The Reluctant Traveler

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 18:13:00 +0000

I wonder how many people remember where they were on their birthday three years ago? I can. Vividly. I was in an ambulance being transferred to the VA rehabilitation hospital in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. I was tetraplegic. A fall on my back paralyzed me from my shoulders down. My prognosis was: patient would never walk again. If someone had told me that three years later, thanks to the incredible medical, nursing and therapeutic staff at the VA hospital in West Roxbury, my wife and I would be celebrating my 82^nd birthday visiting my son in Dublin, Ireland, I would have asked them to stop toying with me.

I recently read an article in the New York Times intended to advise people on how to be resilient in the face of catastrophic injury. There was a list of things to do, such as practice optimism, don’t personalize your misfortune, remember your comebacks, support others and so forth. None of these struck me as being helpful. It was the kind of thing that I would expect to find inside a fortune cookie. However, one item struck home: Go out of your comfort zone.

I had become quite comfortable in my apartment. My wife no longer needed to be with me. I could walk with the help of a walker. I could pretty much do what I did before my accident, only a lot more slowly and always with the strain on my body playing like a basso ostinato.

On the beach at Wicklow, Ireland

One day I decided that I needed to move outside my comfort zone. I don’t know why. I certainly wasn’t thinking, “I need to go outside my comfort zone and mingle with optimistic people.” Going to the racetrack would have filled that bill; not a trip to Ireland. The best I can think of is that I double dared myself and, like a child, I couldn’t back down.

Then I started to worry. How would I manage a six-hour flight? Would I be able to use the restroom? I can’t walk without the help of a walker? Would it fit in the aisle? What about the hotel? How would I get there once I landed? In my comfort zone, I use a motorized wheelchair along with an accessible van. Could I find one in Ireland? Worse still, my wheelchair weighs 432 pounds. Could I even think of transporting it? Suppose it broke down? You can’t push 432 pounds.

From left to right: Benjamin Keyser, Beth Keyser, my wife, Nancy Kelly,
and me at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland

To make a long story short, I did, indeed, move outside my comfort zone and, quite frankly, it was uncomfortable. I slept on a regular bed for the first time in 3½ years. Getting up in the morning was hard. I could barely take three steps before I had to sit down and wait out the aches. My decision to take a manual wheelchair turned out to be wise. And thanks to the good sense of a Dublin Airport car rental clerk, the car I had chosen was replaced by one that I could actually get into.

The bottom line was the trip was uncomfortable but affirming. What do you know? I could do it. I’ll do it again. Next year I will go to Copenhagen. I have a friend who lives in Tucson, Arizona. He invited my wife and me for a visit. I think I’ll go.

As for Dublin, I had the good sense to visit the Guinness brewery where they have a bar, the Gravity bar, located in the Storehouse five stories up where you get a 360° view of Dublin and the best Guinness in the world. That was worth the trip.

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 18:04:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:41:00 +0000

I have been hors de combat for over three years now. This blog has been silent. I have no doubt everyone has given up on me. That’s okay. Completely understandable. However, I have a good excuse.

I’m off to Ireland in a week. This will be the first time I have traveled in three and a half years. What makes this trip different is that this time I’m going to do it in a wheelchair. I wish that were a stunt. It’s not.

I’ll let you know how it went.

Jordan and The Blindfold Game

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 29 Mar 2014 17:30:00 +0000

Al Khazneh glimpsed for the first time
(photograph © 2014. Nancy Kelly)

Here’s a game I like to play. I blindfold myself. It is a magic blindfold. When I put it on, I think of a country, any country. Say, Italy. Then I think of the one thing I would like to see in that country if I only had the chance to see one thing. Suddenly, that thing materializes before my blindfolded eyes. I can look at it as long as I want. I can walk around it. It is as if I am wearing a silken version of Oculus Rift HD. Here’s the kicker. I can only do this once with each country. Once the blindfold is off, so are all bets. Italy is forever off-limits to the blindfold game.

Moral: choose carefully.

When I tried to get my wife to play this game, she refused.

“I won’t narrow a country down to a single thing,” she insisted.

“I know. I know,” I cajoled. “But just once. What would it be for Italy?”

No use. She wasn’t having any of it.

That surprised me. I didn’t find it hard at all. Here’s my starter list:

Australia = The Sydney Opera House
Bali = Mt. Agung
England = Rembrandt’s Titus, Dulwich Picture Gallery
France = Monet’s Les Nymphéas, Musée l’Orangerie in Paris
Italy = Michaelangelo’s Pietà, St. Peter’s in Rome
Peru = Machu Picchu
Spain = The Goya Room, El Prado in Madrid

I have added a new item to the list. It is different from the others. It is not a thing. It is a moment in time. What I would give to be able to relive that moment.

Nancy and I have just returned from Jordan. We saw the citadel and the amphitheater in Amman, the Roman ruins at Jerash, the Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, the River Jordan, the site of John’s baptism of Jesus, the Red Sea and Mt. Nebo with its hazy glimpses of Jericho and Jerusalem in the Promised Land.

But the one thing that blew them all away was a single sight, a glimpse that happens only once and then, like a first kiss, is gone forever. It is when you see Al Khazneh “The Treasury” for the first time as you walk through the narrow slot canyon that leads to old Petra.

The pathway into the ancient city is roughly a mile long. It takes you through a winding siq whose twisting red and white sandstone walls could have been designed by Salvador Dali. They undulate wildly as you pass between them. In some places where the opening is less than ten feet across, they draw you in. They mesmerize you. You are in some kind of fantasyland. And just at that moment when you are ready to give yourself over completely to the beauty of the natural, a narrow slit in the passageway opens up just ahead. Through it, as if you were peeping through a keyhole, you see an 82ft wide and 128ft high four-column facade complete with corinthians like those at Jerash, pediments and a large pedestal mounted urn at the very top. The contrast is wrenching. You are in the middle of a natural phenomenon of great beauty, a narrow snake of a canyon, and then, quite suddenly, someone has switched channels. It is as if some supernatural Monty Python has declared, “And now for something completely different.”

That to me is the heart of the Petra experience, that out-of-body sensation of man-made order superimposed on nature at her wildest. That first glimpse is enough to justify coming this far.

It is the blindfold moment.

The Broken Finger of Fate

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 21:45:00 +0000

On February 11 at about 3pm in the afternoon my wife and I made a fateful decision that would effect the rest of our lives together. It was a cold afternoon. The temperature was somewhere around 16ºF. The wind made it feel like 7ºF. We had been to visit the Peabody Essex Museum’s Impressionists on the Water. We had lunch at Rocafella’s. I had a chicken breast stuffed with artichoke and coated with maple syrup. The waitress wanted to know what I thought of the coating. I told her I liked it. That was a lie. It was too sweet. But I never tell wait staff what I really think. Why would I want to make them uncomfortable? What are they going to do about it? What could anybody who gets paid $2.13 an hour do about it?

After lunch we walked back to the open-air garage. My car was on the top floor. We entered the building and were immediately presented with a decision.

“Shall we walk up or take the elevator?” Nancy asked.

“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s better for us.”

Boy, was I ever wrong.

I made short work of the five flights. But as soon I stepped through the doorway out onto the roof, fate made its cruel and unexpected move. There was a curb just beyond the doorway. It never occurred to me that one would be there. Why would it? It wasn’t as if there was a sidewalk and a street. The architect wanted that extra step. Who put that idea into his or her head? Who knows how long that curb had been lying there in wait for me? It doesn’t matter. I missed the curb and instantly lost my balance. I lurched forward. I tried to run in a vain effort to get my legs back under my torso where they belonged. All I succeeded in doing was driving my left arm and shoulder even harder into the concrete floor.

I could feel something warm running across my forehead, behind my ear and into my hair. It turned out to be blood from a gash over my left eye. My left arm was completely numb. I raised it as if I were giving a Nazi salute to the sky, all the while yelling, “My arm. My arm. I can’t feel my arm.”

