2012 annual letter

                                                                                                                        December, 2012

Greetings. 

            The highlight of our social season was the Oktoberfest in Dallas, Wisconsin, in October with my brother and sister-in-law and cousin Mae.  If you haven't been there, you haven't lived.  (Oh, yes, in addition, Kathy and I got married in January and went to Scotland and Ireland in July.  But more on that later.)

            Several of you told me that you found the Twain quotes I included in last year's letter to be fun and thought-provoking.  Most important, Kathy said she liked them.  So I've selected another of my favorite writer's quotes to sprinkle through this year's edition, those of H. L. Mencken, newspaperman and "The Sage of Baltimore."  Mencken, per Wikipedia, "is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. . . . A keen cheerleader of scientific progress, he was very skeptical of economic theories and particularly critical of anti-intellectualism, bigotry, populism, Fundamentalist Christianity, [and] creationism."  He also wasn't that fond of democracy.  Finally, with apologies to all my women friends, Mencken obviously wrote at a time when one referred only to "men" even when the statement encompasses all of humanity.  Mencken had a darker, more cynical take on the world than Twain so the quotes tend to more black humor.

            I've tagged on the end of this letter a few excerpts from the novels of P. D. James and a little commentary.  For what it's worth.

Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

            Last Christmas the Engstrand family gathering had to be held on December 23rd because of conflicts with the various other in-laws.  My brother and sister-in-law volunteered to host it, but because it was a Friday and they both had to work, it was going to be a simpler dinner than usual.  That was fine with most of us, but Krystin was indignant that there wouldn't be a turkey and dressing—because the Engstrands have had almost the exact same dinner at Thanksgiving and Christmas for decades.  So she volunteered to make the turkey.  Of course, she had never made a turkey in her life, so it was a collaborative effort between Krystin, Kathy, and me.  Krystin, however, did about 90% of the work, and it turned out so well that the Engstrands decided that Krystin now owns the job of making the turkey for family gatherings  J

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

            Gotta love this statement in a press release from the American Sociological Association:  "For decades, data has [sic] shown that middle aged adults with low education levels—that is high school or less—are twice as likely to die as those with higher education levels."  So go to college and double your chances for immortality.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched.

The kids and Kathy and I were chatting one night about cell-phone texting, and we noted that the use of the @ sign is no short cut in texting because it takes the same number (or more) strokes than just writing "at."  Then we wondered where the @ sign comes from, and learned it's "formally an abbreviation of the accounting and commercial invoice term "at the rate of" (e.g., 7 widgets @ $2 = $14)," according to Wikipedia.  The Wikipedia article also notes its more recent widespread use in email addresses.  It is also known as an ampersat (among a lot of other names it apparently has).  The history of the symbol is the subject of contention, but apparently it has been used in some fashion since the Middle Ages.

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

To my extremely pleasant surprise, Krystin finally got serious about taking care of her diabetes.  All by herself.  Last spring she was in Hennepin County Medical Center for dehydration (which surprised her as well as the rest of us) and the medical staff were also alarmed by her blood-glucose numbers (the number that tracks whether the blood sugars are being kept under control).  A big problem for her had been that she lost medical coverage when she came back from South Korea and had a heck of a time finding any (she had been covered by a State of Minnesota plan before she left).  So she'd go to the emergency room.  She was an excellent example of why we need national health care; she found it nearly impossible to get coverage (at any price lower than the stratosphere) because she has a pre-existing condition.  So the good taxpayers of Minnesota absorbed the cost of her visit to Hennepin County Medical Center (over $30,000).

Two stories get conflated here.  The first is that she now has excellent health coverage.  She began working for the University of Minnesota in May, and the University has excellent health coverage for its employees.  With the opportunity to begin seeing doctors regularly, as she should, Krystin has become attentive to the things she must do to take care of herself.  Thank heavens.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

The second story is the job, which is brief.  Krystin was hired at an entry-level position in Sponsored Projects Administration (SPA) at the University.  SPA is one of those offices that those outside a university would have no idea exists, but every major research university has one, by some name.  It is, simply, the office that manages the $700+ million the University obtains in research funding from the federal government, foundations, corporations, etc.  There are hideously complex rules, especially for federal grants, on how money can be used and how it must be accounted for.  So universities have offices to manage the grants and to be sure that the accounting and use of the money is proper. 

I have sometimes thought that the federal (and state) government spends FAR more, and makes institutions spend FAR more, on accounting and accountability, in order to ensure appropriate use of taxpayer money, than institutions and the feds would lose to the occasional fraud or embezzlement that inevitably occurs in large organizations of human beings.  It would be a lot cheaper to assume one must write off 2-3% of the money to fraud or inappropriate use than to spend 10-20% of the total cost on accounting.  That doesn't mean one wouldn't prosecute in the case of fraud, and institutions already have legal staffs that could do that.  But the amount of money organizations like universities spend on accountability infrastructure is both breath-taking and wasteful.

But it's been good to see Krystin with a day job, and even better that it's one she enjoys.  The salary is decent, she has the health coverage, and she participates in a retirement plan (as all University employees must).

What she wants to do in life, however, is write (creative non-fiction).  She also wants to go back to graduate school in creative writing.  Another good reason for her to get a job at the University was that employees pay only 25% of the tuition costs for post-graduate programs.  She's begun writing pieces but has not yet submitted them for publication.  I have enthusiastically endorsed her goal; as I told her, however, make sure she has a day job so she can pay the bills and see the doctor.

The alternative plan, she has told me more recently, is that if she can't pursue creative writing, she wants to become a forensic anthropologist.  The field is "the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition.  A forensic anthropologist can assist in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable.  The adjective 'forensic' refers to the application of this subfield of science to a court of law."  (Wikipedia)  She told me that she's always had an interest in this in the back of her mind, ever since we visited the L.A. County morgue when she was little.  (I have a cousin in Los Angeles who was an assistant L.A. coroner, and when we were visiting one time, she gave us a tour of the facility, including dead bodies on gurneys.)  It is truly amazing the impact that a simple event can have on someone's later life.

Of course, it's not clear to me that her interest in forensic anthropology will ever provide her a living.  How many paid forensic anthropology jobs are there in the United States?  50?  Maybe 100?

What her University job will also enable Krystin to do, presumably in the near future, is move into a place of her own.  It's fine to have her in the house (other than that she's sort of messy), but both she and I agree that it's time for her to be out of Dad's house and on her own.  She was, of course, on her own for 13 months in South Korea, so presumably living in South Minneapolis should not be a challenge.  The plan is that she'll move into her own apartment on February 1.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

            Elliott left home in September to move on campus at the University for his junior year of college.  (Yes, with Kathy and me working there, and now Krystin working there, and Elliott attending school there, we seem to be rather linked to the University.  There are worse organizations with which to be affiliated, to be sure.)  He will be in a residence hall, away from home for the first time other than for occasional summer camps.  (To be sure, three miles from home is hardly "away from home," especially not when his father and his father's wife both work on the same campus.)

            A number of Elliott's close friends from high school (who remain his close friends) have not, for various reasons, pursued a baccalaureate degree in higher education (a couple have gone for vocational training).  I will be curious to see if he retains his close friendships with them as education and perhaps a professional career of some kind create gulfs in world view and interests.  One hopes to retain life-long friends out of high school, but I suspect it's more difficult when education and careers diverge.

            The question is whether Elliott is doing his laundry—something he had never done in his life before moving on campus.  I bought him laundry soap.  Either he's wearing a lot of dirty clothes or he occasionally uses the dorm washing machines. 

The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts.

With a new relationship also comes the attached family.  Kathy's mom and uncle live in Blair, Nebraska (about 30 miles north of Omaha), so last December 25 Kathy, I, and her son Spence made the 6-hour drive through the farm fields of southern Minnesota and Iowa to Blair.  The drive was utterly uneventful—except for the fact that we grabbed a bite to eat at a gas station/food store in Albert Lea, and within an hour after we arrived in Blair, Kathy got very sick.  We later concluded it must have been food poisoning—Kathy looked on the web and determined that she had all the symptoms.  So that knocked out December 25 and 26.  Great way to spend the holiday with family.

We returned to Nebraska in May, just for a visit.  Upon learning of our trip, one of my faculty colleagues wrote to me:  "Hope the trip to Nebraska is a good one.  I like to tell coastal colleagues that I know they have an open and creative mind if they can drive across the prairies of Nebraska and enjoy the big sky, follow the pattern of wind on grass and wheat on the flat landscape, and imagine the pioneers who crossed (and sometimes settled) in covered wagons.  Most anyone can appreciate snow-capped mountains or crashing ocean waves on a rocky shore, but fewer have the capacity to do the same with our Midwestern landscape."

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

Kathy and I got married on January 27, in the chambers of Judge Kevin Burke.  We only had the three kids present, and the two boys served as witnesses.   Judge Burke was a last-minute substitution; we were to have had the service of a judge who is a friend of a Law School colleague of mine, and who is highly regarded by my attorney friends, but he ended up going on medical leave.  The ceremony, on a Friday afternoon, was extremely brief; one of my attorney friends who knows Burke wisecracked that Burke is a good Irishman and it was Friday afternoon—time to get to the pub—so he wasn't going to spend a lot of time on the formalities.  Which was fine; we didn't need anything elaborate from a judge whom we didn't know.

After the ceremony we walked to Murray's, the landmark Minneapolis steakhouse.  My great-aunt Inez, in whose house we live, used to take me there for lunch when I was a little boy.  The two boys, in stark contrast to their usual attire, had assented to wearing a coat and tie for the event, so we thought we'd follow through by taking them out to eat at a place that warranted a coat and tie.  (Krystin, of course, always dresses appropriately for events.)  We had a fine dinner.  It was fun to go back to Murray's; neither Kathy nor I had been there for years.

