If you cross the big road and continue along the city street, you pass the national police headquarters on your right and then the train station on your left, and soon you come to an access road dipping steeply under the tracks to leave you on the river path. The water gurgles, beyond the river the traffic drones, and behind you the town thrums. Birds twitter and flitter beside the glimmering waters.

The territory, crisscrossed by city streets, roads, lanes, tracks, riverside paths and tree-lined trails, is a hodgepodge. It took a number of outings when I moved here four years ago for me to fix the geography in my head, but I now know it well from taking my dogs for a walk every morning. I’m down to one dog, Toby, but we continue on the same beaten tracks.

Toby knows the lay of the land even better than I do because he also gets a walk every afternoon with my son. Not all dogs are so lucky. And yet, I wonder. What does Toby do for the rest of his life? He’s probably waiting for a walk the other 22 hours of the day, lying in the sun on the patio or, on a rainy day, curled into the back corner of his doghouse. Dreaming through the cold nights. He must be lonely, though I am not sure why I think that: His days are much the same as ever, alone in his doghouse. It only seemed different when my black lab Oso was still alive because I knew the dogs had company. What good was company when Toby was curled in his doghouse and Oso likewise curled in his? Were they miserable? Were they relieved? Were they resting? We’ve heard that misery loves company, but I believe that other states of being do, too—the right company. Like Oso’s.

To pick up the river path from my house, I have three options: go through town to the east and turn down past the industrial area, such as it is, and on to the river; take the path straight down to the river, almost from my door; or to take the camino vecinal and from there take the road out of town or continue and pick it up at the train underpass. Until recently, I usually favored the camino vecinal because on that road was a yellow dog on a short chain, and I liked to stop and pet him and tell him that everything would be okay. I wonder if he ever thought the same—that everything would be okay. Maybe everything was okay. He had sun, he had the company of some chickens, he had plenty of food, and he had visitors stopping by most days. A good life? I don’t know, but it was a life. It lasted 12 years.

And now he’s gone. The two dogs at the corner are gone. The occupant of the blue house is gone, the family that replaced him left, and someone new lives there now. Concha, who lived next door to the blue house, has gone, too, to live with her grandson. Before Concha moved, her son was a daily visitor—until one day he died. The man with the sheep across from my house died, but his widow still comes every day, with her son now instead of her husband. My own son came, stayed for a year and a half, and has moved on. My camino vecinal—a dead-end with two-way traffic.

The post Camino Vecinal appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “On the Threshold” by Amy Levy appeared first on The American Scholar.

Portis was a newspaperman by trade, starting off at the Arkansas Gazette, moving to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and becoming, in the early 1960s, part of the legendary stable of feature journalists (Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Breslin) at the New York Herald Tribune, before going on to head the Herald Tribune’s London bureau. In his reporting on the early days of the civil rights movement—reports that are classics of understatement—Portis uses references to cars as a tongue-in-cheek way of summing up dubious characters. At the end of a Ku Klux Klan rally in Birmingham, he writes, “Everyone drifted away and the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.”

“An Auto Odyssey Through Darkest Baja,” published in the Home magazine of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, is an automotive adventure that begins with Portis’s search for just the right vehicle for the trip, which he finds on a used-car lot in Santa Monica: “It was a rat-colored 1952 half-ton Studebaker pickup. Just the thing. It had character and looked eager to please.” Because the pickup sports a diamond-shaped ornament on its tailgate, Portis and his companion Andy decide to call it, “in our humorous way,” “the Diamondback Rattler.” Rumbling along more than 1,000 miles of rutted, sandy, head-rattling Baja California roads, the Studebaker truck becomes as much a character as Portis and Andy. From the opening chapter of Portis’s first novel, Norwood, published in 1966, we learn not only that the eponymous main character is a Korean War veteran who has hopes of becoming a country music star on the Louisiana Hayride, where Hank Williams got his start, but also that he “had bought a 1947 Fleetline Chevrolet with dirt dobber nests in the heater and radio for fifty dollars. He put in some rings and ground the valves and got it in fair running shape.”

The first couple of sentences of Portis’s third novel, The Dog of the South, tell us, “My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.” Ray Midge is upset that Dupree has absconded with his “good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles” and that he was “cruising the deserts of Mexico in my Ford Torino with my wife and my credit cards and his black-tongued dog.” But what really gets Midge’s goat is that in place of the Torino, Dupree has left behind his 1963 Buick Special, “a compact car, a rusty little piece of basic transportation with a V-6 engine.” I used to drive a Buick Special of that vintage myself, so I can sympathize. “That car had 74,000 miles on it and the speedometer cable was broken. There was a hole in the floor on the driver’s side and when I drove over something white the flash between my feet made me jump.”

Portis likes to tell his stories in the voice of first-person narrators. Some of these characters, like Midge, are delightfully full of themselves and comically self-deluded. In The Dog of the South, we get some insight into the conflicts of his marriage from Midge’s obsession with the tape he has made of a lecture by one Dr. Buddy Casey, a history professor at Ole Miss, concerning the Siege of Vicksburg. Portis, like some of his characters, came from one of the last generations of southern men to have real knowledge of the Civil War. But few men carried their interest in military history to such extremes as Midge:

I liked to play [the tape] in the morning while I was shaving. I also played it sometimes in the car when Norma and I went for drives. It was one of those performances—“bravura” is the word for it—that never become stale. Dr. Bud made the thing come alive. With nothing more than his knuckles and the resonating sideboards of his desk he could give you caissons crossing a plank bridge, and with his dentures and inflated cheeks and moist thick lips he could give you a mortar barrage in the distance and rattling anchor chains and lapping water and hissing fuses and neighing horses. … I say I “had” the tape. It disappeared suddenly and Norma denied that she had thrown it away. After making a few inquiries and turning the apartment upside down I let the matter drop. That was my way.

Much less has been written about Portis’s native state than most of the other 10 states of the old Confederacy. When you cross the Mississippi River into Arkansas, you feel you have left the Deep South and entered an in-between region bordering on the Southwest. You start to see people wearing cowboy hats and boots, farms being called ranches, oil beginning to rival cotton as a way of making money. Roy Blount Jr., comparing Portis to another southern-born novelist who was drawn to the West, has commented that the Arkansan “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” Portis was born in a small town just outside El Dorado, Arkansas, a city of some 17,000 inhabitants that struck it rich during the oil boom of the 1920s. A friend of mine hailed from nearby Smackover, a name he explained as being derived from the town’s location “smack over the river” from El Dorado. But Portis was a scholar of history; he contended the name was “an Arkansas rendering of ‘chemin couvert,’ covered path, or road” from the days when this territory belonged to France before the Louisiana Purchase. Who knew?

No other novelist captures the modern American attraction to unsupported fringe beliefs, crackpot schemes, and cults and renders it with such mordant glee as Portis. One of my favorite purveyors of this sort of hogwash is Dr. Reo Symes, owner of the broken-down school bus from which Portis’s third novel takes its title: “ ‘The Dog of the South’ … was painted in black on one side, but not by a sign painter with a straight-edge and a steady hand. The big childish letters sprawled at different angles and dribbled at the bottom.” Symes is a man with a dubious past: “He said he had had very little trouble with the law in recent years, although he had been arrested twice in California: once for disturbing divine service, and again for impersonating a naval officer.” Symes’s mother owns some property in Louisiana, and he has some ideas about how to develop it:

How about a theme park? Jefferson Davis Land. It’s not far from the old Davis plantation. Listen to this. I would dress up like Davis in a frock coat and greet the tourists as they stepped off the ferry. I would glower at them like old Davis with his cloudy eye and the children would cry and clutch their mothers’ hands.

But real estate development is not Symes’s only area of interest. He also has ideas about literature. As they drive into Mexico together in the Buick Special, Midge describes his interest in Civil War history to Symes. “I have more than four hundred volumes of military history in my apartment,” he says. “All told, I have sixty-six lineal feet of books.”

“All right, now listen to me,” says Symes. “Throw that trash out the window. Every bit of it.” He pulls a little yellow book out of his bag. “Throw all that dead stuff out the window and put this on your shelf. Put it by your bed.”

The book is With Wings as Eagles, a manual for salesmen by one John Selmer Dix, M.A. “Dr. Symes turned through the pages. ‘Dix wrote this book forty years ago and it’s still just as fresh as the morning dew. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The truth never dies.’ ” When Midge mentions that Shakespeare is reputed to be the greatest writer who ever lived, Symes replies, “Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.”

Before turning his comic genius to characters like Symes and to a New Age cult called Gnomonism, the subject of his fourth novel, Masters of Atlantis, Portis published his masterpiece, True Grit (1968), the book most people know him for, and with good reason. Set largely in the 1870s, the novel contains nothing automotive—its action occurs back in the day when horsepower was literal. True Grit’s main character and narrator is young Mattie Ross, whose father has been murdered by one of his hired hands. Mattie is nothing if not precocious: Even though she is only 14, she has a head for numbers and keeps the books for her father’s prosperous cotton farm. The self-assurance of her voice establishes her, in the book’s opening lines, as someone who is going to hold our attention:

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then. … I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

“I know many fine people live in Fort Smith,” she continues, “and they have one of the nation’s most modern waterworks but it does not look like it belongs in Arkansas to me.” Her narrative is peppered with citations from scripture and old-fashioned expressions one seldom hears anymore. In 1959 Portis published a charming feature called “Remember?” in the Arkansas Gazette, celebrating the many regionalisms of southern speech that even back then were going out of style: adjectives like “tacky,” “much obliged” as a way of saying thank you, and that curious locution, “right smart,” as in, “You can catch a right smart of catfish in that lake if you have the right bait.” He also invokes the kind of prayers offered up on social occasions like church picnics, or “dinner on the grounds,” which used to be a common feature of life in the rural South. “There were Presbyterians, Methodists and a sprinkling of Baptists at these get-togethers we attended,” Portis writes, “and when it came time to eat, the honor of returning thanks usually fell to the windiest old man there.”

Young Mattie herself is a devout Presbyterian with high standards of personal behavior, but when it comes to choosing a marshal to journey over into Indian Territory and hunt down her father’s killer, Christian principles and social niceties play no role whatsoever in her choice among the several men recommended by the local sheriff. “The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn,” the sheriff says. “He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.”

Unhesitatingly, Mattie asks the sheriff, “Where can I find this Rooster?”

The partnership between these two makes for one of the great stories in American fiction. A self-confident adolescent who is just as comfortable bargaining for a horse or discussing the market price of cotton as quoting scripture teams up with an over-the-hill marshal whose past is just as iffy as his current reputation. In the late war, he served with two of the most notorious guerrilla chieftains on the southern side. As Colonel Stonehill, the livery stable owner, tells Mattie, “Report has it that he rode by the light of the moon with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. I would not trust him too much.” William Clarke Quantrill was among Arkansas’s most notorious figures, his gang launching the criminal careers of Frank and Jesse James, teenagers during the Civil War. Quantrill’s last words to a man he had shot five times and left for dead: “Tell old God that the last man you saw on earth was Quantrill.”

Rooster Cogburn was portrayed by John Wayne in the 1969 Hal Wallis production and by Jeff Bridges in the 2010 Coen Brothers film. John Wayne, of course, always plays John Wayne; Bridges comes a little closer to portraying Cogburn’s meanness and lack of sentimentality. The supporting cast assembled by the Coen brothers is choice—Dakin Matthews, for example, plays Colonel Stonehill to comic perfection. Fortunate not only in having been turned into two memorable movies, True Grit has also been fortunate in having Donna Tartt, the Mississippi novelist, as an advocate. She narrates the audiobook and becomes Mattie. It’s the perfect thing to listen to on a long western road trip. In her introduction to the Bloomsbury edition of the novel, Tartt nicely sums up Cogburn as he appears in the book and in the movie:

The Rooster of the novel is somewhat younger, in his late forties: a fat, one-eyed character with walrus mustaches, unwashed, malarial, drunk much of the time. … Mattie runs Rooster to ground in his squalid rented room at the back of a Chinese grocery store (“Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone,” she remarks, disapprovingly) and he’s happy enough to take Mattie’s money to ride out after her father’s killer.

The duo of Mattie and Rooster quickly becomes a trio when Rooster agrees to let a vainglorious Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (pronounced La Beef), who is also on Chaney’s trail for a murder he committed in the Lone Star State, join the hunt. “Get crossways of me, LaBoeuf,” Rooster tells the ranger, “and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you. You will wisht you had been at the Alamo with Travis.” LaBoeuf doesn’t want Mattie going along with them into the Indian Nation: “Run along home, little britches,” he derides her, “your mama wants you.” But Mattie is having none of it: “ ‘Run home yourself,’ said I. ‘Nobody asked you to come up here wearing your big spurs.’ ”

A crucial moment in the story occurs when, after the girl has swum her pony, Little Blackie, across a raging river swollen with winter rain to catch up with Cogburn and the ranger, LaBoeuf pulls Mattie off Little Blackie, takes her over his knee, and starts whipping her with a switch. Bursting out in tears of humiliation and rage, Mattie says to Rooster, “ ‘Are you going to let him do this?’ He dropped his cigarette to the ground and said, ‘No, I don’t believe I will. Put your switch away, LaBoeuf. She has got the best of us.’ ” When the ranger refuses to stop, Cogburn “pulled his cedar-handled revolver and cocked it with his thumb and threw down on LaBoeuf. He said, ‘It will be the biggest mistake you ever made, you Texas brush-popper.’ ”

Tartt makes the point that True Grit “begins where chivalry meets the frontier—where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West.” For all his slovenliness, shady background, and questionable methods, Rooster Cogburn, if not what Mattie or anyone else would call a gentleman, is certainly a man in whom chivalry has not quite died.

Every country has its own myths of origin and national character. We don’t expect our poets and fiction writers, our songwriters and moviemakers simply to tell stories, as vital as narratives are to us. We look to them to establish myths of national identity and create exemplars of these myths, as Whitman does when he sings of the open road in Song of Myself; to ratify and expand those myths, as Kerouac does in On the Road; to challenge and question myths like the idea of the self-made man, as Fitzgerald does in The Great Gatsby. You’d search far and wide before you found a better yarn than the adventures of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, in which, as Mattie puts it, “I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.” But storytelling is far from all that Portis is up to. After fairly demolishing any notion of chivalry that readers of an earlier generation might have associated with the Confederacy and undercutting Rooster’s credentials as a Wild West hero, the overweight, hard-drinking, bounty-hunting marshal emerges as a kind of chivalric hero after all—not through any mythic identity, but simply because of who he shows himself to be when the chips are down: a man with true grit.

Portis is one of our great and quintessentially American writers because, like Hemingway, he never abandoned his journalistic sensibilities. His ability to see things as they are is bracing. There is something of the investigative reporter’s determination to discover the truth in the sure-handedness with which Portis gleefully ridicules the gimcrack “secret brotherhood” of Gnomonism in Masters of Atlantis, and how he takes down the grandiose delusions of characters like Symes in The Dog of the South. It’s as if Portis can never quite get over the capacity we have for self-delusion. Americans’ readiness to believe something like Q-Anon wouldn’t have surprised him in the slightest. It’s no accident that Jimmy Burns, the narrator and protagonist of Portis’s last novel, Gringos, is not some mythical road warrior like Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty but a shade-tree mechanic scraping out a living in Mexico. In Portis’s treatment of the West, there’s some truth in Roy Blount Jr.’s statement, quoted earlier, that the author “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” I would amend that judgment slightly and say that he’d not only rather be funny, he’d also rather base his stories on actuality than follow the siren songs of myth. A humorist by temperament, he knew instinctively that, as Charlie Chaplin knew in making The Great Dictator and as Saturday Night Live knows in lampooning our current president, laughter is a powerful weapon in dealing with the folly of those who think they have all the answers.

The post On the Trail with an Arkansas Traveler appeared first on The American Scholar.

1.

My memory is legendary in the family, and though it’s wearing thin now, getting patchy in places, I still remember when the legend began.

It was the fall of 1959, when I was five, and we had just gotten home from a year of travel in Italy, with stays in Perugia, Florence, and Rome. My father was a scientist at Columbia back then, and the trip was his first sabbatical. He was finishing a book he was writing with his friend and colleague Bruno Boley, Theory of Thermal Stresses, which would become a bible for the kinds of engineers who designed NASA rockets, satellites, and heat shields.

Now we were back in Hillsdale, New Jersey. One evening, my father brought out a brand-new Kodak slide projector and set it up on a footstool in the living room. I remember the room, can still hear the whir of the projector’s fan and smell again the hot, sourish smell from the projector bulb. I remember where my father stood (by the new projector), where my mother sat (in the armchair next to it), and where I sat or lay (on the rug). My little brother, Eric, was already asleep, I think.

Slide.

It was a scene from months before. In the picture I was crouched in the middle of a dusty path, under the hot sun, digging in the dirt with my bare hands.

“That’s Monte Testaccio!” I said. “That was the first thing we did in Rome. There was a stone in the middle of the road, and I was trying to dig it out. You and Mom and Eric kept on walking,” I told my father. “Then you stopped and turned around and called me to catch up. You said we would find much better things up ahead.”

Monte Testaccio was a lonesome, scruffy hill, the remains of an ancient Roman garbage dump. In those days there weren’t as many tourists in Rome, and we had the hill to ourselves. My father told us to wander around, and we went rambling as if we were picking up shells and pebbles at the beach. My brother and I found little bits of broken pots. Sitting there in our darkened living room, I could still see each one. “You found the best piece,” I said to my father. I saw his find in my mind’s eye, and I can almost see it now, a brown, neatly turned terracotta jug handle.

Slide.

“That was also our first day in Rome!” I said. We had gone for a family walk down a broad avenue. I remembered the row of blinkered horses and carriages that stood and waited at the curb, and just beyond them, the crazy Roman traffic. “A man threw his cigarette into the street,” I said. “I ran into the street to put it out. You ran after me,” I told my father. “You got me back to the sidewalk. You shouted, ‘You don’t run out into the street!’ ”

As I sat there on the living room rug, the whole scene was still right there before me.

“I said, ‘There was a cigarette. I was afraid it would start a fire.’ You shouted, ‘That cigarette will go out by itself!’ ”

“What a memory you have, Giannetto!” my father said.

2.

I also remember writing my first line. It was that same year—1959—the first week of September, midafternoon. Again, I can bring back the whole scene: where I sat at the kitchen table, the precise angle of the light on the leaves of the maple trees outside the picture window, the awkwardness of driving the pencil, even the smell of the paper.

(Mimeograph paper, which smelled like pineapples.)

I’m not like Funes the Memorious, in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Funes could remember (in the translation of Anthony Kerrigan) “the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho.” I couldn’t tell you what I had for dinner, say, on the night of Tuesday, October 2, 1962.

However, I am memorious enough that scenes from the past are always present, always ready to be summoned up. I time-travel all the time, voluntarily and involuntarily. I remember doing this even at the age of five or six. In one memory, I’m lying in the driveway—for some reason—and looking up at the sky while remembering scene after scene from the year before, and I can still recall a few of the scenes that came to me as I lay there.

While walking my dog in the park not long ago, listening to an interview with the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, I recognized a fellow traveler. The interviewer, Max Linsky, asked him about his relationship to memory. Sullivan replied, “As I come up on 50, I find myself wishing that my memory weren’t as good as it is, you know?”

This was the gist of their conversation:

ML: You want it to be worse?

JJS: Sometimes I just feel like I don’t forget anything. And I’m constantly replaying everything. And you feel it start to swallow you, sometimes.

ML: That’s freaky shit, man!

JJS: Yeah. Yeah.

ML: You just remember it all?

JJS: I don’t want to overstate it. If my memory were that good, I’d probably be useful in some way for, like, NASA. But it’s just relentless, and it’s just so vivid all the time. I feel like my heat shield wore off or something.

Well, yes, I thought. Of course. Exactly.

3.

Psychologists have a term for a certain kind of relentless remembering: hyperthymesia. The syndrome was discovered and named two decades ago by a team of psychologists at the University of California, Irvine. One of them, James L. McGaugh, had received this slightly frantic letter:

Dear Dr. McGaugh,

As I sit here trying to figure out where to begin explaining why I am writing you. … I just hope somehow you can help me.

I am thirty-four years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my past. … Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else for that matter) I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.

Some people call me the human calendar while others run out of the room in complete fear but the one reaction I get from everyone who eventually finds out about this “gift” is total amazement. Then they start throwing dates at me to try to stump me. … I haven’t been stumped yet. Most have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!

In other words, the author of the letter, whose name was Jill Price, had no heat shield whatsoever.

McGaugh and his colleagues gave Price a series of tests. In one, they asked her to write all the dates of Easter Sunday from 1980 onward. In just 10 minutes she wrote out the 24 dates almost perfectly (one date was off by two days). And Price is Jewish.

“My memory has ruled my life,” she told the psychologists. And: “It’s like a running movie that never stops. It’s like a split screen. … Like we’re sitting here talking and I’m talking to you and in my head I’m thinking about something that happened to me in December 1982—December 17, 1982, it was a Friday.”

Famous cases of remarkable memory had been documented in the scientific literature, but those involved mnemonists: professional and amateur memory athletes who train like marathoners to remember random numbers thousands of digits long. They are the kinds of people who compete in the annual World Memory Championship. The most celebrated mnemonist in history is Solomon Shereshevsky, who was the subject of a decades-long case study by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in Moscow. Shereshevsky was an extraordinary memorizer, but he didn’t have his whole life running through his head, with every day neatly time-stamped; according to Luria, he seemed to exist “as in a haze.”

McGaugh and his colleagues published a study of Jill Price’s memory in the journal Neurocase in 2006. They wrote, “We know of no other reported case of someone who recalls personal memories over and over again, who is both the warden and the prisoner of her memories.” The paper received a lot of publicity, and the psychologists were swamped with emails from people who claimed that they were hyperthymestic, too. Today there are about 100 well-documented sufferers of the syndrome, which is now called “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM).

That same year, Brian Levine, a neuropsychologist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, encountered a case that was Jill Price’s mirror image. A woman named Susie McKinnon emailed him to say that she had no autobiographical memories whatsoever. This wasn’t dementia; McKinnon was just fine, thank you. She had lived a full life—she just couldn’t remember any of it. She and her husband loved to go on cruises. All around their house they had souvenirs from Aruba, Bermuda, Curaçao. But unlike Jill Price, who could have told you what day of the week she had left for Jamaica, and what the weather was like that day, and what she ate on the plane, McKinnon couldn’t remember a single thing about a single one of those cruises.