Three women were just ahead of me. They saw it all happening. I think of them now as Norns. They kept chanting, “Shall we call 911? Shall we call 911?”

Nancy said no, but they called anyway. I could hear one of them say into her cellphone, “I’m a bystander.”

It sounded to my half-working ears like a political statement.

I asked the Norns what I should do about the blood on the floor. They told me not to worry.

“The rain will wash everything away,” they said like good Norns would.

“They don’t think I’m taking this seriously enough,” Nancy said as she drove me to the infirmary at MIT.

Yesterday, I had day surgery at Mt. Auburn Hospital. It turned out I had broken the 3^rd metacarpal in my left hand. The hospital staff, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the anesthesia nurses, the operating room techs and surgical nurses, the clerks who took my Medicare and Medicaid numbers—in other words, everybody I came in contact with at that hospital was marvelous. I mean here it is the day after surgery and I’m typing with both hands.

I remember two things about my blood pressure. On the Friday three days before the operation the pre-surgical nurse took my blood pressure. She put the cuff on my left arm, the one that was hurt. She said my BP was a bit high. It was 139 over 86. She seemed a bit concerned. I said I could fix that. She put the cuff on my right arm. I meditated. This time the BP was 120 over 72.

“That was awesome,” she exclaimed. I am pretty sure she was impressed.

“Will I become a hospital legend?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “A lot of people can do that.”

When I was wheeled into the operating room on Tuesday morning, my blood pressure was 200 over something. Nothing awesome I could do then. They weren’t bothered.

As I rolled into the room, I was making small talk to make myself feel better. I said I got the impression from watching Grey's Anatomy on TV that all doctors and nurses in a hospital slept around and that the patients either got better or died. The anesthesiologist said that the program got the medicine wrong, but everything else was accurate.

“Only nobody sleeps with the patients,” I remember saying. Then someone put a mask over my face and then someone said, “It’s all over.”

And, indeed, it was.

Here are the results. You can see the break in the photo on the left. Just click on the picture. Do the same on the right. You can see three screws putting the bone back together. It looks like a solid bone with three screws in it. I mean how good can you get?

Broken 3rd metacarpal on my left hand

Rebuilt 3rd metacarpal

I said at the start that my decision to walk up the steps rather than take the elevator would effect my wife and me for the rest of our lives. What was I thinking of?

Airport metal detectors. What a drag!

My Madeleine Moment. January 23, 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 21:39:00 +0000

Boundaries have always had a mysterious allure for me. I remember once driving across the United States with some friends. I was 15 years old at the time. We were a group of five Boy Scouts who had decided to see America in six weeks. We traveled in a red 1947 Pontiac convertible and pitched a tent every night along the way.

1947 Pontiac Convertible like the one that took me 6,000 miles around the USA

When we crossed the Continental Divide, the hydrological divide of all the Americas, where water on one side eventually flows into the Pacific while water on the other reaches the Atlantic, I insisted that we stop so that I could spit into both oceans at the same time.

It presaged another event 57 years later when I went to Uganda. The equator passes through that country and our guides, Cliff and Ben, made sure we crossed it. The three of us sang a song there. Cliff was in the northern hemisphere, Ben in the southern and me in both.

Cliff on the left. Benjamin on the right

I remembered that moment, though it took me a whole day and night to do it. I was on my daily walk when I saw a car pull into a parking place across the street. The nose of the car was parked in Somerville, MA. Everything else was in Cambridge.

Car straddling the city line between Somerville and Cambridge, MA

A wave of sadness passed over me. Why should that have happened?

I slept on it. This morning I am writing about it. The man on the left side of the photograph is Cliff Kisitu. He is dead, killed in a tragic accident in Uganda while he was scouting new locations. I wrote about it in my book I Married a Travel Junkie. And I have blogged about him here. If you click on the video, you will get a sense of what a terrible loss his death was.

So here I am looking at a car straddling the boundary between Somerville and Cambridge. A wave of sadness passes over me. I feel compelled to take a photograph, though I haven’t the slightest idea why, not until this morning when I remember the moment when Cliff and I straddled a boundary.

In A La Recherche du Temps Perdu Marcel Proust describes a moment that has become iconic in western literature. It is, of course, the madeleine moment.

...when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreay day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin...I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors…

The mind is a funny thing.

Magical Thinking: January 4, 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 19:29:00 +0000

I revisited the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. last November with two friends from Holland. It was a sightseeing trip. It seemed like the right kind of New Englandy thing to do. Author’s Ridge is world famous for being the last resting place of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, Little Men and little else. Ralph Waldo Emerson is there, too, as is Nathaniel Hawthorne and, of course, Henry David Thoreau. What could say New England better than Author's Ridge? It is the literary version of the 1985-86 Boston Celtics.

Walking along the path that takes you from one gravesite to the other, it is not hard to pick out the famous authors from the less famous relatives that lie beside them. The reason is detritus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

The Ralph Waldo Emerson memorial boulder (photo above) is topped with rocks that visitors have obviously put there and, if you double-click on the photograph, just above the plaque with all the vital details, you will see a collection of small change.

Emerson isn’t the only one to receive such largess.

Henry David Thoreau's Grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

At Henry David Thoreau's more appropriately modest headstone (photo above), there are ballpoint pens, money, pine cones and more rocks. Visitors have even left messages. The large eggshell blue stone in the photograph above is inscribed with a quote from Walden Pond. It says:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to ink it onto that stone. I wondered why? I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine. He gave me a very sensible answer.

He said, “People find it impossible to accept death. So they engage in all kinds of death denial behavior, like leaving messages, money and writing implements at grave sites.”

The idea is that these are things that you do with the living; i.e. give them money and pens and send messages. If you do the same to the dead, then they won't be dead, will they? It is a kind of magical thinking.

The practice goes way back. I wrote a blog about the terracotta soldiers of Xi’an City in Shaanxi Province, China. You can read about it here. The incredible 6,000 man army was meant to serve Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China (247-220BC) in the next world. Or think of the tomb of Tutankhamen. It was filled with artefacts intended to allow the boy king to live in the next world the way he did in this one. Among the artifacts were four canopic jars, one each for his liver, lungs, stomach and intestines. It was reasoned that he would need these to survive in the next world.

In his autobiography Undiluted Hocus-Pocus (Princeton University Press, 2013) Martin Gardner described his belief in God in these words: “There are no proofs of God or of an afterlife. Indeed, all experience suggests there is no God...My faith [is/SJK]...a lasting escape from the despair that follows a stabbing realization that you and everyone else are soon to vanish utterly from the universe.”

That's what the terracottta army, all those canopic jars and the ballpoint pens on Henry David Thoreau's tombstone have in common. They are an attempt to escape from the despair of vanishing utterly from the universe.

Or as Woody Allen once said, "I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."

More Perks

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 19:48:00 +0000

Floppy Disk Car

One of the dangers of walking in my neighborhood is not the smiler with the dagger under his cloak. Rather it is the anonymity of the unexpected. Take this automobile, for example. I almost passed it by. It was parked along Oxford Street and I almost missed it. Thank goodness I didn’t. The owner has decorated it with old floppy disk sleeves. That is clever enough. But look at the color pattern. That shows a real coloristic eye. I'll bet the owner (or owners) dress well. It must have taken a lot of moxie to do this to your car. Just click on the photo and take a look at the blank space where one of the sleeves has fallen off. Some kind of epoxy has been applied in a spiral pattern to make sure the sleeves stayed put. You can forget about the original finish. You can also forget about any trade-in value. Whoever this person is, thanks for the gift.

Why the Lobster?