After we got home, Elliott led us in word and etymology lessons for a couple of hours.  We lead a thrilling life.

Our first weekend of wedded bliss?  We spent it mostly apart, in the house:  Kathy working on making jewelry for an upcoming show and Gary working on updating his Chronology cards and game.  Gary saw Kathy when he changed loads in the washing machine and dryer.  Like I said, a thrilling life J  But one we love.

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. (Needless to say, I prefer not to agree, but it is a point others have made and one can be bothered by the fact that it may have some truth.)

We had decided to have the small family-only marriage with Judge Burke and then have a post-nuptial party with all our friends and family.  As we explored various venues, however, we got discouraged, because the price tag, even for hors d'oeuvres only, was heading north of $10,000, which was more than we had in mind just for a fun get-together.  So we decided to skip the party altogether—after all, everyone knew we got married.  Because we had told a few friends that they'd be invited to a party, however, I thought I should let them know that they wouldn't be receiving an invitation after all—not that they were waiting with baited breath for an invitation to a gala, but in case they wondered later whatever happened to the party.

            Well.  Much to our surprise, some of our friends decided that we were going to have a party anyway, that we couldn't let the marriage go without an appropriate social gathering.  So our friends Joe and Genie Dixon offered to host one and our friends Jay and Signe Heffern and John and Ivy Arlandson signed on as co-hosts! 

            It was a marvelous affair.  If you're reading this and weren't invited, I apologize; given that the event was in a private home, rather than at a restaurant, the size of the guest list was constrained.  Part of the reason the cost of the party that we'd thought about hosting ourselves went so high was that we wanted to invite pretty much everyone we knew!  Scaling it down didn't save that much money at the restaurants, however, which is when we gave up.  So we were delighted when we got to have a party anyway.

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

With a new bride and partner comes the construction of new relationships.  There was no overlap in Kathy's and my circle of friends (hardly a surprise) but Kathy has been flexible and kind enough to adapt readily to my circle of friends.  There was an interesting gap in the mean age of our circles of friends; hers tend to be younger (than she is) and mine tend to be slightly older (than I am).  Kathy observed that fact and suggested that perhaps I should look to bring a more youthful flavor to my circle of friends.  I have always accepted the proposition that one cannot have too many friends, and with all due—and great—respect for my circle of friends of many years, I decided Kathy was right and that I should not be the last one into the nursing home among my own circle.

So I began to look for social engagements with "younger" faculty friends, faculty being my most logical pool for new friends, and Kathy and I have been delighted to come to know new friends.  As always in the case of establishing friendships with faculty members at a major research university, these friends have some of the most interesting fields of inquiry:  Japanese culture/film, Japanese history, law and post-secondary education, environmental media/music and communication/ethnographic studies, speech and language development, physical therapy, and so on.  (I should note that "younger" just means younger than me, so colleagues in their late 40s and 50s qualify as younger J)

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Kathy and I have been talking this year about travel:  Where we each want to go and where the overlap is on our lists of "places to go before we die."  One of the results of turning 60, for me, has also led me to realize that I have a finite (and not large) number of trips left before I'm likely going to be unable (for physical reasons) or unwilling to travel, or at least travel abroad.  (Of course, I could also be dead in the next month or year, but no one can or will plan on that option.)  If I'm optimistic, I figure we can travel until I'm 75, so there are about 14+ years available.  If I figure 1.5 trips per year, that means roughly 20-21 trips we should plan.  As Kathy has observed, our trips abroad tend to be fairly active, so I suppose in theory we could travel and simply do less.  We'll see.

We are not going to wait until retirement to do our traveling because we have seen too many cases, including our parents, where, when retirement came, there was no longer the physical ability or will to travel.  So we want to get the traveling done early—then we can reminisce about it when we're no longer able or willing.

So then the question is, what will be the destinations for those 20 trips?  We sat one night last winter and compiled a list of the places on the globe we'd like to visit before we die or become incapacitated.  We each wrote out our own list and then compared them.  (Gary:  Russia, China, Czech Republic-Hungary-Romania, Israel-Egypt, Greece, Italy again, Australia (again)-NZ, India, Norway (again).  Kathy:  Egypt, France, Italy, England, Thailand, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Turkey, Hungary.)  The overlap in our lists is easy because we'll certainly try to do those.  Then there are the places Kathy wants to go about which Gary is indifferent, and vice-versa.  We'll go to some of both.

Of course, we will have to live long enough to make these trips.  If we do, and go, we'll be delighted.  If not, such is life.  And in the meantime, we decided to skip international travel in 2013 and go to two places in North America we've never been.  Our friends Geoff and Mary have invited us to spend a little time with them at their cabin in Muskoka, Ontario, so we'll go there, and then my brother and sister-in-law (among others) commended Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, to us, so we'll take a week and explore that area this summer.  At least the airfare involved will be a lot less than going around the globe.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

After our usual marvelous New Year's Eve dinner at our friends Joe & Genie Dixons', the first day of 2012 saw me in the basement most of the day—doing laundry, ironing napkins, sorting out clothes to be donated, storing Christmas decorations.  One would not think that a particularly auspicious way to begin a year, but I was perfectly satisfied to putter on mindless tasks for a day. 

Kathy, meantime, spent her day similarly, in the house that Spence moved into on December 29.  My long-time friend Steve Richardson inherited his parents' house after his mother died a couple of years ago and it has been standing empty except for his occasional visits from North Carolina.  Spence wanted to move out from living with his father to be on his own, but as a college student with a part-time job, paying normal rent was not a possibility. 

So I was matchmaker—Steve was extraordinarily gracious about agreeing to put Spence in the house, thus providing Spence a low-cost living option, but the arrangement also gave Steve someone simply to be there; as we all know, a vacant house is an invitation to mischief or worse.  But the house was a bit of a mess after an elderly woman had lived there alone for several years and then it sat vacant for some period.  So it required a little attention, which occupied Kathy's and Spence's last days of 2011 and first day of 2012.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States.

In 1678 English poet Andrew Marvell died in London at age 57 after taking an overdose of an opiate for his ague.  He left behind verses that include the lines "To His Coy Mistress": "had we but world enough, and time,/ This coyness, lady, were no crime"; "At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near."
   

I wonder if he was close to 57 when he wrote those lines.  I never heard the "winged chariot hurrying near" until the last few years. My friend Connie Blackburn last year wrote reflectively on turning 60, "with a sense that we are winding down one phase of life and preparing for another."  I don't feel that I'm entering a new phase yet; I suspect that won't come until I think seriously about retirement.  I have never thought that my job defined me (maybe others do), but it certainly preoccupies me more than any single other activity—and I'm sure that's true for most professionals who enjoy what they do.  (And in the age of the Internet, when I can be working all the time if I want to, it preoccupies even when I'm nowhere near my office.  My faculty and administrative colleagues write emails at all times of the night and day, seven days a week—and, of course, so do I.)  So when the job disappears, I will find other commitments.  But I have come to think more about the fact that time is growing limited.  I don't want to give the impression I am obsessed about it—I am not.  I just think about it in reflective moments.
   

Some of my friends could perhaps say that one enters a new period in life when the kids vacate the nest.  That's not happened yet for me as I compose these words, but I am sure that vacate they will, and probably in the near future.  Elliott is already "gone" in that he now lives on campus, and as I mentioned, Krystin will presumably soon move into a place of her own.  My, the house will seem quiet to Kathy and me.  I imagine that departure of the offspring will be followed a few years later by retirement, and that's when things will really seem different.  (When Elliott read this, he wrote to me "You could add in that I have made vocal my intentions to not move back in after receiving my bachelor’s degree.  So aside from summer breaks, I have effectively moved out."  I told him I knew that, but also told him—as my parents told me at that stage in my life—if getting a job or into graduate or professional school does not work out right away after he graduates, he can always come back home for a period.)

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.

College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.

Elliott was talking with Kathy and me one night in February about Magic: The Gathering, a card game that is one of the most fiendishly complicated games I have ever encountered.  The topic arose because earlier in the day he'd gone to The Monster Den, a local establishment where one can play Magic as well as buy and sell Magic cards (of which there are about 6,000 different ones).  Elliott happened to lay a few of his spare cards on the counter while deciding what new cards he needed to buy and some guy saw one of them—and gave Elliott $120 in cash on the spot for the card.  There are a number of Magic cards that have values into the thousands of dollars. 

Anyway, Elliott told us that the game was invented by Richard Garfield, who has a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics.  I have to say that Wikipedia is usually enormously useful as a quick introduction to a topic I don't know much about, and the opening paragraphs in most articles provide a helpful overview.  Here is the opening paragraph about combinatorial mathematics:

Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of finite or countable discrete structures. Aspects of combinatorics include counting the structures of a given kind and size (enumerative combinatorics), deciding when certain criteria can be met, and constructing and analyzing objects meeting the criteria (as in combinatorial designs and matroid theory), finding "largest", "smallest", or "optimal" objects (extremal combinatorics and combinatorial optimization), and studying combinatorial structures arising in an algebraic context, or applying algebraic techniques to combinatorial problems (algebraic combinatorics).

And here's an abstract from Garfield's dissertation:

If p is a prime, a is a primitive root modulo p, and n is a positive integer, let ri(n) be the number of k such that 0 ≤ k ≤ n and (kn) ≡ ai modulo p, and let Rn(x) = Σi _{= 0}p ⁻²ri(n)xi be their generating function. We show that Rn(x) ≡ Πj _{= 1}p ⁻¹Rj(x)tj modulo (xp ^{− 1} − 1), where tj is the number of appearances of the digit j in the p-ary expansion of n. The proof uses the fact that a certain mapping of p-ary digit strings to polynomials modulo (xp ^{− 1} − 1) is a homomorphism. We use this result to study how the values of the binomial coefficients sit in the quadratic residues modulo p.