Levine and his colleagues wrote a paper about McKinnon’s condition, which they called “severely deficient autobiographical memory” (SDAM). Their paper got a lot of play in the news, too, and Levine set up a website to handle the public response. More than 25,000 people have filled out a survey on the website, believing that they have SDAM.

4.

On the morning of September 3, 2025, which was a Wednesday, very warm and sunny, I arrived at my brother’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, bearing bagels and cream cheese, to discuss our own relationships to memory.

Eric and I have talked about this topic many times, maybe a bit obsessively, because we seem to be somewhere near the opposite ends of the spectrum. He is not memorious. He calls me The Memory Man. Our experience of looking at a snapshot of the two of us in a family album is completely different. I see it, and I’m there. Eric studies it with a sense of estrangement, distance, dissociation. He doesn’t remember being present when the picture was taken. He doesn’t even feel that the child in the snapshot is him. He worries about this sensation of absence the way you might poke around with your tongue after a visit to the dentist, touching the place where the anesthetic is still making you numb. A part of him is missing, and he wants it back.

And yet, we are both writers. I write nonfiction, and he writes fiction. I’ve written half a dozen books for adults; he’s written more than 100 books for children, many of them under various pen names, as well as half a dozen children’s television shows. Eric was the head writer and co-creator of Dora the Explorer. He helped name the character “Dora.” Dora was also the name of our father’s mother, but when I pointed that out to him, Eric said it was just a coincidence because he’d forgotten our grandmother’s name; he wasn’t sure he ever knew it.

When Eric flips through an album from one of our father’s sabbaticals, he thinks, Right, we were in Italy. Or, Right, we went to England. “It’s like you go, ‘Well, I guess I was there,’ ” Eric says. “And whatever memories you do have feel sort of isolated. They don’t begin to connect with other memories.”

One of Brian Levine’s mentors in Toronto, a famous psychologist named Endel Tulving, divided autobiographical memory into two basic types. In the first type, episodic memory, you remember a scene from your past with a sensation that Tulving called “mental time travel.” In the second type, which he called semantic memory, there is zero time travel. A classic example is the color of milk. You know that milk is white. You remember this the same way you remember that the capital of France is Paris. There are vast numbers of facts and concepts that you’ve filed away in your memory as things you just know. It’s as if you picked them all up in a book somewhere.

My brother seems to remember episodes from his own childhood as if they were semantic memories, whereas I seem to have been born with a passport for mental time travel.

These days, Eric and I can’t say “highly superior” or “severely deficient” without laughing. The jargon takes us back to our years of sibling rivalry, which we’ve put behind us. Eric can tell from my expression whenever I’m about to bring up HSAM and SDAM. I get an apologetic look on my face that makes him guffaw.

After the bagels, Eric sprawled on his couch. I took an armchair. Between us on the rug we’d placed a large cardboard box. The box contained stuff that my brother and I had saved from our old family house in Providence—a big Victorian place on College Hill, where we lived after our father left Columbia for Brown. I’d stored a dozen of these cardboard boxes in my apartment. Some years back I filed almost everything in the boxes in loosely chronological order, as grist for a family memoir.

I set up my iPhone to record our conversation. Then Eric and I opened what I was calling The Last Box.

“When you say ‘The Last Box,’ what do you mean?” he asked.

“Because I’ve sorted through almost everything else from the old attics,” I said. (In the AI transcript of our conversation, “old attics” came out as “old addicts.”)

The box was full of miscellaneous junk—envelopes containing old keys, a yellowed ring-pull for a window shade with a little bit of white string attached—a random sample of the innumerable things that our mother had stashed in the two large attics and the many crawlspaces of the house on College Hill.

“Musty,” I said.

“That to me is a very third-floor smell,” Eric said. “Not in your room, but in the closet.”

I’ve noticed that smells can sometimes transport Eric back in time. Some years ago, the two of us made a day-trip pilgrimage to Hillsdale, the small town where we spent most of our childhoods. Walking through the streets evoked very few memories for Eric, but when we opened the door to Marsala Hardware, he sniffed the air and said, “Okay, that I remember.”

For me, almost every step in Hillsdale brought back memories, because so much still looked the same, right down to the 1950s aluminum scrollwork on the screen doors of the shops. Context is a powerful trigger of episodic memories. Tulving called this triggering phenomenon “synergistic ecphory.” If something in the present happens to match your memory, slam, back comes your memory. Almost anything can do it: smells and tastes, pop songs, moods, voices, sudden movements, tricks of the light. Once when my wife, Deborah, and I were strolling down a street in Bologna (or was it Florence?), I let out a little laugh out of the blue. I had just heard my mother’s voice. She was speaking in the baby-talk Italian that she used back in ’58, when I was four years old and Eric was pushing two, as we walked through Italy’s medieval streets.

She said, “Giannetto, lascia il nozzolo.” Jonnie, leave your nose alone.

Eric’s apartment is lined with bookcases, with some of the overflow stacked in tall towers on his coffee table. He collects books by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. When he and I talk about HSAM and SDAM, he sometimes quotes Winnicott’s phrase “the continuity of being,” from “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” a paper that Winnicott published in 1960, when Eric was not very much older than an infant himself. That is what Eric wishes he could feel when he looks back: the continuity of being.

In The Last Box, we found an album of snapshots from when we were teen-agers in Providence, and we flipped through it. Eric said, not for the first time, that he envied my sense of the continuity of being: “Mine feels like patchwork—not whole. Looking at this album, there are some nice pictures in the back yard. I seem very present and happy, but I don’t remember me then.”

One snapshot showed a sunny afternoon in the spring of ’77. He and I were both home for the weekend. I was back from Harvard, with a big mop of hippie hair. Eric was back from Exeter in an Izod alligator shirt.

Eric’s wife, Natalie, came by the living room and looked over his shoulder at his picture. “I would have had such a crush on you,” she said. “You were so cute, just my type. The preppy shirt. I love that.”

“There might have been happy times,” Eric said again, ruefully. Looking at the album made him painfully aware of his distance from his own past—his perpetual sense of discontinuity.

“It kind of taints everything,” he said.

5.

As Eric and I rummaged through the box, we were watched by a large oil painting that hangs over his living-room mantelpiece, a portrait of our parents. They commissioned the painting from a family friend, the artist Philip Pearlstein, for their 25th anniversary, in 1975.

I like seeing the portrait when I visit Eric, but I wouldn’t want to live with it. The cool eye of the painter, whom we met that first year in Italy, caught too much. Too much for me, although not for Eric.

Our father grew up in a rough part of immigrant Brooklyn in the middle of the Great Depression. His hard-luck parents lost their store and almost their house—and on and on, worse and worse. A few of those early years were so bad that my father didn’t talk about them until he was almost 90.

At Brown, he had risen to the lofty title of University Professor. He lived in suits, dined with the university president, and spoke in a very formal, old-school, WASPy style that verged on the Victorian. He liked to share little stories about his boyhood with us, but they were carefully curated. When he talked about playing stickball on his old street in Brooklyn, he pronounced it Alabahma Avenue, which is not how they said it on Alabama Avenue. When our parents went out, they went to the thee-ah-tuh.

To get beyond the Harris tweeds, to keep in touch with Dad’s warm side, Eric and I called him Abba. Father, in Hebrew.

We sometimes wonder what Abba’s relationship to memory must have been like. Once, in the fall of my junior year of college, I took a bus home, spoiling for a fight over some grievances about my childhood. My father and I faced each other across the kitchen table. He said, coolly, “All of this seems very important to you now, but it really isn’t. How often do I think about my parents?”

6.

After we grew up and left home, Eric seemed to feel as distant from our mother and father as he did from his memories. He carried grudges and grievances not only against them but also against science, which he found subzero-cold and remote.

Recently, he wrote a one-man play that he’s been performing around town. He’ll be taking it to this summer’s Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Although it is fiction, it’s heavily autobiographical, and the hero’s father doesn’t come off too well:

He was a brilliant man, my father, a professor of inorganic chemistry at Tufts, and when I was growing up friends would say, Charlie, your father is the nicest guy. What a nice guy. And I’d be thinking, Are we talking about the same guy? Cause yes he was a nice guy but when he got angry, he would punish my mother by giving her the silent treatment for days at a time.

In the story, Charlie rebels against his father, and against the walls that his father put up, by putting up massive walls of his own. His first marriage fails, and he finds love only late in life. Like Eric.

It’s a strong play. It captures the way family secrets can warp space-time around them, assuming enormous gravity and giving out no light.

How could he write that story without mental time travel?

The difference between my brother’s relationship to memory and mine was especially intense during our father’s final years, as he slipped away into Alzheimer’s. While Abba lost his past, my own past kept racing back. Not long ago I asked Eric whether the same thing had happened to him back then—the huge upwellings and flood tides of memories, the way they arrived day and night in wave after wave. “Definitely not,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

In those sad, anxious days, I sometimes found myself drifting back in memory to our first childhood home, the one in Hillsdale. I sat in my apartment on Broadway and at the same time went wandering around like a ghost in the little house in Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson. I almost felt as if I lived on both sides of the river at once. One winter afternoon, in a particularly vivid reverie, I took a mental stroll into the bedroom that Eric and I shared in Hillsdale when we were kids. In our bureau we had two drawers that weren’t for shirts and socks. We called them our Treasure Drawers. As I sat in a state like a waking dream—the dream of a dreamer pushing 60—I decided to walk over to the bureau and try my Treasure Drawer. It slid open as smoothly as ever. Then, still in the same reverie, I took everything out of the drawer, treasure by treasure, and examined each one. The Liberty silver dollar from Aunt Helen and Uncle Sol. The fossil fern from Illinois (or Indiana?). The little mummified seahorse from a roadside gift shop.

When the drawer was empty, I looked down at the bottom. Lying there in the dust and grunge was one last long-forgotten treasure.

A bluejay feather.

Eric didn’t even remember that we had Treasure Drawers.

Not long ago I realized what was going on during that eerie ghost walk. In my reverie, I was reliving a scene from the summer of ’69, when I was 14. We were packing up the house in Hillsdale for the move to Providence. One sunny morning my mother made Eric and me empty out our Treasure Drawers and decide what we wanted to keep and what we would throw away. We both protested. We wanted to keep everything. But she said, “You can’t keep everything. You have to go through it. You have to throw things out.”

I realize now, having gone through the old attics in Providence, that she herself threw almost nothing out. Most of the furniture from Hillsdale went into the moving van; so did bunches of useless old keys, one of them wrapped in a scrap of paper on which she’d written, “Old Dodge Comet?” I remember that old gray Dodge very well. Before we left Hillsdale, my parents sold it to a teenager in town, James Ricciardi, for $1. So why on earth did Mom pack the key?

Also, judging by the vintage-car listings on the internet, it couldn’t have been a Comet. Mercury—not Dodge—made the Comet.

Anyway, on that summer morning in 1969, I really did empty my Treasure Drawer and find that bluejay feather. I must have put the feather in there at the age of six or seven. By the time I was 14 I had forgotten about it, because we’d been filling those drawers with other treasures.

During my reverie on that winter afternoon in New York, I was sitting at my writing desk, right where I am sitting now. But at that point, my desk was surrounded by stacks and stacks of unexamined boxes that Eric and I had saved from Providence; messy, musty, dusty towers of stuff. I’d barely begun to sort through it all, to choose what to throw out and what to keep.

So that’s what triggered my episodic memory. I wasn’t just wandering around in the old house like a ghost. I was remembering the time that I emptied out the Treasure Drawer. The context had triggered the memory. It was a textbook case of Tulving’s synergistic ecphory.

I hope this is clear. Tales of mental time travel can get confusing. So many decades, so many places, so many continuities.

I still have some of those treasures, actually. A few of them are right here on my desk, and a few of them are in my office at Columbia. And apparently I have all of them in my brain.

7.

With HSAM and SDAM, scientists have bracketed a mystery. What’s going on in the brain when we remember or when we forget? What does the brain do differently during episodic memories and semantic memories? The difference between them looks dramatic in brain-imaging studies, which use fMRIs. When a subject is in the middle of mental time travel, a certain pattern of brain activity lights up. Psychologists and neuroscientists call this pattern the autobiographical memory network. People with SDAM fail to engage the autobiographical memory network even when they think back to major events like weddings and funerals. They can tell you about episodes in their lives in a matter-of-fact tone, without re-experiencing them.

Other differences have shown up, too. People with SDAM often have no mental imagery, a syndrome called “aphantasia.” Brian Levine, the psychologist who coined the term SDAM, has done a case study of Nick Watkins, a British theoretical physicist. Watkins can’t see any imagery with his eyes closed; it’s as if his mind’s eye is totally blind. He has no episodic memory either; he is SDAM. In interviews, he sounds just as rueful about his poor memory as my brother does.

A week or so after my bagel brunch with Eric, I arranged a Zoom call with Levine and told him about my brother and me. Levine said he now regrets the term SDAM. “It’s pejorative, you know? It focuses on the deficiency. And the deficiency is real,” he said, “and I don’t want to sugarcoat it. But there seem to be advantages that are just as real.” People with SDAM can function brilliantly, like Watkins.

This is a surprise, a deep paradox in the science of autobiographical memory. If memory is so important to us, if memory is a matter of identity, then how can Susie McKinnon be happy, having forgotten her cruises in Jamaica and Cozumel? And how can Watkins lead such a creative life?

Levine told me that he and his colleagues have now made a sharp pivot. They’re studying the strengths of people with SDAM. “We’ve brought some of them in to do brain imaging and gotten all sorts of interesting findings,” Levine said. If  “severely deficient” is not always what it seems, then neither is “highly superior,” he added. Many people with HSAM have remarkably vivid mental imagery, and its very vividness can lead to a deficiency.

Borges makes this same point in “Funes, the Memorious,” which he published in 1942. “In effect,” Borges writes, “Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” Funes’s memories were so intense that he found it hard to think. “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.”

“My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal,” Funes tells the narrator.

These days, scientists who study autobiographical memory are fascinated by the resemblance between Funes the Memorious and Solomon Shereshevsky, the memory-dazed mnemonist in Moscow. Borges couldn’t have known about Shereshevsky when he wrote “Funes” because Shereshevsky’s story wasn’t published until 1968. The neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explores the parallels between Funes and Shereshevsky in his book Borges and Memory. At one point, Shereshevsky was asked to memorize this table of numbers:

1 2 3 4
2 3 4 5
3 4 5 6
4 5 6 7…

Shereshevsky memorized the table effortlessly. However, for him it was just another vivid visual image. He didn’t think about the order of the numbers. He didn’t even notice the pattern that would have made the table so simple for the rest of us to remember.

8.

On the morning of our bagel brunch, my brother and I tried and failed to empty The Last Box.

And on the morning of Friday, September 19, a gentle, sunny, late-summer morning—it happened to be the anniversary of our father’s death—I went out on my terrace to take a set of memory tests. Eric was planning to take the same tests at his place, not many blocks away.

The tests came from Levine, who has now been studying autobiographical memory for 30 years. He was eager to explore our case, he told me. “It’s scientifically interesting for me,” he said. “You know, two brothers, and both writers. So similar, yet so different. It’s quite interesting.”

I set up my laptop under one of the big market umbrellas on my terrace, in the privacy of my junipers. During the years that my wife and I have lived in this apartment building, the junipers have grown from shrubs into trees. When we sit in our garden now, the row of trees helps to screen us from the windows of the tall buildings around us. That morning I needed the privacy because I found the prospect of taking Levine’s tests surprisingly intense.

Memory matters to me. What a memory you have, Giannetto! And I know it isn’t what it used to be.

In the shelter of the junipers, I started on the tests.

For the moment, Levine wasn’t asking us to tell any stories from our childhoods. He does those kinds of examinations with many of his subjects, although interviewing people about their distant pasts is tricky. Their answers can be hard to verify, and often their stories have been much rehearsed. I’ve rehearsed my own stories in writing my family memoir. Eric rehearses his in his one-man play, in a stand-up sketch he did for the Moth Story Slam, and in short stories.

On my laptop screen, I met a succession of computer-generated cartoon characters. I tried to learn their names as if I were at a cocktail party. After a pause, I met each of them again. Now I had to remember: Was it Cloud Bob who liked the shovel and the pickax? Was it Sponge Sam who liked the books and magazines? As the timer ticked away, the cartoon characters began to look faintly horrible.

In another timed test, I saw a series of irregular three-dimensional shapes on my screen. I had to mentally rotate each of them and judge what they would look like if viewed from the right or the left, from above or below.

Next, as the sun rose over the junipers, a series of two-dimensional geometrical shapes appeared on my screen. I had to decide whether the square was bigger than the circle, and whether the triangle surrounded them both … then the same sorts of questions again, but this time, I seem to recall, with red firetrucks, gray garbage trucks, and yellow VWs instead of geometrical shapes.

The tests took me almost two hours. I finished around 11:30 a.m., schvitzing a little under the arms.

Afterward, I texted Eric:

Did the online research study this morning. Brian doesn’t want us to compare notes, so I won’t say anything more than that.

And today’s the anniversary of Abba’s death … Thinking of him, but so often do anyhow …

Eric texted back:

I’m planning to do mine today as well

Thank you for reminding me about abba’s anniversary

I miss him

9.

It took some time for Levine to process the tests. At one point, without explaining why, he asked us to take some of them all over again. Near the end of October, we Zoomed with him at last.

“Thanks for your patience,” Levine said. “I’m sure you’re eager to hear the results. Give me a second here to pull up the screen that I need. … Okay, these are Eric’s numbers.”

Eric had bombed on the tests of mental imagery. In the one where you had to imagine what an odd three-dimensional object would look like if you rotated it, he had scored two standard deviations below the mean. In another test he scored four standard deviations below the mean. That one put him below 99.99 percent of the population. The score was so low, and fit so neatly with what Levine would have predicted, that rather than simply say, “Hooray,” he had asked us to take the tests over again.

For whatever reason, Eric had done a bit better the second time around, but still badly.

“Eric is pretty impaired in terms of imagery,” Levine said. “This is getting towards aphantasia.”

As we had all expected, Eric scored somewhere on the side of the spectrum near SDAM.

“I’m sure Jonathan is waiting with bated breath here,” Levine said. “Let’s go over to Jonathan.”

He walked through my test results. To me the most interesting part was a timed test in which my penchant for mental imagery had actually gotten in my way. When the questions were strictly logical (“The dog is smarter than the ape. The ape is smarter than the bird. The dog is smarter than the bird. True or false?”), my brother and I had scored almost exactly the same. But when the questions called up pictures in my head (“The dog is cleaner than the ape …”), I was slower than Eric. Apparently it took me some extra time to picture the clean dog, the messy ape, and the muddy bird. Eric didn’t have to slow down, because he didn’t picture them. To him they were all abstractions.

All in all, our scores were “confirmatory,” Levine said. “Jonathan’s high episodic. Eric’s low.” We had scored two standard deviations apart. That put us fairly close to the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Levine wondered—although it was just speculation—whether our differences in memory might help to explain why I am drawn to nonfiction and Eric to fiction.

Naturally I thought of Eric’s play, which he performs flawlessly from memory. And I thought of the writing life. For a writer, it can be a burden as well as a blessing to carry a garbage dump like Monte Testaccio around in your head. Eric and I both like reading how-to books about storytelling. One of his favorites, From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler, praises the creative power of forgetting:

The great British novelist Graham Greene said that all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. I want you to remember that Graham Greene quotation—though in fact it’s a paraphrase because I can’t remember the quote.

When I watch Eric onstage, I’m fascinated to see how many details, characters, and plotlines he has invented without losing his play’s emotional core, its autobiographical truth. I couldn’t work that way myself. I write nonfiction. I write about science. My memories are my memories; I would no sooner try to alter a detail than an archaeologist would mess with the stratum of a dig.

Reading those how-to books about story structure, I apply their lessons to my material and give my material a narrative arc. When Eric reads the same books, he sometimes chooses an abstract structure and then creates his material to fit.

Once, I told Levine, I was scribbling a family remembrance and I found myself briefly tempted—in order to simplify a scene—to move the location of a book. My father had a paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day in the guest room of the house in Providence. I wanted to move it to the sitting room, even though in my mind’s eye I could see the book’s spine perfectly clearly where it sat on a guest room shelf. I started to make the change. Then something in me cried out: Don’t move a single book.

Just thinking of Seize the Day threatened to stir up a series of episodic memories to which the book is connected by the indissoluble laws of the continuity of being. That copy of the novella played a part in a scene by my father’s hospital bed at a tough moment. But I didn’t get into that. I stuck to the point: Don’t move a single book.

Eric told Levine that he feels just the opposite. He described an exercise in one of his acting classes. It was one of the key moments that led him to write his one-man play. “You had to tell an autobiographically true story,” Eric said. “Had to be strictly true. But at any point that you wanted, you could start changing it, even though you’re still telling it as autobiography. And I loved that exercise from the outset. It was like, ‘Oh, I get to change it.’ ”

“Interesting,” Levine said. “But Jonathan wouldn’t be into that.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t. I would have to excuse myself.”

10.

I find myself struggling to end this essay, for the same reason that Funes the Memorious struggled to think. Too many “details, almost contiguous details.”

Seize the Day, for instance, was a slim green paperback. A moment ago, seeing it there on the shelf in my mind’s eye took me back to the guest room of the old house in Providence. I could see that the shelf was part of a piece of blond Danish modern furniture that my parents had bought in the ’50s. There were shelves on top and bureau drawers below. Then it came back to me: That was our old bureau, my brother’s and mine, the one where we kept the treasures.

The post You Must Remember This appeared first on The American Scholar.

Then, around four years later, another rocker heard the song and thought: Peace? Love? Was this for real or a put-on? In 1978, he recorded a cover that cut the bridge and otherwise left little room for doubt about how he felt. Produced by Lowe himself and released on the Armed Forces album, Elvis Costello’s snarling tale of disillusionment became a New Wave anthem.

Lately, I’ve been playing those two versions of the song in my head, wondering how, during a period of only a few years, a sincere call for peace became ripe for rage and sarcasm. With jingoism and belligerence all around us today, Brinsley Schwarz’s entreaty seems even quainter. But why? What is so funny about peace?

In 1931, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a branch of the League of Nations, solicited exchanges on the world’s pressing problems from a variety of thinkers. Albert Einstein was enlisted, and in July 1932, he contacted Sigmund Freud and proposed that the two tackle the question, “Why War?”

The two men had met once before. During the winter of 1926, the Viennese psychoanalyst traveled to Berlin to visit his son, Ernst. Einstein and his wife, Elsa Löwenthal, paid them a visit. Freud later quipped that their two-hour discussion was excellent, since he knew no physics and Einstein knew no psychology.