Here’s a second gift. I have passed this camper several times. What caught my eye was the plastic lobster wedged in against the water tank at the back. At least I hope that is a water tank. Not a good idea to store fuel in there. Sometimes when I pass the parked Chinook, the lobster isn’t there. But most of the time it is. What is that all about? Is it a signal? Is the owner telling street buyers that there is a fresh stash of lobster meat onboard? The license plate indicates that the van has come from Colorado. A long way from home. Also a long way to go for fresh lobster. So is the owner telling us that he'd walk a mile for a lobster? No, that can’t be it. If it were, the plastic lobster would have been sitting up there on the dashboard of his car right next to the plastic Jesus. The plain truth is I don't have a clue what that lobster is doing there. As Yul Brynner sang in The King and I, “Is a puzzlement.” If I had to guess, though, I'd say that the owner is a fan of David Foster Wallace and is doing homage to his great collection of essays Consider the Lobster. Wallace would be pleased.

One of my favorite surprises while walking I found in the quadrangle at the Harvard Law School, the one next to Langdell Hall. At the west end of the quadrangle is a statue. I am unable to find a plaque indicating its name or the artist. It vaguely resembles a Louise Nevelson, but I am doubtful. In any case that isn’t why the statue caught my eye. Usually, one thinks of objects casting shadows because of light shining from behind. But the statue has taught me that the wind can also cast a shadow. A few weeks ago—it was November 24, 2013 to be exact—the day was very windy with gusts up to 40mph. I didn’t go walking on that day. The temperature was in the 20ºs and the wind chill factor brought it down to somewhere in the 10º range. I stayed home. But the next day I went walking. Much to my delight I came upon this scene. The wind had blow the leaves around the edges of the statue casting a three dimensional shadow along the ground.

Shadow of a sculpture cast in fallen leaves

Going for a walk in my neighborhood can be like going to a birthday party where it's your birthday.

The Perks of Walking

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 20:39:00 +0000

One of the perks of walking, aside from being healthy, is the people and things you meet. I thought I might share a few of them to give you some idea of what it is like to walk around my Cambridge neighborhood.

On one of my recent excursions I looked up to see this woman coming toward me.

"Who is this guy?" she must be asking herself

“Excuse me,” I said. “I really like your look. Do you mind if I take a picture?”

“Sure,” she said.

Then, she stopped dead in her tracks. She was having second thoughts.

She cocked her head to one side and took a long, hard look at me.

“Wait! Are you some kind of weirdo?” she asked.

I assured her that I was not, though why she should have accepted my assurances is beyond me. I mean would some kind of weirdo ever say yes to that question? She took up a position with her back against a wall and stared at my iPhone.

“Would you care to smile?” I asked.

She shook her head no. That, I thought, was important. It must have had something to do with what the “look” did for her. It takes a lot of courage, I thought, to dress against the grain. I tried to imagine myself putting on a dress and walking up Mass. Ave. No way, José. She was carrying it off with aplomb.

I especially liked the touch of the line drawn across her right eye so that the eyebrow became the hilt of a dagger. It lent that side of her face a kind of menace that said keep your distance. In the corner of the other eye was the hint of tears. The two sides of her face were at odds with one another. The left said, “Keep your distance.” The right asked, “Why are you keeping your distance?” No wonder she didn't want to smile.

The bright red color of her dollar store wig was just right, the way it matched the touches of red in the fringes of her outfit. She must have made this costume herself. It shows a lot of attention to detail, especially the red-fringed white apron around her middle that made her look like a cocktail waitress in a Dada bar.

But what is that expression on her face? The partially closed eyes are slightly wary, slightly defiant, slightly quizzical. She is obviously not completely relaxed. Take a look at that left hand bent back against the hip. Who is this guy, really? she must be asking herself.

If she is in hiding, she has done it very well. I doubt I could pick her out of a lineup where everyone was wearing civvies.

Nick and Willie

I thanked her for the photograph, walked around the corner and ran into Nick on his bicycle and Willie in his knapsack.

"Do you mind if I take your photograph?" I asked.

“Go ahead,” said Nick.

He had no second thoughts. He also had no trouble smiling. He told me he was a graduate student and lived in the neighborhood.

A week or so later I ran into Jack.

Jack wasn’t alive, of course. Even so, I felt sorry for him. He must have brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of kids on Halloween. And now here he was, discarded in a trash bin, his mouth in a round O as if to say

“Oh my! How could this have happened? I was on top of the world just yesterday.”

Jack

Cover of Wendell Minor's Julie

Post Script:

I recently took a trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum. I recommend it for everyone. He was an incredible illustrator. As it happened, there was an exhibition of children's books, including Julie (1994) by Wendell Minor. The cover illustration was by Jean Craighead George. I couldn't resist photographing it and putting it up next to Nick and Willie. Talk about life mimicking art .

People Who Live in Glass Houses Shouldn't Grow Flowers

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 18:32:00 +0000

“What did you think of them?” the nice young woman at the gift shop cash register asked when I came out of Harvard’s famous glass flower exhibit at the Peabody Museum.

I had gone into the museum on a whim. Now that I had taken up walking, I thought maybe this would be a good place to get in some easy mileage. I joined up. Of course, I’d heard of the glass flowers. For one thing we had a neighbor who lived around the corner from us on Oxford Street. She lived in a very unusual house. It was set well back from the street bracketed by two of the more typical wood frame houses in the neighborhood. The house was one mile west of the Peabody on the same street. An easy trek from door to door.

Unlike its neighbors the house was all brick and mortar. Spread sideways, it was two stories high with two large bays on the ground floor. One was used as a garage and the other a workshop. Our friend was a weaver and her loom was in the second bay. She has moved now. I don’t know the new owners or what use they’ve made of the workshop bay.

Original woodworker shop where glass flower cabinets were built.

There was something odd about the house. It hadn’t always been a private residence. The block and tackle jutting out from the roof was the giveaway. Over dinner I asked our hostess about the history. She said that it was originally a woodworking shop. In fact this was where the cabinets that held the glass flowers at Harvard’s Peabody Museum had been manufactured. She said we had to see the exhibit, if only for the cabinets. And now several years later I had somehow managed to find the time and the inclination.

Professor George Goodale originally commissioned the flowers as a teaching aid in his botany class. Between 1887 and 1936 Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph fashioned them to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. They were everything a botany professor could want. They were life-size, accurate to a fare-the-well, and best of all, they never perished.

They have become something of a celebrity item. Marianne Moore, in her poem Silence, wrote of them:

My father used to say, 

“Superior people never make long visits,

 have to be shown Longfellow's grave,

 or the glass flowers at Harvard.”

Guidebooks tout them as one of the important “sights” of any Boston visit. The duck tour would, I’m sure, stop there if it could get up the steps.

“Well,” repeated the nice young woman at the gift shop, “What did you think of them?”

Glass cabinets made at Oxford Street Woodworking Shop

When I entered the rooms where the flowers were displayed, it is perhaps understandable that my eyes had fallen first on the cabinets. They were splendid. The wood shone as only wood polished for a hundred years can.

Then came the flowers. I traveled the room twice. I needed absolutely to be certain.

By this time the young woman was growing impatient. I hadn’t answered her question. She decided to answer it herself.

“They are incredible, aren’t they? It is amazing the level of detail the Blaschkas managed to mold in glass, don’t you think?”

Cactus

Pitcher Plant

What I thought was that the Blaschka flowers were like vodka martinis. They are an acquired taste.

“It is a remarkable achievement,” I mustered and then—I don’t know. It just slipped out—“Amazing how they’ve managed to make them look just like plastic.”

Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae

She broke into a huge smile.

I took advantage of her good humor to ask, “Can you tell me how to find the coelacanth?”

In Search of Judgment

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 17:43:00 +0000

I recently received the following e-mail from Andrew, a British friend who was in Boston for a conference. Being a barrister, I was sure he would visit the Harvard Law School before returning to London.

“Whatever you do,” I said, “Don’t miss seeing the Safer sculpture Judgment. It’s just by the Gropius dormitories.”

This is what he wrote.