Got that?

I still have no idea what the field is about, and the succeeding paragraphs in the Wikipedia article aren't any more help.  But this gives one an idea about the amazing complexity of advanced research and knowledge that is characteristic of a lot of fields beyond mathematics.  I run into this every once in a while in talking with faculty colleagues.  What they are involved in sometimes dazzles me.

            Elliott later reported there was a flyer in his dorm advertising a math tutor—who would also help with combinatorics.  Elliott thought maybe he should talk to the guy. . . .

Believing passionately in the palpably not true . . . is the chief occupation of mankind.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

As with many in Minnesota, we were astonished to find ourselves sitting outside having a glass of wine on March 16 in short sleeves, with the evening temperature over 70 degrees.  We did yard work during the day and had the itch to bring the houseplants outside and clean the gardens, but my climatologist friend warned that there was almost certain to be another freeze before May—he said that even with this extreme weather, it was almost impossible that we wouldn't see freezing again.  I thought "rats." 

At the same time, I found that warm spell (which our Scottish friends also had) depressing, especially when combined with the heat that followed last summer.  This portends bad things.

And well beyond the end of the summer, we were sitting outside on November 10 when the temperature was near 70. 

The opera . . . is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression. (Yes, I understand quite well how this quotation might be applied to this very letter.  I choose to ignore it.)

Elliott said that we had to see the movie The Avengers.  But he also insisted that we see the three movies that preceded it, that set the stage for the main characters in the move (Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man)—because, he said, otherwise I'd sit next to him in the theater and keep asking him questions.  Which was probably right.  (He didn't believe it necessary to see The Hulk, which didn't have the same actor as in The Avengers, which the other three did; it wasn't a very good movie anyway, he said.)  So Kathy and I dutifully watched on DVDs the three movies, and then we all went out to see The Avengers.  They were all perfectly good action movies and the special effects in movies now are really quite something. 

The question is, how many of you recall the distinction between Marvel and DC comics?  The latter include Superman and Batman while the former include the characters in The Avengers and others.  Elliott suspects that DC may try to mimic the success of The Avengers by a similar combining of characters—but he says it won't work, despite the phenomenal success of the "Batman" series.  So I'm now up to date on the current incarnations of the comic book characters I read about when I was young.  Who brought all this stuff back and why is it interesting to audiences 50 years later?

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Courtroom: A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.

Slate, 6/20/12:  A "judge named Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published The physiology of taste, or, Meditations of transcendent gastronomy  and in it he paints a portrait of a world increasingly preoccupied with the culture of dining. . . .  He distinguished between eating to satisfy a need and eating as a social activity: 'The pleasure of eating is one we share with animals; it depends solely on hunger and what is needed to satisfy it. The pleasures of the table are known only to the human race; they depend on careful preparations for the serving of the meal, on the choice of place, and on the thoughtful assembling of guests.'" Brillat-Savarin published the book in 1825—and it's been in print ever since.

I had never articulated to myself why it is we entertain—and why we fuss about the setting and the food.  Brillat-Savarin does so far better than I could, and I have never realized, all these years, that we were engaging in transcendent gastronomy.  We saw some nice dining rooms in a couple of the places we visited in Ireland, but I can't afford to replicate them in our South Minneapolis house, and we'd need a couple extra city lots just for the dining room.  So we have to do the best we can with the food and with the selection of the guests.  Sometimes our "thoughtful assembling" works but sometimes it doesn't.  So far, no one has held us blameworthy.  We at least have the consolation that we've also been to gatherings over dinner elsewhere that perhaps did not go as smoothly as the hosts might have wished.

An avid cheese lover, Brillat-Savarin remarked: "A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye."

"The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star."

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."

"A man who was fond of wine was offered some grapes at dessert after dinner. 'Much obliged,' said he, pushing the plate aside, 'I am not accustomed to take my wine in pills.'"

"To receive guests is to take charge of their happiness during the entire time they are under your roof.'"

"Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one that has rendered us the most important service in civic life."

"The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all aeras; it mingles with all other pleasures, and remains at last to console us for their departure."

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

I will not bore you with most of the details of our trip to Scotland and Ireland in July.  It wasn't that interesting for anyone not with us.  We had a great time, but you had to be there.  But I will make a few observations that perhaps you'll find interesting or amusing.

--          I have finally come to realize that Americans are spoiled when it comes to driving because our shoulders and traffic lanes are wide.  I can't speak for much of the world, but as far as I personally know, compared with Europe, only Australia has similar space for driving.  Ireland was a challenge:  I was driving on the left side of the road in a car with manual transmission—and the gear shift was on the floor on my left side.  All of this is wrong for Americans.

            Ireland's road system has three levels:  N roads (e.g., N59), indicating a national road; R roads (regional, e.g., R334); and L roads (local, e.g., L3011).  Theoretically the N roads are the best and L roads the worst in terms of width and upkeep.   Actually, this is not a system of roads, it is a system of asphalt bike paths, some of which are slightly larger than asphalt bike paths in the Twin Cities—and some of which, it seemed, are smaller.   Most of the traffic lanes are no more than a few inches wider than the vehicle.  Even the N roads, and almost always the R and L roads, have little or no shoulder (and if they do, it's about a foot wide), and in many places all of them have 15-20-foot-high walls of rhododendrons or fuchsia (in full bloom when we were there) that align exactly with the edge of the driving lane.  If the tall plants were absent, there was chest-high wild growth (that is, weeds), behind which by about 3-4 inches lurked a stone wall.  The stone walls are everywhere in both Scotland and Ireland.   So I was driving with Kathy's side of the car brushing against the greenery (or risking brushing against a stone wall) and on my side avoiding sideswiping oncoming traffic by inches.  Moreover, the roads in the countryside—which is where we did most of our traveling—curve sharply and go up and down like a rollercoaster.  So one can be heading into a curve with a wall of greenery on the passenger side and have absolutely no idea what is ahead.  Most alarming, to me, was that the speed limit is usually 100 kph on these roads (or just over 60 mph).  Much of the time I was going 40-50 kph and thought that was way too fast for the curves or ups and downs.  As a result, I frequently pulled over, when I could find a spot, to let other cars pass me, because the locals are clearly comfortable driving on those roads far faster than I was.  I heard a sharp intake of breath from my lovely wife on many occasions because she thought I was going to scrape a stone wall, especially when the oncoming vehicle was a tour bus.

            I know that I removed hundreds of fuchsia flowers from their stems.  I would have thought the fuchsia lovely if I hadn't been so terrified I was going to hit something.  (OK, I exaggerate when I write "terrified," and I never did hit anything, but I sure didn't get much chance to enjoy the scenery because I dared not take my attention from the road for more than a second unless I was on a straightaway and could see that there was no oncoming traffic.)

            When we were driving around Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, some of the roads were one lane only, with occasional passing places.  They were definitely smaller than Twin Cities bike paths.

            There are a few M roads in both Scotland and Ireland (I don't know what M stands for), the equivalent of our interstate freeways, but the emphasis there is on the word "few." 

--          One of the great virtues of frequent roundabouts is that when one makes a mistake, one just drives to the next roundabout and goes back.  I know, I did it several times.

--          Except for one full day and parts of 3-4 others, it was overcast, gray, drizzly off and on (and sometimes we even had rain), and the temperatures were in the 50s and low 60s for all 15 days.  We didn't actually mind because we well remembered our trip to South Korea and Japan in the summer of 2011, when temperatures were in the 90s and 100s and the humidity about the same level.  While it would have been nice to have more sun, we didn't mind the cool at all and even the drizzle didn't prevent us from doing almost everything we set out to do.  We did realize that this was the coolest either of us had ever been in the first two weeks of July; we almost always had on shoes and socks, jeans/slacks, shirt plus a sweatshirt/sweater, and a jacket.  And we usually carried umbrellas, because the drizzle could strike at any time.

            We also didn't mind because we had left beastly hot weather in Minnesota—and returned to it when we got back.  Elliott had to water the gardens like crazy while we were gone because it only rained once in 16 days.  When we got back, it rained every couple of days, so that I didn't have to water for some time.  Elliott was not amused.

            The Scots and the Irish, however, had had this gray weather since late May and they were sick to death of it.  They were all bewailing it—even there they expect to see temperatures out of the 50s and 60s in July.  One of my Scottish friends told me that the jet stream has shifted south, so Ireland and Scotland are now having weather typical for Iceland.  If this shift becomes permanent—and who knows what might happen with global warming—the tourism industry in the two countries is going to go down the toilet.  One of our Irish B&B hosts said her business was down, not because of a lack of international travel but because of a lack of Irish travelers:  Those who might vacation in the country, perhaps take a week from Dublin and go to Killarney, are not doing so (why take a week to go to Killarney when they'd have the same drizzle as they would in Dublin?).

            Some people from Minnesota go south during the winter to escape the cold.  We, on the other hand, went to Europe in July to escape the heat.

--          The one day we spent in Edinburgh happened to be the day that Prince William was being invested in the Order of the Thistle (no, I don't know).  So, because we were there, we stood for a bit outside St. Giles Cathedral and watched Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Kate Middleton (among many others) get out of their limos and walk into the church.  So I can say I've seen the Queen.  So what.