Six years later, both faced a darkening horizon. As they contemplated the causes of war, they had to wonder whether they would become its prey. Despite his Swiss citizenship, Einstein possessed no illusions. With the Nazi takeover of Germany a year later, he sailed across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, an ill, 76-year-old Freud clung to what he admitted might be “rationalizations.” He assured one ally that despite the rise of Hitler, Vienna’s Jews were safe, thanks to a negotiated treaty on minority rights that, if breached, required the League of Nations to intervene. As for Austria’s being swallowed whole by the Nazis, the French would “never allow” it. Such were the illusions that sustained the psychoanalyst when he received Einstein’s request to take up the riddle, “Why War?”

Einstein’s question was a bit ridiculous. Explain “war” in a short letter? Did the physicist expect the psychoanalyst to have a rule, an equation, some one-stop answer on the subject? Freud was not thrilled by the request. The often-marginalized founder of psychoanalysis enjoyed his association with the wild-haired theorizer of special and general relativity, but the vastness of the question and the epistolary format seemed like a recipe for disaster. Still, he didn’t want to turn Einstein down. A year later, their letters appeared in German, French, and English (translated by Stuart Gilbert), though tellingly, the pamphlet was barred from distribution in Germany.

In many ways, the dialogue between the two men highlighted their differences. Not particularly interested in depth psychology, Einstein was a moralist, a democratic socialist, and a dedicated pacifist. He had come to this last position after being disgusted by the whipped-up martial fervor in Germany prior to World War I. At that time, the 35-year-old physicist tried to rally opposition to the Kriegmenschen, who confidently touted the use of brute power as necessary and virtuous. In the 1930s, as the trumpets of war blared again, Einstein took up his pen for the cause of disarmament and building an antiwar coalition.

In his letter to Freud, Einstein focused on the troubles of nationalism. During the 19th century, modern, secular European states—shorn of the bonds once solidified by Crown or Church—struggled to maintain social cohesion. Universal ethical principles did not help to create national bonds. Instead, nations were inclined to define themselves by the shared heritage of their residents and the historical grievances they held toward their neighbors. Highlighting the irrationality of this attitude, the 19th-century press dubbed such bigotry Anglophobia, Francophobia, Germanophobia, or worst of all, xenophobia. The problem got bad enough for fin-de-siècle thinkers such as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Bertha von Suttner, Bertrand Russell, and H. G. Wells to suggest that the sole remedy was some form of supranational governance.

Einstein followed in that tradition. In his letter to Freud, he proposed that each country relinquish some autonomy to a neutral international body that would ensure law-based, collective justice and offer nonviolent conflict resolution. The toothless League of Nations could not yet provide this service, but it was a start. As for the enigma of why humans became possessed by a “wild enthusiasm” to kill and die for la patria, Einstein threw up his hands. Recently, he had penned a preface for a German pediatrician’s book called War as Illness. Was war, he asked, a “collective psychosis”? With that, he passed the baton to Freud.

As Freud put pen to paper, he relied on a range of Socratic skills honed over three decades. During those years, he was in near-constant dispute with an array of adversaries. He loved debate and admitted that he was most creative when thinking against others. These intellectual battles drew out his razor-sharp powers of analysis. Insoluble questions and imprecise terms would be dug up, then transplanted to more hospitable terrain. In addition, since shifting his studies from microscopy to the inner life, Freud had pioneered methods that allowed him to feel his way forward in darkness. Failures and impasses resulted in what would prove to be Freud’s most lasting achievement: a powerful, if easily misused, form of inquiry, with novel kinds of indirect evidence, and a specialized logic regarding deeper motivations that were not already known to the thinker.

Still, what an oddly phrased question. “Why War?” suggested that for his interlocuter, intergroup violence was an anomaly. Einstein believed that humans, as social animals, were naturally cooperative, and that organized violence was our greatest aberration. As such, he wondered if it might be driven by madness. Were there epidemics of insanity that explained everything from the battles of antiquity to the revolutions in France, Haiti, and Russia? As a proposition for historians, political thinkers, or military strategists, the notion was absurd. If war was an illness, they might have retorted, the cause was being human.

Freud’s early views on aggression and war had encountered much disbelief. By 1905, he had concluded that behavior was solely driven by the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. A modern Epicurean, he synthesized his theoretical excursions and clinical findings into an overarching concept: “psychosexuality,” which linked mind with body, reason with passion, and humans with their animal ancestors. Psychosexuality also made aggression neither intrinsic nor inevitable. Lift the repressive barriers imposed by family, church, and state, early Freudians contended, and civilized men and women would dispense with their frustrated fury. Otherwise, half-alive, pent-up beings would seek out violent, cathartic release.

This Rousseauian critique won adherents in urbane café culture and radical political circles, but it was opposed by a more prevalent view. During the decades that followed the Napoleonic Wars, Europeans conceived of themselves as custodians of the world’s most peaceful civilization. Technologically and scientifically, the continent had leapt ahead of the rest of the planet. Innovations in medicine, manufacturing, mechanized transport, electrical power, long-distance communication, basic science, trade, and military weaponry led to health, wealth, and power. Enhancing these advancements was the fact that after 1814, this once conflict-ridden region enjoyed relatively long periods of tranquility, attributed in part to advances like the Concert of Europe. After the Congress of Vienna ended in 1815, diplomats periodically congregated at this forum to calmly work out their differences. What better sign of a peace-loving culture?

In line with this self-perception, military theorists believed that in Europe, only “rational” wars would be fought. After the death of the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz in 1831, his writings were widely admired. He had presented war as a logical instrument of national policy. Although conflicts took place in an emotional maelstrom—the “fog of war”—they were governed by cold reason; war was politics by other means. Some went further and declared that war in Europe was on its way out. A Russo-Polish banker and financier, Ivan Bloch, published a six-volume study in 1899 called The Future of War. Bloch concluded that as an act of rational, Clausewitzian politics, war on the continent had become pointless. Fifteen years before World War I, Bloch predicted that future large-scale conflicts would be based on trench warfare, in which both sides took great losses and achieved little. War between nations had become “impracticable” and “impossible.” While busy wiping out the other side, one could easily be wiped out oneself.

There was, however, one sizable caveat: The great European powers may have considered themselves to be peaceful by nature, but the feeling did not apply to much of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas—parts of the world they had colonized through violent means in the 19th century. As telegraphic communications brought dispatches home to London, Brussels, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, riots and unexplained deaths were reported in China, Java, the Congo, Ethiopia, Morocco, and Tasmania. These encounters were wrapped in euphemism and racism; the “primitives,” like prehistoric “savages,” were viewed as inherently warlike. And so, the settlers periodically needed to carry out corrective operations, events described more like exercises in school discipline than the massacres that they often were.

This split vision of peace here and unacknowledged war there crashed during the summer of 1914. With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Concert of Europe split in half, halted negotiations, and descended into total warfare. Old rules that spared women and children—rules long abandoned in the colonies—no longer applied in the cities, towns, and countryside of Europe. The French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, though a fervent supporter of “actions” taken in the colonies, could not believe what was happening. “The war, which has brought so many nations into conflict,” he wrote (in E. Andrews’s translation), “burst like a clap of thunder upon a Europe which was pacifist [my italics] in its tendencies.”

Hardly. The brutality exercised in the colonies had come home. The birthplace of Bach and Chopin filled with the snap of repeating rifles and the screams of ambulances. Villagers stood wide-eyed as the earth was strewn with torsos. As the battles of Verdun and the Somme depressingly demonstrated, the “civilized” were slaughtering the “civilized” with “primitive” abandon.

The Great War was a disaster for many, including the Freudians. It compounded trouble that had started in 1910, when Freud, along with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, formed the International Psychoanalytical Association to weed out halfhearted adherents and make psychosexuality a shibboleth. That strategy backfired spectacularly, in part because of debates over the nature of aggression. Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s most prominent disciples, had rejected libido theory. Then president of the Vienna Society, Adler had insisted that the core driving force in humans was not sex but aggression, which, when repressed, led to feelings of inferiority and neurosis. “He has created for himself a world system without love,” Freud wrote to a friend, “and I am in the process of carrying out on him the revenge of the offended goddess Libido.” Just before war broke out, the loyal followers of that goddess had expelled doubters like Adler and Jung.

After the assassination in Sarajevo ignited war, Freud’s Pyrrhic victory became even more apparent. If it was ever wise to make a dogma out of psychosexuality, it didn’t look so smart after the Great War led to the worst mass killings in world history. Could this monstrous violence really have been caused by frustrated sexuality? The scale and scope of the cataclysm mocked that interpretation. Meanwhile, the International Psychoanalytical Association suspended all activities, journals ceased publication, and analysts were conscripted. For Freud, the conflagration did not just break up his fledgling community, it also shattered a lattice of conjectures. Some German neuropsychiatrists gleefully announced that the war falsified Freudian theory. Sexual repression could not do this.

In 1915, Freud began his own reappraisal. In an essay called “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (translated into English by James Strachey), he struggled to maintain some neutrality. “In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up,” he began, “relying as we must on one-sided information …” Provisos piled up as Freud tried to stake out a position as a nonpartisan, a restraint that distinguished him from many colleagues. For unlike Einstein, many scientists had entered the fray. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals, including the biologist Ernst Haeckel, released a proclamation supporting their side. The founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, churned out a 1915 work, The Nations and Their Philosophy, that made the case for German superiority. Not to be outdone, the French Le Bon pumped out The Psychology of the Great War, which focused on the “aggressive attitude” of Germans. Meanwhile, professors on both sides, having embraced social Darwinism, egged the fight on, seeing it as a battle royale for the future. The only question was which race would go the way of the mastodon.

Freud’s attempt to avoid partisanship may have been motivated by his perception of the conflict as more of a civil war. A nonpracticing Jew and outsider in the polyglot capital of a sinking, Catholic, monarchical empire, Freud was a secular liberal and man of science who embraced Enlightenment culture, whether it came from England, France, Prussia, or elsewhere. In that sense, his people were at war with one another.

In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud had little to say about what destroyed peace on the continent, but he predicted its effect. Our “high norms of moral conduct” had utterly failed to resolve differences peacefully. Mass “disillusionment,” he wrote, would now afflict men and women on both sides of the fight. That prognosis proved correct. If in August 1914, H. G. Wells enthusiastically declared that this was the “war to end wars,” not many people held that hope a few years later. After the Paris Peace Conference, when the punitive terms were confirmed, the British viceroy of India, Archibald Wavell, bitterly remarked that this was the “Peace to end Peace.” Some 20 million Europeans—nearly half of them civilians—had died. And for what?

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud’s Weltanschauung also tottered but seemed to hold. However, a clue in “Thoughts for the Times” pointed to a radical change that was coming. Freud had attempted to console his European readers. Their diminished sense of themselves, he insisted in that essay, was overstated, for “in reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed.” In the unconscious, he continued, “we are ourselves, like primaeval man, a gang of murderers.”

Murderers? In the unconscious? Adler had been exiled from the Freudian community for asserting that violence lurked inside us. Did Professor Freud now agree? Later, Freud would admit how difficult it was for him to make sense of a primary form of aggression. However, the war experience and strange clinical matters like masochism forced him to try. In 1920, when the psychoanalytic journals came back to life, Freud stunned his adherents by announcing a U-turn. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was a messy, digressive hunt through speculative physiology and psychology for a new drive, a source of aggression not accounted for by the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

In this reappraisal, one might have expected a discussion of Freud’s quarrels with Adler, not to mention another disciple-turned-rebel, Wilhelm Stekel, who had proposed that neurosis resulted from a battle between life and death forces. Instead, Freud referenced the work of a Russian analyst named Sabina Spielrein, who had put forward a theory in which destruction was inherent in creative actions of the psyche. Spurred by that, Freud wrote, he came up with a similar idea. In the unconscious, he maintained, libido coexisted with a death drive. If the life instinct Eros desired and created, then the death instinct, later called Thanatos, broke and destroyed. This death drive was an anti-desire; it expressed a yearning to be released from the constant anxiety and pressure of wanting. Thanatos sought out an unbothered state, a nirvana. It compelled us to relinquish hope, rather than nervously await what might be frustration or failure. Thanatos was a built-in remedy for the risk of disillusionment.

Though obscured by political rationalizations, wars—Freud wrote—were often driven by Thanatos. They were burn-it-down wildings, joint murder-suicide missions. Legions eagerly marched off, shadowed by their own doom, and when their enemies appeared, that shadow was cast outward. Thanatos controlled life’s risks by giving them up. It destroyed love with hate, the ambiguities of peace with eager warfare, and the anxieties of mutual understanding with dominant mastery. Hate and the urge to harm now had a primary source. Peace, Freud was forced to conclude, could no longer be achieved by lifting social and religious repression alone, for the death drive, too, would be untethered. It seemed Freud had grown closer to the Roman playwright Plautus, whom a few years later the psychoanalyst would quote: Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man.

In September 1932, Freud sent his reply. He groused to a colleague that the result was tedious and sterile, his lack of enthusiasm likely stemming from having cribbed from a prior work, Civilization and Its Discontents. “Life, as we find it,” Freud had declared in that melancholy masterpiece, “is too hard for us; it brings too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.” We must take refuge in illusions, deflections, substitute satisfactions, or intoxications. Even then, suffering will arrive through the superior power of nature, our fallible bodies, and lastly, the “inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society” (translation by James Strachey).

In “Why War?” Freud explored that last cause of suffering—our social world. If Einstein believed in social democracy, Freud asked why it had failed, why humans refused to be more cooperative. “We believe,” he answered, “in the existence of an instinct” for hatred and destruction. “We” was a stretch here, for the theory of Thanatos had been rejected by most leftist psychoanalysts, such as Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, and Erich Fromm, as well as child analysts who followed Freud’s psychoanalyst daughter, Anna. They insisted on a larger role for social causes. But time had only hardened Freud’s view. Emotionally crushed by the death of his daughter Sophie and in constant pain from intractable mouth cancer, he could see the end hovering before him. Often sleepless, he would write into the night to tire himself and perhaps, through his pen, briefly taste the creative pleasures of Eros.

Freud did not fully elaborate, for Thanatos was no easy sell. And as an explanation for large-scale human violence, it was just a start. For if we all possessed a universal, aggressive drive, why did wars occur here not there, now not then? In 1931, the psychoanalyst Edward Glover, at the time influenced by Melanie Klein, delivered a lecture to a forum of the League of Nations, in which he discounted political and economic forces and tried to convince his audience that war was due to unconscious sadism. It didn’t go well. In “Why War?” Freud made no such error: For him, the aggressive drive in humans was but a prerequisite for group violence. He then tried to provide a succinct account of how social collectives formed, cohered, managed divisive forces, and fell apart. He began circuitously, asking Einstein why pacifists like ourselves recoil from violent conflict. Aren’t we the odd ones? Animals fight for resources and dominance. Isn’t such aggression natural? Though we are shocked by war, isn’t the real question, How do we avoid it? After seeming to head toward the war-is-inevitable logic of militarists like the Nazi Carl Schmitt, Freud then spun around. Everyone should know how horrifying and detestable war was. Pacifists may be unusual, but they constituted a vanguard, a group that via the “evolution of culture” had redirected its violent tendencies toward a higher end.

The question had flipped. Why Peace? was now the mystery. If the secret was “cultural evolution,” what kind of social structure evolved to rein in and redirect our destructive drives? Modern liberal thinkers thought they had the answer. Early bands of humans, once they settled into agrarian life, no longer were self-sufficient. They required goods from others and depended on those others to buy their surpluses. Immanuel Kant, the Baron de Montesquieu, and Adam Smith all believed such interdependence would diminish and maybe even end warfare. The Mediterranean offered a rich example of how trade gradually wove foreigners into mutually beneficial relationships. The problem was that war was not unknown among those trading seafarers. In fact, it was frequent. If mutual exchange helped to support peace, what else was required to make peace last?

Freud headed into this murky terrain, again by picking at Einstein’s assumptions. The physicist had expressed frustration that any international tribunal for peace eventually would be corrupted. “Law,” he wrote, eventually would be opposed by “Might.” Freud responded by asking, in an almost exasperated way, why they couldn’t call things by their real names. “Might,” Freud wrote, was actually “violence.” Furthermore, violence could not be neatly opposed to the law, since the latter sprang from the former, like Athena from Zeus’s head.

To explain, Freud imagined the origins of our social order. The earliest humans, he surmised, resolved conflicts with brute force. Domination by the most powerful created fear among the rest. Eventually, weaker parties banded together. Any time a new bully arose, new groups coalesced in self-defense. And so, the raison d’être of a cohesive society was not trade but fear-driven cooperation.

That also meant divisiveness within the group needed to be contained. How? Long fascinated by anthropology and archaeology, Freud once immersed himself in James Frazer’s four-volume Totemism and Exogamy, which examined social cohesion in tribal life. Tribal groups, Frazer concluded, moved past the parochialism of their sacred totem by insisting that women marry outside the group. Intertwined bloodlines limited the demonization of rivals and stabilized larger alliances. The royals of Europe had long used such a strategy, but was there a modern equivalent? For Freud, it was egalitarianism and a just, rules-based order. Within a nation, necessarily full of diverse identities and affiliations, those commitments created stability. What you were doing to others could be done to you.

However, problems were certain to develop. As societies stratified, the powerful inevitably tried to exempt themselves from the law, while the weak sought to alter it to their advantage. These centrifugal forces could tear the body politic apart. Unlike free-market believers such as Adam Smith with his “invisible hand” or Bernard de Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees, Freud’s community could not “self-regulate.” Adjustments and reforms were required. Shared histories, myths, religions, rituals, and traditions still created commonality, but for Freud, the failure to secure equality before the law was badly corrosive.

Peace between nations was similarly predicated on equality; a just, rules-based order; and the need for constant reformations that protected against corruption. The breakdown of these psychic stabilizers led to paranoid us-versus-them conflicts. One violent solution was to turn back to that original communal rationale and find a common enemy. Even ridiculous reasons to hate could suffice. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud referred to the “narcissism of minor differences” to explain how, for example, North Germans and South Germans, though indistinguishable to outsiders, furiously villainized one another.

Before these destructive forces, Freud offered up the bravery and resolve of men like Einstein. Cultural evolution led to those who were able to value the whole, a “vanguard” of pacifists, egalitarians, and moralists. They advocated for equality even when it was not in their own interest. They agitated for peace while others fomented violence. They dared to question grievances against an ancient foe and the ideological usage to which such stoked anger was put. Diehard believers in justice, tolerance, and cooperation, they had successfully neutralized and redirected their aggression, not into suicidal submission but rather into a righteous opposition to warmongers.

In 1938, five years after “Why War?” appeared, Freud fled his home in Vienna for London, thanks to the urging of Princess Marie Bonaparte. Four of his sisters remained and would be murdered in concentration camps. The exile was spared this knowledge, for tortured by pain, he finally asked his doctor, Max Schur, to fulfill a pact agreed to years before. Dr. Schur put his patient out of his misery. Sigmund Freud died without fully witnessing how Thanatos strode across the earth, taking 100 million men and women and children with it. Elias Canetti wrote that during this time even the smallest hope needed to be banished in order to survive: “You no longer say to yourself, ‘The curse of destruction! If it would only stop! Stop!’ You say instead, ‘It shall be! Night after night, destruction, destruction!’ ” (translation by Peter Filkins).

From the safety of his study in Princeton, New Jersey, Albert Einstein took in the horror. His pacifism had been brought to its knees; in fact, six years after his letter to Freud, Einstein wrote another famous letter, this one to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which he urged the United States to quickly develop an atomic bomb before the Germans did. After the war ended, Einstein published an essay in The Atlantic, “Atomic War or Peace,” in which he defended pacifism as a principle, not an absolute commitment. The bombing of Germany and Japan, he concluded, had been justified. However, the commitment to global justice and pacifism now should be renewed. Atomic weapons should be unilaterally outlawed, and a world government must step in, enforce this ban, and provide international security.

Some of Einstein’s proposals materialized. The United Nations was founded. Its charter outlawed wars of aggression and created a body dedicated to the peaceful resolution of conflicts. A taboo on the use of nuclear arms also held. And the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was restrained by the recognition, as Ivan Bloch anticipated, that direct hostilities meant mutually assured destruction. However, in the same way that Bloch bracketed out wars in the colonies, the postwar period was not peaceful.

Recently, I saw Elvis Costello perform and, sure enough, he closed with an acoustic rendition of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” Costello, now 71, was coming off a long tour, and his voice quavered and cracked. The tone was no longer anger directed at cynics, but more melancholic. Still, the song swept the crowd up and gave me chills, since ultimately, in its clear-eyed survey of decadence and immorality, it offered not easily vaporized fantasies but something steadier. Call it hope.

Like Europe in 1918, like America after Vietnam, we again seem to be experiencing mass disillusionment. After the duplicitous invasion of Iraq, the falsity and theft that led to the financial crash of 2008, and the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic, the promises of globalism have come undone. Worse, suspicions around international cooperation imperil the postwar order. Nationalism has come roaring back and with it, militarism.

In the face of all this, to sustain real hope, disillusionment first may be required. My homeland, I always believed, though fallible, acted on fundamentally good intentions. Our exceptionalism as a nation was forever enshrined in those glorious founding words that we hold “to be self-evident,” the statue that welcomes persecuted masses to my city’s harbor, and the innumerable achievements that expanded individual rights, prosperity, and human knowledge. That America is exceptional; every citizen should be deeply proud of it. But there is another America. A number of years ago, I visited the Pentagon and stood before an exhibit that chronicled our military’s overt engagements. I was shocked. Today, the best estimate from the Tufts Military Intervention Project is that since 1945, excluding covert operations, the United States has participated in more than 200 military conflicts.

How are we to understand the fact that since the end of World War II, we have essentially always been at war? Why has our nation so often turned to armed conflict? Yes, Vietnam and the domino theory were mistakes. Of course, Iraq was a horrendous blunder—but 200? Like those pre-1914 Europeans who flattered themselves as “peaceful” by turning a blind eye to their own violence abroad, we might ask, What has been done in our names?

