, I am not surprised by what I have forgotten but amazed by how well I remember a friend from my youth and by how strong her presence is. I am surprised by how real the past is and how tenuous everything else, how uncertain. How much fun my friend still is, slipping into a room quietly, drawing no attention to herself, hiding in plain view.
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Amanda Holmes reads Maxine Kumin’s poem “Morning Swim.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Morning Swim” by Maxine Kumin appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30
It’s almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin’s most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that—over the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s—grew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike.
But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, “It’s easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father like that.” Another’s mother is referred to as “that old womb with a built-in tomb.” The latter quotation comes from painter Jackson Pollock, who’s among a small parade of notables who wander like oddballs through this strange milieu. (Others include art critic Clement Greenberg, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Richard Price.)
Dishy as it is, however, Stille’s book is hardly an exercise in name dropping. The true heroes and villains in this story—most individuals, children excepted, take turns being both—are everyday people whose dramas are sometimes darkly amusing but more often heartbreaking. These are real members of nontheoretical families who found themselves at once the victims and willing enforcers of disastrous social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily. Through all phases of the story, from the kinky, free-love eccentricity of the early years to the insularity, paranoia, and criminality of the later years, Stille maintains an admirable, almost tenacious sympathy for his subjects—a sympathy some of those subjects, in retrospect, aren’t sure they deserve. But as the cognitive dissonance grows, so too does the tension, making the book an improbable thriller, propelling us from chapter to chapter to see how these unfortunates will extricate themselves (if they can) from a Gordian knot of their own creation. Will anyone make it out emotionally intact, reasonably functional? Will they be reunited with their own blood, whom they’ve been conditioned to regard with indifference if not hostility?
One cavil: Stille places the origin of his story in a typically caricatured version of 1950s America, an unsophisticated place marked by little more than stifling convention (Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), but with a hint of rebellion on the horizon (Rebel Without a Cause, On the Road ). The implication being that the Sullivan Institute was part of that incipient rebellion, a harbinger of the revolutions to come in the ensuing decade. This is misleading on two fronts.
First, 1950s America was not some sheltered national virgin whose inaugural orgasm awaited in the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising ’60s. The conventionality we associate with the ’50s was partly a return to normal after the 1940s, a decade that—owing to war-related domestic upheavals—saw myriad social and sexual pathologies rise, some drastically. (Jack Kerouac’s dionysian On the Road, it should be remembered, was a chronicle of journeys taken mostly in the late ’40s, though the book wasn’t published for another decade.) Given this recent anomie, the return to conventionality in the 1950s was akin to what Stille observed among former Sullivanians, who left behind the commune’s deliberate parental chaos and loveless promiscuity to find shelter in the old-fashioned romantic and family structures the commune had forbidden.
Second, the ideas that animated the Sullivan Institute weren’t born in reaction to 1950s American convention. They were a proactive (if kooky) extension of theories that had emerged partly from the Frankfurt School in the prewar years. One of the Sullivan Institute’s founders claimed to have learned at the feet of, among others, the social psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself had participated with a Frankfurt School colleague, philosopher Max Horkheimer, on Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). That publication is a heady mix of Freudianism and Marxism that placed the family—its dynamics, dysfunctions, sublimations, and pathologies—firmly within a web of larger social and historical forces that acted on it. Those forces chiefly related to capitalism, under which fathers were seen to enact a kind of small-scale ownership and exploitation of their own families. If the surrounding society could be made more just and egalitarian, it might, in Horkheimer’s words, “replace the individualistic motive as the dominant bond in relationships,” giving rise to “a new community of spouses and children,” in which children “will not be raised as future heirs and will therefore not be regarded, in the old way, as ‘one’s own.’ ”
That’s a pretty fair approximation of what the Sullivanians fancied themselves pursuing. How did it go? “There was a feeling of pressure,” said one cult member, “that was really unpleasant, of having to conform in a certain way to unconformity.” Women endeavoring to get pregnant were required to sleep with multiple men while ovulating, to obscure paternity, which—said one male Sullivanian remorsefully—made it “easier to dissociate from the possible offspring.” Maternal bonds were broken as well, as children were taken from their mothers and raised in other parts of the commune by groups of men or women, with biological mothers being granted ruthlessly limited interactions with their offspring—and those offspring ultimately being denied knowledge of their origins. Per Horkheimer, children were not, in the old way, one’s own. Many of the children themselves came to regard their parents as “insane,” “basically a bunch of zombies.” In the long aftermath, one remarked, “I’ve thought three different men were my father in the past three years. I’m exhausted by having to relive the mistakes of my parents.” Another felt that he had been treated like an “experimental subject”—his childhood and his tender, developing psyche deformed by others’ commitment to validating a theory.