Today, my last day in town before flying back to London, I went with a colleague, Richard, to Cambridge. We wandered round Harvard yard and elsewhere….In our wanderings I hoped to discover 'Judgment' but we were having little success. Eventually we asked various passers by—many with maps but none with a clue as to what we were talking about. Most wanted to direct us to the statue of John Harvard.

Eventually we came across Harvard Law Library and Richard went inside to ask. They also did not know what we were talking about (again assuming it was the Harvard statue). In the end I went online and showed Jay's blog to the helpful receptionist—and although she did not recall seeing the sculpture shown in his photos, she did recognise the buildings in the background. In a very helpful way, she offered to print us a map—and while we waited for her to do that she very kindly allowed us into the library itself—which was a real treat for us lawyers.

Having viewed the library we went, map in hand, and easily found the statue—and as proof I attach a photo.

British barrister in front of Safer's Judgment

It really is a lovely piece—so thank you Jay for telling us about it—and you should know that there are two more people (who work in the library) who now know what it represents.

I’m not sure why this ignorance of the Safer sculpture so gets under my skin. It is a major work. It is also a trenchant statement, sitting as it does in the lap of Harvard’s legal wannabes. This, it says, is what you are getting into.

It isn’t an MIT/Harvard thing. (Truth in advertising, I’m an emeritus member of the MIT faculty.) Maybe what bothers me is that it bespeaks a negligent attitude of the public toward public art. The Harvard Law School class of ’49 undoubtedly spent a lot of money purchasing the Safer piece. Harvard went to a lot of trouble to bring it onto its campus. Yet nobody seems to notice.

But why isn’t it enough that I notice? Why do I want everybody to join in? I think I may be getting closer to an understanding of why this ignorance of the sculpture gets under my skin. The fact that I care about the sculpture and so many others don’t suggests alienation. It draws a line in the sand between those who walk on by and me. That is an uncomfortable feeling. During my daily visits to Judgment, I have been stopping people and asking them to take a closer look at what they are about to pass up. Shades of The Ancient Mariner! Some of them have been grateful. Well, one of them has been grateful—a Harvard Law School student whose name is Maria. But most look at me as if I were an old man in need of humoring.

Now that I know what is at the bottom of it all, I think I’ll stop personally recruiting for Judgment.

As the Beatles wisely sang, Let it be.

These Are the Craftsmen

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Tessellated floor in Borromeo Palace

This past May Nancy and I visited Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. We spent a morning on the Isola Bella. I took this picture. It is of one of the tessellated floors inside the Borromeo Palace. I was struck not only by the beauty of the floor, its patterning and workmanship, but also by its anonymity. Someone 300 or more years ago laid it with care, consummate skill and a flair for design. It has lasted for centuries. Yet no one has the slightest idea who the maker was. When I asked an attendant that question, he looked at me as if that were an odd thing to ask about, what with all those Bassanos and Crespis hanging on the walls of the palace gallery with their nameplates clearly legible for all to read.

This is not an unusual state of affairs. Who fashioned the gargoyles that protect Notre Dame in Paris. The sarcophagi of ancient Rome? The wall carvings of Angkor Wat? The carvings of the life of Buddha that ring Borobudur in Indonesia? These are among the great injustices of history. We know the masters, but we know nothing of the master craftsmen. It doesn’t seem fair.

Kirk and Joe

I have been fighting a small battle to rectify this. Last year when plumbers installed a shunt so that an outdoor spigot wouldn’t freeze in winter, I had them sign the trap door that hides the shunt. Last month when a plumber installed a garbage disposal under the kitchen sink, I asked him to sign the unit.

Mel

And now another occasion has arisen. Outside my front door, craftsmen from the J. Marchese Company of Everett, Massachusetts are laying down a new brick sidewalk. These sidewalk makers will not disappear into obscurity if I have anything to say about it. Here are three of them, Kirk, Joe and Mel. They are experts at exchanging new walks for old.

It isn’t an easy job. There are curbstones to be reseated. Tree pits to be relined and then there are those new bricks to be laid. If there isn’t a concrete foundation beneath them—and in our case there isn’t—then a whole new foundation has to be fashioned. The bricks will go on top of a black carpet of asphalt.

Kirk handles the backhoe as if he were driving a bumper car in an amusement park. Joe, the one with the Red Sox beard, maneuvers a huge dump truck as if he were riding a bicycle. Mel lays down the bricks. And I’m leaving out all the guys who support them, the ones who tote the brick piles for Mel or the ones who spread sand on the bricks and then sweep them clean to fill in the cracks.

Brand new sidewalk

Now I'm conscious of brick sidewalks. Bricks are like people. They shrink just like us when we grow old, .

I am grateful to these craftsmen for rejuvenating the sidewalk while I am still around to enjoy it. It will certainly outlast me. If anything, the sidewalk will watch me grow old instead of the other way around.

20 or more years later

This morning Mel said goodbye to me. He is off to Colorado to shoot elk. His family likes the meat. He wouldn’t shoot it if he didn’t eat it, he said. Anyway, Mel said the sidewalk is guaranteed for 10 years, but that it will easily last fifty. I’ll be lucky to last another 15. That’s good. I wouldn't want to be around to watch the edges crumble.

Releasing the Sword in the Stone: September 15, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 23:54:00 +0000

Gottlieb's Jews Praying in the Synagogue

This is the time of the high Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. According to Jewish lore, on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, God inscribes in the Book of Life who shall live and who shall die, who shall wax and who shall wane. Then, on Yom Kippur he seals the book and, consequently, your fate. It is a time of judgment as well as of atonement.

After Yom Kippur comes Sukkot, the feast of the tabernacles. In preparation for it Jews everywhere erect sukkahs, flimsy, vine-roofed booths noted for their purposeful decrepitude. The sukkah is meant to remind Jews of the hardships of the Exodus. Since there is no solid archeological evidence that there ever was an Exodus, I take Sukkot and sukkahs with a grain of salt. Still, ghettoes are justification enough for a holiday that requires a meal and an overnight in a flimsy structure by way of remembrance.

Why am I going on about this? I am not an observant Jew. But I am an observant walker. Today my walk took me back to my favorite spot, the one in the Harvard Law School quadrangle that holds the Safer sculpture, Judgment. When I reached the sculpture, I found that someone, most likely a band of law school students, had raised a sukkah next to Safer’s Judgment? Did they do this deliberately? I doubt it. On the many days that I sit for a few minutes to admire the sculpture, dozens of people walk by as if the space were empty. One woman who has worked in the building since 2001 told me she had never even seen it until I called it to her attention. There is no reason to suppose the sukkoteers are any different.

Before After

But whether they knew what they were doing or not, I am delighted that they chose to put the sukkah next to Judgment. Aside from the obvious biblical implications--judgment following humility--the arrangement affords a special perspective on the sculpture.

It is a familiar enough image to describe a sculptor as someone who does not put a figure into a block of marble but releases it from the stone. That is, the sculptor carves away all the unnecessary bits, leaving the figure behind.

The juxtaposition of the Harvard Law School quadrangle’s sukkah with Safer’s Judgment gives special meaning to that description. I look at the blunt squareness of the sukkah and then the power and brutal finality of Judgment and imagine Safer doing just that, releasing the sword in the stone.

The Neighborhood Is Changing

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:01:00 +0000

During one of my recent morning walks I caught sight of a series of chalk drawings on the sidewalk of Massachusetts Avenue just around the corner from where I live. Here is an example.

Sidewalk chalk drawing of a water buffalo

It reminded me of this.

The Real Thing

These water buffalo are in Veranasi, India. They are on their way to the Ganges, that spot of white in the middle of the picture. Frankly, I prefer the chalk variety. Still the juxtaposition is provocative.