Wars, of course, differ. Some possess a casus belli; they are not just well-intentioned but also virtuous and noble, and in the end, they can save lives. However, among our nation’s 200 conflicts, how many were, at best, optional acts of militarism by a superpower that could do what it liked? How often have we been pushed into battle by leaders like Henry Kissinger, who believed pacifism, much less moral accountability in geopolitics, was ridiculous blather that signified pathetic weakness? What about the issue that both Einstein and President Eisenhower worried about—the way the military-industrial complex eagerly attends and pushes for war? Finally, Freud would have us wonder: How many of our violent missions indirectly stemmed from the difficulties we have squaring our “Wilsonian goodness” with our shortcomings? How often have we latched onto foreign demons to rid us of our own?

Wars and wars and wars. In all that fighting, were we at times busy restoring our own innocence by unifying against a new little Hitler? And as we did so, what cracks in our own society were papered over? By allowing internal fractures to go unattended over the decades, did we ensure that the solution provided by violent catharsis would also become an unwitting act of self-destruction, a gradual suicide? The “madman” abroad unifies us for a while, but the ills within our body politic do not heal. As the troops return from their missions, we blink and our homegrown problems burst back into sight. For an instant, their reappearance might occasion surprise, even seem odd, all these painful divisions over identity, power, and justice, in such a peaceable land.

The post Thanatos Rising appeared first on The American Scholar.

The campus is a classic contested site: a place that makes people safe for ideas, an incubator of unlabeled eggs, a bright island in darkness. In 2022, 17-year-old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford craving greatness, proud to believe in tech-driven change. “I still am, I guess,” he tells us, “but my relationship to this world has grown … complicated.”

Very. Silicon Valley talent groomers targeted Baker in his first weeks at Leland Stanford Junior University (est. 1885, current endowment $40.8 billion), and the black comedy of his involuntary upgrade from idealistic coder to global commodity reveals how the school’s science-bound are “cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed, and cultivated” by adults desperate for fresh frontal lobes to power the next trillion-dollar offering. Venture capital firms circle, offering yacht parties and slush funds to students who cannot yet vote, drink, or rent a car.

“Investors buy into hype cycles,” Baker writes, “knowing that the next Google will set them up for life. There seems to be more money now than ever, and more of it focused on a mythologized view of a young founder.” The canonical story is that of Facebook, which was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. Mark Zuckerberg fell out with Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, the classmate who had originally funded the venture with a check for $15,000. “Nowadays,” Baker notes, “Stanford clubs will spend twice that on a party.”

How to Rule the World recounts Baker’s freshman year, during which he lived one scandal and then covered another as a student journalist. “I found myself torn,” he explains, “between two worlds—that of a programmer glimpsing jaw-dropping wealth and that of a fledgling reporter revealing unsavory stories despite steep resistance.”

The Ivy League still trades in old-school power, but much of Silicon Valley was built on Stanford land by Stanford talent, and that symbiosis (and profit sharing) produced Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Theranos, Tesla, Google, and Lyft. Stanford alumni and faculty founded Netflix and LinkedIn, Open AI and Zillow, Victoria’s Secret and Trader Joe’s. The university “even operates its own VC fund to seed students, bragging that companies it has incubated are ‘3X more likely to reach $100 million in valuation.’ ”

No one expected a crossed wire like Baker. He joined the Stanford Daily’s investigative team, reporting first on the university’s infamous War on Fun, then testing the deeper waters of academic misconduct. Baker’s labors soon linked neuroscientist and biotech executive Marc Tessier-Lavigne to decades of questionable studies containing falsified research data and image manipulation; some papers he supervised dealt with treatments for Alzheimer’s. Tessier-Lavigne was a multimillionaire, a rumored Nobel Prize contender.

He was also the president of Stanford.

Strange doings in the Palo Alto C-suite keep cropping up. Secret deferred compensation packages have funneled millions to former presidents and deans, and in 2019, the Varsity Blues admissions bribery scheme made world headlines. An irate administration sent top law and public relations firms after Baker and the Daily, then embraced the modified limited hangout tactic—concede a little, stonewall the rest—invented for Richard Nixon by Stanford alumnus John Ehrlichman. It didn’t work for Watergate, nor did it deter Baker. The secrecy reflex of the rich and powerful is the engine of How to Rule the World, and its demolition is the reason Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of a George Polk Foundation special award for “a reporter who exhibits steadfastness and bravery and whose work does not fall into a typical category.” (Past Polk winners include Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.)

Tessier-Lavigne resigned. Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Baker’s story. The Stanford Daily continues its First Amendment battles, suing the Trump administration in 2025 for threatening noncitizen student journalists with surveillance, detention, and deportation. More comparatives would have been welcome in Baker’s tale: Do other prime STEM schools like MIT, the University of Chicago, and Caltech handle bold reportage with better grace?

And in this galacta-bucks universe of tech oligarchs, where are the women? Mostly shut out, Baker writes. “There are a hundred and fifty people—and they’re all men—who run the world,” the billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya once told a Stanford audience. The students listened, enraptured; after all, the lecture was titled “View from the Top.” “Anyone who wants to go into politics? They’re all puppets,” Palihapitiya continued. Instead, to succeed is “to aggregate enough of the capital of the world to then reallocate it against your worldview. And that’s why so many people are desperate to go here.”

Cleanly written, admirably sourced, Baker’s postpandemic tell-all is modeled on One L, Scott Turow’s classic of elite induction at Harvard Law, and shares a Y chromosome with other identity quests in hostile terrain, from Wall Street (Liar’s Poker) to backcountry Alaska (Into the Wild ). Early on, the author overplays the naïf—false modesty in an Andover product whose parents are supernovae of journalism. His father, Peter Baker, is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Susan Glasser, his mother, once editor of Foreign Policy and Politico, now covers D.C. for The New Yorker.

Except for wrenching war memoirs like Samuel Hynes’s Flights of Passage or Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle, few teenage lives warrant a book-length retelling. But How to Rule the World, set amid luxury and evil, is combat testimony, too, whether read as an audit of rot, a dark-academe survival tale, an obituary for the campus honor code, or a horror story rich in helpful tips: how to vibe-code fabulous tools, how to afflict the comfortable where it hurts, how to preserve a soul.

The Stanford development office is unlikely to hand out free copies, but this is an invaluable map, drawn by a participant-observer, for an amoral world where poets need not apply. This June, Theo Baker, once sworn to computer science, receives his Stanford B.A. One of his two majors is history.

The post Inside Man appeared first on The American Scholar.

The crowd erupts in cheers at the sight of a boy and girl, both age 13, who wave from a convertible. The boy wears a straw hat and a button-down shirt with a Peter Pan collar; the girl’s hair hangs in long braids underneath a bonnet that matches her ruffled dress.

They’re this year’s “Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher,” chosen from a pool of around 100 local seventh graders. The rigorous application process for the Tom and Becky Program, as it’s called, lasts six months and involves interviews, evaluations, and presentations in which the children demonstrate their knowledge of Twain’s works and the history of Hannibal. For the rest of the year, the selected pair will serve as tourism ambassadors, greeting visitors off riverboat cruises, strolling around the historic district and posing for pictures, and cutting ribbons around the community. “Growing up in Hannibal, that’s probably the most exciting thing you can do,” Ainsley Ahrens, who served as Becky in 2024–25, told me.

Hannibal is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain. Just about every location associated with his childhood has been developed into a potential source of revenue. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home, filled with memorabilia, is bordered by a whitewashed fence like the one made famous in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom, a mischief-maker whose antics range from wickedly ingenious to borderline sociopathic, tricks his friends into doing a tedious chore for him by pretending it’s fun. There’s the Mark Twain Cave—where Clemens himself played as a child and which inspired the one where Tom is trapped for three days along with Becky, his sweetheart—now electrically lit and accessible to visitors on an hour-long guided tour. The list goes on: the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”

Twain is a complex figure: A child of slave owners, he married into an abolitionist family and ultimately wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of American literature, with a deeply antiracist message. At the same time, the book has been criticized and even banned for its frequent use of the n-word and perceived racial stereotyping. The runaway success of Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion, shows that interest in Twain remains high even as contemporary readers increasingly acknowledge the ways in which his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people. “Part of the continuing fascination with Mark Twain is that he combines in his person both the best and the worst of our national culture,” Ron Chernow, the author of a new Twain biography, has said.

But you wouldn’t know it in Hannibal, where the perfume of manufactured nostalgia hangs heavy in the air. With their dogged focus on Tom Sawyer, a book that depicts an idealized version of Clemens’s childhood, the town’s cultural institutions avoid recognizing its history of slavery. “Mark Twain’s Hannibal is a palimpsest that yields diverse and often contradictory meanings,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin writes in Lighting Out for the Territory, her study of Twain and American culture. “It is also a microcosm of America itself—its promise and its potential, its guilt and its shame.”

Much of today’s Hannibal, like the Walmart just off the highway or the sports bar      showing a Cardinals game on its big screen, would be alien to Mark Twain. But as a skilled and shameless promoter of his own work—he liked to advertise his lectures with lines like, “The trouble begins at eight o’clock”—he would recognize, and likely admire, the strenuous marketing around his own persona.

Hannibal’s main commercial area, which occupies just a few blocks along Main Street and Third Street, offers a mix of blatant tourist traps and businesses catering more to locals. Famous lines spoken by Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim, with images of the characters, are printed on banners that hang from street lamps. Tom’s quote is from the whitewashing episode: “Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Just up the hill, a giant root beer mug advertising the Mark Twain Dinette rotates during the restaurant’s opening hours.

It’s July 2, and I’m headed to Java Jive, which calls itself “the first coffee shop west of the Mississippi” (the river is a block away). The wall is plastered with photographs of past Toms and Beckys and a picture of the site as it was 50 years ago. Now the café occupies two long, narrow rooms painted peach and decorated with lava lamps and original artwork by local artists (for sale). There’s a huge menu of sugary drinks, as well as assorted tchotchkes that wouldn’t be out of place in my Brooklyn neighborhood: a desk sign featuring a Taylor Swift lyric, a sippy cup that reads, “I like big cups & I cannot lie.”

I’m here to meet Ellie Locke, who was the official Becky Thatcher in 2016–17 and just graduated from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She’s working a summer job near the Lake of the Ozarks but is back in Hannibal for Tom Sawyer Days. “My dad is the youngest of nine, my mom is one of three, my grandpa was one of seven, and my grandmother one of seven or eight. And they’re all very close-knit still,” she explains over a lemonade.

Like all students in Hannibal, Locke was assigned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in her seventh-grade English class. “Partly to learn about the story, but also for the history of Mark Twain,” she says. Her cousins had been participating in the Tom and Becky Program for years, and she always knew she wanted to be a part of it. At age three, when she was supposed to be napping, her parents discovered her in the living room giving a speech, as if she were trying out for Becky.

The speech is the first hurdle in the process. Each would-be Tom or Becky has to speak for five to 10 minutes to a group of judges, as well as the current year’s official couple, about why he or she would make a good ambassador for the town. Twenty-four semifinalists—12 girls and 12 boys—will spend the next few months studying for a test “on everything Mark Twain, Hannibal, tourism, the book,” Locke explains.

After the test and an interview to assess the contestants’ knowledge and people skills, the group is narrowed down to 10 finalists. “Which is when the costumes come into play,” Locke says. For the Toms, the costume is relatively simple: a button-down shirt, a pair of pants, moccasins, and a big straw hat. For the Beckys, it’s an elaborate affair that can cost well over $1,000.

“You start with your pantaloons,” Annie Webb, one of this year’s Becky finalists, tells me later that afternoon at Mark Twain Elementary School, where her mother, Katie, is the music teacher. A vivacious 13-year-old who attends Hannibal Middle School, Annie has long light brown hair and green eyes. Today she’s wearing a floral tank jumpsuit and earrings with Becky charms, but she has brought her entire Becky outfit to show me.

The ritual begins with a visit to the Hickory Stick, a fabric store in the center of town, where the proprietor helps each girl pick out material for her dress and then stows it away to prevent duplication. Annie’s is red with tiny white dots, accented with navy blue trim and yards of white lace. Atop the pantaloons comes a crinoline—“a pouffy layer that poufs everything up.” Next is an apron-style overskirt, which may be split at the back to reveal the layers of ruffles underneath. The outfit is topped off with a matching bonnet, parasol, and handbag. The entire getup is custom-made by a seamstress.

Each Tom and Becky carries a bag filled with items that represent moments from the book or aspects of their characters that they’ve invented. The kids, who must be in character at all times while performing, use the objects as props to help them tell stories. Annie carries an old-fashioned cup-and-ball game and a string with 99 buttons on it. The story goes that the boy who gives a girl her 100th button will be her true love. “I’m kind of hoping Tom might give me my 100th button,” she says, in character.

Are these modern girls ever frustrated by Becky’s secondary status to Tom? “In the books, you don’t really hear about Becky having anything in her bag,” admits Koryn Miller, a poised 16-year-old who was the official Becky in 2022–23. But they tend to see Becky’s blankness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. “It gave me room to create this character in my head of how I think she should have been brought to life,” Koryn says. “You get to really make her your own.”

Although one boy and one girl will be chosen as the official Tom and Becky, there are so many events requiring their presence that the eight other finalists will also be pressed into regular service over the course of the year. Though they always perform in pairs, the kids rotate: The official Tom might be matched with a Becky finalist, or vice versa. “Being a Tom, it’s always on the spot,” says Mason McIntyre, a garrulous teenager who was a Tom finalist in 2023–24.

I’m visiting him and his sister Malaina, an incoming Becky, at their grandparents’ home in a tony neighborhood high on a hill northwest of downtown. There’s a model of the Robert E. Lee riverboat on the table in front of us and an antique gramophone in the corner. Mason, who speaks very quickly with a heavy Southern accent, wants to quiz me on life in New York City. He’s most curious about the subway. “So you don’t drive anywhere? … That’s goofy.”

When I can get a word in edgewise, I ask Mason what he most enjoyed about being Tom. “If I can make someone smile, if I can get that smile upon them, that’ll be a positive of the day. Ladies especially say it was a highlight of their day,” he says cheerfully.

His sister, in a blue-flowered T-shirt, khaki shorts, and gold watch, is as cool and polished as Mason is exuberant. “There’s a lot of history in Hannibal because Mark Twain was a very big part of modern-day literature,” she says, speaking clearly and rather formally. “It’s a very homey place. We want people to feel welcome whenever they come to Hannibal.”

I ask both siblings what it’s like to be in character all the time. “They have this saying, ‘You’re never tired, you’re never hungry’—what was it?” Mason says. (He’s referring to the Tom and Becky Program’s unofficial motto: “Never hot, never tired, never thirsty, never hungry.”) “You can’t complain. It’s not that it’s a hassle. It’s very fun. Well, with the heat advisory …” The thermometer will reach the upper 80s every humid day of my visit to Hannibal.

It’s hard work for the parents, too. For each event, at least one parent must volunteer time driving and supervising the kids. For the official Tom and Becky, this is a major financial commitment: They visit Twain festivals in Calaveras County, California (site of the original jumping frog contest); Carson City, Nevada, where Sam Clemens and his brother Orion lived briefly; and Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain’s mansion has been turned into a museum. The kids’ travel is covered, but parents and other family members pay their own way.

The parents I speak to consider it a worthwhile investment. “It’s definitely an experience that will bring out some skill sets for him for the future,” says Koryn’s mother, Sarah, who runs Bark Twain, a pet-sitting company. And it’s good for the résumé, since local businesses like to hire former Toms and Beckys. “They’re always good kids, good in school, well-rounded,” Koryn says. “No human is perfect, but everyone that is a Tom and Becky tries their best.”

“A book a day keeps reality away,” reads a sampler in the window of Clemens General Store. This wasn’t Twain’s philosophy—in Huck Finn above all, he aimed to depict the realities of racism—but it could well be the town motto. Not only does Hannibal’s elevation of Tom Sawyer as an icon of American boyhood marginalize Huck, a more developed and ultimately more admirable figure, but it also deliberately obscures the difference between the author and his fictional creation. “I probably didn’t find out Tom Sawyer was not a real person until I was like 10,” says Preston Miller, Koryn’s brother and one of the incoming Toms.

Poking around the complex of small buildings that make up the Mark Twain Boyhood Home, I can understand why. The museum’s official line is that “Mark Twain transformed his memories into literature through the power of his creative imagination.” But over and over, it insists on identifying Sam Clemens the author with Tom Sawyer the character. “Here stood the board fence which Tom Sawyer persuaded his gang to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing,” a plaque outside informs the visitor. Inside, a sign points to a bedroom window from which “Tom Sawyer would jump” when sneaking out at night.

Among the Clemens family paraphernalia and nostalgic descriptions of Sam’s childhood antics is a single panel about enslaved people. In Clemens’s time, about a quarter of the residents of the county, or 2,800 people, were enslaved. Forty-four percent of white families owned slaves; others rented them. The museum does not mention that Sam at one point shared his childhood bedroom with an enslaved boy named Sandy, who slept on a pallet. He also spent time on his uncle’s farm in nearby Florida, Missouri, with an enslaved man named Daniel Quarles, who is believed to be one inspiration for Jim.

The Huckleberry Finn House, a small white hut inside the compound, is a re-creation of a home in which Tom Blankenship, a local urchin often said to be a model for Huck, once lived with his family. The exhibits treat cursorily some of the controversy around the novel, emphasizing Twain’s use of both humor and realism in telling the story. “Should it be banned?” the exhibit asks, and answers, “Decide for yourself. Read it.”

Mark Schneider, a curator, tells me that the museum was last renovated nearly 30 years ago and that a new update is on the horizon, potentially to include a Mark Twain hologram. Perhaps it will replace the current mockup of a gigantic sculpture containing 28 figures from Twain’s works that was planned to commemorate Twain’s 100th anniversary in 1935 but was never built. Tom and Huck both appear twice, whereas Jim is relegated to the far right corner, kneeling and looking up at the King and the Duke, the two con men who will eventually turn him in. A line of Huck’s featured on the panels hung around town echoes in my head: “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

First thing in the morning on July 3, the 10 incoming Toms and Beckys line up on the east end of Main Street, behind a statue of Tom and Huck. They all have numbers attached to their chests so that the judges can easily tell them apart. The moms hover, adjusting the kids’ costumes and commiserating about how impractical it is that the girls have to wear white gloves. “I feel highly uncomfortable,” complains Tom #5, a small kid with very short hair and round glasses. One person sports a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Sawyer’s Painting Company.”

A photographer asks the girls to pose while twirling their parasols, but they’re standing too close together and the parasols keep colliding. Meanwhile, the Toms are getting restless. Tom #3, in a yellow shirt, shoots his slingshot at one of his fellow contestants.

After the photographs, it’s time for the kids to greet tourists under the blazing sun. The girls can wear ice packs under their costumes, but the boys have only their hats for protection. In pairs they start down the hill, fanning out onto Main Street. “Bye, Becky—good luck! See you at lunch!” Annie’s mom calls. Tom #1 tugs at the arm of Tom #3. “We have to wait for our Beckys!” he cautions.

One of the judges approaches Tom #1 and Becky #1 and asks for tourism advice. “I think you should start right here! The Mark Twain Boyhood Home is the main attraction in Hannibal,” chirps Becky #1. Tom #2 offers directions to the Mark Twain Cave and recommends purchasing a souvenir rat on a string from the gift shop. Becky #2 considerately offers a sweating judge her parasol. Tom #4 and Becky #4 are asked to move so that workers can weed the sidewalk in front of the whitewashing fence in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities. Meanwhile, Tom #5 and Becky #5 act out the engagement scene for another judge. He seems a little lackluster, but she’s into it.

Rereading the novel for the first time since my own childhood, I found this scene disquieting. At first Becky resists Tom, but he gradually breaks down her resolve. At one point, Twain tells us, Tom takes her “silence for consent” and whispers sweet nothings in her ear; when he tries to kiss her, she runs away and hides under a desk, but he tugs at her apron and hands until she gives in. “By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop; her face, all glowing with the struggle, came up and submitted.” (The kids hold out Tom’s hat and duck behind it so that it only appears as if they’re kissing.) During our conversations, I asked some of the Beckys whether they were troubled by the gender dynamics, but no one took the bait. Now, Becky #5 explains to the onlookers that “it was love at first sight, but she was playing hard to get.” They applaud and cheer.

Melissa Cummins, the program’s longtime director, ushers all five pairs onto the shady side of the street, where they wait hopefully for tourists to show up. Alas, it’s a sleepy Thursday morning, and the street is nearly empty. My nine-year-old daughter, whom I’ve brought along, steps in to fill the void. Tom #1 gives her a stick of candy, and she asks him what he likes to do for fun. “I love to swim and fish and play in the woods with my friends,” he says. “He finally caught a fish,” Becky #1 chimes in. “It was this big!” She pulls out an antique tape measure from her bag and measures about three inches. One of the judges, looking on, guffaws.

In front of Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, Tom #3 shows bugs to my daughter while Becky #4 rolls her eyes. I ask him about a piece of paper he’s holding, a picture of “Injun Joe”—another of the novel’s now-regretted stereotypes. “He’s wanted for murder,” Tom #3 says, his eyes glittering. “We’re out here fearing for our lives!” Becky #4 adds. Tom takes the opportunity to throw her under the bus. “Becky’s terrified of everything,” he says.

Planted in front of the Blue Daisy gift shop, Tom #2 and Becky #3, twirling nervously from side to side, try to engage with tourists, who smile and wave. “I wish I had a horse and buggy,” he says to her. “You would probably crash it,” she retorts.

One of the judges is John Maupin, a retired lawyer from St. Louis who was Tom himself in 1963. He and his Becky traveled to New York City to dedicate the Missouri pavilion of the World’s Fair, he tells me. Dressed in their costumes, they took the subway all the way from Grand Central Terminal to the fairgrounds in Queens. “We told people there were days we couldn’t go to school because buffalo herds surrounded our house. They believed it,” he says.

Becky #2 shows another judge the matches and collapsible cup she’s carrying in her bag: If she’s ever stranded in a cave again, she says, she’ll be able to collect water. These Beckys seem determined not to be caught unprepared; they certainly won’t need to depend on their Toms, who don’t seem equipped for survival in a cave. Tom #5 looks on forlornly—his Becky has disappeared. Meanwhile, Tom #2 enthusiastically demonstrates how to use a dead cat to drive away warts—another plot point in the book. “Spunk water, spunk water, swallow these warts,” he chants, hurling a stuffed cat by its tail. A father and daughter heading into the ice cream parlor look on. He was the official Tom in 2000, he tells the kids. “Do you ever miss it?” Tom #4 asks. “I loved meeting the boats with people from out of town,” he says wistfully.

Maupin is quizzing Tom #3 and Becky #3: “When the steamboats came here, what were they bringing?” The kids have no clue. “Coal?” Becky tries. Tom vamps, “If I hadn’t had to go to school, I could have seen.”

