2016 annual letter

                                                                                    December, 2016

                                                                                    22^nd annual letter, if you want to call it that

I send you my warmest greetings for the holidays and 2017.

            I almost decided against sending a letter this year.  One reason (I’ve had to deduce; it wasn’t obvious until the year progressed) is that I retired in June and have been astonished by how much less initiative I’ve had since then (including a decidedly decreased inclination to work on this annual tome).  More on the retirement gig later.  Another reason is that I’ve been so depressed and lethargic following the November elections that I didn’t feel like doing anything that required intellectual energy (but it is November when I pull all my notes from the year into this letter with whatever coherence I can manage).  As a result, this year’s edition is a more slapdash affair with less editing than I prefer.

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves a constant ease and serenity within us, and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can possibly befall us.

            Here is a fuller (but still incomplete) version of Dickens’ famous opening line from A Tale of Two Cities:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. . . .”  His opposing clauses pretty much sum up 2016. 

            Apropos of “the worst of times . . . it was the season of Darkness . . . it was the winter of despair,” except for one tiny bit at the end, there will be nothing in this letter about the 2016 U.S. elections.  There have been millions of words written both during the campaign and after the results; I have nothing new or unique to add.

            One small anecdote, however.  When we were in Italy in October, we spent three days in Rome with a couple who are friends from Scotland.  After our elections, he wrote to me drawing an analogy between the Brexit vote and our presidential election:  “Eventually I realised that, without being aware, I’d been sharing a country with a whole bunch of people who thought differently from me about virtually everything.”

Men who profess a state of neutrality in times of public danger, desert the common interest of their fellow subjects; and act with independence to that constitution into which they are incorporated. The safety of the whole requires our joint endeavours. When this is at stake, the indifferent are not properly a part of the community; or rather are like dead limbs, which are an encumbrance to the body, instead of being of use to it.

            I’m sticking with my recent practice of interspersing quotations between topics.  This year I’m going with an obscure English playwright, poet, and politician, Joseph Addison, whose observations about humanity struck me as remarkably current, even though he lived 1672 – 1719.  Some of the quotations verge on pieties, but they struck my fancy so I used them.  You can be the judge of how apropos they remain.  I must make the obligatory apology:  Addison’s writing, given his era, uses the male pronoun, and I’m not going to fiddle around with his language.  I believe that reading what he wrote, however, one can conclude that his observations include most all human beings.

Were not this desire of fame very strong, the difficulty of obtaining it, and the danger of losing it when obtained, would be sufficient to deter a man from so vain a pursuit.

A goofy story.  When Elliott was home for his college’s spring break, on his last day in town Kathy and I took him out to eat at a local establishment.  After we were seated, I went to the restroom.  I washed my hands.  The paper towel dispenser was one of the older ones where you push down the lever on the side to issue the paper.  I pushed it down once, got a short towel, so pushed it down again to get a larger piece.  The entire paper towel dispenser came out of the wall and landed on my left foot.  I jumped back when it fell, and got my right foot out from underneath it, but I wasn’t quick enough with my left foot.  So my big toe on my left foot took a blow that hurt through the night.  The toe turned dark purple the next day but the pain dissipated.

Kathy joked that I should sue.  I jokingly agreed, but recalled that my attorney friends who’ve done personal injury work have told me that to sue for damages, there has to be some damage.  I’m not sure what the cash value of a sore toe would be if it were litigated.  Probably not enough to warrant a lawsuit.  So without consulting a lawyer, I didn’t sue.  My toe recovered.

A common civility to an impertinent fellow, often draws upon one a great many unforeseen troubles; and if one doth not take particular care, will be interpreted by him as an overture of friendship and intimacy.

            I found an interesting observation from Alexis de Tocqueville last spring.  He opined that there would be no replication of European aristocracy in the United States.

“The manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”

His fear, it seems to me, may have been warranted.

Interestingly, I also happened upon an article that bore directly on de Tocqueville’s observation.  In the daily news update from Quartz, Aamna Mohdin reported on a study by two Italian economists that analyzed taxpayers in 1427 and 2011 in Florence.  Looking at surnames, they found that “the richest families in Florence 600 years ago remain the same now.”  (They were able to do so because tax records from 1427 have been digitized and made available online, and they argue that Italian surnames are regional and are passed on.)  “The families at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago are the top earners among current taxpayers. Those at the top of the ladder had the most prestigious jobs, while families at the bottom had less esteemed occupations, with earnings below the median.”  They retained their positions in spite of wars involving Florence, the Napoleonic wars, and fascism and World War II. 

This replicates work that has been done in England, where “researchers have previously demonstrated how a family’s status in England can persist for more than eight centuries, or more than 28 whole generations.”  And it’s not limited to England.

One reason I’m in favor of a modest (not 100% confiscatory) inheritance tax.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief, and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

            Although his death occurred early in the year, the constitutional approach advocated by Justice Antonin Scalia will outlive him.  He was perhaps the leading advocate of the “originalism” approach to the constitution:  we must interpret it in light of the meanings attached to the words and phrases by the authors in 1787.  That is an approach that has garnered respectability in some quarters, in part because of course one wants to know what the authors were thinking when trying to interpret their document.  But it is, as one of the more biting commentaries pointed out (in the Skeptic’s Dictionary Newsletter), Scalia ignored the distinction between a concept and a conception.