Is this how the neighborhood is going to change? Will we be “assaulted” by guerilla art? I certainly hope so. I rather liked seeing one chalk buffalo after another trot up Mass. Ave. between the Harvard Law School and Porter Square. Someone, probably not the same person, has stenciled the side of the Korean United Church of Christ.

Guerilla Art on the Korean United Church of Christ

It reminded me, of course, of the famous painting by Magritte.

Painting by Rene Magritte

All this activity is, I strongly suspect, the result of Lesley University buying the Art Institute of Boston and moving it to the corner of Roseland and Mass. Ave where the former Korean church will be re-incarnated as a part of the Lunder Art Center, named after the enterprise’s benefactor. That’s the church on the right, decked out in a new steeple courtesy of Lesley.

Artist's Sketch of Lunder Art Center

Someone has taken seriously the idea of a temple of art. In its new incarnation the 165 year old church will be a library. I hope I can get a card.

A Banksy Assault

Well, the neighborhood is changing. But I must say I like the direction. I wish I could join in. I’m not that much of an artist. If I were, you’d see stuffed monkeys hanging from trees and papier mache workmen popping up from under manhole covers.

My hope is that with the new Lunder Center rising in the near future, Banksy won’t be far behind.

Where Have All the Secluded Rendezvouses Gone?

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 16:26:00 +0000

The night before last I went to a local bar to listen to a piano player in a rock band. He is a friend of mine. He is also a superb player. The other musicians played guitar, drums and bass. They were all excellent players. Rock wasn’t their background. They trained as jazz musicians. My friend told me they played rock together because it was so much fun. They grew up on the music. It was obvious they were having a blast.

I don’t usually go to places that cram 50 people plus or minus seven into a 450 square foot room. (That’s 9 square feet per person; so we’re talking 3x3 feet of personal space, roughly the height and width of a coffin.) But the bar was just around the corner and I wanted to support my friend. So I went. I doubt I will ever go again. From where I was standing at the far end of the room closest to the door with a $6.40 glass of Guinness in my hand, the scene was, to say the least, unnerving.

The leader of the band started off the set talking into a microphone. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Neither, I’ll bet, could anyone else. Apparently, that didn’t really matter. Nobody was listening. The leader went on talking as if the whole room was hanging on his every word. Then the band started to play. The only thing that changed was that people talked louder. The music was a backdrop to noise. To give the crowd its due, prodded by my friend the piano player it did join in with rhythmic clapping during one of the tunes, but that merely amplified an atmosphere already overwhelmed by noise.

Where did this idea of equating noise saturation with a good time come from? What ever happened to “In some secluded rendezvous?” Maybe Spike Jones did those rendezvouses in with his parody of Cocktails for Two. (If you don’t know it, stop reading now and watch it here.) The people in that tiny bar may love rock, but they sure as hell didn’t come to listen to it. In fact, as far as I could tell the only people really listening were the musicians. Would that everyone had given the music that much attention.

The noise scene isn’t limited to bars. Several years ago my wife and I went to a neighborhood restaurant that had been opened for just a short time by a local and very well known chef. The noise in the restaurant was so loud it was painful. I couldn’t wait until the meal was over. I told my wife I had to go outside. She stayed to pay. On the way out the chef/owner happened to be standing by the door. I asked him if he would mind stepping outside for a moment.

“I thought the food was great,” I said to him in the relative quiet of a busy street. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to come back here.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“The noise,” I said. “It’s unbearable. Can you tell me why there’s so much noise?”

“It’s the style of the times,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “If it isn’t noisy, people don’t think it's a happening place. We have to turn up the juice.”

What does it mean to be a part of a culture where noise is an indicator of excitement? You can hardly hear yourself think.

Then again, maybe that’s the point.

Marcel Proust and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 21:09:00 +0000

There are three novels that are an absolute must for every literate creature to have read. The first is War and Peace. The second is Don Quixote. The third is Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I admit to an embarrassment. I have never been able to finish the latter. I started it several times, always under pressure from a friend whose opinion I valued or from a reference in a book that reminded me I hadn’t read it yet.

What has taken me so long?

The truth is I should never have tried to read Proust. The descriptions are exquisite, minute, neurasthenic, narcissistic, interminable. But that is when I am reading him. My great discovery is that Proust comes alive when I listen to him while I’m walking.

I recently decided to walk two miles every day. My decision has to do with a back spasm. The walking has definitely helped. But to make the enterprise tolerable, I decided to listen to books. I had recently read The Hare with Amber Eyes, in which de Waal notes the great similarity between Charles Ephrussi, his ancestor, and Proust’s Swann:

They are both Jewish. They are both homes (sic) du monde. They have a social reach from royalty (Charles conducted Queen Victoria round Paris, Swann is a friend of the Prince of Wales) via salons to the studios of artists. They are art-lovers deeply in love with the works of the Italian Renaissance Giotto and Botticelli in particular…

The reference was enough to guide me to Audible Books.com where, for $9.99 I got 21 hours of someone reading the whole of A La Recherche unabridged. An incredible bargain. With my Bose noise suppression earphones snugly over each ear, I walk and listen. The combination is perfect. But why?

I have given that matter some thought. Why should Proust be so enjoyable while I’m walking and such an ordeal when I’m not? This is what I think. When I am walking and listening to Proust, he and I are engaged in the same activity, a minute inspection of a world as if it were brand new.

Proust’s descriptions arise from an obsessiveness characteristic of someone seeing something for the very first time, say, a seven-month old child. Everything about the world is new, exotic, mysterious. It is all an object worthy of the most minute scrutiny. Same with me. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for almost 20 years but I’ve never really seen it, not until now. Now it has come to life with all the intensity of a Proustian word painting.

There is an incredible John Safer installation in one of the Harvard Law School quads (see my previous blog). Had I not taken to walking I would never have seen it, let alone run it through my fingers like a child playing in the sand. Around the corner from my house one of the neighbors has turned his front patch of lawn into a luxurious garden dominated by Lacinato Kale.

Lacinato Kale Growing Just Around the Corner

I look at this while I am listening to Proust describe the colors of an asparagus spear.

But what fascinated me would be the asparagus tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads finely stippled in mould and azure through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet still stained a little by the soil of their garden bed. A rainbow loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them they played lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream at transforming my chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume.

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised at this collaboration of walking and Proust. After all, Swann's Way is the name of a footpath.

My Favorite Spot. Thank you, John Safer.

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 18:48:00 +0000

I have found a favorite spot. It is 1552 steps from my house, about 9/10ths of a mile door to chair. It is in a quiet quadrangle surrounded by Harvard Law School dormitories. For the past two weeks I have walked from my house to the quadrangle. I sit on a wire mesh chair beside a wire mesh table that is one of four sets strategically placed beside a canopy that offers protection should the weather turn wet. So far every day has been fair or, if cloudy, with barely a suggestion of rain.

I like two things about my favorite spot. The first is that apparently it is no one else's. I’m sure that will change once the students return. But just now it is as free of people as a private beach in the dead of winter.

The Axe

The second thing I like about my favorite spot is a statue by John Safer. It stands a few feet away from my chair. I had not known of this sculptor before coming here. I googled him. I found a page with pictures of his work. The price list page explained that the objects depicted ranged from $6,000 to $3,000,000!

The sculpture that I look at every day was Safer’s first public commission. It was a gift of the class of ’49. It was moved to this somewhat out of the way spot from its original location to accommodate law school expansion. Since Safer was involved in the relocation, I assume he approved of placing it on the outskirts of Harvard property. I wonder why. It seems to me to be too important a piece to hide under a bushel.

I didn't always think that. When I first sat in my wire mesh chair across from it, the piece struck me as overly opaque with its three angular blobs sitting stolidly on a platform. Nothing in particular about them jumped out at me until one day, as I got up to leave, I caught a glimpse of the profile of the tallest blob. Of course! I exclaimed to myself. How slow not to have seen it before. I savor that moment. It is the way one feels when one is learning a foreign language. In the beginning everything is just a meaningless stream of sounds. Then, suddenly, you hear words and the spaces between them, even though the spaces aren’t really there.