After an hour of this, the kids are starting to fade. “You’re all still out here?” asks an older woman with a panting pug, pausing to straighten Tom #2’s collar. “You’re lookin’ awful good,” she adds. Becky #3, whose family is planning a trip to New York, has been asking me for travel tips, but she snaps back into character when a woman walks by wearing a sun hat festooned with military pins. A substitute teacher in the local schools, she tells me that the whole town takes responsibility for Tom and Becky. “When I see them somewhere and I think their mom’s not paying attention, I say, ‘Becky, are you supposed to be here?’ ”

Megan Rapp, the executive director of the Mark Twain Museum, appears in a black-and-white print dress and a button that reads, “Peace Love Twain.” Behind her, the trolley goes by, tourists leaning out the windows. My daughter has Annie’s cup and ball and is trying determinedly to get the ball in the cup without hitting herself in the head. Maupin is talking to Becky #4 and Tom #5 about growing up in Hannibal. “Your friends from then will be your friends forever,” he says. “Everyone knew not only me but my parents and grandparents. You couldn’t get away with anything.”

Feeling woozy from the heat, I give in to my daughter’s pleas to check out Clemens General Store. The wares include old-time board games, puzzles, novelty salt and pepper shakers, a cookbook by Snoop Dogg and Earl “E-40” Stevens called Goon with the Spoon, and a cutting board that reads, “Don’t be afraid to cut the cheese.” “They have everything anyone could want,” my daughter says, awestruck. At the counter, before I can stop her, she eats most of the fudge samples, including a purple goo called “Huckleberry Haze.”

“People that like American literature … are some of our brightest people,” G. Faye Dant tells me. “But they go right over there to Huck Finn’s house and don’t walk across the street to Jim’s place. A lot of people don’t want to make that connection.”

We’re standing in the one-room museum Dant opened in 2013. Called “Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center,” it chronicles Hannibal’s Black history, starting with the story of Daniel Quarles, the enslaved man whom the young Clemens got to know on his uncle’s farm. Through painstaking archival work, Dant has managed to trace Quarles’s story back to Virginia in the 1800s. “That’s a sketch that I came across,” she says, her speech deliberate but animated as she points to an image on the wall of enslaved people walking from Virginia to Tennessee. “And he would have done that very same thing.”

Tom #3 and Becky #3 may not have known what the steamboats that came to Hannibal were bringing, but one answer is enslaved people. Twain’s father, John Marshall Clemens, could be brutal to his slaves, including a woman named Jennie who once saved the young Sam Clemens from drowning. Once, after she pulled a whip out of his wife’s hands, John Marshall Clemens punished her by beating her. Twain later said of the enslaved children he and his friends played with, “We were comrades, and yet not comrades.”

Dant found a photograph in the Library of Congress, taken by the local photographer J. R. Shockley, of two enslaved boys on Main Street in Hannibal, steps from where we are standing. Dressed in ragged clothes, their feet bare, neither of them meets the camera’s gaze.

“Hannibal took the position that we don’t have to talk about slavery because we’re gentler, kinder,” Dant says. Still, even in Tom Sawyer, slavery is present. Tom uses the n-word blithely in conversation, and his Aunt Polly owns an enslaved boy named Jim (a different character from the grown man in Huck Finn).

In Hannibal, too, the traces of slavery are evident to those who look. The little stone building that houses Jim’s Journey was built by enslaved people in 1837. In its front yard stands a memorial wall Dant made out of bricks donated by a local resident who found them while renovating her property, which had originally belonged to an enslaver. On a few of the bricks, the handprints of the enslaved people who made them are still visible.

A fifth-generation Missourian, Dant and her husband are both direct descendants of enslaved people. When she was growing up in Hannibal, she says, the only public acknowledgment of a Black character in Twain’s writings was a metal plaque, dating from the 1930s, that supposedly marked the spot where “Huckleberry Finn and [n-word] Jim stopped for a few days on their way down the Mississippi.” (The slur is sometimes used incorrectly as part of the character’s name, though Twain never refers to him that way in the novel.) The marker was donated to Hannibal by George Mahan, the son of an enslaver who was then the president of the State Historical Society of Missouri. He also purchased and donated to the city the building that is now the Boyhood Home. “That gives you a sense for Hannibal,” Dant said in a recent podcast interview. “Most of the politicians, most of the businessmen, most of the people—white people, I’ll say that—in leadership roles, are descendants of enslavers.”

Dant’s museum is built on donations. One wall is nearly covered with pages from the 1927 Colored Directory, a listing of Black-owned businesses that helped Black people navigate segregated cities. Another is devoted to artifacts documenting the Quarles family: pictures, newspaper references, a passage from a slave narrative. The perfectly preserved Navy uniform of a Black veteran is part of a display commemorating Black members of the armed forces. Some of this material appears in Dant’s recently published book, Hannibal’s Invisibles.

Dant’s museum isn’t part of the official Mark Twain complex. “They acknowledge me now, but they don’t support this effort,” she says, telling me that some local business owners won’t let her put flyers in their windows. “I don’t know if they think it’ll scare off their customers or if they just don’t want to act like they’re supporting us,” she says. When she approached a former director of the Boyhood Home about including Jim’s Journey in his promotional materials, she says that he told her, “We’re not a Huck Finn kind of town. We’re a Tom and Becky town.”

“A few years ago, we had a biracial girl” as Becky, Dant says now. But otherwise, in a school district that averages about 80 percent white, virtually all of the Toms and Beckys are white. Only two of the current contestants have visited Dant’s museum. “I don’t do Tom and Becky,” she says. “I do Samuel Clemens.”

On the morning of the Fourth, every single person in the breakfast room at our motel is wearing the colors of the flag. A little girl has red, white, and blue ribbons wound through her braid and glitter that makes her hair and cheeks sparkle. My daughter looks at her own purple T-shirt self-consciously. “We look like we’re not from here,” she says.

I’m a little surprised that this is the first time she has noticed. We’re Jewish, and Hannibal’s culture, like that of most small towns in America, is relentlessly Christian. Some of the Tom and Becky contestants can easily rattle off their favorite Bible verses; crosses and T-shirts with Christian slogans are omnipresent in town. Meanwhile Hannibal’s former synagogue, a brick building with a stained-glass Jewish star and the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on its façade, was sold to the New Hope Gospel Center in the 1970s. The temple’s congregation merged with one across the river in Quincy, Illinois. The Quincy synagogue closed its doors in 2019; the nearest active congregation is now nearly 100 miles away, in Columbia, Missouri.

The parade won’t start until 10 a.m., but people are already starting to gather in Hannibal’s business district an hour beforehand. A few blocks up the hill from the tourist area, it’s shabbier, with numerous shuttered storefronts. Hannibal’s population peaked at roughly 22,000 in the 1930s and has been steadily trending downward ever since. But the town is thriving in comparison with others in the region. An English teacher I met tried to follow Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi in her own kayak and discovered that most of the towns along the river were in ruins. In one, the only buildings open were a library and a church; in another, the entire main street had burned down. The Mark Twain industry, a pillar of Hannibal’s economy since the 1930s, is keeping the town alive.

We leave our rental car on a side street and join the crowds jostling for position by the post office, where the incoming Toms and Beckys have assembled in an old-fashioned trolley. Seeing their excitement, I am surprised to find myself choking up. I blow a kiss to Annie, but she doesn’t see me.

The vehicles go by: police cars, an antique Ford Bronco, decked-out Harleys. There’s a cancer charity and a unicyclist. Bleigh Construction Company, celebrating 75 years. Heartland Towing. Point Pest Control. Pageant winners: the 2025 Miss Hannibal and Miss Mark Twain, Mister Hannibal, Miss Marion County. A group called Build Our Country on Christ on a float made out of cardboard blocks decorated like Legos. A girl wearing a red, white, and blue T-shirt that reads, “Everybody in America Parties on My Birthday!” The Gracie Barra Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu team. Almost everyone is white. In a marching band playing “Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue,” I count three Black kids among more than 50 musicians.

As the parade wraps up, the onlookers start moving to “Central Park,” a plot of grass a few blocks away. Vendors are selling hot dogs, tie-dyed clothing, and a brand of barbecue sauce made with moonshine. All the seats close to the bandstand are already occupied by the families of the Toms and Beckys.

It’s Melissa Cummins’s last Tom and Becky ceremony as program director, and she’s so emotional, she can barely speak. “This is not just a Hannibal tradition. It is loved around the world,” she says. The woman next to me nods her head sympathetically. “She’s put her heart and soul into it. Those tears are real,” she says.

After the outgoing Toms and Beckys share favorite memories of their year, each of the incoming kids delivers a short speech. “My name is Becky Thatcher, but some of you may know me as Annie Webb,” begins Annie, nearly bubbling over with excitement. “I feel like I just stepped out of the papers of Mark Twain’s book,” Malaina says, “and let me tell you, it’s already been an adventure.” In addition to thanking their families, their teachers, and their seamstresses, several contestants offer gratitude to God: “Without him, none of this would be possible,” one of them says.

The judging is “based on what the kids know about Hannibal, about Mark Twain, how they interact with visitors,” Stacey Mueller, the incoming director of the program had told me earlier. “Looks have nothing to do with it. Tom and Becky are universal.” Finally, when I think I can’t stand the heat for a moment longer, Cummins taps Thatcher Johnson, the tallest and perhaps most conventionally handsome of the group, as the official Tom Sawyer. He circulates around the Beckys till he finds Malaina. When he kisses her cheek to designate her as official Becky, her mouth drops open in a perfect O of surprise and delight.

On July 5, our last day in Hannibal, we head over to the frog-jumping contest, which my daughter has been looking forward to all week. Inspired by “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Twain’s most famous short story, kids “rent” a frog from a giant bucket of the amphibians (collected by the Boy Scouts), place it in the center of a bull’s-eye-shaped mat, and prod it till it jumps. The frogs get three tries to reach the outer circles.

The competition takes place around noon on yet another blindingly hot day, and the frogs need more encouragement than one would expect. Some try to escape, but most lie there pathetically, legs splayed, looking confused. “It’s too hot for this!” a dad complains as a cute blond boy around five tries unsuccessfully to get his frog to move.

Thatcher, newly anointed as Tom, is performing his official duties for the first time, with Annie as Becky. They give up on encouraging the little kids and stand in front of the cooling fan. Tom hands a piece of “pirate treasure” to a girl in a rainbow T-shirt. “Found it in a cave with my friend Huck,” he says, still in character.

A man I haven’t met before addresses me out of the blue. “How’re you liking Hannibal?” he asks without introducing himself. “Pretty different from New York?”

I respond with something noncommittal.

“Kinda gross,” he volunteers, gesturing at the scene around us.

I look around at the kids handling the frogs, which they don’t seem to find particularly gross. Frog 91 is currently on the lily pad. My daughter’s number is 118. All I can think about is how eager I am for her to take her turn so that we can find some shade.

An older man, maybe the grandfather of the kid with frog 91, yells, “Boo!” at the frog. It doesn’t move.

“Inhumane,” my interlocutor adds.

When he says that, something shifts.

My daughter, overhearing him, feels it too. “It’s frog torture,” she says slowly. “You’re scaring the frog to make it move.”

A tiny girl next to us in blue Crocs has her hand around the neck of a frog nearly the size of her arm. “That frog looks mad,” my daughter stage-whispers to me.

The little girl hears her. “I don’t want to,” she says to no one in particular.

There can be no doubt: This ritual is inhumane. Incredibly, my first reflex is to justify it. I don’t want my daughter to feel bad. It’s a Hannibal tradition, sponsored by the Boy Scouts, and what could be more wholesome? It must not be pleasant for the frogs, but maybe they aren’t really suffering. It lasts only a short time.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

It’s time for my daughter to select her frog. She gently places it on the mat, where it takes a few reluctant steps. We won’t be winning anything today. We say goodbye to Tom and Becky and head back to our car.

The post Twain Town, U.S.A. appeared first on The American Scholar.

After that trip, his field studies took him again and again to communities coping with the aftermath of disaster: a mercury spill in Canada; an underground petroleum leak in Colorado; the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. He collected insights from these visits and distilled them into a slim but seminal book, A New Species of Trouble (1994).

In industrial civilization, Erikson wrote, humans had unwittingly made an unsettling trade. On one hand, we had increasingly buffered ourselves against natural disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. On the other, the progress that afforded this protection had also yielded something else: the phenomenon of “technological disasters,” which he defined as “everything that can go wrong when systems fail, humans err, designs prove faulty, engines misfire, and so on.” The oil tanker crashes; the dam collapses; the reactor operator slips up. “The first thing to say about this new species of trouble,” he wrote, “is that it is a product of human hands.”

Erikson (who happened to be the son of famed psychoanalyst Erik Erikson) theorized a psychological difference in how humans react to these two types of events. Although natural disasters—or “acts of God,” as they used to be called—could be devastating, people tend to accept them as part of life, an unlucky break. Technological disasters, by contrast, provoke “outrage rather than acceptance or resignation. They generate a feeling that the thing ought not have happened, that someone is at fault.”

In the years since that book was published, we’ve had our share of technological disasters. There was the 2015 leak at a natural gas storage facility in Southern California that released more than 100,000 metric tons of methane and other toxic chemicals over the course of four months; the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in which cars carrying hazardous substances caught fire, contaminating the surrounding area. These incidents and others would have fit seamlessly into A New Species of Trouble.

But we have also seen another development: The lines between natural and technological disasters have increasingly blurred. The most emblematic catastrophes of the Anthropocene are those in which humanity and nature collide and collude. The tsunami causes a nuclear meltdown; radiation contaminates the soil. Climate change intensifies the drought; the drought abets the arsonist.

This newer species of trouble was epitomized by the Los Angeles fires of last year, when a mélange of natural and unnatural forces produced one of the most shocking and costly calamities in American history.

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” Joan Didion famously wrote in 1967. “What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow. … For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.” She quoted Raymond Chandler: “On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

The Santa Ana winds blew long before midcentury literary icons enshrined them in poetry, before Spanish settlers arrived in the Los Angeles basin, before the invention of the steam engine. In other words, they’re natural. But in early January 2025, the winds blew in a city, and on a planet, that had changed substantially since all of those prior developments. The global temperature had risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius—2.34 degrees Fahrenheit—since preindustrial times. In the fall of 2024, Los Angeles County had record-low precipitation. The autumn had been conspicuously warm. The shrubs and grasses were aching to burn.

Then came two points of ignition, one on the west side of the city, the other on the east. At a trailhead in the Pacific Palisades, a 29-year-old Uber driver allegedly started a small fire. It was soon suppressed, but almost a week later, according to authorities, undetected embers from that fire met with those Santa Ana winds, reigniting the blaze. The same day, January 7, another fire started in Eaton Canyon under a dormant power line. The leading theory is that the magnetic field of a nearby active line may have induced an electric current in the idle line.

These fires swiftly grew into hellish conflagrations that obliterated two communities, Pacific Palisades and Altadena. They destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed at least 31 people. (Hundreds more people are thought to have died soon afterward as an indirect result—from health conditions exacerbated by the smoke or because of disruptions to the health care system.)

Through mishap or malice, through one person’s momentary impulse or the accretion of hundreds of years of choices, human hands multiplied the damage caused by the elements—and the elements multiplied the damage caused by human hands.

But there’s another feature of Erikson’s new species of trouble. He focused on what he dubbed “toxic disasters,” which make up many, though not all, technological disasters. A plane crash, for example, is a technological disaster but not a toxic one. Toxic accidents “contaminate rather than merely damage,” he wrote; “they pollute, befoul, and taint rather than just create wreckage; they penetrate human tissue indirectly rather than wound the surfaces by assaults of a more straightforward kind.” Living in the aftermath of a toxic accident such as a nuclear meltdown or chemical spill, people feel an insidious and pervasive dread. You don’t know exactly where the contaminants are, so you fear them everywhere, including in your own body.

The Los Angeles fires were a toxic disaster. When a modern city catches fire, the smoke contains residue of not just the organic matter of trees and grasses but also all the materials in our homes and cars, furniture and clothes, toys and electronic devices: lead, asbestos, plastics, metals. These particles, liberated by fire, stream into the lungs of firefighters and fleeing residents. And they settle into buildings and soil long after the flames have been extinguished. A recent study by UCLA researchers found elevated levels of potentially carcinogenic compounds inside houses within the burn zones.

Last June, in a commentary published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers made a startling comparison. They argued that to understand the Los Angeles fires, we should look at the consequences of the burn pits constructed on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan: “The chemical profile of the smoke from the LA fires is similar to that of a massive, uncontrolled burn pit, with the release of toxins such as lead, mercury, volatile organic compounds, and other harmful substances.” Exposure to these toxins, they wrote, has been linked to respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological conditions.

For residents returning to their homes or trying to rebuild in the Palisades and Altadena, the danger is far from over. “One reason toxic emergencies provoke such concern is that they are not bounded, that they have no frame,” Erikson wrote. Imperceptible contaminants “do no immediate damage so far as one can tell, and then begin their deadly work from within—the very embodiment of stealth and treachery.”

How does the psychological response to the California fires compare with the reactions Erikson so astutely observed? It’s hard to generalize; the range of reactions is wide and heterogeneous. In any disaster these days, there is a tendency to seek human culprits. But those who get the most blame—mayors, fire chiefs—are not necessarily the most culpable. It’s just easier to point fingers at them than at the diffuse network of corporations and lawmakers that bears responsibility for the conditions that made the fires so ruinous. And yet, for some, indignation may be tempered by the knowledge that wildfires have always been a feature of life in Southern California.

Of course, the natural, pre-industrial world was full of risks, whether from poisonous berries, hungry lions, or storms against which people were more vulnerable. We are no longer at the mercy of the elements to the same degree. We have a greater capability than our ancestors did to protect ourselves from natural disasters, with advance warning systems, firefighting equipment, and hospital infrastructure that didn’t exist a century ago. But we are simultaneously increasing the frequency and destructiveness of these events, in a kind of race against ourselves. We live in unease, anticipating the next disaster, knowing we are surrounded by hazards, uncomfortably aware of the complicity of our own species. One line from Erikson’s book still wholly applies: “An all clear is never sounded.”

The post A Newer Species of Trouble appeared first on The American Scholar.

“You can’t step in the same river twice.” Heraclitus’s adage is true not only because the water that constitutes the river is ceaselessly flowing but also because “you” are never the same from one moment to the next. Cells and atoms disintegrate, and individual human selves are enmeshed in a vast cosmic vortex in which nothing ever remains the same. “Our bodies are deciduous things,” writes Thomas S. Mullaney. And so is everything else.

How We Disappear assigns primacy to entropy—the impulse to disintegrate—over coherence. In the operations of the universe, disorder is the norm, according to Mullaney, and “we owe our sense of continuity to the fact that our bodies and brains are constantly muttering bedtime stories to themselves.” The story that he tells, of unavoidable gaps and incessant flux, seems a departure from his scholarly work as a historian of modern China. However, by examining “how some things struggle to stay together, how everything comes apart,” he is exposing the inherent imperfection of trying to make sense of the past. It is not so much that history abhors a vacuum; historians do, and their professional task is to fill the void with narrative.

Beginning with the aftermath of his father’s death, Mullaney anchors his ruminations on evanescence in details of his own family. A dutiful son, he is summoned from California, where he teaches at Stanford University, to Maryland to care for his ailing parents. A sudden death leaves him to deal with his late father’s material effects—cartons and cartons of flotsam accumulated over the course of a life that began in 1945: documents, clothing, all the miscellaneous objects that constitute what Mullaney calls the “diaspora” of any human being. Organizing it into an archive, similar to the curated collections in which he conducts his scholarly research, he must decide what to discard and what to retain. What order does he impose on the latter? He notes that a 76-year-old male would have emitted 24,000 pounds of feces, 85 pounds of dead skin, 40 feet of hair, 10 feet of fingernails, and 9,000 gallons of urine. Even for lives that are archived, most of their diaspora disappears. How to arrange what remains is moot. Eventually, it will all, like the mighty Ozymandias, disintegrate and evaporate. As Marx and Engels observed, “All that is solid melts into air.” Sunlight might indeed be the best disinfectant, but open air is a potent agent of entropy, dissolving documents that are exposed to it.

Mullaney’s father accrued a crushing debt that threatened to erase him, and his mother offers further lessons in how to disappear, not just in her attempted suicide. After her death, he learns that she had concealed the fact that she—and therefore he, too—was Jewish. This discovery forces him to rethink his entire family narrative and realize that there are mysteries about his parents and himself that he will never understand.

Pennies and deutsche marks disappear, languages cease to be spoken, and once-popular technologies are abandoned. Over time, many hieroglyphs, wax cylinders, and computer codes have become indecipherable. No Rosetta Stone has been found to make sense of unrecoverable scripts such as Minoan Linear A, the Harappan script of the Indus Valley, or Easter Island’s Rongorongo. Floppy disks, Betamax videocassettes, HD DVDs, and other orphaned formats survive as fossils that cannot easily be revived. A connoisseur of obsolescence, Mullaney explains how new technologies promise permanence but merely produce novel ways of disappearing.

Reviewing the history of photography, which promised a stable, reliable record, he writes that images fade and fail as adequate documentation. Sound recording, film, fingerprinting, and even DNA patterns are similarly imperfect as accurate and enduring testimony. According to Mullaney, “Sites of production are always sites of disappearance—every act of recording is also an act of not recording everything else.” Vast bureaucracies (the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS) have been created to reduce the messiness of personhood to statistics, but some shards of humanity always evade quantification.

Entropy can occur by accident, but it often acts according to plan. Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is a common biological mechanism. The example that Mullaney cites is the way in which the hand of a human fetus initially develops amphibian webbing until, at an appropriate time during gestation, the webbing cells die off and yield to individuated, movable fingers. The artificial obsolescence built into consumer products—video game consoles that don’t support older accessories, smartphones that reduce performance as batteries age, clothing outmoded by newer styles—are other examples of a world designed to be in flux.

To anyone in love with the precious, fleeting things of this world, resistance to disappearance seems natural and proper. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas implored his dying father. Although he certainly does not advise suicide, Mullaney seems more sanguine about the inevitability of disappearance. “It is only by making peace with entropy—conceptually, albeit never physically—that we can understand continuity and coherence for what they are,” he writes. “Marvelous and strange.” Making peace with entropy means accepting its primacy and adopting a kind of Buddhist resignation to the inevitable. Instead of attempting a futile war against decay and disintegration, Mullaney urges us to study it. “Rather than lamenting oblivion, what if we chronicled it, unsparingly. To ask, simply: How do we disappear? Could we become students of entropy, examining it—not with a World War II mindset of ‘Know Your Enemy’—but with the unflagging patience, suspension of judgment, and dogged empiricism of a researcher”? In How We Disappear, Mullaney does exactly that.