--          Speaking of monopolies, which I wasn't, I saw two of them.  One, which I remembered from when we lived there in 2006, was that Armitage Shanks has a monopoly on ceramic toilet fixtures.  (Men may notice this more than women, for obvious reasons.)  Two, when we were in Edinburgh, we went to the National Museum of Scotland.  After browsing awhile, we went into the gift shop.  Inasmuch as I am one of the last dozen people in the Twin Cities who still sends thank-you notes for dinners, etc., I like to look for thank-you notes from different places.  There were a number of boxes in the gift shop with designs that I liked, mostly drawn from or after the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh—and all of them were made by a company in Petaluma, California.  Every box of cards in the shop came from that company.  I bought one anyway.  Then, several days later, when we had finished our tour of the Glasgow School of Art, one of Mackintosh's masterpieces, we were in the gift shop and I looked for thank-you cards.  Wholly different cards from those in Edinburgh—but all made by the Petaluma company.  (Only when we were in the bookshop/gift shop of Trinity College in Dublin did I find cards that were NOT made in Petaluma.)

--          I made my third (and I suspect final) visit to Crail Pottery, on the Fife Coast of Scotland in the small village of Crail.  I love their stuff and bought more of it.  So of course we were schlepping pottery home again.  (Which we added to when we found wonderful work by a Czech potter who had been on Mull only three months.)  One side benefit (maybe) to our trip to St. Andrews and the north coast of Mull is that we found quite a few shells that Kathy may be able to make into jewelry.  And with those pieces, she can tell the story that she personally gathered the shells in the cold wind and drizzle from the beaches of Scotland.  (On the coast facing the North Sea, it was more than just cool; the wind was sometimes downright cold.)

--          Three different places we stayed used skeleton keys for rooms.  I haven't seen one of those being used since I was a little kid.  Nor have I run into them anywhere else in our travels.

--          We visited two large manor homes/mansions in Ireland (Muckross House outside Killarney and Kylemore Abbey outside Clifden) that had similar stories.  Both were enormous, built by some wealthy Irish somebody, and each at one point later was purchased by an American millionaire as a wedding present for his daughter (who, in each case, had married an Irishman).

--          One night in Killarney we sat outside and had a beer.  We realized later that this pub/restaurant had a Latino atmosphere, and playing on the speakers was a Latino/jazzed-up version of "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady.  It was odd to hear a male with a Spanish accent singing the song (and the lyrics converted from him to her).

--          We only took one opportunity to listen to traditional Irish music.  They don't start playing at any of the pubs until 9:30—way too late for us after we've been playing tourist all day!  We made a special effort one night to stay up, and really enjoyed the music, but we couldn't make it a habit.

--          I tried once and immediately liked Cullen Skink.  If you're invited to dinner here, at some point we may serve it.  Or maybe not, after Kathy looked at recipes for it on the web:  "I'm not going to be making that. Even if, by some miracle, we have access to arbroath smokies!"

--          Americans do not do everything better than Europeans nor do Europeans do everything better than Americans.  One thing Americans do better, however, is provide water in sinks that is the right temperature.  I had forgotten how annoying it is to have hot water come from one spigot and cold from the other; I realized how much I like the fixtures that bring hot and cold together so one can adjust the water temperature.

--          We saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College.  (The Book of Kells is an illustrated version of the four gospels of the New Testament written about 800 A.D. or slightly before.)  As Kathy asked, "How did they DO that?" in the 9th Century.  The calligraphy, but much more the illustrations, is simply astounding.  And breath-taking.  I also found interesting the bookshop/gift store in the library building.  Between the price of admission (and tour of the college) and the sales of Book-of-Kells-related items, I would guess Trinity College derives a steady $15-20 million (or more) in revenues per year simply by possessing the Book of Kells.

--          I have never thought of rhododendrons as evil, but when we took a bus tour of the Ring of Kerry, our bus driver reported that it has been deemed an invasive species in at least parts of Ireland.  After he said that, we could see why.  It grows very tall and gets very dense and chokes out all other growth.  We could see in the woods and around a couple of places we stayed that the rhododendrons were everywhere.

            At the same time, we were struck by the great size and beauty of the hydrangea in Ireland.  White, light blue, dark blue, lavender, dark purple, pink—huge blossoms on large bushes much taller than we are.

--          I don't know that the Scots and Irish would agree, but to us, parts of western Ireland look very much like the highlands of Scotland.  Rocky hills, valleys, lakes and rivers, and green.  Eastern Ireland, on the other hand, looks rather like western Minnesota:  gently rolling hills, trees/shrubs here and there, and farmer's fields.  It was rather a dull drive from western Ireland to Dublin to get our flight home—and from Galway to Dublin, it was on an M road, so a four-lane divided, limited-access highway, at 120 kph.

            So that's the trip.

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. A man really learns little by it, for it is narrowly limited in range. What does a faithful husband know of women, or a faithful wife of men? The generalizations of such persons are always inaccurate. What really teaches man is not experiences, but observation. It is observation that enables him to make use of the vastly greater experience of other men, of men taken in the mass. He learns by noting what happens to them. Confined to what happens to himself, he labors eternally under an insufficiency of data.

            Kevin Drum, a blogger for Mother Earth, wrote last February about a campaign statement that Rick Santorum made (when his candidacy was still very much alive).  He commented on Santorum's statement “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely. . . .  The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country.”  Santorum went on to claim that “62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it,” but he didn't offer any evidence to support the proposition.  (I've never seen such data.)  Drum went on to comment that

this is a new one to me. It's commonplace for movement conservatives to believe that universities are dens of depravity and radical left indoctrination. So far, so normal. But as far as I know, most of them don't believe that efforts to get more kids into college are motivated by a desire to destroy their faith. That's a step beyond even normal wingnut land.

This stuff leaves me kind of speechless. I already know what hardcore conservatives think of academia and university life in general. Nothing new there. And let's face it: the political mood at most universities is pretty liberal. So fine. But what kind of person actively believes that the president of the United States favors more access to higher education as a plot to secularize the country? This is 10-page-single-spaced-crank-letter-to-the-editor territory.

           

            Drum's blog entry prompted a response from a colleague at the University.  "What also amazes me is that someone thinks that, after 18 years of being in the home surrounded by whatever religious faith, training, etc., that the students get from their families and churches, we somehow are so powerful that in 120 credits X 3 hours of academic work per credit X 15 weeks per semester, [or about] 5,400 hours, we can totally reverse the 18 years X 365 days X 16 hours/day = 105,120 hours of previous experience."

            The faculty only wish they could have that kind of influence on student learning.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.  [One of my all-time favorites, one I use frequently, and one that invariably comes to mind listening to political debates, especially on the political far right and among the no-government types.]

          Elliott and I exchanged emails last summer about barber and dentist appointments.  We ended up with them both on the same day, to which he responded "alright that works.  Tuesday is just all around head cleaning day."

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

[Democracy is] based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth.

            The more I read about American politics and history, and the positions on major public policy issues by various members of Congress, the more I have come to believe that Abraham Lincoln was wrong.  He should have let the South go.  The majority of the adult population in the South, it seems to me, wants a different kind of government than many of us in the Midwest, northeast, and west coast want.

            Since I reached that conclusion (all by myself!), I've seen proclamations and statements circulating on the web making the same point. 

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone—one which barely escapes being no government at all. This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes and taken up my public duties in Hell.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

In one of her books, P. D. James makes the observation that the Internet provides "a bottomless mine of other information, some of it even accurate." (Death in Holy Orders).  Mencken offered this take on more information:

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

One person who's considered the vast increase in the amount of information now available, a faculty member at Penn State, argues that the "ability for computer technology to automatically create a society of smart, tolerant citizens may be more hype and hope than

reality. . . .  We have to rethink some of our most common assumptions about modern life and, specifically, we need to rethink assumptions that the information age will naturally lead to a society that is intelligent and scientifically literate.  In fact, we may have moved backwards in many respects. . . . [W]ith the rapid increase in news and information distributed by such technologies as the Internet and mobile phones, people are struggling to tell the difference between facts and opinion, entertainment, and outright disinformation."  That was certainly apparent during the 2012 election season.  "Oppressive governments also use social networks to spread disinformation. . . . As corporations increasingly try to make money from information, Mohammed says economic pressure is blurring the line between news and entertainment. . . . The transition to an information age is similar to the change to society caused by industrial age technology.  'We are just at the beginning of the information age and we are just starting to ask the questions. Just like we learned to adapt to the industrial age, we have to adapt to the information age.'" 

Based on the evidence available to me, I fear that Mencken was right:  "What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."  And now there are so many more errors to find.

The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle.  (One wonders at Mencken's prescience.)

In his article "Does Copyright Matter?" Tim Parks, in the New York Review of Books indirectly raised an interesting question.  “'They have taken away my right to own a slave,' wrote Max Stirner, the opening words of the chapter on human rights in his great book, The Ego and its Own (1844). One paradoxical sentence to remind us that what we call rights are no more than what the law concedes to one party or another in any given conflict of interest. There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force. Rights can be different in different countries, they may be notional or enforced."  I think Parks is correct; our rights are what the law concedes us.  As Hobbes famously observed about the state of nature, where human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  My female partner (Kathy!) and I build a hut in the woods; two guys bigger than we are come along and either kill us or chase us away from our hut.  If we're still alive, we have no hut—and we have no "legal" or social recourse other than to recruit friends who'll chase the bullies out of our hut.  We don't have any "right" to the hut except for rules that provide that we "own" the fruit of our labor.  But a society doesn't have to have that rule; it could be (in a purely communist system—communist, not what existed in the Soviet Union or now in China) that everybody owns everything.  Seems alien to us, but there is no reason a group couldn't set up that rule (not that it would work well, or last long, in my opinion).  Or the rule could be that everyone keeps half of what their labor produces and the rest goes into the common pool. 