What did it for me was the shape of the tallest blob. It was an executioner’s axe.

The Executioner's Block

The Executioner

Suddenly, the other blobs ceased to be blobs and became sharply focused images. The middle sized one was the hooded head of the executioner. And the massive blob was the executioner’s block. That’s why Safer called it Judgment. Now when I go to my favorite spot, I am not contemplating a shapeless mystery. I am rereading a familiar text, like a favorite bedtime story.

Even so there is something a bit odd about the installation. Perhaps the class of ’49 had a macabre sense of humor. Or maybe they shared with the sculptor a dark view of the legal profession. Judgment, after all, doesn’t have to be harsh. Think, for example, of the Judgment of Solomon where the death of a child was averted by the wisdom of the king. But this statue brooks no such merciful denouments. There is the axe. There is the axeman. There is the block from which the head will fall. No matter how you slice it, the presence of this sculpture in this quadrangle is a hostile act.

Judgment by John Safer '49

I wonder what the students who live in these rooms think about this meditation on their chosen careers. What do they see when they look out of their windows at the three blobs in the quadrangle? Do they even see it? Perhaps they take it for granted that there is a symmetry between justice and legality. Perhaps the sculptor wanted to call that into question.

After all, he was a graduate of this very school of law, class of '49.

These Boots Were Made For Walking

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 20:05:00 +0000

This walking thing is quite novel for me. I am amazed at how new my neighborhood appears. And I have lived here 18 years. I am actually seeing much of it for the very first time. This morning a woman was pushing her two-year-old down the street in a stroller. The little boy raised his arm to me in greeting as we passed one another. Now that is a friendly neighborhood.

There are teams of workman digging holes, trimming trees, moving churches in the neighborhood. I have noticed that whenever there is a team that involves one man driving some sort of tractor, a backhoe of some sort or a mobile crane, and two men to put on the finishing touches of whatever is being done, filling in a hole, digging a hole, moving a beam, the driver of the vehicle is always fat while the wielders of the shovels are always thin. I wonder which came first, the belly or the job?

On my walk I pass an elementary school. Three days ago I saw on the sidewalk in front of the school the remains of some kind of pipe cleaner figure. It caught my eye because of its colors, white, green, brown and red. It had been so badly treated that it was impossible to tell what it was meant to have been. I mention it because it has been in that same spot on the sidewalk for the past three days. Surprising, at least to me, how long a bit of flotsam like that can stay put.

Next to the elementary school is a children’s park. Parents bring their kids to play. There is a small fountain where a kid can get wet if she wants. There is a very large structure in the middle of the park, a giant monkey bar contraption. The inner part of the tubular structure is filled with a webbing made out of steel cable that has been tinted a rust color. Children climb all over it, including very young children, maybe four years old. I watched one little girl way at the top. She was bare-foot and making her way down from one strand to another. I would have found it quite daunting. It was a long way down, especially for someone that small. Her mother was at the bottom watching, but not at all concerned. She was, if anything, admiring her daughter’s agility.

It is a friendly spot where parents congregate and talk while their children do the same on the various slides and webs and swings put there for their amusement. Today I noticed, however, that way off in one corner a little boy was playing alone in a sandbox. Near him on a bench was his guardian. They were Chinese. Were they sitting apart by choice? The little boy seemed happy enough, but the two of them were striking in their satellite-hood. If they were any farther away from the center of activity, they would be out of the park.

All this walking has created a number of little dramas for me, like the isolated Chinese child. There is, for example, the door stoops on which someone has piled back issues of the Journal of Economics. Who could possibly want those? But each day the pile diminishes. Today it was gone. On one step a package leans up against the riser. It is from Amazon. It is a book addressed to someone named Xiang. I looked. It’s faded address plate indicates it has been sitting there a long time. How much longer? I wonder what book it is?

A Traveling Man

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 20:41:00 +0000

I have taken up a new form of travel. It is called walking. I haven’t done this by choice. It happened when the piriformis muscle in my right buttock spasmed. Who knew I had one? I remember when it happened--May 26, 2013. The pain was incredible. That is the price I paid for a lifetime of sitting at a desk writing. Over the years my hip flexors—you can guess what they are—grew tighter and tighter and that caused the gluteus to...well, it is like James Weldon Johnson’s song Dry Bones.

Chorus
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Now hear the word of the Lord.

Verse

Toe bone connected to the foot bone

Foot bone connected to the leg bone

Leg bone connected to the knee bone...

That is why you will find me walking the streets of my neighborhood. I'm stretching those hip flexors that in turn are stretching those...well, like the song says.

Each morning I make a thermos of coffee. I plug in my earphones and I start walking to the accompaniment of Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past. I have been surprised to find that listening to Remembrances while walking is much more enjoyable than reading him by lamplight. Perhaps it is all those nature passages like the one in which he is about to leave the countryside for Paris and hugs the branches of a beloved hawthorn tree in tears, vowing always to love it since it has never done him any harm.

I found a pathway from one street to another through a complex of clapboard buildings that belong to Harvard University. Halfway through I discovered a tiny little park set aside for smokers. It is nothing more than a bench and a few wooden chairs. But at that hour it is always empty. I sit on one of the chairs, turn inward to the voice telling me about the mysterious Swann with his beaked nose, his high forehead and his schock of red hair. I sip the dark Vienna Roast coffee that I brewed myself in the way my wife taught me, she having learned from my son who was, in another life, an accomplished barista. The sunlight is bright but because it is not late, it is not too hot. It am bathed in a sense of contentment that I have not felt in a long while. I am beginning to sound like second-hand Proust.

There is more than the satisfactions of solitude to be gotten from walking in the neighborhood. A nearby college is building an art institute on its property. This means taking a landmark church and moving it eastward a couple of hundred feet. As I was walking past, someone had spray painted a sign on the side of the moveable church. I took a photograph. I have added my own caption.

ART

I would have missed this guerilla gem altogether if I had been in a car. Good for the artist. It is, of course, unsigned. Good for me for walking.

I expect to meet more people on these walks. Just this morning I met Auguste. He is the gardener who keeps the lawn of a dismal gray-stuccoed apartment looking like an emerald necklace. He nodded to me as I passed and was interested in the music I was listening to. When I told him that it was Proust’s Remembrance, he said, “That is a real classic.”

He wondered if I had read Camus’ La Chute or Le Peste. Auguste is from Brazil. He speaks Portuguese and tells me that he read those books in high school. How many American students read Camus, I wonder?

I am looking forward to tomorrow’s walk. Who knows what surprises it will hold?

A Visit to the Dulwich Picture Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 07:33:00 +0000

Aside from the man across the tracks at the North Dulwich station exposing himself while we waited for the London Bridge train, our outing was a great success.

The Girl in the Window

The North Dulwich train station is a beautiful structure. The facade has been blended into the street so well you might think it was an apothecary shop if you hadn't taken special note earlier when you first arrived. The steps to the platform take you to a sunken railway line that is completely hidden from the streets above. The thick heavy greenery growing along the high embankment is a further mask. Like the train station the railway line is so well disguised, the walk to it from the Dulwich Picture Gallery gives no hint that this is the fastest way back to town.

It had a Harry Potter feel to it, until, that is, the man approached the brick stanchion as if he were about to disappear into it, stopped short and exposed himself to the only other people on the platform across the tracks. That would be us.

I had noticed him earlier. He was tall, wore blue jeans and a blue denim work shirt. There was a thinning crown of gray hair on top of his head. He was probably in his mid-fifties. Why had I noticed him? Several trains on his side of the track had come and gone. He hadn't moved. Since they were all going to the same place, I thought maybe he was waiting for someone. It was a Sunday, but it was late, too late to meet someone for an outing. That's why I thought his being there seemed odd. Then, I stopped thinking about him.