The Sullivan Institute insisted that every family—categorically—was a source of Larkinesque psychological damage. Then the institute became a scaled-up version of one and proved it.
The post Family Tatters appeared first on The American Scholar.
Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special; drive-through and deli; chili and chile: Loftus devoured them all. Her ensuing book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, brings the glory and the gory. It may be the first to detail not only the different genders of pickle jars one can buy at a gas station, but also the horrific treatment of animals and workers at slaughterhouses, conditions that got distinctly worse during the pandemic. Loftus—stand-up comedian, TV writer, and creator of such illustrious one-season podcasts as “My Year in Mensa” and “Ghost Church”—joins us to talk about the wild world of that iconic American food.
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A few of the varieties mentioned in this episode:
But Loftus’s top five are:
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The post What Could Be Wurst? appeared first on The American Scholar.
John Prine wrote his song “Hello in There” at 22, when he was too young to have experienced the isolating effects of old age that he depicts with such sympathy.
You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello.”
Children often wriggle like puppies, bursting out of their skins. As teens, they retreat into the edifices they build around themselves, the blinds come down, and it becomes harder to peak inside. The surface of those structures often has a high shine. No leaks or holes. Nothing gets in or out. But time wears you down. You rattle around within the confines of your own chosen habits. You are your own prison. As Roger Angell says in “This Old Man,” you become invisible though you sit in plain sight. Time strips much away but manages to leave remnants from your former life that knock about sadly. You are not a sponge soaking up everything and getting fuller and fuller but instead a hollow shell with bits of the past rubbing a raw spot. You further wither. Few people see you, much less show any interest. What to do?
A neighbor on my street, who, at 92, lives alone in the same house where she raised her children, is a fine example of keeping alert and interested despite old age. Her house faces south, as does mine, but being across the lane, her house gives onto a patch of meadow, not onto the comings and goings on the asphalt. Through her kitchen window or from her front patio, she sees flowers in the pots just outside her door and grass and trees in the land beyond the low stone wall, but no human activity. So what does she do? Gets her two canes and hobbles around the corner of her house, leaving her sanctuary to sit on a peeling plank fixed to the side of the building, under a bit of overhang. From there, propped against the wall, she sees every person who enters or leaves the dead-end lane, whether coming from the far end on foot or by car, or whether climbing the stairs behind the sports center to the lane that way. And because she’s there, you say hello. And she answers full of energy, “Hello, hello!”
One drizzly morning in early spring, I drove past the woman’s house on my way out of the lane. Nobody was about at that hour, nine a.m. on a Saturday. Strangely, smoke was seeping from a window in the back of her house. The friend I was with and I looked at each other. “What’s this?” we said. He was driving and stopped so I could hop out and check. The window was open, so I went to it, and now more smoke came drifting out. “Hello!” I called. “Hello! Anyone in there?” No answer. “Hello?”
I ran around the front of the car and headed past the bench where the old woman so often sat. I had never seen the other side of her house, the front side, but I barged right in to this inner sanctum. “Hello, hello?”
The front door was open and smoke wafted out. Beside the door a window was open too, into the kitchen. I peered into the smoky room. “Hello?” I said.
From the back the old woman answered. She leaned on the counter with one hand and with the other she fanned away the black smoke. “What’s happened? Are you okay?” I asked, and amid some coughs she answered that the coal in the old cook stove wouldn’t burn. “No tira,” she said. It won’t draw. She coughed again.
I urged her to come out. I asked if her son or daughter, who both checked on her daily, were around. Her son lived just three blocks away, and she had attempted to call, but hadn’t managed to. “You try,” she told me, shuffling to the window to hand me her phone. I found the number in the contact list and pressed to dial. Her son answered, and I passed the phone back. A jumbled account she gave him, but that was good enough—he was coming right over. By then my friend had parked the car and come around to the front of the house too. Speaking of the toxicity of coal smoke, he urged the old woman to come out of the kitchen, and she did, hobbling on her canes. She stood under the awning, out of the fine drizzle. The door was open behind her. She was fine, she said, and promised to wait for her son there. No, she wasn’t cold. No, she didn’t want a chair. She thanked us. And so, we left.