            The point is that claims by any political party about "rights" are dependent on the rules (in a democracy) that "we the people" agreed to establish.  The U.S. Constitution obviously sets some of the rules, but it is remarkably and intentionally vague in many places, leaving us to our own devices.  (I don't think there's anything in the Constitution that would bar us from choosing to have a system where we all only get to keep 10% or 25% of what we earn.  Or 0%.  At any level, the contribution to the common pool is, of course, taxes.)  It is from this perspective that I so disagree with the libertarian (and partially Tea Party) view of government.  In a more and more complex society, they want fewer and fewer economic rules, leaving all of us more open to losing our hut to cheats and bullies.

            What's also interesting to me are facts that the advocates of no/small government choose to ignore.  The experiment has been done.  What the Tea Party and libertarians want they had—in the U.S. in the 1880s.  No regulation of business and industry, horrible working conditions for those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale, and massive inequality of wealth (to name but a few drawbacks from that society).  Not a time that anyone who thinks very long and knows anything about history would want to return to. 

The other part of the experiment is the one that's been conducted in Scandinavia.  By all the measures one reasonably uses to assess societies—by WHO, UNESCO, World Bank, IMF, etc.—those are the happiest and healthiest societies on the planet.  They're the societies that Mitt Romney at one point scorned Barack Obama about wanting to emulate (apart from the fact I do not believe Obama has ever said anything about mimicking European social-welfare states).  Yep, they sound like pretty bad places—you get sick, you go to the doctor; you qualify, you go to college at low or no cost; you don't tip in restaurants because people are paid living wages and fringe benefits; by and large educators are among the most highly-respected members of the society, well-paid and among the best and the brightest.  Taxes are high, but not confiscatory; there are wealthy and poor folks, but not the extremes we see.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, of course, was right: "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."  Some parts of the U.S. are decidedly more civilized than others.

            And as Claude Fisher recently wrote in an article in the Boston Review about all the studies of "happiness," especially now by economists, and who is himself a skeptic about such studies, "nonetheless, people who say they are generally happy tend to be economically secure, married, healthy, religious, and busy with friends; they tend to live in affluent, democratic, individualistic societies with activist, welfare-state governments."  The interesting part for me, of course, is the last two clauses (which accord with everything I've read in other places).  Just as I was finishing this letter, I happened upon an article in The Economist, not exactly a mouthpiece for the left wing, reporting research that they had done on the best places to be born in 2013, based on both subjective measures (such as happiness) and objective economic measures.  The top five were Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.  What a surprise.

            All I can conclude, from the mounds of evidence available, is that the Tea Partiers and libertarians (to extent they overlap in a quest for low and nearly no taxes and little government) are driven by ideology unsupported by facts.  But as Mencken pointed out decades ago, that should not surprise me. 

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Like just about all the other flora in the Upper Midwest, my raspberries ripened more than three weeks earlier than usual.  "Usual" is within a day or so of the Fourth of July; this year it was the weekend of June 16.  That they came early is a good thing because we were in Scotland over the Fourth of July, and I would have lost my entire crop this year!  (I cannot fathom that the kids would have picked them.  Elliott was willing to water the lawn and gardens; asking him to pick raspberries in the heat and mosquitoes would have been a bridge too far.)

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

Stephen Hawking, on the Discovery Channel:  "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native

Americans. . . .  We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."  [BBC News]

The palmist looks at the wrinkles made by closing the hand and says they signify character. The philosopher reads character by what the hand most loves to close upon.

            Kathy has taken to calling me the cat whisperer.  No matter where I go in the house, eventually I have one, two, or all three cats lying on the floor or on furniture somewhere close to me.  I'd like to believe this attachment is because I am such a tremendous human being, but I suspect it's more because I am the one who feeds them soft cat food every morning and tosses them cat treats in a game every afternoon after we get home from work.  Kathy and Krystin both give them as much affection as I do, and the cats will follow them around if I'm not at home, but they stick to me like glue if I'm there. 

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.

            Elliott and I talk about his classes from time to time.  He took a combination of courses in the fall, 2012, semester that neatly represents a fragment of a good liberal arts education.  He had cognitive psychology, Japanese history since 1868, the American criminal justice system, a seminar on leadership, and a research methods (statistical analysis) course required by his major field.  He told me that despite the rather unappealing nature of the course, the research methods and statistical analysis course has been interesting (it enabled him to read political polls much more critically).  I was prompted by his enrollment in the course to pass along an observation by George Bernard Shaw:  "The sign of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics."

            Kathy and Krystin and I also gave Elliott a lot of unsolicited advice on registering for spring semester 2013.  We sat around one night looking at the class schedule on the web, and finally he picked out the two additional classes he needed.  Two were obligatory, research methods for his major (Psychology) and Spanish (because he needs to be proficient in a second language in order to graduate), but he had two electives, with one in the major.  So he ended up with research methods, Spanish, abnormal psychology, and Viking history/stories/archaeology.  Another well-rounded set of courses for a liberal-arts education.  (Inasmuch as the biggest single chunk of Krystin's and Elliott's background is Norwegian, learning about the Vikings is entirely apropos.)  I had to caution him about the abnormal psychology class, which I also took about 40 years ago:  One comes out of it convinced one has many of the afflictions described in the course.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

            It wasn't a great birthday week, in late August, I have to say.  On my birthday, a Monday, Krystin learned she has to have a kidney transplant within the next two years.  The waiting list for kidneys is 3-5 years.  So she has to find a donor or eventually go on dialysis.  The day before, Sunday evening, Kathy started to get sick; eventually I took her to urgent care on Wednesday and she got a diagnosis of pneumonia.  She was flattened for a week with aches, temperature fluctuating, headaches, and coughing.  In the "piling on" category, my beloved sister-in-law's father died during the week, so Elliott and I went to the funeral on Friday.  This was not my idea of a good time.  Fortunately, Kathy recovered.

            Krystin's treating the news of the need for a kidney transplant like a trooper.  She said to me, when she called to tell me, that it was her own fault, for not dealing appropriately with her diabetes for the last 15 years.  She started a blog on the process and started the testing necessary for the eventual surgery.  Several of her Facebook friends (on which she informed people of the diagnosis) immediately volunteered to be tested for a match in order to donate a kidney.  I was amazed and overwhelmed at the generosity.

            She has gone through all the appropriate screening and is now "on the list" for a combined kidney and pancreas transplant (the organs would come from a cadaver).  Interestingly, she moves up on the list because she needs both; her transplant team told her that it's more like six months to a year.  She also has a friend from high school whose blood type matches Krystin's and who went in for testing for the additional matches that have to exist before an organ can be transplanted from a living donor. 

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

            Following up on a Mark Twain quote from last year ("This is the only place in the world where the pavements consist exclusively of holes with asphalt around them. And they are the most economical in the world, because holes never get out of repair"), an eminent British economist wrote this year that the economist John Maynard "Keynes famously advocated reducing unemployment by employing people to dig holes and fill them in again: today it would be enough to employ them to fill the potholes that are already there."

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

I composed this portion of the letter looking out through the vivid yellow and red leaves of the trees onto Caribou Lake.  Kathy and I took a long weekend at the end of September and went to the North Shore.  We did the same thing last year, and stayed on Caribou Lake both times, about 4-5 miles north of Lutsen.  One forgets how quiet and dark it is outside a city.  The one drawback to coming up here is that there are far too many interesting galleries and potters in Grand Marais.  We do get out in the woods, of course, and repeated our performance of Mons Klint in Denmark, walking down and then back up too many steps; the Judge Magney State Park only has 189 steps down to the Brule River and then back up to the walking path.  Kathy thought the leaves were as brilliantly-colored this year as they were last, but I didn't; I thought the drought in the state (not as severe in the northeast part as in the central and south) had brought down some leaves earlier so there were more bare trees this year.  Given what I read from the climatologists, that's likely to recur as one of the effects of anthropogenic global warming.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

There's not a lot more to say about the election season, other than that even I, a political news junkie all my life, was glad to see it over, but I did stumble across two apposite comments about money.  First Robert Reich, channeling Winston Churchill, about the unrestricted PAC spending:  "Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many."  (And, from the Republican side, surely, given the election results, "with so little effect."  But, as is often the case in life, we don't know the counterfactual:  If the conservative PACs and GOP candidates had not spent as much money as they did, matching the amounts spent by Democrats, would the results have turned out even worse, from their standpoint? )  

Compare Reich with a statement from Marc Hanna, the man who just about single-handedly engineered the election of William McKinley in 1896:  "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is."

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

My side of the family gathered for Thanksgiving at my brother and sister-in-law's, Tracy and Joan's.  Kathy's son Spence joined as well, as he has in the past.  We (Kathy and I) are grateful to them for hosting, and usually doing Christmas as well, because our house cannot easily accommodate 12-16 people for dinner.  So as one way to repay them, and because Krystin made such a hit last year with her bird, we brought the turkey as well as other foods for the dinner.  We still get the better end of the bargain, but we appreciate their willingness to serve as hosts.

We added a small variation to the annual family gathering this year:  We brought champagne and toasted my brother's completion of his doctorate.  Getting the degree is a long slog, as I can attest, and as any number of my faculty friends have commented, is more a tribute to perseverance than intelligence.  But I was glad for Tracy that he earned the degree.  I am quite sure my parents would be astonished (pleasantly and proudly) to learn that they had two kids who are now technically Dr. Engstrand.  (I think I recounted at the time that when I earned my degree, Elliott was quite young, and when I told him I was "Dr. Engstrand," he said I was kidding.)