The post Things Fall Apart appeared first on The American Scholar.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
—W. S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death”

My father died on September 18, a day he had walked through 85 times before. He crossed it at the age of three, living in Hershey, Nebraska, cornfields to match the sky in both richness and reach, a stack of white bread on the dinner table every single night; and then again at 21, driving with my mother in a large-fendered car with the radio on and the windows open to a chorus of late-summer frogs; and then again at 36, a man who appeared at home in his body, bore children on his shoulders, dangled them from his arms; and then again at 65, his own children grown and one of them with children of her own, the grass now cut and the leaky roof fixed and the shed in the back yard built, the not-yet-turned leaves still on the trees but the rake standing at attention in the garage. Until the last September 18.

My mother held his hand.

I was not there.

Even though I had been home a week before and would arrive the following afternoon, when my father left this world in a body he no longer recognized as his own, I was not at his bedside holding his other hand, a fact I am still trying to forgive myself for.

Because my dad was there for me. Always. Except when he wasn’t. At my birth, the obstetrician gave him the choice of saving either his daughter or his wife. A botched delivery meant that one would likely have to be sacrificed. My father chose his wife. I do not blame him; anyone would have made the same decision. Or maybe I do. Or did. I once wrote a memoir suggesting that this initial abandonment led to a lifelong feeling of lack. But the longer I live, the more I realize that lack rides beneath the skin of every human; we have a fundamental belief that we are not enough. That’s the thing about growing older: The arc of your past elongates, such that what was once tragedy flattens and mercy becomes the line you discern.

Feather came into this world in late summer, on a neighbor’s farm about a mile from my house. Another foal had lived in Feather’s corral from spring to early summer. I had named him Feather, too. But First Feather left, was sold, I imagine, and a new Feather arrived in July as if fallen from the sky. Feather was the color of bone, with a darker mane that was but an inch or so long. The first day I saw him, his legs trembled when he stood. Just born, he reminded me of myself as an adolescent, knees and elbows unable to find ease, unsure of my place. He stayed close to his mother, his sweet nose nuzzling her belly, always trying to nurse.

I would see them on my runs in the early morning, dawn making promises from behind the nearby mountains. Feather and his mother were corralled in a pen next to the road. Each day I would call to Feather, and within a few days of being born, he made his gangly way to me. I would have to fall to my haunches because he was so small. Through the metal fencing, I would offer my fingers, and he would suck them one by one, seeking milk. His lips were soft like velvet, warm, but he pulled with determination.

The bodies are laid out on tables; black plastic covers them from head to foot. The plastic is not heavy enough to conceal the fact that humans rest beneath. I would know the form anywhere. Six bodies stretch on six stainless steel gurneys in a white-walled room labeled “veterinary lab” on the door. The anatomy labs on campus are being remodeled, so the cadavers have been moved to the vet science building. Everything is temporary.

At one end of the room, two skeletons dangle from an unseen thread attached to the crowns of their heads, and the skeleton of a large animal of some sort skulks behind them—a family out for a walk. Chemicals charge the air, though beneath that smell is the brood of decay, the funk of a cluttered room closed to sunlight and air.

We are handed white lab coats and blue latex gloves. Some of the coats have ribs Sharpied on their backs in an attempt at whimsy. I don’t laugh, though the nine others in my group giggle and point. Most of them are 20-year-old women training to be yoga instructors. I am closer in age to many of the dead than to the young women wearing leggings and holding notebooks. Though I have been teaching yoga for years at this point, my understanding of anatomy remains limited. This is why I am here: to become a better teacher. I have trouble visualizing the inner landscape of the body, get lost between ligament and tendon, concentric and eccentric, have trouble navigating the medial, the distal, and the proximal. As forced air blows from air-conditioning vents in the ceiling and goosebumps populate my arms, I wonder whether the dead can clarify the living.

Above each cadaver, a white board records the name of the individual, the age, the sex, the occupation, the cause of death. All in erasable marker.

“Get into groups of four,” the head of the anatomy lab says. “That way you will get to see everything.”

None of us moves.

“Should we count off?” he jests. But we remain huddled near the sinks. I am normally one to take action. Today, though, surrounded by dead people, I want to remain with the herd.

<hr/ >

The first gift I remember my father bringing home from his travels was a thick red book titled Walt Disney’s Story Land. On the cover, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy rode an open book like a magic carpet. Inside, cream pages were filled with rich, colorful illustrations. Mickey was in there, Bambi and Dumbo, too, as well as a squirrel named Perri who lived with his family in a perfectly circled hollow of a tree. I was three, though I question whether the memory is real or not. I’m on the sidewalk, in front of our military bungalow that sits a hundred feet from Pearl Harbor. My father unlatches the gate to the yard, one hand holding a briefcase and the other a hardcover book, just for me. Because my father was a storyteller, it feels right to me that this first gift I can remember receiving would have been a book of 55 stories. But he would not be the one to read them to me. My mom would narrate the antics of the animals. Instead, my father would make up stories in which I was the main character, not some teapot that could sing. Later, my two younger brothers joined the tales. The stories lived inside me, not on a page. In my father’s words, I became an author of my own life. I am hard-pressed to remember any of the details from those bedtime tales, only the feeling of sitting in bed against my father’s side and waiting to see where his imagination might take us next.

The book remains, but just barely, its binding now mostly string. I picture it on the shelves of the spare bedroom of my parents’ home. It outlasted my father.

Feather and his mother lived alone in their narrow corral. Other horses whinnied sometimes from a nearby pasture, and the mare called back. In late summer, long grasses were harder to come by, so I would pull them from the roadside early on my run and carry them in my hands for a mile. I wanted Feather to taste more of the world than the hay left by his owner. A horsewoman I knew said that I wasn’t supposed to feed other people’s horses, but I never saw Feather’s owner, didn’t believe Feather was given much more than a pen. I took him grass every day. Soon he knew it was me and would run to greet me at the metal bars. Gambol really, half buck, half run, pure joy. The mare would push her way toward me, greedy for more grass, the blades squeaking in her teeth, but Feather mostly just wanted me to pet him. He liked me to rub his neck the most. When I knelt to the ground, Feather and I met face to face, and I saw myself reflected in his liquid eyes. In Feather’s gaze, I appeared larger than I was, appeared larger than I felt. In those moments, I would swim in his pupils. “I love you, Feather,” I told him every day. “I brought you this grass.” He would turn his body to my palm.

The first body belongs to Lenn, who died at 91. He had been a high school teacher and now rests belly-up on the gurney. His head remains covered by a sheet, while the remainder of his body lies exposed. The flesh on his thighs and arms is brownish orange, infused with formaldehyde, which preserves his innards long past the time that nature would reclaim them. His penis cowers in contrast to the rest of his skin, shrunken tight to his body. Gray pubic hair furs the lower pelvis; his toenails are white and pointed. We have been invited to touch the bodies with our gloved hands, but I don’t yet.

“How long has Lenn been here?” someone in our group asks.

“Ten months,” the lab tech answers as he peels the flesh away from Lenn’s thoracic cavity.

Lenn has turned 92 on this table.

His insides have been carefully arranged, a curio cabinet of flesh, each piece—appendix, small intestine, pancreas—labeled with a square white tile for hundreds of students to see. I realize that more people know Lenn intimately from the inside than those who knew him intimately from without. I have never met Lenn, but when offered, I take his liver in my palm. Cold, heavy, certain.

The lab tech unpleats the large intestine for us, a crenulated organ in a muddy golden brown that contracts into a space no bigger than a lunch box, the kind a high school teacher might keep in his desk. Lenn’s stomach has been slit and emptied, the evidence of his last meal removed. I peer at nothing when the lab tech opens the paste-colored organ. Somehow the emptiness is more haunting than the intestine itself. The inside of this body takes me outside, to an image of Lenn at his desk grading papers, the half-eaten sandwich packed by his wife close enough to reach as he grades his students’ essays. When Lenn takes a bite, he tastes summer in the tomato.

I knew my father was dying. At least in general. After my younger brother’s unexpected death three years ago, my father’s lymphoma became aggressive. The cancer marshaled in his neck and threatened to choke a man who could hold his breath for minutes when retrieving a shell from the ocean’s floor. A year or so before his death, the doctor ordered chemo, not for cure but to prevent suffocation. The chemo attacked the cancer and my father. Every time I saw him, he was further diminished.

It was a Wednesday morning in mid-September when I understood his death was not distal but proximal. By then, we had 24-hour care to help my mother, give her some rest, move my father from bed to table to toilet. That Wednesday morning, over the phone, my aunt told me to fly home.

The following day, I entered the house, scanning the usual spaces my father occupied—his recliner, the kitchen table, the patio chair outside. Instead, my dad sat in a wheelchair in the living room, slumped over. He wore a white T-shirt, just like the hundreds of white T-shirts he wore when I was a child, beneath his naval uniform, a triangle of white at his throat like a handkerchief or a flag. I dropped my bags and ran to him, fell to my knees, and reached for his gnarled hands. When he saw it was me, he cried. Or maybe I was already crying, and he followed. “It was not supposed to end this way,” he kept saying. “It was not supposed to end this way.”

But how should it end? How should the man who made me, in large part, dissolve? Is there another ending where the hero rides off on his horse into the horizon to be gloriously met by the sun? He could not sit upright. My mother fed him the little that he ate, one spoonful at a time, wiping the corners of his lips. That image of the hero on horseback was wildly impossible.

Some days I would feel burdened by Feather, another being dependent on me, another being I needed to show up for, be present for, help. Between the classes I taught as a professor, the young colleagues I mentored, the yoga students I led, and my own family, my body felt stretched, my hide thinned and fragile. Sometimes I didn’t want to get out of bed. Yet I would, every morning, long before the sun arrived, to run from no one but myself. And here was Feather, a baby animal who I told myself was waiting for me, a manufactured need. One morning I decided I would just wave and call to Feather as I ran past, keep my body moving. To stop meant that my joints would thicken and resist the return to the run, that my knees would ache from bending down. Today, I would not stop.

But then I saw the long grass on the side of the road, bent under its own weight, cooled by the stars. I knew he would take such tiny bites, nibble my skin. I stopped to tear handfuls for Feather, marveled at how easily the grasses gave. Such a simple gift. In that moment, bringing grass to Feather felt light and joyful again, the giving not a loss but a gain, if only because the opportunity was so remarkable. No one else awake on the street, the stars still pouring over the mountains, and a tiny horse had run to meet me, his coat having grown thicker in a month, his limbs longer. And the two of us stood eye to eye, as we did every morning, a joining that had become the best part of my day partly because it was magical, partly because it was simple, and partly because the warmth of his small body affirmed the future.

Here are her hips, still dripping from the wetting agents that keep the parts from rotting. Here, the fat on her thighs, her ovaries, the tiny fallopian tubes. Here is her uterus that may or may not have held a baby. Natalie, 93, died of ovarian cancer. Hard to say what all she carried in her lifetime. The uterus, her uterus, is flat like a pancake.

“It would expand in this direction,” the lab tech indicates, motioning with his hands to show us how a fetus would fill her body.

The young women around me gasp.

My hope is that Natalie knew those first butterfly flutters of a baby growing in her womb. No one knows me more intimately than my two children. Though they have no memory of this, they once swam inside me. For nine months, I was inhabited by each of them. For years after, I carried them on my body, on my hip, in a sling or a baby backpack. Now my children have left the house. They wander the world outside my body, tethered by strings that only I can see.

Natalie’s brain rests on the table beside the trunk of her body, never to be reunited. The brain is smaller than I would have expected, cream-colored and soft.

“This is outstanding,” the head of the anatomy lab says, “the time it took someone to cut everything else away to leave only the brain and the nerves that run down to fingers and toes.”

Not as long as it takes to grow a baby within an organ the size of a pear, I think.

The professor picks up the brain so that he can display the coral-like structure of the nervous system, which runs down the main channel along the spine and then branches to the arms and legs. He fans the nerves into a shape that mimics the human skeleton. When I touch them, I am surprised at their rigidity, given how they float above the table like a gossamer scarf.

Natalie’s eyeballs, though, are soft and so very light.

“Were her eyes blue?” I ask him, because they look gray now, or cloudy blue, marbled.

“Those are the chemicals,” he responds. “You can’t tell her eye color.”

Even in death, the body remains a cipher.

When I was 11, my father made a desk for me. This was when we lived near Pearl Harbor, in a house that had no garage. I do not know where he made it or when. How could he have built a desk without my knowing? And what hours would he have used? He was up with the dark and came home with the dark and worked Saturdays because Asia was still awake and my father was the lawyer for the Pacific Fleet. Some of my strongest memories are of my dad returning home at night, his uniform still sharp and white, carrying nothing in his hands that was not military issue, because to do so would have been against regulations. Some days he might pull the hat from his head and remove a paper for my mother—a letter or a receipt that had been riding atop his body all day. But from the outside he looked exactly the same as when he had left.

The desk had tiny compartments for letters I didn’t learn to write until I was an adult, letters I would send to him because he had trouble hearing and felt cut off. I kept secrets in the desk drawers, as well as my sticker collections and mix tapes. An angsty teenager, I would write vicious diary entries about how my father did not understand me, was unfair and cruel, never once considering that I wrote on a surface sanded by his own hands.

My children used the desk, stored their own secrets in the cubbyholes and drawers, and now it sits in my home. My father’s hands have touched every angle, every edge, every plane. It has moved across the Pacific Ocean three times, hardly a nick.

Feather inhabited my days, long past my runs. I worried about Feather on stormy nights. Told myself stories about how he spent his time. He had only a skinny tree for shelter, and his mother’s flank. I asked the horsewoman I knew whether her horse had a barn. “Yes,” she said. “Technically he doesn’t need one, but I want him to have a safe place.” Feather’s coat remained wet even a day after a storm, the rain sunk deep in his hair. I wanted him to be safe. I wanted to be safe. A barn for the world.

Once when I was running, I saw some walkers on the road ahead of me stop to pet Feather. I was both upset and comforted. He was mine. He was loved by all. Perhaps they called him by another name, Apple or Breeze or Cash.

“I have fed him from my fingers,” I wanted to say. “I have been inside his eye.”

Genevieve’s lungs rest on a table to the side. I have no idea where her body is. Like Natalie’s uterus, Genevieve’s lungs are slick with moisture. Like Natalie’s uterus, they are adrift from the whole. Liquid pools on the cloth under the organs. A nearby plastic box, empty except for the pervasive brownish-red liquid, reads “Genevieve” in black marker. How many times have her lungs been pulled from the waters to be exposed to the air once again?

I had always envisioned the lungs as light, like balloons inside the body that lift on inhalation. But lungs are heavy, meaty things, not unlike the liver of a chicken in terms of color but enormous and slabbed. The lobes are marked by edges that flap like gills, almost frilled, but dense. I push my finger into the meat of the lung, like I might a steak, and the tissue is thick and fleshy. There is nothing airy and light about lungs, nothing transparent or fragile or translucent, like eyes. When you breathe air into your body, you are taking the air through a sieve of thick tissue, the weight of a chihuahua.

No air remains in Genevieve’s lungs. We all end our life on the exhale. Empty like a pocket.

On the weekend before my father died, the same weekend when my father told me he wanted a different ending, my mother and I drove him to the VA hospital in Fort Worth. He needed to be seen by a doctor to be able to receive benefits, and my mom had been waiting for close to a year for this appointment. Most of the drive, he slept. Or he asked, “Is it morning?” It took an hour, but when we arrived, nurses helped us unload my father and wheel him to the office.

The intake involved a series of questions my father either could not answer—How do you learn best? Visually, orally, aurally?—or questions that he answered in ways that made my heart contract: Have you ever considered taking your own life? “I am the luckiest man alive,” he said, tears in his eyes.

On the wall was a photograph of Marines being extracted from water by a twin-blade helicopter. One Marine was in midair while the others were treading water that looked gray and cold. My father could not stop staring at the photograph. “Look at that,” he said, shaking his head. I do not know if my father could have articulated what he was seeing, but he knew that what he saw was full of wonder.

Recently, I had the realization that I should love the whole world the way I love Feather. It was early autumn, and Feather had grown tall. I knew he would be leaving me soon, and I had begun to reassure him about his future owners. “They will take care of you, Feather.” Every day I saw Feather in his corral, I experienced relief. Every day I approached Feather in the autumn dark, I worried. Would he be gone? It was a question I did not ask of the people I met every day, the trees I passed, the cats who curled by my side. Feather was more impermanent, so every time I left him, I told myself it could be the last time I saw him. But that is true of everything; nothing remains. The book, the body, the desk.

I had the opportunity to say goodbye to my father, on the night before I flew back home, five days before he died. I sat on his bed and held his hand. I told him all the things I wanted him to hear, that soon he would be with my younger brother Bryan and his older brother Jerry, that he didn’t need to be afraid, that he had given us everything. My father cried. I cried.

He pointed to his chest. “It hurts,” he said.

“I know, Dad,” I replied. “It’s sadness.”

I promised him that I would take care of my mother, and my other brother, as well as my own two children, his only grandkids, whom he has always worried so much about. His hazel eyes seemed faded, his body so small. The hands that used to engulf mine now curled and purpled, unable to hold a cup. “You will always be with me,” I said.

One of the last things he told me was delivered in a whisper: “You have no idea how religious I am.”

Above the lungs rests Genevieve’s heart. The lab tech pulls the heart apart to show us the cavernous insides. “Here are the heartstrings,” he says, pointing to thin connective tissue that spindles into columns inside the chambers. “They aren’t really called that.” He laughs.

The heart is papery and slight when compared with the lungs, which stand solid like a wall behind it. In fact, all the organs and muscles have been dwarfed by the certainty of the lungs, their literal heft, our primal need for air.

“But does some kind of electrical impulse or something travel from the heartstrings to the brain when we are in emotional pain?” asks Carli, one of the young women. Unconsciously her hand goes to her chest. She knows how much the heart can hurt.

“No,” the lab tech scoffs. “I was just kidding! These are the chordae tendineae. They connect the papillary muscles to the tricuspid valve and the bicuspid valve.”

He moves on to the aorta and the other massive arteries that take oxygenated blood from the heart to the rest of the body.

I catch Carli’s eye. She stands next to me. “Not everything that is real can be touched,” I say.

The other day, I could not find Feather. I called to him in the dark, but he wasn’t there. I began crying, giant sobs, my forehead against the cold metal of the pen. Then Feather appeared from the shadows, like a beige-colored ghost. I knew then the feel of the future. I would be at those bars again, and I would be crying alone.

Lenn knows, as do Genevieve and Natalie. Phoebe, too, the homemaker who lies right now on her stomach so that I, and so many others, can touch the translucent tendon, shining gold that runs up the back of her calf.

In my head, they gave their bodies, though I know too well that some choose donation because they cannot afford anything else. Still, the story I tell standing above Phoebe’s corpse is that they offered their bodies knowing the body is precious but cannot be held forever. Without attachment to their material, to what happens next, knowing that they, that we, are all dying, that everything is temporary, they donated their calves, and their livers, and their lungs, and their empty uteruses into the hands of others.

Though I will always remember holding Genevieve’s lungs and Natalie’s eyes, I realize more and more as the days pass that I did not hold their organs but rather their surrender.

I was not there when my father died. I will not be there when Feather is taken to his new home. One day, the corral will be empty and winter will be upon us and nothing will move, frozen and cold.

My father knew I was coming the next day and did not wait for me. Maybe the manner of his leaving was his final gift to me. There he is, walking up the sidewalk, black shoes shining, laces done up just right. He carries nothing and builds furniture out of air.

The post What Remains appeared first on The American Scholar.

Not how I imagined meeting my playwright: I emerge from the stall, and there she is. Standing in front of the mirror, she applies makeup, then catches my eye in the reflection. We break into grins.

Oana?

Amanda?

Playwright, meet translator, in the most private public space of a building you love: the bathroom of a theater.

2.

I had flown from New York to Paris a few days before, still tweaked with jet lag as I watched the cooling gray skies from the daybed in my cousin’s apartment. The week before I arrived, Oana had flown from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, for rehearsals at Théâtre Ouvert with her French creative team and translator. They were working on a staged reading of the French version of Scenes from the Life of the Family Stuck, a play I had translated with my father from Romanian into English several years prior.

I had already been planning a trip to the City of Light to meet my cousin and see some theater, and when Oana told me she would be there as well for her workshop, I felt even more motivated to visit. I loved the thought of two Romanian writers meeting up in Paris, where so many Romanian literati and artists found inspiration amid the avenues, gardens, and cemeteries. The works of sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, dramatist Eugène Ionesco, philosopher Emil Cioran, artist Lena Constante, and more floated through my mind, and I felt a swell of pride in myself and Oana, two women theatermakers with our southeastern European roots in this city.

3.

I find my pride turned upside down, the whole situation uproariously funny, as Oana snaps a photo of us in the mirror. We laugh, and I wash my hands. “Translator and playwright in a bathroom” sounds like the setup for a literary groaner. But somehow the casualness of the space makes sense. My romanticized notions come back to earth as I think of the spaces where translation has entered into my life: the stage, the kitchen table, now the bathroom. Tender, messy, vulnerable places.

Happening upon Oana so informally, I feel as if I am running into a classmate, a neighbor, a cousin. Someone not ordinarily on another continent, separated by an ocean, mediated by screens and emails. If history and politics had taken another turn, closeness could have coalesced through physical proximity and culture. Instead, we found each other through drama, translation, and a longing for something just out of our grasp.

One last look in the mirror, and we walk back into the theater lobby.

4.

My parents met in Bucharest in the ’70s, two free spirits in the spheres of travel and politics. My mother worked as a press attaché for the Philippine embassy in Romania, and my father as a guide for the national department of tourism. One of the photos I have of them from this era, a glossy black-and-white, shows them seated on an armchair and couch in a lamp-lit, wood-paneled room decorated with framed landscape paintings of large trees. Dressed in business attire with legs crossed and absorbed in their own activities, my father reads a magazine, my mother takes notes. (Scholars—or nerds—through and through.) They married in Bucharest in 1980, and as the Ceaușescu regime took a darker turn, they fled to the States shortly after and made their home in Washington, D.C., and then Virginia, where they had first my brother and then me.