John Prine died in the spring of 2020, an early casualty of Covid. He had just finished a European tour. This woman survived the pandemic, fairly isolated in her home. Her birthday was a few weeks after the cook stove incident. “Can you eat sweets?” I asked when she told me about her upcoming birthday, the very next time I saw her. She was seated on her wooden plank, and I had stopped to say hello. “I’ll make you a cake,” I said, sitting down beside her. No, no, she said, as I had expected. Thank you, no. She patted my leg. She could eat sweets, she added, but had never been very fond of them. “Like my father!” I exclaimed. It was a nice connection to the old woman. But the tighter connection was me peering into the smoke and calling, and her appearing in answer.
The post Hello in There appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Portrait” by Stanley Kunitz appeared first on The American Scholar.
On March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, and shortly thereafter, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad became an accidental journalist. Originally trained as an architect, he fell in as a translator with a group of foreign journalists, then as a photographer and war reporter for The Guardian and The Washington Post. In his new book, A Stranger in Your Own City, Abdul-Ahad documents the devastation of Baghdad, from the sanctions of the 1990s to the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall. Punctuating his account are revealing interviews with his fellow Iraqis—Sunni commanders, schoolteachers, old high school friends, insurgents of every stripe—about the war and its effects, which continue to shape life in the region years after the American withdrawal.
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Some of Abdul-Ahad’s illustrations from the book:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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The post Twenty Years of War appeared first on The American Scholar.
Palm Sunday behind us, Passover today, Good Friday coming up, Easter after that. A handful of special days, each with its designation, its tradition, its significance, bunched together as Holy Week, Semana Santa in Spanish. Easter might be the apex in Spain, with chocolate bunnies for children and solemn processions all over the country for the devout, the ardent, and the curious. Then the celebrations are over. Unless you live as I do in Pola de Siero and still have the fiesta of the painted eggs to look forward to, huevos pintos in Spanish and güevos pintos in Asturian. The festival is held the Tuesday after Easter. Not famous the world round, but on the lists of important cultural celebrations hereabouts and much attended. It’s a last, colorful burst of fun before the Easter celebrations are over.
This is my second Easter in La Pola, but last year I was newly arrived and still buried under a pile of boxes, unable to squirm out to partake in the festivities. When I did wriggle free, it was to appear at the town’s notary office to sign the papers for the purchase of the house that I was already living in. I remember sitting in the notary’s office across a big table from the marquesa and her family’s consigliere, who was easing both of us through the process. I was surprised that she seemed nervous—half the town had belonged to her family once, my little house being just a crumb of the cake the family had feasted on for ages. The notary appeared, confirmed our identities, gave us the document of sale, and then disappeared, allowing us time to read what we would shortly sign.
As soon as he was out of the room, the agent commented that the notary’s absenting himself from the room was routine: it was an old habit of notaries to protect themselves from implication in any irregularities in the deal, such as partial payment under the table to save on taxes. The marquesa and I listened. Then the notary reappeared to read the document aloud, ask if we had any questions, verify the payment (which was the receipt for a bank transfer I had already made), explain that we’d get a copy eventually of the papers, and remind me of the costs still to be assessed—the taxes, the registration costs, and the notary fees, together amounting to about 10 percent of the sale price. And that was it. I owned a house, all my own, my first ever. I wanted to get back to it. I wasn’t even conscious of the town’s festivities.
This year is different. My world has expanded beyond the walls of my house. I will go down to the town’s main park in the late morning, wander through the line of stalls where artisans and merchants display their goods, principally the painted eggs. No reader of this post needs reminding what colored, dyed, or painted eggs are. But until you’ve seen dozens of them beautifully painted in scenes of astonishing detail, you can’t imagine the intricate care and great talent used to create such fragile artifacts. The tradition of painted eggs stems, I read, from the accumulation of eggs during Lent, when no meat or dairy was consumed. Afterward, one could both celebrate and eat, and so it was.
I first visited the painted eggs celebration about 10 years ago. A collection of beautifully decorated eggs I could imagine, but hundreds to admire? Originally the eggs were cooked in the old kitchens and colored with soot from the fire, and the first color they had was simply dark. Or they were boiled with chestnuts and acquired a reddish tone. Later, new dyes and tools came into use. India ink was used, paints and washes. Brushes and calligraphy pens replaced twigs dipped in wax. The eggs were decorated with traditional scenes on one side, often with pithy counsel on the other. Nowadays you can see tiny renditions of Las Meninas or Guernica, or characters from children’s cartoons.