One of the strangest delusions of the Western mind is to the effect that a philosophy of profound wisdom is on tap in the East. I have read a great many expositions of it, some by native sages and the rest by Western enthusiasts, but I have found nothing in it save nonsense. It is, fundamentally, a moony transcendentalism almost as absurd as that of Emerson, Alcott and company. It bears no sort of relation to the known facts, and is full of assumptions and hypotheses that every intelligent man must laugh at. In its practical effects it seems to be as lacking in sense and . . . inimical to human dignity.

Douglas Coupland wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "A Dictionary for the Near Future."  One definition he described as "Bell's Law of Telephony:  No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size."  We have had a somewhat different experience, which is that with each advance in technology, no matter how much cheaper and widespread it may be, the higher your phone bill goes.  Not so many years ago I was content to pay my $30 per month for my landline.  Now our bill is over $200 per month for telephony, which of course includes Internet access on cell phones and unlimited texting.  I could cut out the landline, but Comcast tells me I would reduce the monthly bill by $7 if I were to do so.  So I keep the same telephone number the house has had since 1940.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

I have come in the last couple of years to be astonished and irritated by what I describe as the cantankerousness of inanimate objects.  If I am pulling hose across the yard, it finds a rock or plant to get stuck in.  If I am vacuuming in the house, the cord finds a chair or table to get ensnarled in.  If I try to cut dead branches off a houseplant, other branches maliciously get in the way.  If I am trying to wash dishes by hand, the dishcloth manages to get all balled up.  Maybe this has happened all my life and I've noticed it happen more regularly recently.  Maybe I am just getting crabby as I get older.

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

As is often the case in my life, late this year I absorbed new technology several years after most of you reading this.  I wanted to start reading an Icelandic murder mystery series one Sunday evening in November and I didn't want to go to the effort of driving to Barnes and Noble.  So I asked Kathy to download the first in the series on her Kindle, a device I had never used.  Now that I've used it for several books, I can say that for text-only books, it works for me as well as the print version—something that obviously millions of other people have already discovered.  Of course, I still don't know how to actually do anything on the Kindle except read; Kathy will at some point have to show me how to order and download books.  But hey, little steps.  Just so I keep taking little steps into my dotage and don't become technology-resistant rather than being merely technology-retarded.  (Upon reading this, Elliott wise-cracked that "You can take solace in the fact that you have purchased a smart-phone before me, despite my usual place at the forefront of electronic technology.")

[on Shakespeare]  After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

I have discovered that for some reason unbeknownst to anyone, the Scandinavian countries have become a hotbed of murder-mystery authors; there are dozen or more that have begun writing series in the last decade or so.  Apart from the Martin Beck series of ten police procedurals, by Swedish authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the mid-60s to mid-70s, I don't know that anyone thought of Scandinavia as a source of good murder mysteries. 

            [There is a spoiler alert here, although it's pretty widely known.] Then came along Henning Mankell, who also wrote ten mysteries with the same protagonist, Kurt Wallender, starting in 1997 and ending in 2011.  Mankell had said that the tenth book in the series would be the last one, and to make it clear that Wallender would not be coming back, he has Wallender fade into Alzheimer's in the closing paragraph.  So unlike Conan Doyle, who, because of popular pressure, brought back Sherlock Holmes even after his supposed death in his struggle with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, Mankell can't be pressured to bring back Wallender unless he wants to posit a cure for Alzheimer's.

            Since Mankell began his series, several other authors have popped up, from Oslo to Reykjavik, but for some odd reason the significant majority of the authors are Swedish and the stories set in Sweden.  (Yes, there was the Stieg Larsson series, but I don't really consider them "murder mysteries" in the traditional sense, whatever that is.)  I have been surprised at how good I have found the Scandinavian mystery writers to be, at least for my taste in junk reading.  What also surprises me is that I like these authors rather than others who are Italian or French, for example, and set mysteries in Paris or Venice.  I've tried those authors and didn't especially care that much for them.  It must be my Scandinavian genes acting up again.

            One series I like quite a bit is the series set in Iceland by Arnaldur Indriðason [Indridason] that set me off using the Kindle, but I quickly learned that I shouldn't even try to pronounce the names of either characters in the novels or the place names.

Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person.

[Spoiler alert in this paragraph as well.]  We went to see Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie.  As those movies go, it was good.  I wonder if Queen Elizabeth would ever think to have lunch with Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, and Dame Maggie Smith.  It could be a fun conversation to listen in on.  (Dench and Smith were born 19 days apart in December, 1934, Mirren in 1945.)  I was really disappointed that they did in Judi Dench as M in the movie.  I loved her performance in that role.  Elliott said I could be consoled by the fact that M will now be played by the same guy who played Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.  Great.

Age, with his eyes in the back of his head, thinks it wisdom to see the bogs through which he has floundered.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

            I learned in early November, by announcement in a committee meeting, that there is going to be a dinner in early 2013 in honor of my 25 years in my current position.  The chair of the faculty's executive committee announced the dinner in a meeting that included the president and the provost.  I was taken completely by surprise.

            Although I shy away from tooting my own horn, in the interest of reporting noteworthy events in our lives, I should tell you about another recognition.  The chair of said faculty executive committee gives a report on committee activities at each meeting of the Faculty Senate (about 175 people), which meets 5-6 times per year.  She went to the podium at the meeting in early December and began by observing that this is the centennial year of the Senate and that one person has worked with the Senate and some of its committees for one-quarter of its existence.  I suddenly got the idea I was going to be the focus of brief attention.  She went on reading a commendation of my work and then pulled out a large framed certificate and beckoned me up to the join her so she could give it to me.  The president of the University (the presiding officer at the meetings) walked over and shook my hand.  The Faculty Senate gave me a standing ovation.  I was absolutely dumbfounded.  And extremely touched and choked up. 

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

            We have decided to remodel the kitchen, a project that we hope will take place in February or March.  Not that there's much anyone can do with a galley kitchen, but we're going to extend it a bit into our breakfast nook so we can move from an amazingly small amount of cupboard space and countertop to a below-average amount of cupboard space and countertop.  It seemed like we improved it a lot when the house was remodeled in 1996, but now, 16 years later, Kathy looks at it and blanches, both for the décor and for the practicalities.  We happened to have dinner with a friend who had moved into a new house this summer and he'd redone the entire kitchen in Ikea cabinets.  We thought they were extremely attractive, so we're going to copy him.  Oh, goodie, another period of a mess in the house—my third time.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

I have a perfectionist dental hygienist.  In many things in life, I try to achieve, or at least want, the best possible, within the constraints of my time and resources, whether painting, writing, cleaning, decorating, etc.  When it comes to getting plaque and stain off the back of my teeth, however, I'm perfectly willing to settle for adequate.  But no—my hygienist wears mini-binoculars while working and if she sees one micron of either, she's back in there with her tools.

One committee I work with at the University received an update on the Affordable Care Act (or in the derogatory term of the GOP, Obamacare).  Now that it is clear that it will go into effect, those here with the right expertise have begun to assess the impact of the law on the health benefits provided by the University to its faculty and staff.  Much remains uncertain, because the law contains a cap on the tax-exempt value of employer-provided health benefits—and the amounts, set when the law was passed but effective in 2018 and with no inflationary provision, will likely be lower than what the University (and probably many other organizations) provides.  So unless Congress subsequently adjusts that cap, the University will have to reduce the level of support for health benefits—it may fall within the "Cadillac" provisions of the law (that is, providing plan value that exceeds the cap set in the law), and if it does provide benefits to us that exceed the cap, it will face fines that would run into the millions of dollars.  I am told that the reason for the cap is so that the IRS will not be forgoing any more income than necessary (because of the tax exemption for health plans).  But I'm not going to worry about that possibility because I think it entirely possible I will be retired in 2018.

This dilemma, however, is one that could have been avoided if Congress had simply adopted a single-payer health-care system.  It isn't perfect, but it surely would work as well or better than the jerry-built system we ended up with just because certain interests in Congress wanted to protect the insurance companies.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

            For all the years the kids have been alive it has been our tradition to drive north of the Twin Cities and cut down our Christmas tree on the Friday after Thanksgiving. (The entire process, from departure to the tree farm to hanging the last ornament, is about 8 hours.) Part of the tradition is that on the drive up we listen to the soundtrack from My Fair Lady and on the drive back we listen to Fiddler on the Roof.  I got to reflecting this year on a couple of lines from one of Henry Higgins' songs, "I'm an Ordinary Man":  "I'm a quiet living man, who prefers to spend the evening in the silence of his room, who likes an atmosphere as restful as an undiscovered tomb.  A pensive man am I, of philosophical joys, who likes to meditate, contemplate, far from humanity's mad inhuman noise."  This reminded me of Blaise Pascal's quip that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

What is the purpose of spending an evening in the silence of one's room alone?  Quiet, I suppose, and reading and thinking and writing.  Or playing games on a computer, in this era.  But I've decided that the option of being alone in my room, unless I happen to want to read or write, is not particularly attractive.  I can think and write all I want to, and heaven knows I do, but I'm surely not going to write anything that should survive.  I doubt I can think anything original or that's worth illuminating the world with.  Nope, on balance I'd rather spend the majority of my time with my spouse, my children, good friends, having a good time, good meals, and good company.  Hermits can go sit in their rooms.

Kathy has described our Christmas tree as "retro" (her artificial tree has not come out of the box in the basement—she kindly goes along with our drive-up-and-cut-the-tree tradition).  She said it harks back to the 40s and 50s.  I can't decide if I'm insulted or not, but she's right that it is reflective of the kind of decorated tree that I grew up with, which is probably similar to what my parents grew up with.  I suppose there aren't many people who still use the C7-watt light bulbs, or bubble lights, or steel/chrome reflectors behind the bulbs.  Kathy assures me she does not mean it as an insult and says she's come around to liking the tree.