My father avoided speaking Romanian—or rather, avoided speaking to Romanians—when he first arrived. Too much trauma from communism, too much distrust of a surveillance state that forced family members and neighbors to report on one another. English was a new start, not to mention the language that he and my mother shared. Two kinds of accented American English filled our house, peppered with phrases from four Philippine languages and the occasional Romanian word. Not until I was 14, when a friend told me he liked my mother’s accent, did I realize that my parents sounded different from the people around us.

5.

“Translators like to say, we discover our authors,” writes translator and novelist Anton Hur. “But maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the books choose us.”

I find this to be also true of the theater, for both translators and playwrights—the plays choose us. Writing dialogue is not unlike tuning a radio, finding the clearest frequency amid static, music, other voices. Ultimately, playwriting is an exercise in listening.

As a theater translator, I find myself sifting through plays as if through photographs, waiting for a familiar face or location to jump out at me. I skim the scripts written in the language of my father, looking for words that pop, characters that excite, stories that I might have written if I had grown up in Romania. In this case, translating is an exercise in looking.

6.

This is how I found Oana’s play—or rather, how it found me. In 2022, about a year into my literary translation practice, I was perusing an online Romanian library looking for poetry, short stories, and—mostly—plays.

In this way, I found my first Romanian play, Brancusi v. United States by Tatiana Niculescu, and I became hungry for more voices, especially from living women playwrights. Reading and translating their dialogue became a way to understand myself as a woman of Romanian descent and what themes and details we had in common, whether it was writing satirically about international modern art or observing how children cradled farm animals.

During the quiet days between Christmas and New Year’s, I scrolled through a collection of plays from the Cluj Reactor Drama 5, a residency for Romanian playwrights. I paused when I saw Oana’s script, noticing the modular format, the short scenes scattered like snapshots. The long and loose sentences, indented phrases. The playwright’s name, Oana, formatted and repeating as a character name, signaling to me the writer’s predilection for self-reflection and doubling. The words for father— tată, tata, tatăl—scattered like familiar fingerprints across the page.

I imagine that the play saw me, too, a woman in the diaspora looking for her roots. Despite not being fluent in Romanian, I could feel the play calling me.

7.

A week into the new year, I found Oana’s email and asked her whether the English-language rights to her play were available. She emailed back within a few days with enthusiasm and a private link to the scanned archival photos that had inspired her, adding that my message had brought her “unexpected joy.” I turned this phrase over like a gem, delighted that translation could open up this emotion, not only for her but also for me.

8.

When Oana was in a Cluj flea market in 2016, she bought a box of old film negatives. Cleaned and developed, the black-and-white images depicted the daily life of an anonymous Romanian family and its travels throughout Eastern Europe. Gradually, she began to imagine and write stories around these mysterious people and places. She created a book, an installation, and eventually a play—Scene din viaţa familiei Stuck, an experimental work containing 49 short scenes and vignettes.

She named the family “Stuck” (pronounced shtook) and created characters from the photos: mothers, sons, relatives, as well as neighbors, colleagues, and passersby on the street. She imagined the father figure of this family—Janus Stuck—based on one portrait in particular. In it, a bespectacled man reads in a tent, while holding something in his mouth: a leaf, a small flower, a matchstick—too hard to make out from the photograph.

Oana, the playwright, records these observations as a monologue spoken by Oana, the character, in the fourth vignette of the play:

I returned to this image time and time again. I don’t know who this man is, and I didn’t have any intention of finding out. I am afraid that facing reality would destroy the embroidery I keep stitching around this family.

In this portrait, though, there’s something that speaks about him in a loud voice. I named him, playfully, Janus Stuck.

So, who is Janus Stuck?

9.

The online repository that Oana sent me contained 26 folders, each labeled “film” with a corresponding number. Inside each folder were a dozen or so photos. Ruins of cathedrals. Trees laden with snow. A woman in a bathing suit with sunglasses pushed up on her forehead, looking down and away from the camera, presumably at a book, while she sunbathes at the beach. The metal crescent moon atop a mosque. (I recognized this place as Constanţa near the Black Sea, for like hundreds of other tourists, I have stood in this same position and taken this same photo.) A little boy, maybe eight years old, wearing a white beard, a pointed hat, and the festive fur-trimmed robes of Moș Crăciun—Santa Claus—standing inside a carpeted room next to the skeleton of a tinseled tree, tabletop games strewn about his feet. The same woman from the beach, now propping her head on her hand, a flash of light interfering with the camera and covering her chest as her gaze, deep in concentration, drifts away from the photographer.

10.

One of my favorite parts of the play occurs before any scenes begin, with a stage direction that my father and I translated as: In a potential staging, one can use all the scenes or just some of them. Their order may be modified.

I think of most plays as blueprints for a production, but with this stage direction, I imagine this play as a blueprint cut into a hundred pieces that can be reassembled in thousands of ways for wildly different outcomes. It mirrors my fixations around translation, how there can be multiple choices for a single word, phrase, or sentence, but ultimately, a translator must make a decision and proceed. But that doesn’t prevent future translators from making different choices, like a director developing a vision for a new production of a familiar play.

The dizzying array of choices also echoes my feelings around diaspora and immigration, how speaking a language, falling in love, leaving a home, applying for citizenship, all could go down thousands of paths, but somehow, only one version of a life exists.

11.

The first vignette in the script begins with an audio recording of the mother of Janus Stuck reminiscing about a camping trip they took when he was five years old. In later vignettes, other characters—acquaintances, neighbors, coworkers—speak about Janus’s temperament, with Character Oana occasionally asking them questions. Anonymous characters drift in, narrating dreamlike episodes of moving through empty houses, collecting objects, ruminating on love and death among family members.

12.

As Oana and I emailed each other, I learned that she named Janus Stuck as a play on the phrase io nu știu, Romanian for “I don’t know.” I also like the English meaning of stuck, as if the family is waiting for something or someone, and the pronunciation of Stuck. I roll the word around in my mouth, enjoying the hard K that comes out. I know that my translation with my dad might read as too close to the Romanian, a little less fluid than how an American might say things, but I want these non-English sounds and grammatical structures to be in the text. They remind me of hearing Romanian as a child.

13.

Janus also comes from the Roman god of doors, gates, passageways, paths, transitions, beginnings, and endings. Depicted with two heads facing in opposite directions, the deity also lends his name to the month of January. Is he coming or going? Maybe both at once.

14.

Scene 40 is where I fell in love with the play. Janus describes driving his laboring wife to the hospital for the birth of their second child on a snowy day. At the end of his reminiscence, Character Oana shares a similar memory of her own birth, to which Janus responds: If you don’t mind me asking, who are you?

As in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the theatrical character turns on the theatermaker, asking questions and sharing his own story (but of course, one written for him by the playwright). As Janus and Character Oana converse, with the former asking the latter to leave him alone, yet still sharing details about his fictional background, it’s a moment of recursive madness. The madness turns tender when Oana asks Janus to be her father, comic when he immediately replies, No.

Despite their back and forth, he eventually advises her to go her own way in life:

I don’t know your father, but I am sure that he, like me, is an ordinary man, like all our peers. Same lack of power, same weakness, same bastards. The ground is sliding under our feet and we try to stay upright as best we can.

As my dad and I translated these lines, I wondered how many times he had felt that the ground was sliding out from under him.

15.

Translating with my father has two potential origin stories.

In 2017, I moved with my husband and young children to Los Angeles for a graduate degree in playwriting. I began drafting Lena Passes By, a diasporic fable about a Filipina-Romanian-American superhero who travels to Bucharest to find a magical ingredient to cure her ailing Romanian father. Despite her supernatural talents, Lena herself does not speak Romanian until she eats an enchanted bowl of mămăligă, a polenta-like dish, offered by trickster cousins. Suddenly, she is as fluent as if she had always lived around Romanians. Her transformation is represented by the cousins’ speech, which at first is Romanian, then accented English, and finally American English for the remainder of the play.

When I first started this play, I would write the characters’ dialogue in English, then ask my father to translate the relevant scenes into Romanian. With great patience, he would sound out the words over the phone and describe the letters to me, which I would repeat back, asking whether he meant a with a hat (a-circumflex, â), a with a cup (a-breve, ă ) or i with a hat (i-circumflex, î ). Or he would Anglicize the orthography, turning ţ into tz, or ș into sh. I would ask, t with a tail? s with a tail? I wanted to see the diacritics on the page, to see these markings that reminded me of letters and books from my childhood home.

Later, I would ask Romanian friends living in Romania to check the dialogue, trading bilingual conversational lessons over Zoom for the work done. When Lena Passes By had its first staged reading in May 2020 as a culmination of my degree, it was performed virtually because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the thrill of live theater felt subdued, and Zoom’s features at the time limited simultaneous speaking (so we had to adjust the play’s choral and chanting effects), I took heart in the fact that not only did the actors speak their bilingual dialogue beautifully, but my father, across the country in Virginia, was also watching online.

When I asked him later what he thought, he said he didn’t quite get it but was happy to hear my voice.

16.

My second translation origin story begins in 2021, when my interest in literary translation was sparked by an introductory online class for which participants did not need to be fluent in the language they were translating but could simply have a working knowledge of it. At this point, I’d had two major changes in my Romanian American cultural experience.

First, motivated to write the characters for Lena Passes By, I had improved my own language skills by taking a summer school session of Romanian. Second, because of the pandemic, my father had moved from Virginia to Los Angeles to live with us.

The online instructor asked us to translate an excerpt from a popular fiction piece (originally written in English) into the language of our choice. As I looked at the Romanian words that encapsulated the familiar story, all the As with hats and cups, all the Ts and Ss with tails, I was surprised by how much Romanian I remembered. I next translated a poem from a Romanian children’s book into English and took the first draft to my father. No longer having to call or email, I crossed the living room and knocked on his bedroom door.

I was expecting a few notes on words or phrases, but he got up, walked to the kitchen table, and put on his glasses. He sat down, picked up the paper, and began to read aloud. As he switched between Romanian and English, I started taking notes, correcting my mistakes, and including variations on phrases in the margins. I asked him about the next sentence, and the next.

Over the next few days, we continued to meet at the kitchen table until I had English drafts of all the poems in that book.

17.

When I am translating a Romanian text with my dad, I feel as if I am in rehearsal. This act of translation is not the game of improv that Romanian conversation is. I am not so much put on the spot, heart racing, nervous system alert, tongue sore after an hour of conversation in a new but familiar language, one whose sounds my mouth and teeth cannot quite shape despite what my ears detect. I resort to gestures and smiles, laughter and Rominglish, streaked with the pain of not knowing this language yet eager with the desire to be understood.

No, as a translator, I can backtrack, experiment, slow down, take my time. As in rehearsal, the fun and discovery come from repetition and variation on a moment. I’m still in relation with another person but mediating through their written words, fixed by the marks on the page and meandering around those letters. As in rehearsal, my different choices will lead to a different performance. I am an actor, uncovering multiple meanings and choosing one. I am a director, taking those choices and shaping them into a vision for an audience. And my father becomes my scene partner, volleying the words back and forth until we find the ones that satisfy us.

18.

I introduce Oana and my cousin in the Théâtre Ouvert lobby. My cousin is also Romanian, but her parents settled in Paris while she was a child, in the early ’80s, around the same time my parents left for the United States. I consider her as French as I am American.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if my parents shared French instead of English. Would they have remained in Europe, or gone to Canada? Would I see my cousin more than once every few years? Would I have been able to learn Romanian more easily, having already learned a Romance language?

I don’t understand French, but I still expect to understand this performance. Even if the language is different, its heart is the same.

19.

My father, fluent in Romanian, is not necessarily fluent in the language of the stage. When we translate, he sometimes reads the Romanian to himself, then translates aloud into English. Occasionally he stops, furrows his brow, and repeats the sentence as a question. I usually respond, No, I get it—I get it. I see what a director can do.

I might close my eyes. Behind the language, I can see the movement onstage. The empty space, now filled with shadow and light.

Oana’s play is particularly abstract. In Scene 27, we come to a melee of characters, with the stage direction setting the scene: Fragments of eavesdropping you might want to share with someone else—

One character speaks loudly on the phone: Pista died. Pista died … Pista, man, died … Died. Died! Meghalt. Died, man … died!

It’s very absurdist, my dad says, his voice wrapped in a doubtful chuckle, as if he is not sure what he just said or how it builds the story. Despite my dad’s hesitation about the play’s logic, I can hear and see how actors would inflect their voices, play with a phone prop, gesture wildly, or commit to stillness. I can imagine how a director would offer different guidance based on the feeling or mood he or she might want from the scene.

I write down the English words, which are ultimately traces of emotion for an actor to follow, to make decisions for breath and sound.

20.

My early memories of my father’s native language summon up liminal spaces—cars, hallways—and unseen listeners. Invisible scene partners, offstage characters.

As a child, buckled in the back seat of our red Toyota, I heard Romanian swear words in conjunction with a jolt—my father hitting the brakes to avoid an oncoming car. The language was instinctual, fiery, a weapon against stupidity or a defense against impending danger.

In another memory, I lingered in the hallway outside my parents’ bedroom while my father spoke on the black cordless phone to his mother. We all referred to her as “Granny,” and she lived back in Bucharest. This time the language was soft, explanatory, somehow wounded but also hopeful. I would hear my name and my brother’s rolled into their conversation.

Granny spoke Romanian, French, and scant English. When my father would hand the phone to me, I would try out a tentative, Ce faci? followed by many mhmms and I love you. Te iubesc? Love you …

But also in this sea of conversation was my name, slightly varied. A small suffix to make it diminutive, loved. Amanduța.

Though Amanda speaks English, she still has a Romanian name. She exists in another version.

21.

In his essay “The Strangeness of the Theater Translator,” William Gregory writes that among the fields of translation, theater “is the least well-defined, most misunderstood, and, dare I say, marginal of translation specializations,” with these practitioners asserting and redefining themselves in three communities: theater, academia, and literary translation.

Because of my diasporas—my parents from different continents and races, speaking different languages—it’s precisely within these margins and multiple communities that I feel myself thriving. Yes, a minority. Yes, in need of constant redefinition because if anything, theater workers are shapeshifters. We are accustomed to altering the emptiness of the stage and adapting to our bodies’ needs in the moment, how a gesture in a performance on one night might change because of a broken prop or surprised timing. No matter how many times we repeat something, it becomes new because the moment is new.

And translators are shapeshifters. We move words back and forth, we consider different versions, alternative visions. What do we want to prioritize in our translation? Lyricism, rhyme, meaning, emotion? (Which emotion?) What shape will we shift our translation into?

22.

Once, I acted as Oana. At a translation conference in 2024, I chose an excerpt of Scene 40—the scene where Oana asks Janus to be her father—for a public reading. A friend and fellow translator read for Janus, and I took on the Oana persona.

The playwright who translated the play was now also the actor who was playing the character of the playwright who wrote the original play. Look at that last sentence—full of play. Roles like nesting dolls, playwright-translator-actor-character vibrating around a persistent core, the desire of a woman (me? Oana?) to understand her father, to tap into the mystery of family and embrace it.

In a photo of that reading, my black T-shirt is partially blocked by my arm, but it reads, NOI HOTĂRÂM CE POVESTE NE SPUNEM.

We decide what story we tell ourselves.

23.

When I worked with a theater company in Los Angeles to mount a staged reading of Oana’s play in 2024, we rehearsed in a community darkroom. Cameras and photography equipment spilled from the boxes around us. We were a team of seven: myself, the director, and five actors, including a Romanian actress originally from Bucharest and a mixed Filipina actress reading the role of Character Oana.

Now in our rehearsal space, I felt less like a translator making decisions about words and sentences and more like a dramaturg. I provided cultural and historical background and the occasional pronunciation note. The Romanian actress in our group would also fill in gaps, providing context (such as how people in Romania today celebrate certain holidays) and an alternative sound to my American-accented Romanian.

Our script-in-hand performance took place on a bare auditorium stage. As usual with standard American staged readings, there were no props, no additional sound effects or lights. Sitting in five chairs in a line, the actors propped their binder scripts on the black music stands before them. I didn’t take my father to that reading. Those days, he had too much trouble staying seated for long, his arthritic knees and joints the culprit.

But I did bring my daughter. Eight years old, she curled up in the seat next to me in the auditorium and whispered, You and Tata Ursu translated this?

Yes, I said. And now the actors will share it with us.

24.

In Paris, I note the differences in how the French team has arranged the rehearsal room. Tables and chairs form a semicircle. Props—cassettes, boxes, and an audiotape player—sit on a table. This performance brings the technology from the script onto the stage, making the story feel more archival and material, emphasizing the vintage machines that captured moments from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

As the play starts, I hear the mother of Janus Stuck, her words spoken not through a live actor, as in my version of the American staged reading, but instead through the audiotape—a recording as the playwright intended, frothy with static. In my memory, I hear my grandmother’s voice on the telephone. Romanian, French, or English: What lies behind the sound is a persistent desire, a dialogue between separated family members.

25.

I can’t quite follow the French, but I know this play so intimately that I can perceive the through line among the vignettes. When we arrive at Scene 40, in which Oana asks Janus to be her father, I find myself surprised. I cannot help but compare it with the LA version, where the actress chose to portray American Character Oana as vulnerable, pleading, hesitant, thinking that she could be rejected at any moment. In this version, French Character Oana bravely asks Janus to be her father—inviting him to the role as if it would be an honor. She need not implore or petition.

I wonder whether I missed something in the Romanian, or whether the French translation just happens to be more confident. Or perhaps the director simply envisioned a more self-assured Oana, either from the text or this specific actor.

As a theatergoer, I am happy that the actor committed to the choice and followed through in creating a character who is unwaveringly sure of her invitation. As a translator, I am curious. As an American in the Romanian diaspora, I wonder what that kind of confident, playful relationship with a father would look like.

26.

As my father navigates elderhood, I find myself navigating my own journey as a daughter also turning into a caretaker. I add his medical appointments to my calendar. I serve him the same food as I do the kids. Occasionally, I lecture him about watching too much YouTube on his phone, but I pipe down if I hear that it is Romanian language news. I know that he is reconnecting with his homeland in the ways available to him.

Translation becomes a place where we can have the kind of confident, playful relationship that I see in the French version of Oana’s play. This translator relationship shifts our other bonds and ties. The script becomes a place to discover Romanian in a new light, and our identities of father and daughter move to the background, clearing space for new identities to emerge, such as scene partner and detective, with words as clues for our characters’ own identities.

Take the word meghalt in the abstract Scene 27. My father did not know its meaning but guessed that it was Hungarian. I searched for it online, and we discovered that it meant “died,” a semantic repetition of the original Romanian word and our English version. But now, I suggested, this could mean that the character—or the person to whom the character was speaking—was Hungarian, or at least spoke that language. My father, born and raised in Bucharest, then suggested that other words had Hungarian (and subsequently, Transylvanian) connotations, making it easier for us to understand names like Pista and exclamations like fain (“great!” or “cool!”).

In another instance, we looked through the photos in the online archive in hopes they would help us better understand the play. Staring at one monochromatic image, we noticed Cyrillic letters on a university building. My father, required to take Russian under communism, knew the alphabet and began to translate. I Googled the letters, and we found that the university is in Bulgaria.

I marvel that my father contains so much language.

27.

Even though my father is far away as I watch this French performance of Oana’s play, I am pleased that my cousin can be with me. My cousin, who actually knew our grandmother in person, who could speak to her in Romanian. My cousin, who also studies drama. I feel sober joy that the absence of my father is filled by the gracious presence of my cousin. I sense that this play is traveling not only through cultures, countries, and languages, but also through generations. And somehow, through my family.

I write notes in a little white notebook, and I notice my cousin is doing the same on a piece of paper. Later, she will hand me the notes, written in French and blue ink, promising to translate them into English later.

28.

As my cousin and I leave the theater and step into the lamplit evening, we bid Oana goodbye and walk to the Métro, discussing the play. Days later, Oana and I will meet again, this time outside the Théâtre de la Concorde after a matinee. It will be raining, as it does in Paris in autumn, and I will have forgotten my umbrella, but I will bow my head and pull my black rain jacket over myself.

Oana and I will walk to a touristy bistro, the only place open during this sleepy hour between lunch and dinner. We will order crème brûlée and wine, talk about theater and our writing projects, and say how happy we are to have finally met.

In this moment, I will feel that I am part of the Stuck family. I, too, have imagined the possible futures, journeys, and languages of this family and mine through playwriting and translating. The world of Romania, which I knew most directly through my father instead of a larger cultural milieu, has become more nuanced and textured. Every play I translate with my father will continue to widen the aperture of what I know about his old home. Oana’s play in particular has transformed a world of communism, trauma, and escape into a place of dreams, poetry, and the recovery of one’s family. Together, my father and I have made blueprints for more homes.

Somehow, this little family—whether through photos, drama, or translation—travels on.

The post Found in Translation appeared first on The American Scholar.

In this country, wilderness is codified by what is excluded from it—namely, us. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as a landscape “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” This concept became a physical reality for me the summer after my sophomore year of college, when I took a job on a two-woman trail crew in Idaho’s Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, the nation’s largest wilderness area outside Alaska. Our job was to hike mile after mile through the most beautiful landscape I had ever seen in my life, all the while clearing trees that had fallen across the trails. Because of federal restrictions, we couldn’t use chainsaws or power tools of any kind; in official wilderness areas, you can’t even use anything with wheels. So my crew partner and I would each take one end of a six-foot-long crosscut saw and cut through any trunks that blocked our trail. Then we’d hike on to the next.

We in the United States tend to define wilderness as something set apart from us, but in her new book, The Savage Landscape, Scottish writer Cal Flyn uncovers broader stories about humanity and history, probing the things we seek in wild places, among them beauty, remoteness, spiritual experiences, brushes with wildlife, proximity to the sublime, and opportunities to hunt. Flyn early on acknowledges the paradox of her quest. As she trails Cape buffalo across a game reserve in Mozambique, hikes into bear-thick woods in Romania, backpacks across Yellowstone, ambles through Antarctica, and tiptoes to the edge of a volcanic crater in Iceland, she confesses that “the very attempt to define wilderness, to itemise it, delineate it on a map, seemed to make it slip from my grasp.”