I expect to see people thronging the market when I go. I will view all kinds of baked and fried pastries, many savory dishes, cider opened and poured, bars with tables set out serving wine, beer, and plates of one specialty or another. The day is a holiday in La Pola. Children will still be on their Easter break. I will watch the people, who will come and go all afternoon and into the evening, and I will join them for a while. Later, back at home, I will hear the happy sounds of the verbena, the big outdoor party with food and music, dance and drink, that will not conclude until the day, like so many good days, runs over into the next. And so life goes on, one day running into the next, one year into the following, one decade merging with another. Sometimes we stand midpoint, looking ahead and back. This year, last, next. With luck, something unexpected, a reprieve, joyous and bright, around the bend, before it’s all over.
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Amanda Holmes reads Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “The Flower-School.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Flower-School” by Rabindranath Tagore appeared first on The American Scholar.
Hanging out. All of us could probably stand to do more of it, especially if it doesn’t come with a calendar invite. In her new book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Sheila Liming writes that she’s found herself “an accidental witness to a growing crisis: people struggling to hang out, or else voicing concern and anxiety about how to hang out.” The coronavirus may have heightened this struggle, but its root causes—our increased obsession with our phones, the shrinking of public spaces, widening income inequality, American individualism—predate the pandemic. Liming, a professor of communications at Champlain College, joins us on the podcast to discuss both what we have to lose by not spending unstructured time together and how we can get it back.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post The Art of Doing Nothing Much, Together appeared first on The American Scholar.
The new student in the advanced English class, a 16-year-old, was a large, soft-looking young man with a round face, barely defined jaw, and floppy brown hair almost to his shoulders. Plumped in his seat, he reminded me of an oversize stuffed animal, a peluche. I expected him to be slow and quiet, perhaps bumbling, but instead he was an interesting combination of assertiveness and diffidence, full of opinions given without embarrassment—The view from this corner into the street is very nice! The lights in the street are pretty!—though in answering a question, he often paused in search of the right word, then expressed doubt that he had found it. His voice was loud and clear, and I liked him as soon as he spoke, and the feeling increased steadily, notching up every time I looked his way or he gave his opinion. At the end of the first class, he stood up and turned to the other two students, who were pulling on their coats, and said, “You know, these chairs are really comfortable!”
The chairs were old and battered desk chairs, not chairs for desks but ones that incorporated a writing surface and substituted for a desk. They were surprisingly durable and had lasted many years, but the Formica surfaces were nicked, the plastic strips on the rims of the seats and backs were peeling, and the glint of metal showed through the chipped black paint on the legs. I laughed and said, “That’s the first nice thing anyone has said about these chairs in a long time.”
“Really very comfortable,” he repeated.
He did not make the remark in passing but as if he’d discovered something of interest to everyone. I found him disarming. “I don’t know if you understand me,” he had said several times during class, squinching up his face in worry. He couldn’t be only 16, I thought. No 16-year-old could be so free of self-consciousness, so open. His demeanor suggested someone who had advanced beyond fear of what others thought. “I don’t know!” It wasn’t a disavowal but an appeal. In another class of 16-year-olds, the students routinely shrugged when they didn’t have the answer, and had I asked those students to elaborate, I feel sure they would have said, “Who cares?” Not this student. He cared enough to ask for help—help in choosing his words and shaping his sentences, not as in I can’t do it, you do it but as in Does this work? Communication appeared to be a team task. I was captivated.
So when on the second day he said that he believed high school students often questioned their purpose in life, I didn’t blink, though I had just minutes earlier suggested the opposite—that high school students generally don’t think about a purpose to their lives or wonder why they are here. They don’t think in terms of the meaning or point of their existence. At best, I believe, they think about the meaning or the point of a particular action or particular moment, but the trajectory they don’t question. They seem on the whole to be fairly confident that enjoyment is the point of life. To have a comfortable life, have friends to socialize with, a family, a job with a good salary, time for hobbies—this is what the high school students usually tell me they want from life. However, when I had asked the new student to select a statement that he agreed with from among the 10 we’d been looking at in the class book, he’d chosen the statement that said it is normal to start questioning your purpose in life when you’re young. “You agree with that?” I asked, to make sure.
“Yes.”
“Do you know many people your age who do that? Or do you?”
“Yes,” he said and began to talk about what he wanted to do, and where he’d like to be, and what choices he might make. He often wondered, he said, about all of this. It occurred to me, looking at his very earnest, open face, that he was talking about what track to follow to reach his goals, but not about whether his goal was good, or whether any goal might exist beyond satisfying his own desires.
“Are you sure it’s purpose you’re talking about?” I asked. “I think it’s something a bit different.”
“Okay,” he said, cocking his head. He waited with an air of willing expectancy.
“Maybe it’s not a purpose you’re describing but a path.”
“Yes!” he said. He raised his fist as if in exaltation. “That’s exactly right. That’s the right word.” He smiled at me. “You got it!”
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