On the subject of Christmas, Kathy and Krystin and I had quite the laugh.  In late November I had on a CD of Handel's Messiah, and as those of you who know the piece know, there is a song "All we like sheep have gone astray":  "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Krystin commented that this sounded close to bestiality (the "all" is often soft and the lyrics most easily heard are "we like sheep")—and she has only heard Messiah about a hundred times, because I play it several times every December.  She said that she's wondered about that song for years.  Kathy and I laughed and laughed.  Krystin was puzzled until we pointed out the complete lyrics and I said that there are implied commas setting off the phrase "like sheep."  She laughed then as well—but added that one never knew what was going on in 18th-Century London and maybe they did like sheep.

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

            Fortunately, I rarely have to travel for business.  When I was footloose and fancy-free in my late 20s and had traveled little, the chance to go to meetings and conventions in various U.S. cities was exciting; I got to see new places and meet interesting people—but not on my nickel.  Now I just find it a duty, not something I look forward to.  The people at most of my meetings are still interesting and while I'm in the meetings (and sometimes having a drink afterward), I enjoy them.  But on the whole, I'd rather not put up with the hassle of travel.

            As someone who watches perhaps 10-20 hours of television per year, which of course puts me in the weirdo category in modern American life, when I'm in the hotel and don't feel like reading, I'll turn on the local cable channels and flip through them.  At one point at a meeting at Northwestern University, I saw that I had the opportunity to watch the annual NASCAR awards ceremony, several music videos, and food and religious channels.  The movie channels had nothing interesting, and I couldn't stay up to watch an entire movie anyway.  The news channels have so many ads that I don't want to suffer through them to get news.  I suppose I shall go to my grave as one of those weirdos about TV because nothing I've ever come across on these cable channels has ever struck me as delivering anything worth my time.  Or maybe this is just another reflection of the fact that I'm getting crabby as I get older.  Sigh.  Or maybe I'm not so wrong; Elliott wrote to me that "it's not you; TV is mostly trash these days."

            What also makes me crabby (light-heartedly so) is that when I took the light-rail train home from the airport after this trip, at three different times I had people aged perhaps between 15 and 30 stand up and offer me their seat.  Ugh.  *I'm* the one who still stands up and offers elderly people my seat.  It was refreshing, however, to see that there are still considerate people in the world, even though I found their considerateness annoying.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

            So ends this year's epistle.  I will hope I did not contribute to the "capacity of human beings to bore one another," at least not too much.  I wish you a prosperous, healthy, and happy 2013.

         

* * *

The reflections of P. D. James

Last spring I re-read all of the P. D. James Adam Dalgliesh mysteries.  I regard her has one of the best mystery writers of all, in part because I get such pleasure out of her ability to use the English language.  When I read them the first time, quite a few years ago, I noticed that from time to time she interjected, through the thoughts or speech of her characters, interesting observations about human life and society.  This time I made note of the observations and have excerpted some of them here, which serve primarily as a vehicle to reflect on a variety of things in life.

After I had compiled them, I realize that many of them could be seen as somewhat depressing.  They do not reflect my state of mind at all:  I am extremely happily married, my kids are doing fine (well, Krystin's waiting for a transplant, but otherwise she's doing well), life is good.  I am completely chipper.  I just found these excerpts intriguing, even if they aren't all the way to start your day.

Thank God he didn't use that blasted word challenge.  If I have to listen to one more candidate telling me he sees the job as a challenge I'll throw up over the boardroom table.  Death of an Expert Witness

Yep, we hear that word all the time in higher education, too.  The "budget challenge," the challenge of the political situation, and indeed the challenge of a job.  I could not agree more.

They'll tell you that the most destructive force in the world is hate.  Don't you believe it, lad.  It's love.  Death of an Expert Witness

I'm not enough of an expert—not an expert at all—on human relationships to have an intelligent opinion on this.  Maybe it's a throw-away line that just occurred to her while writing, but it strikes me (in the absence of evidence) that it might well be true.

Night was different from bright day, smelled different, sounded different; ordinary things assumed different shapes; an alien and more sinister power ruled the night. . . .  The power that ruled the night could smell out fear as dogs smell out terror.  Devices and Desires

I have always felt this way, even when securely and safely inside my own house.  Less so than as a child, of course; we all get over (or at least suffer less from) what seems to be an instinctive fear of the night, a fear that must come from deep in our evolutionary roots.  But I still find the night spooky, and that is especially true if I am in a strange place.  (I don't mean it's scary if I'm in the middle of a crowd in a big city at night, or at a major outdoor social event, like watching 4th of July fireworks outside the state capitol in St. Paul with the kids; I mean walking alone or only with Kathy on a dark path along the Mississippi River or in the woods at night.)  Houses, especially old ones, seem to creek and groan, and when I'm lying on the sofa at night (down from the bedroom because I'm sleepless—not because Kathy kicked me out!), I can still find myself reacting to those creepy odd noises from around the house.  (Cats nearly-silently wandering around, just as I'm drifting off to sleep, don't help.  Especially not when they suddenly jump out of nowhere and land on my stomach.)

It was on those lonely walks that he had first intimations of an essentially adult truth, that it is those who most love us who cause us the most pain.  Devices and Desires

I certainly agree.  As I told the kids many times when they were growing up, if a neighbor kid, or even the child of a friend, did something annoying or ill-mannered, I would never say anything.  But I did say something to Krystin or Elliott, I told them, because I cared about them.  If the neighborhood children were going to grow up ill-mannered boors, there wasn't much I could do about it and it wasn't my business.  The case of children, however, is only a small slice of what I suspect James was alluding to.  Finding myself in an unexpected divorce was probably more of the order of magnitude she had in mind. 

But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large, and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.  Devices and Desires

I can see myself reaching that final state, that realization, although it seems pessimistic.  I sometimes think it now.  But is it inevitable and all-consuming?  One hopes not, and I know people at and over eighty who—at least in social settings—don't express a sense that "nothing mattered at all."  Some of those over eighty quite regularly beat me at bridge.  One reason for the thinking James characterizes is represented in another couple of excerpts:

'I have not since 1918 been a religious woman.  I doubt if I ever was in any real sense.  Mysticism, in particular, is as meaningless to me as music must be to the tone deaf.  I accept, of course, that people do have these experiences.  I would expect the causes to be physical and psychological; overwork, the ennui of middle age, or a need to find some meaning to existence.  That to me has always been a fruitless quest.'  A Taste for Death

Hear what comfortable words our [hospital] Matron saith.  Her whole working life seemed a blasphemous liturgy of reassurance and absolution.  And much easier both to give and to accept was this bland milk of human kindness than the acid of truth.  She could imagine the blank incomprehension, the resentment with which they would greet her private credo.  'I haven't anything to offer.  There isn't any help.  We are all alone, all of us from the moment of birth until we die.  Our past is our present and our future.  We have to live with ourselves until there isn't any more time left.  If you want salvation look to yourself.  There's nowhere else to look.'  Shroud for a Nightingale

If one accepts the probability that we exist in an entirely physical universe that has no extra-human or extra-species agency of any kind, then it is difficult not to conclude that "nothing really mattered at all."  That does not, however, preclude one from having a good time along the way.  It's when one is no longer having a good time (as, for example, my grandmother was not as she lived into her late 90s in an assisted-living residence for the elderly, in one room of her own) that the meaningless becomes more apparent, and perhaps also the importance of small things in life looming larger.  I'm not quite there yet, but I'll tell you when I do get there, assuming I do.

He wasn't sure whether this disenchantment with his job was caused solely by his illness, the salutory reminder of inevitable death, or whether it was the symptom of a more fundamental malaise, that latitude in middle-life of alternate doldrums and uncertain winds when one realizes that hopes deferred are no longer realizable, that ports not visited will now never be seen, that this journey and others before it may have been a mistake, that one has no longer even confidence in charts and compass.  The Black Tower

The character thinking this, James' main character, Adam Dalgliesh, is somewhat younger than I am when this reflection occurs.  It's a point I suppose that many of us reach; I have.  I find it so hard to know whether this journey has been a mistake; so many of our choices (great and small) are driven by our genetic makeup and the environment we find ourselves in.  I've wondered from time to time if I should have stuck it out in law school.  Maybe I would have been more successful financially (not that I'm poor), but would I have liked what I did as a lawyer as much as I have for the last 25 years?  I don't know.  But as I wrote earlier, I’m sure going to try, with Kathy, to visit as many ports as I can before my stamina runs out!

The phrase "middle-life of alternate doldrums and uncertain winds" is delightful. 

He found himself wondering, as he had before in his life, at man's insistent need for ritual, for the formal acknowledgement of each rite of passage.  Devices and Desires

I, too, have come to wonder about this need.  We must have funerals, we must have weddings, we must have various services, religious and not, to recognize getting older (e.g., confirmation, bar mitzvah, parties at age 21, retirement parties).  I'm as guilty as anyone in recognizing and respecting these rituals, even while I marvel at them.  But why not just a continuing series of intimate dinner parties with good friends and family?  (Well, we do that, too.)  Elliott (although less so Krystin) finds some of these rituals and ceremonies to be odd, although he goes along with convention in respecting them.  I wonder if his view will change as he gets older.

Timor mortis conturbat me.  [The fear of death disturbs me.]  He thought:  In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us.  Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.  It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.  And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural. Whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage.  Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath.  How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend.  Devices and Desires

Is this what happens when nothing matters any longer?  One can only hope so.  I know it's not original with James to observe that we come to think more about life's end when we have passed out of our youth and into middle age.  In my case, later middle age, if "middle age" is defined as perhaps 35 and older.  (I wouldn't accept 30 as middle age, not now.)  As I observed earlier in this letter, I probably didn't start thinking about my own mortality until I was 50ish.  Now we do wills and health-care directives and trusts and heaven knows what other documents our attorney says we need (getting married a second time, when there were children involved on both sides, is a complicated matter).  All those documents to prepare and sign are rather intrusive reminders that youth is slipping away. 