So opens a book that grapples with the complexities and downright cruelties of wilderness. Digging deeper, Flyn reveals the brutal contradictions of wild places. Across the world, many conservation areas were established by violently evicting Indigenous peoples from their lands. Flyn tells the story of the Batwa people, for example, who were brutally forced off their territorial lands by Ugandan authorities to make way for national parks. The United Nations estimates that about 90 percent of the 87,000 Batwa people living in the Congo Basin lost access to their homeland. Like many other Indigenous groups worldwide, the Batwa have become “conservation refugees,” people severed from their ancestral territory in the name of landscape protection and who now lack both home and a means of subsistence.

Flyn also ventures two days by boat on a muddy river in the Brazilian jungle to visit a community of Yanomami people, the largest of 300 Indigenous groups that make their home in the Amazon Basin. She is distressed when a local leader announces the price of her visit: a chainsaw. “Hadn’t it been their lack of chainsaws, their repudiation of chainsaws, that was the reason I was so keen to come?” she laments. This is a dilemma, she acknowledges, that gets at a central question of wilderness: Who is allowed to use it—and how? “What level of human interaction ‘spoils’ a wilderness?” she asks.

These are the tangled trails Flyn blazes, and I found myself an eager follower, reminded of that summer in Idaho, which I count as the best of my life. We were prohibited from using a chainsaw, but our groceries were flown in every other week by small bush plane. Bicycles were forbidden, but pack horses, which can introduce weeds through their feed, were welcome.

The questions get even knottier when we consider how climate change is leaving its indelible footprint on all lands and waters on Earth. By one estimate, Glacier National Park will be glacier-free as early as 2030. The challenges are confounding. What if wilderness restrictions put wild places at greater risk of devastating wildfires? What do official wilderness boundaries mean as rising sea levels swallow coastal lands and as species—and even whole ecosystems—head to higher latitudes?

Flyn’s book found me at just the right time. I was nearing the end of a three-month-long stint at the computer to complete the manuscript for my second book. I craved time away from my desk, and even more, I craved time outside, time in a wild place. But it was mud season here in Alaska, not a good time for an outdoor adventure. When a friend told me there was one seat left on a five-day rafting adventure she was organizing down the Yampa River in Colorado, all the conundrums of “wilderness” floated out of my mind. I’d spend days with water, canyon walls, and sky. I’d see rock art made by people who’d lived off the region for generations. I’d pitch a tent every night under a dark sky. “Yes,” I said. “Yes!”

The post Into the Wilds appeared first on The American Scholar.

It wasn’t as big as the Palace or as grand as the Pantages, and it had a handwritten sign instead of a neon marquee, but the Bougainville Roxy was a hot ticket in 1943. Housed in a tent on the largest island in the Solomon archipelago, the Roxy was one of many movie theaters improvised in even the most rugged outposts during World War II. Venues were standard on stateside Army posts. Movies at War, a documentary produced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1943, reveals that the demand for films did not diminish once servicemembers went abroad. Copies of three new features were sent overseas every week from a New York distribution center by “air express with military right of way. … A million dollars’ worth of morale wrapped in each carton.” Delivery was meant to coincide with a film’s domestic release; sometimes the troops were treated to a world premiere.

Films reached destinations throughout the world by truck, motorcycle, boat, and plane; by porter; by oxcart and pack mule and dogsled and camel. There were approximately 1,500 screenings each night: in tents, at open-air theaters, on airfields with screens mounted on planes, in hospital wards, in commandeered auditoriums. Five and a half million servicemembers went to the movies each week. Prints were screened so many times, the emulsion wore away in five months.

The premise of Movies at War is that films symbolized home to the troops: all those “sights and sounds left behind for the duration but never forgotten.” Motion pictures also fostered unity within U.S. forces and, in dubbed versions, with allies: “millions of troops heterogeneous in other respects yet maintaining a mutual interest in screen entertainment.” Training films such as How to Get Killed in One Easy Lesson offered practical guidance, but feature films generated the greatest anticipation. They satisfied “definite cravings” and “strange appetites,” offered a “respite” from battle, and distracted the wounded from their scars. Movies at War intercuts a scene from Preston Sturges’s comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek with shots of laughing troops convalescing on a hospital ship, Frank Sinatra singing in Higher and Higher with starstruck Army nurses, the end of the religious drama The Song of Bernadette with rapt GIs bathed in the reflected glow of a screen. (Who knows what these audiences were actually watching, but the editing of the stock footage proves affecting and effective.)

The documentary follows one particular shipment to the India Film Exchange in New Delhi. From there, films were dispersed throughout the China-Burma-India theater to Bangalore, Calcutta, and Kabul, to Chabua, and over the perilous Himalayan Hump to Chungking.

My father was a beneficiary of the Army’s movie distribution service in India, where he served as an air traffic controller. How many of the C-47 Skytrains that he guided through takeoff and landing carried film reels in their cargo? Yet though he must have seen movies overseas—he was familiar with Desperate Journey, Destination Tokyo, and other wartime films—he didn’t talk about the experience. Indeed, the only movie he ever recounted watching while in the service was Casablanca, which he saw in New Mexico in 1943, probably at the Alamogordo Army Airfield.

When I was a kid, we watched a lot of movies together. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that while I gave them my full attention, he watched with one eye on the television and the other on his work, which on Sundays he consented to do at the kitchen table instead of in his office. We often caught movies in the middle. These were, after all, medieval days, before streaming and on-demand services. When my parents eventually bought a VCR, it changed my life.

It isn’t surprising that going to see Casablanca was the one wartime trip to the movies my father recounted in any detail. One of Warner Bros.’ most significant contributions to the war effort, the film transcends propaganda—its patriotism never veering into jingoism, its spirit cosmopolitan rather than parochially American, its cast and crew a magnificent alliance of émigrés and refugees.

Casablanca is a prime example of the peculiar magic of the Hollywood studio era: a film not initially “destined for greatness” that nonetheless achieved it, as Thomas Schatz writes in The Genius of the System. Schatz suggests that Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, jaded café proprietor–turned–patriot, “crystallizes the American shift from neutrality to selfless sacrifice.” “When will you realize,” the rival café owner and racketeer Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) chides Rick, “isolationism is no longer a practical policy?”

But when I watch Casablanca now, more than five years after my father’s death, having written a book about the way his war is remembered, and with the B-rolls of audience reactions from Movies at War fresh in my mind, I wonder whether those young GIs in the New Mexico desert were seeing what I see now.

“I stick my neck out for nobody,” Rick declares near the beginning of the film, when he refuses to help the black marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre) escape from the police. Perhaps we never quite believe Rick, whose intervention would have been futile in this instance, but it takes a whole movie to make us absolutely certain. And he has a point. Courage is a costly virtue. Wasteful and extravagant, almost by definition, it directly challenges an unromantic American ethos of thrift. Being a sucker ranks high on the list of national fears. Sticking one’s neck out in an idle gesture with no assurance of profit is to act a prize “mug.”

Rick’s refusal to help Ugarte owes not to caution but to self-interest and self-absorption. Yet the delightfully corrupt Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) intuits a closeted “sentimentalist” beneath Rick’s “cynical shell,” a patriot lurking behind the mask of neutrality. The critic Barbara Deming calls attention to the process—a kind of dreamwork—whereby Rick’s cynicism somehow ends up signaling to Louis and others the depths of his faith.

Courage in others (especially the resistance leader Victor Laszlo) impresses Rick, who excuses his own history of running guns to antifascists in Ethiopia and Spain by revealing that he was a “well-paid” mercenary and no zealous chaser of causes. A flashback reveals that the Nazis have put a price on his head, yet he shows no fear of them in Casablanca: He denies a German banker entry to his backroom casino and warns Major Strasser that there are “certain sections of New York” he ought not to invade. In an act that closes down his café, he permits the band to play “La Marseillaise.”

Nevertheless, these gestures and actions coexist throughout much of the film with alienation, unpredictability, cruelty (especially toward women), and a miserable, marinated self-pity. When Rick, who has been exiled from his country for unknown reasons, is asked his nationality, he declares himself “a drunkard” and means it. Ilsa Lund has broken Rick’s heart, and the world must pay. When Ilsa fails to make their rendezvous at the Paris train station, Rick escapes in the arms of the pianist, Sam (Dooley Wilson), just as he will escape Casablanca with Louis at the end. Women leave, the film implies, but you can depend on men.

After Ilsa and Laszlo wash up in Casablanca, she and Rick have a pivotal reunion. In her desperation, she accuses him of cowardice for deserting the cause that was once his and consigning Victor to his fate: “If you don’t help us, Victor Laszlo will die in Casablanca.” Rick’s reply—“What of it? I’m going to die in Casablanca. It’s a good spot for it”—is no boast but a cry of despair. When Ilsa threatens to shoot him, he scoffs, “You’ll be doing me a favor.” Everything changes, of course, when Rick learns that it was only her loyalty to Victor that kept Ilsa from meeting him on that station platform in Paris, but the film keeps us in suspense until the end: Will Rick sacrifice everything for his personal desire or subordinate his passion to the cause?

The alchemical strangeness of the film lies in the fact that Rick, inhabiting at once Old World and New, exposes a fundamental American uneasiness about motive: tangible self-interest or ineffable idea, isolation or solidarity, style or security? As a “citizen of the world,” Rick brings a distinctly cosmopolitan note of tragedy as well as a certain luster and panache. He turns patriotism into something more than profit (he settles on a handshake deal to sell his café to the unscrupulous Ferrari, and he won’t take the money Laszlo offers for the exit visas) but less than reckless abandon by managing to embrace idealism without taking on its concomitant waste or mouthing its pieties. His disillusionment foreshadows certain antiheroes of postwar film noir, but he lets Laszlo welcome him “back to the fight.” Rick may be a romantic, but he is never a sucker. He sends Ilsa and Victor away with a “fairy tale” and walks off with Louis into a different fable involving male friendship and fighting on one’s own terms. We can luxuriate in our tragedy and keep our comedy, too.

My father loved Casablanca. I can’t think of another movie that elicited from him such “joy and appreciation,” to borrow the words of the Movies at War narrator. At the end of his life, few things—not even the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey—still brought him joy, but watching Casablanca one last time did. “What a great movie,” I heard him say from the other room. I had refused to watch it with him, even though he asked me to. It was the middle of the pandemic, and having just arrived for a visit after a long time apart, I didn’t want to risk his health. Isolation was a prudent policy, but even prudent policies can put one in harm’s way.

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Vietnam, as I learned when I visited my parents, was a place of many sensations. It was the aromas of fish sauce, coconut, and freshly baked baguettes. It was the roar of motorbikes, the rumble of army trucks, the screeches of hurtling cars. It was grim-faced, beautiful women hurrying in silky, pastel áo dàis and grim-faced men clustered at sandbagged street corners in green khaki and carrying loaded guns. It was skin sweaty and sticky from the oppressive, unrelenting heat. And it was daily meals of rice and fresh fish eaten to a soundtrack of intermittent, belly-clutching blasts from Vietcong explosives and grenades. It was a place steeped in sorrow, where the hardened Vietnamese people did whatever was required to survive and forge viable lives.

My parents were trying to do good. As a clandestine CIA operative, my father aimed to help people under repressive regimes achieve democracy, per the American creed as a superpower of the era. (This whole dynamic and mythology, in some part nobly motivated, was, of course, soon to be disrobed as arrogant and vastly flawed in both conception and execution.) And my mother was trying to help the injured, the sick, the disabled, the displaced, the traumatized, and the impoverished.

I witnessed both of them in action when I visited Saigon for Christmas. At a party held at my father’s radio station, known as House Seven, I sensed a genuine affection and devotion between him and the station’s Vietnamese employees. My mother, meanwhile, took me to visit two houses where women were being taught embroidery and other skills so as to be able to earn a living in some way other than selling their bodies on the street. In tiny living quarters cluttered with sewing machines, cloth, and thread, the women eagerly showed off their latest creations: beautiful dresses and flowing blouses embroidered with orchids and jasmine blossoms. My parents’ house was often filled with orphans who sat on the laps of embassy women. The children, fathered and abandoned by American servicemen, were set to be adopted by American families and would experience the added trauma of being taken away from their home country. The idea was to acquaint them with motherly figures who would cuddle and play with them, and to offer them a little taste of English before their new lives in America began.

Then, as 1974 turned into 1975, the American project in South Vietnam began to collapse. The grand scheme, nearly 20 years in the making, of trying to establish a democratic regime in the country, was failing. The U.S. ambassador, Graham A. Martin, insistently denied this, but all the embassy staff knew the truth. The explosions aimed at the capital from the surrounding countryside grew louder and more frequent each day, and the intelligence corroborated what was now inevitable. Embassy staff developed plans to evacuate the Americans from the country, but the plans were vague regarding the thousands of Vietnamese people who worked for and with the Americans. The administration began floating the idea that it would be okay to leave the Vietnamese staff behind, even though, because of their American affiliations, they would likely suffer punishment, retribution, re-education camps, or much worse.

When my father and his colleagues learned of this possibility, they made a carefully calculated choice. Acquiescing, at least by all appearances, to the ambassador’s belief that the South Vietnamese still had a chance to prevail and insisting that the work of the Americans should just proceed as usual, they moved the entire House Seven staff and family members—a total of 1,300 people—to an abandoned army base on Phú Quô´c Island. The ostensible plan was to keep beaming the radio programs from this new location. And there, under cover, the staff could more easily be evacuated when the North Vietnamese forces inevitably took control of the country.

My mother remained in Saigon. Panicked by the sense of imminent disaster, she hastened to get orphans adopted and out of the country before the city fell. She, like my father, wanted to stand by the people to whom the United States had made promises, with whom she had forged a connection, whose faces and hearts she knew, and whom she had come to love.

One day, I was in my dorm room at Carleton College, poring over my psychology assignments, when another student pounded on my door.

“Sara, you have a phone call. I think it’s from somewhere overseas. It’s really crackly.”

I was puzzled. Long-distance calls were expensive and overseas calls exorbitant, so my parents and I seldom spoke. We wrote letters instead. A phone call from abroad was very unusual.

When I picked up the phone in the stairwell, I heard my mother’s faraway voice through the static.

“Oh, sweetie, don’t worry. He’s okay,” she said. I didn’t know what she was referring to. She continued in the same mode. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I’m in Taipei. He’s still there, but he’ll be okay, sweetie.” Her voice was all mixed up, the sentences rushed together. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but soon I could feel her anxiety like a hundred birds zooming in my stomach.

I was able to make out, as my mother urgently tried to convey her message, that things were really bad in Saigon. She had been evacuated, with the few other embassy wives who’d remained in the country, to Taiwan. She was in intermittent radio communication with my father, who was, she told me, still on Phú Quô´c Island with the House Seven staff. He was going to be okay, she kept saying. “He’s figuring it out. He’ll get out, he’ll get them all out. He’ll find a way.” Clearly, she was worried sick. My mother said, “I love you,” over and over, and she promised to keep me informed.

Before she hung up, almost in passing, she mentioned something about an orphan flight she’d helped load three and a half weeks earlier. “It was awful,” she said. “The babies were shrieking.” I didn’t really register what she was saying—she quickly resumed talking about my father. Only later would I hear of the trauma that wrote itself indelibly into my mother’s nerves.

With the American exodus nearing, my mother and the other American women involved in the embassy’s social service efforts, along with NGOs and orphanage directors, had begun organizing chartered flights to transport the orphans to their waiting adoptive families in the United States. The first flight of Operation Babylift was scheduled for the first week of April 1975. Several American caretakers had volunteered to look after the children during the flight.

On April 4, my mother and many others assembled at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base along with scores of babies and toddlers. My mother boarded the C-5A Galaxy, a cargo plane widely used by the U.S. Air Force, to help get the children settled. After the children were all buckled in, my mother stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, heaved a huge sigh, then turned to join the other remaining women in exhausted jubilation, all of them hopeful that the children would soon find themselves in nice homes.

Twelve minutes later, the massive Air Force cargo plane crashed in a rice paddy near the runway. One hundred and thirty-eight people died, 78 of them children.

The children—the living and the injured; the unconscious and the dead—were brought back to the terminal. My mother was changed forever. All her life, she had reached for the positive and salved herself by helping others. Now, insoluble sorrow settled upon her soul.

This is how my father’s Vietnam story ended:

Not long after he and his colleagues arrived on Phú Quô´c  Island, the House Seven radio man was able to communicate with the embassy enough to know that the situation in Saigon was deteriorating. When my father heard on Vietnamese radio—not from headquarters—that Ambassador Martin had finally agreed to an American evacuation, it took many hours before he could reach his counterpart at the embassy to find out more. When he finally got through on April 29, he was hurriedly told, “Get out any way you can.” As he suspected, there was no plan for the evacuation of House Seven. When the helicopters took off from the embassy roof in Saigon, he and the others were left stranded in Vietnam.

My father was not completely shocked at the turn of events, but he was still stunned by those words from the embassy. One thing he refused to do was abandon those with whom he worked. As he later wrote in his memoir, he was compelled to meet “a moral obligation to deliver [his] Vietnamese employees and their families to safety” and to “give them a chance to rebuild their lives.”

Scrambling to find a solution, my father contacted ships passing through the Gulf of Thailand. Eventually the captain of the SS American Challenger agreed to take onboard the entire House Seven crew. In the early hours of the morning, the freighter was loaded like a pilgrim ship. As the vessel moved eastward across the Pacific, members of the House Seven team were crammed together, slept on deck, and ate food cooked by the sailors. Their quarters were hardly comfortable, and two babies were born onboard, but everyone survived the six-day journey to Guam, where the Vietnamese employees and their families were housed until they could be resettled safely in the States.

My modest father, never one for self-praise, was profoundly moved and grateful that the rescue mission had succeeded, but he was also traumatized by the experience. Those words, “Get out any way you can,” were like an icy lance thrust into his warm, pulsing body.

Both of my parents were trying to help people threatened or harmed by our country’s actions. The truth is, sometimes you try to help and you fail; other times you mess up (or are caught in others’ failures) and succeed. My father triumphed. My mother’s compassionate actions met with tragedy. All we can and must do, perhaps, is try.

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Frederic Edwin Church, born 200 years ago, was once the most celebrated artist in the United States. His mammoth canvases of the Maine wilderness, Niagara Falls, South American volcanoes, and arctic icebergs drew appreciative crowds, enthusiastic reviews, and eager buyers willing to pay what were then the highest prices ever commanded by a living American artist. Yet Church’s time at the artistic summit was brief. Having reached its peak in the 1850s, his reputation began to slip in the decades after the Civil War. By the time of his death in 1900, he had fallen into such obscurity that his New York Times obituary reported that “the fact that he was still alive has been almost forgotten by present day artists.” Not until the 1960s would his reputation begin to revive. Since then, a host of scholarly books, articles, and exhibitions have restored him to preeminence as one of the greatest American artists of the 19th century. Yet, in all this time, he has never been the subject of a full-length biography.

Now at last, Victoria Johnson has done full justice to this extraordinarily talented man who was both blessed and cursed by fate. The task that she set herself—“to access Church’s interior life”—was made challenging by the artist himself. His career coincided with the agony of Civil War and Reconstruction, and his landscapes address those fraught times through their depictions of gathering storm clouds, erupting volcanoes, and blood-red sunsets. In his writings, however, including a voluminous correspondence, he shared little of his thoughts and feelings about either public events or his private life. Even when he traveled through the South in 1851, he wrote not a word about his first encounter with slavery. Johnson, drawing on thousands of pages of letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts, has worked deftly around these silences.

In vivid prose, she draws Church’s character into focus. He was a devout Christian who observed the Sabbath even when traveling with Bedouin tribesmen across the Syrian desert. When he was at home, days always began with prayers and Bible readings. At the same time, he was charming and fun loving, rounding up friends to accompany him on adventures and filling his letters and conversation with lighthearted jokes and puns. His self-confidence and perennial optimism were supported by a lifelong cushion of financial support from his wealthy father. This sense of security contributed to a personal fault Johnson has discerned: Church’s seeming obliviousness to the economic hardships of others. A good friend, the painter Jervis McEntee, recounted a visit during which Church “told me of the carpets he had bought today and lots of other things. He has plenty of money and cannot conceive the wretchedness I suffer from the lack of it.” Beyond treating his friends to dinners, he seems never to have offered them financial help.

Church was an adventurer. He reveled in the challenges and dangers of the wilderness treks he undertook in pursuit of novel subjects for his landscapes. Johnson recreates in engrossing detail Church’s efforts to reach the peaks of Andean volcanoes, traveling through country gray with volcanic ash, struggling up barren, craggy slopes only to be beaten back from the rim of a smoldering caldera by a hailstorm. She also follows him, as an older man, into the Maine woods, where his companions marveled at his ingenuity when he “soldered up a hole in a teapot by melting a metal paint tube together with birdshot in a spoon.”

A friend wrote of Church in 1862, “I have never known a more fortunate man.” Three years later, though, his fortunes began to unravel. He and his adored wife, Isabel, lost their two young children to diphtheria. In recounting this devastating loss, Johnson, as she does throughout the book, nimbly works the couple’s life story into the larger canvas of American and New York history. “Deep in mourning,” she writes, “Church and Isabel suddenly found themselves surrounded by celebrating New Yorkers when word arrived of Lee’s April 9 surrender at Appomattox.” The grief-stricken parents sought to escape the scene of their children’s deaths: “Two days before Lincoln’s funeral train arrived in New York on its way from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, Church and Isabel boarded a steamship bound for Jamaica.”

The Churches would have four more children, but the eldest of these, Freddie, brought his parents little but anguish from his teenage years onward. An ominous note from his boarding school’s headmaster informed them that Freddie “knows of evil & corrupt ways.” He was suspended from Princeton for cheating. He fled to the West Coast, and his parents continued to hear of gambling debts, unpaid bills, and embezzlement scandals. Ill health began to shadow both Church and his wife. When he was still in his 40s, Church suffered bouts of debilitating pain in his right wrist, a sign of the rheumatoid arthritis that would so enfeeble him by his early 60s that a friend described him then as “a knotted skeleton all askew and covered with skin.” Tenaciously, Church continued to paint whenever he was able, though increasingly he turned his creative energies to the construction of his magnificent Persianate villa, Olana, and its grounds, taking delight in what he described as “Landscape Architecturing.” Situated on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, his home still stands today as a New York State Historic Site, open to the public.

Church showed his largest, most spectacular landscapes in single-picture exhibitions that traveled around the country and abroad to London. Thousands of eager spectators paid 25 cents to gaze on them. Today they occupy prominent places on the walls of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The artist, ever reticent about his inner life, would surely have preferred that we keep our attention focused on his paintings. Fortunately for us, Victoria Johnson, in drawing his portrait in such vibrant detail, has given us a biography as richly rewarding and absorbing as his art.

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