Rembrand'ts son, Titus, with haunted eyes

Instead I let my mind recall the Rembrandts we had seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, earlier in the day, the Girl in the Window so real you wanted to say hello, Titus, a portrait of Rembrandt's son, dying of tuberculosis that miraculously showed the fear and the vulnerability in the eyes of the subject, and a portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III, the most stolen painting in the world. It has gone and come four times.

Jacob de Gheyn III - most stolen painting

"Shall I call the cops?" I said to Nancy.

She shook her head.

"It's not worth the trouble."

Later my son confirmed Nancy's advice.

"They'd just assume he was drunk," he said.

We stared fixedly down the railway line in the direction our train would be coming from. With no reaction from our side of the tracks, he went back to his stone bench, looked down at the ground and massaged his thinning gray scalp in an anguished sort of way.

Our train came. We got on and took seats by the window. I had intended to make some kind of gesture in his direction as we moved slowly past him, but he never looked up. He just kept rubbing his scalp and staring at the ground.

The Rembrandts were superb.

What Is This World Coming To?

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 20:26:00 +0000

"What is this world coming to?" I muttered to myself.

That, I suppose, is the remark of an old man. But before you go clicking yourself elsewhere, give me a moment to explain. What occasioned my curmudgeonliness was a recent trip to London. Nancy and I decided to pay a visit to the Samuel Johnson House at 17 Gough Square. I had expected some perfunctory experience in the usual "house of X" fashion. I was surprised. The house managed to give a genuine sense of what it was like when Johnson lived there.

Photograph of first floor taken from the Johnson House home page

Portraits of his impressive circle of friends (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Boswell, of courrse, Oliver Goldsmith, Mrs. Williams, et al) were hung on the walls. It brought the human traffic of the house into focus. Oliver Goldsmith was a frequent guest, the author of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea...

Goldsmith's talent was inversely proportional to the weakness of his chin and he had a very weak chin. He had a fragile ego as well. Here is what Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson has to say about Goldsmith:

Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, "Pshaw! I can do it better myself."

I bought a copy of James Boswell's biography in the reception area on the way out of the house. It is a 1248 page tome. I'm half-way through. It is a remarkable book consisting almost exclusively of Boswell's questions and Johnson's replies. I should have read the book first and then visited Gough Square.

But it isn't just the book and the pictures on the walls that bring the house to life. There are the tiny details, like the front door that Johnson literally barred to keep out a butcher who had come to drag him off to debtor's prison. Had the butcher gotten in, Johnson would have been jailed. Thank goodness Johnson was a man of action as well as thought.

At the top of the Johnson House is a particularly sparse room that should be to lexicographers what the Vatican is to Catholics. This is where Johnson wrote his famous A Dictionary of the English Language, an amazing enterprise for one man that was nine years in the making. Its completion turned him from being a London scribbler to a British lion.

The room is sacred in a secular sort of way. This was where the model for James Murray's masterwork, The Oxford English Dictionary was constructed; bare floors, a deal table and slips of paper. This was where Johnson conceived the definition of a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge."

The picture that emerges from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is, above all, one of a group of people centered around Johnson who cherished the life of the mind. Boswell, Garrick, the actor, Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many, many more, all of them members of the famous Literary Club, all of them children of the Enlightenment. They were first and foremost dealers in ideas. Conversation to them was the coin of the realm and, for Boswell, Johnson's was pure gold.

So why, then, do I ask "What is this world coming to?"

On a recent visit to London we stopped at a coffee shop to buy a pound of Finca Las Nubes for my son, who lives here. The young woman who helped us was thoroughly charming. Nor could she have been more helpful. When I say young, I mean somewhere in her twenties. We chatted. She wanted to know the usual things. How long had we been here? How long would we be staying? What had we seen today?

In answer to her last question I said, "We went to Samuel Johnson's house in Gough Square."

"Who is Samuel Johnson?" she asked.

I hid my astonishment. How could anyone educated in England not know who Samuel Johnson was?

The young woman recommended a restaurant on nearby Great Queen Street. She was right. It was excellent.

Our waiter had a Scottish accent. He told me that he lived just outside Glasgow. Boswell was Scottish. In fact, Johnson had once said of him, "I will do you, Boswell, the justice to say, that you are the most unscottified of your countrymen. You are almost the only instance of a Scotchman that I have known, who did not at every other sentence bring in some other Scotchman."

I couldn't resist asking, "What do you and your fellow Scotsmen think of James Boswell?"

"Who?" he replied.

Well, it is only a sample of two. Still, these two gems of the British Isles ought to be savoured by everyone of its sons and daughters. Instead, they have made me wonder whether Johnson and his faithful Boswell have disappeared into the shrouds of history.

What is this world coming to?

Where Have All the Warring Families Gone?

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:27:00 +0000

Isola Bella overflowing with the Borromeo Palace and its terraced gardens

Borromeo Palace

The Isola Bella is an island in Lake Maggiore that is the home of the Borromeo Palace. Begun in 1631, it took over 300 years to complete (1951). The island is the size of 12 and a half football fields and is literally filled to the brim with the palace and its terraced grounds.

The entrance to the main gallery of the palace is a history lesson. It is lined with massive crests of the powerful and warring families of Italy's past, the Medici, the Farneses, the Odescalchis, the Savojas, the Barberinis and, of course, the Borromeos themselves. As various members of these families came to visit, they would see their crests displayed prominently along the walls of the staircase. So, too, would lesser visitors who were by these crests silently instructed in the power of the Borromeo family. Italy's history is a history of powerful families. Even the mafia sees itself as a “crime family.”

The Medici, for example, were the dominant family of Florence, warring against the Republicans. (Under their despotic rule, Florence experienced one of the most fruitful periods of the Italian Renaissance.) The war between the Torriani and Visconti families over control of Milan ended with Como falling to the Visconti in 1335. Como has plowed in the wake of Milanese history ever since. The Sforza family of Milan is another example of a warring family. In fact, Francesco Sforza and his son fought one another at the Battle of Montolmo in 1444. The elder won. The Barberinis and the Farneses are on the Borromeo staircase. They fought one another in the Castro wars, though there was no clear winner.

And then, of course, there is that feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that led to the demise of both Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare could take for granted that powerful families would be at one another’s throats. After all, they were Italian.

Things have changed in modern times. Italian family bonds are as strong as ever, but the families are nowhere near as belligerent as they once were with the exception, of course, of the mafioso. In today’s Italy it is not uncommon for young Italian men and women to live with their families all the way through college. Children from Como who go to college in Milan don't live in Milan. They take the Ferrovie Nord everyday. It takes about an hour each way. Those who go farther afield, say Venice, come home on weekends.

The domestication of the Italian family may not be accidental. I am thinking of the experiments by the Russian scientist, Dmitri Belyaev, who selected foxes for their aggressive tendencies and bred them through twenty generations, selecting foxes at certain stages, for example, the 8th generation, that showed themselves to be demonstrably less aggressive than their siblings. With repeated selection of less aggressive foxes, Belyaev ultimately produced a breed of fox that resembled the family dog. You can go on line now and purchase a Belyaev fox as a pet!

Could the decline of the warring families in Italian history be related to Belyaev's experiments? When I mentioned this to a friend and colleague, he thought it was highly possible. He even suggested an ingenious explanation for the trend toward tranquility; namely, the widespread use of firearms. His argument was that since only aggressive medieval families acquired firearms, it would be only aggressive families using them against one another. In other words over the centuries aggressive families knocked one another off, leaving the field to their placid relatives. That might be an argument for supporting the NRA.

On second thought, maybe not.