He liked himself too well to conceive that other men might find him less lovable, and this endearing naivety gave him a kind of charm. . . .  Certainly his was the infectious good nature of a man who necessarily finds the world an agreeable place since it contains himself.  Shroud for a Nightingale

I've known people like that.  I must say, however, that I find the world an agreeable place because of my presence to the extent that I definitely would NOT find it agreeable were I not here.

He was never tormented by doubt of his own motives.  Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles.  He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cause their perplexing shadows.  A Mind to Murder

The Tea Party.  Jerry Falwell. A few on the left, but far more on the right.

There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.  Unnatural Causes

I don't have any comment on this, but it strikes me as likely true.

'What use is theology?  Tell me that.  You chose to spend three years on it [at Oxford].   I mean, you must have felt you would gain something from it, something useful or important. . . .'  He didn't tell her . . . what it was he had chiefly gained:  a fascination with the complexity of intellectual bastions which men could construct to withstand tides of disbelief.  Death in Holy Orders

While James used this exchange to poke at theology, I'd say it's more generalizable.  Those who dispute evolution, even if not for religious reasons (although it almost always is), manage to construct those "intellectual bastions . . . to withstand tides of disbelief."  One might say the same about those who deny the human contribution to climate change or who reject vaccination.  Or who believe a thousand things that leave me speechless.  (Or as Warren Buffett has remarked, "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.")

'It's just that what they believe [at a small Church of England theological college] has become irrelevant.  I don't mean the moral teaching:  the Judaeo-Christian heritage has created Western civilization and we should be grateful to it.  But the Church they serve is dying.  When I look at the Doom [a medieval allegorical painting of heaven and hell] I try to have some understanding of what it meant to fifteenth-century men and women.  If life is hard and short and full of pain, you need the hope of heaven; if there is no effective law, you need the deterrent of hell.  The Church gave them comfort and light and pictures and stories and the hope of everlasting life.  The twenty-first century has other compensations.  Football for one.  There you have ritual, colour, drama, the sense of belonging; football has its high priests, even its martyrs.  And then there's shopping, art and music, travel, alcohol, drugs.  We all have our own resources for staving off those two horrors of human life, boredom and the knowledge that we die.  And now—God help us—there's the Internet.  Pornography at the touch of a few keys.  If you want to find a paedophile ring or discover how to make a bomb to blow up people you disagree with, it's all there for you.  Plus, of course, a bottomless mine of other information, some of it even accurate.'  Death in Holy Orders

I mentioned information overload earlier in the letter.  On the other hand, however, those interested in advancing religious or any other views now have audiences and followers, instantly joined.  This has not always seemed to me a good thing.

All hospitals, thought Dalgliesh, whatever their situation or architecture, are essentially alike:  the same smell, the same paint, the same notices direction visitors to wards and departments, the same inoffensive pictures in the corridors chosen to reassure, not to challenge, the same visitors with their flowers and packages making their confident way to familiar bedsides, the same staff in a variety of uniforms and half-uniforms, moving purposely in their natural habitat, the same tired resolute faces. . . .  'I try to keep out of these places.  They give you infections that they can't cure, and if your own visitors don't exhaust you to death, other patients' visitors will.  You can never get enough sleep and the food's inedible.'  Death in Holy Orders

Yep. The line about "inoffensive pictures in the corridors" rings true.  I've conducted an informal personal survey of pictures hanging on the walls of hospital corridors.  I am convinced there is a large warehouse in Omaha or Knoxville that has thousands of copies of the same prints of flowers and pastoral scenes that every hospital in the country orders from.  I suppose having some of Dali's weirder paintings would be a little strange for a hospital, and hanging Munch's "The Scream" might upset a few people, but surely there's some middle ground between the unnerving and the soporific.  (And I'd add in defense of hospital staffs that most don't have the "same tired resolute faces."  They are mostly caring people who are all doing duty that I'm enormously relieved that some are willing to do.  Can't pay those people enough.)

[Apropos of her son, a character said] 'Like most upper-class Anglicans, he would have found the Incarnation more understandable if God had chosen to visit His creation as an eighteenth-century English gentleman.  But like most of his class, he got around that little difficulty by more or less refashioning Him in the guise of an eighteenth-century English gentleman.'  A Taste for Death

Just as many of us raised in Christian churches of some stripe have seen so many pictures of Jesus looking like a hippie from the 1960s.  They certainly don't have his skin tone the right color and he looks like someone born in middle or northern Europe.  With a beard and long hair.

                                                   

It's inconsiderate of one's friends to commit suicide, too like setting a good example.  A Taste for Death

Uff da.

He marveled anew at the infinite variety of marriage, that relationship at once so private and public, so hedged with convention and yet so anarchical.  A Taste for Death

I've never thought of marriage (at least not my own) as anarchical.  Certainly hedged with convention—and the conventions vary enormously by socio-economic-educational class.  My marriage doesn't resemble anything like some marriages I've seen or that all of us have read about in the news.  I think of mine (and certainly those of my friends and close relatives) as respectful, collaborative, and fun, joint ventures in life.  (I sure hope Kathy agrees J). 

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.  Original Sin

On the other hand, none of us can grieve indefinitely.  But then again, in a few cases, perhaps we grieve for someone, at least a little, for the remainder of our lives.  In my life, I still grieve some for my mother, who died too young (at 62).  I don't grieve for my maternal grandmother (who died at 98) because she led a full life and didn't want to be alive any more (or so she said repeatedly).  I don't know that I grieve much for my father, again because he led a full life and died at 83.  But perhaps it is true that when we stop grieving, the person is "dead at last."  I think I'd say, however, that someone is really dead when those who remember them are also dead.  Then they just become someone on a family tree or someone in a photograph taken by one's parents or grandparents.  And then there is this:

The dead, however they die, are tidied away with decent speed to their designated place, a tray in a hospital mortuary, the undertaker's embalming room, the pathologist's table.  The doctor may not come when called; the undertaker always does. . . .  Those who mourn, as she in her time had mourned, move like automata into a shadow world in which nothing is real or familiar or seemingly ever will be again.  But even they speak, attempt to sleep, raise untasting food to their mouths, continue as if by rote to play their destined part in a drama in which all the other characters seem familiar with their roles.  The Private Patient

Nice line, "the doctor may not come when called; the undertaker always does."  The latter part is certainly true—they've never missed in my experience.  The idea that a doctor would come when called is either a picture from a bygone era, when doctors made house calls, or is a peculiar reference to the ambulance crew.  The varieties of reaction to death, including grief, seem to me greater than what James suggests with this passage.  This is the reaction when someone extremely close dies—a loved spouse or child, perhaps. 

It sometimes seemed to him that the thought processes of other people were so radically different from his that he and they inhabited a different dimension of reason.  Facts which to him were self-evident required from his four partners prolonged thought and discussion before, reluctantly, they were accepted; discussions were complicated by confused emotions and personal considerations which seemed to him as irrelevant as they were irrational.  Original Sin

I have encountered such people.  Some of them are faculty colleagues. 

He wished that, sitting there quietly, he could hear the sea . . . that ceaseless rise and fall which, more than any other natural sound, touched mind and heart with a sense of time's inexorable passing, of the centuries of unknown and unknowable human lives with their brief miseries and even briefer joys.  Original Sin

Anyone who has ever lain in bed at night listening to the sounds of the ocean understands this passage, I suspect.  The ceaseless, relentless rolling of the waves onto the shore does seem to touch infinity, or something like infinity compared to our short time on the planet. 

But their minds had moved in tandem.  'Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days:  that I may be certified how long I have to live.'  [Anglican Book of Common Prayer, The Burial of the Dead] Surely few people could pray that prayer with any sincerity.  The best one could hope for or want was enough time to tidy away the personal debris, consign one's secrets to the flames or the dustbin and leave the kitchen tidy.  Original Sin

Elliott once said that what he'd most like to know is the date of his death.  I told him that that was probably the last thing he wanted to know.  After he thought about it, he agreed.  James is surely right; "few could pray that prayer with any sincerity."  Kathy and I have been confronting the need to "tidy away the personal debris" in that preparation of documents our lawyer says we need.  Fortunately—or perhaps because I have led rather a dull life—I have no secrets to consign to the flames.  We certainly will try to leave the kitchen tidy, however.

She had always found it difficult to believe what experience had taught her, that men and women could be physically beautiful without also possessing some comparable qualities of mind and spirit, that beauty could be wasted on the mundane, the ignorant or the stupid.  The Private Patient

It would be interesting to know what the correlation is between physical beauty and intellectual ability or between beauty and character and integrity.  Heaven knows one can certainly encounter the beautiful who are also vapid or who've never had an original thought in their lives.  As we also all know, beauty can be transient; some of the most beautiful of my high-school classmates didn't retain the attractiveness into middle age, and some who were not so beautiful in high school acquired beauty as they got older. 

He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to its possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field.  The Murder Room

Donald Trump?  Rupert Murdoch?  I suppose Buffett and Gates and Soros as well.  Mitt Romney?

So there, P. D. James' on aspects of life.  One could also observe that James herself doesn't seem to be afflicted with any depressing end-of-life obsessions.  She couldn't have time; she recently published Death Comes to Pemberley, her transposition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice into a murder mystery, published when she was 91.  As far as I know, she's still writing (she's 92) and she serves in the House of Lords.