Joined at the Hip

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:36:00 +0000

Both Cuba and the United States are facing a critical problem: how to distribute income. Cuba’s socialist economy wants to have an equal distribution throughout the population. The Cubans I talked to told me that they make somewhere between $30 and $40 a month. UN data available online increases that by a factor of 10. Even so, it isn’t much. Cuba is slowly allowing a “private sector” to emerge in an effort to create more wealth for everyone. But they are doing it slowly and cautiously. By contrast, the United States has no ideological commitment to income equality. It opts for a free economy. Let the chips fall mostly where they may. When Obama mentioned the “R” word (redistribution) during his first campaign, opposition to it became a cri de coeur of the conservatives.

In his January 27, 2013, column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman fought back:

Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades.

As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.

Krugman’s comment underscores the fact that the United States is currently engaged in a real battle over redistribution. Indeed, for the past half-century we have seen an unprecedented migration of the nation’s wealth to a small segment of its population. The chart shown below (from Wikipedia) indicates that in 2007 the top five percent of the population controlled 62 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Edward N. Wolff chart reproduced from Wikepedia

During the 20^th century the great economic conflict was between capitalism and socialism. In a nutshell the former wants to maximum profit, the latter wants to maximize satisfaction of human needs at the expense of profit. The 21^st century marks the apotheosis of capitalism. China and Russia, both standard bearers of socialism in the 20^th century, have given way to capitalism. Cuba is on the verge of a similar transition, though probably one not so radical as in China or Russia. But there is a problem. Capitalism works pretty well for 20 percent of the people and not so well for the rest. Here is what Castro himself said about the matter in a speech before the Group of 77 South Summit Conference in 2000:

In over 100 countries the per capita income is lower than it was 15 years ago. At the moment 1.6 billion people are faring worse than at the beginning of the 1980s. Over 820 million people are undernourished and 790 million of them live in the Third World…The world economic order works for 20 percent of the population, but it leaves out, demeans, and degrades the remaining 80 percent. We cannot simply accept to enter the next century as the backward, poor, and exploited rearguard.

It isn’t ironic that the United States and its professed enemy, Cuba, are both struggling with the same economic problem. It is the economic problem facing everyone in today’s world: how to make an economic order that works for everyone?

A City Time Is Trying to Remember

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:21:00 +0000

Pepe Rivera

El Caballero

On the Calle de los Mercaderes Pepe Rivera, La Santiaguero, sits motionless outside a hostel for expectant mothers. He is not protesting. He’s making a living. He is a living statue though several passersby have mistaken him for the real thing, i.e. a statue. He is that good, so good, in fact, that he makes the statue of El Caballero de Paris look like it has a nervous tic. At Pepe’s feet is a satchel. Drop a coin into it, and Pepe comes to life—well, he comes to a snail’s pace life. He turns ever so slowly, lifts his eyes ever so slowly, and like a man traveling close to the speed of light, he extends his hand in a gesture of goodbye that feels as if it will take a lifetime to complete.

The buildings look as if they had a skin disease.

Pepe is supplanting Fidel as my avatar for Cuba. He is a reminder that Havana is a surrealistic city.

Scaffolded Walls

It is after all strange to pass block after block of abandoned buildings several stories high and to see boarded-up windows on the ground floor while clotheslines dangle outside broken floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. It has the feel of a Ridley Scott movie. I’m thinking, of course, of Blade Runner. There are electric wires that droop openly (and probably illegally) from one window ledge to the next as they snake their way along the facades of these boarded-up hulks. They are like dark rivulets of wire that shadowy inhabitants dip into the way a villager living alongside a forest stream might dip a bucket for water. Buildings are either collapsing or about to collapse. They look as if they have a skin disease. Then there are walls—single walls, in fact—held up by scaffolding the way you might support a drunk. All around the wall and its scaffolding is a vacant lot filled with the rubble of some previous collapse that has left nothing standing but the wall. Why haven’t the authorities put it out of its misery instead of forcing it to stand there in all in feebleness? If it were a horse, you would shoot it. And then there are the empty buildings with corrugated fences surrounding them and a gap, a guard at the gap, and painted in big black letters above the gap, “This is not a toilet.” Is it meant to impart a warning? Or information? Or is it an appeal (this is not a toilet, for Chrissake)?

Driving through the town at night is like driving through a blackout. There are hardly any lights and those that are there glow dimly and in the oddest of places: a tall office building, pitch dark save for a glimmer two floors from the top on the corner, or a squatter’s second floor room, a spare yellow gleam buried deep inside the building like a gravedigger’s lantern, the electricity most likely tapped from a nearby building.

Amid all of this descending rubble there are pockets of life—the Buena Vista Social Club, the San Cristóbal Paladar, and all the hot spots that lie hidden from the tourist trade because they are too authentic to share. And then there are all those 1950s chick mobiles floating through the city like particles from a different universe.

Havana is a contradiction. America is its enemy and yet it loves its enemy. What could be more surrealistic than a city in love with tail fins and grinning grilles? Havana is, indeed, a special place. Havana is a not a city that time has forgotten. It is a city that time is trying to remember.

Shedding Humiliation

noreply@blogger.com (Samuel Jay Keyser) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:55:00 +0000

You can never overestimate the impact of humiliation on a society. It is as profoundly palpable as it is on a human being. Before going to Beijing, my wife and I visited Bishu Shanzhuang, a palace complex that the Chinese Emperor and his retinue occupied for six months out of each year when the heat in Beijing became unbearable. Kangxi, the great Qing Dynasty Emperor, began the complex in 1703.

On the wall of the emperor’s bedchamber, the so-called warm room, there is a plaque that reads:

NO FORGETTING THE NATIONAL HUMILIATION

Emperor Xianfeng signed Beijing Treaty here

On October 28, 1860 . . . it was in the warm chamber Xianfeng was forced to sign Beijing Treaty with Britain, France and Russia which ceded south Kowloon to Britain and to admit Aihui Treaty through which more than 1,000,000 square kilometer territory that lies to the north of the Heilongjiang river and to the east of the Wusulijiang river was ceded to Russia.

For most of the past 200 years China has been a country whose relationship to the rest of the world has been one of humiliation, pushed around as they were by the British, the French, the Germans, the Americans, the Japanese and the Russians. China’s current strong posture internationally is a response to that humiliation. Never again.

Portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel Castro commemorating
26th of July Movement that overthrew Batista dictatorship in 1959

This sheds light on the affection the Cuban people have for Fidel. He has pulled the thorn of humiliation out of their collective psyche. Mao described Castro as having shown the Cuban people how to “stand up” and grasp whom they really are. Is it any wonder that the Cuban people’s affection for Castro has remained as strong as it has for as long as it has? After more than 600 years of domination, he showed them how to stand up.

Before coming to Cuba I read “Cuba’s New Now” by Cynthia Gorney in The National Geographic. She describes an encounter with Eduardo, a 35-year-old Cuban.

“I love my country,” she quotes him as saying, “but there is no future for me here.”

Eduardo drives Gorney around in a 1956 Plymouth. He shows her a boat he is secretly building with some friends. They intend to sail to America. He will be taking advantage of the current “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy put into place in 1994 by President Clinton. If you make it to American soil (dry foot), you are granted asylum. If you are intercepted on the water (wet foot), it’s back to Cuba with you. This applies to aliens even if they cross into America from Mexico, just so long as they are Cubans. If they are Mexicans or Latin Americans and try to cross the Rio Grande or the Sonoran Desert, they are at risk of running afoul of the sometimes-lethal Border Patrol.

Back in America and out of touch with Eduardo, Gorney tracks down his brother in Mexico. He tells her that a short way out into the Atlantic the rudder on the boat broke off. Eduardo and his friends had to row back to Cuba.

On January 14, 2013 all restrictions on when and where Cubans may travel were lifted. Now Eduardo can sell the boat and use the proceeds to fly to America. Obviously, the times are changing.

I take it as highly significant that the inaugural poet for Obama’s second term was Richard Blanco. Blanco describes himself as having been “ . . . made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States.” His strong Cuban connection is, I take it, telescoping a policy change.

None too soon.