On his view, one must interpret the Constitution according to the conceptions held by the authors (or by others living at the same time in the U.S.). On Scalia’s view, the authors intended their conceptions to restrict all further discussion of application and interpretation. On Scalia’s view, whatever the authors’ conception of, say, “speedy trial” or “jury of one’s peer” happened to be, we must not apply the conceptions of those concepts living two hundred years later. That was his view, but it was never recognized by him as a philosophical position of no more validity than the notion that the authors never say nor did they intend that people living two hundred years after the writing of the document should be disallowed from recognizing that while concepts may be expressed by the same words the conceptions evoked by those words evolve and change over time.

While Scalia’s political philosophy may be equally valid with philosophies that allow for the evolution of concepts embedded in the Constitution, I don’t think his approach is equally reasonable. In fact, I think his approach is irrational because it makes the framers look like morons. I don’t think Madison and the rest of the framers were morons. They may not have been the foresightful geniuses many of our history books make them out to be, but they surely did not intend to restrict all future generations to accept their conceptions of “reasonable doubt,” “justice,’ “general welfare,” “excessive bail,” “liberty,” “freedom of speech,” “well regulated Militia,” “Arms,” “cruel and unusual punishment,” etc. To assume what Scalia assumed is to believe that the framers did not want America to progress beyond the 18th century (my emphasis).

That seems to me highly likely.  Why would they have presumed to bind the nation for eternity?  Jefferson is known for having urged the desirability of a revolution every 25 years or so, and the great Chief Justice Marshall admonished his colleagues that they were interpreting a constitution, a document that had to meet the conditions of the times.

            So, while Kathy and I saw Justice Scalia on the University of Minnesota campus in the fall of 2015, and found him highly entertaining, I still think he was full of baloney when it came to constitutional interpretation.

            Moreover, as a Bloomberg.com article pointed out, “the justice’s most immediate, powerful, and lasting influence may be felt on one important issue: who can gain access to the courthouse. His opinions on such matters as which parties have ‘standing’ to sue and which types of cases can be tried as class actions tilted the scales of justice sharply toward corporations and away from consumers, environmentalists, and women.”  I don’t see that as a positive contribution to our society, not one as litigious as ours is.

            His contributions to American constitutional law will not be looked upon kindly by the muses of history.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

People who say ‘Let the chips fall where they may’ usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.  --Bernard Williams

There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.

Martin Lomasney, legendary Boston political boss, also completely honest:  “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”  Although Lomasney’s advice preceded the Internet and email, he would certainly include emails in “write.”  This is advice that many in public organizations especially seem to ignore, at their peril.  Interesting that this counsel came from a man who was, by all accounts, one of the cleanest politicians in the country.

Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape:  “If we have data, let’s look at data.  If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”  Which is why I am fond of data, rather than going with the opinion of whoever speaks loudest or fastest. 

Young men soon give and soon forget affronts; old age is slow in both.

After reading my letter last year, and the part about getting older, a friend send me this quote from Chris Farrell’s book Unretirement:

At what age did people become old from an employment perspective? The best scientific research and popular stereotypes converged at the idea that age forty marked the beginning of old age. William Osler (chief physician at Johns Hopkins and textbook author) . . . in 1905 gave a talk built on two key points about aging: “The first is the comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age. This may seem shocking, and yet read aright the world’s history bears out the statement,” he said. Osler continued. “My second fixed idea is the (total?) uselessness of men above sixty years of age.” (italics mine)

My friend went on to tell me that Farrell described “the picture of extreme age discrimination in the workplace 100 years ago, explaining how that job market reality coupled with a lack of social insurance left working people with few ‘senior options’ outside of burdening their offspring or going to the poor house.”

Then he recalled a comment from his wife’s great aunt, who turned 99 last year:  “I remember when I thought 80 was old!” She went on to say, “I’ve never been old before—I’m still learning.” My friend concluded: “learning how to navigate the territory, in other words. Aren’t we all, at whichever stage we find ourselves?”  I agreed with him—and thought of another quote from Alice in Wonderland that I didn’t use but that seems apropos now:

But then, shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way -- never to be an old woman -- but then -- always to have lessons to learn!

I think Alice was right:  we always have lessons to learn.  The lessons, however, aren’t the school lessons to which Alice was doubtless alluding, but (one hopes) the more fun and interesting lessons of advancing life.

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.

            Those of you who read all the way to the end of last year’s letter may recall my mention of a horrific crime in the family, cousins who were murdered by their grandson/nephew in San Diego.  As a consequence of those events, I was in touch with one of my cousin’s daughters (I have met a couple of her children only once, and only for a short dinner, many years ago, so we in effect do not know one another).  Aside from exchanging messages about the murders, my cousin’s daughter (also my cousin, of course; first cousin once removed) asked me about our common family history.  She presumably knew from her mother that I had poked around a little with genealogy and had collected information over the years.

            Before I responded, I decided to take a look at the background of one of my great-grandmothers, my dad’s mother’s mother (a relative shared in common with my cousin).  My grandmother had told me, when I was quite young, that her mother had interesting ancestors, but I’d never explored the history.  I did what everyone in the 21^st century does when looking for information:  the first thing I did was Google my great-grandmother, Delia Barton.  That got very little.  Then I tried her married name, Delia Wilson.  That didn’t get much.  Then, after a number of failed searches, I tried her second married name (she divorced my great-grandfather in the early 1900s, married another guy, and moved to Skagway, Alaska with him!).  I hit the jackpot when I finally tried her second married name.

            It turns out that my great-grandmother Fidelia “Delia” Barton/Wilson certainly did have an interesting genealogical history.  I found a gold mine (both of information and historical interest).  Most significantly, she was a Washburn on her mother’s mother’s side.  The Washburns have a long and distinguished pedigree, both in the United States and in England, they link to a number of the royal families in Europe—and along the way a significant number of Washburns have done an enormous amount of historical research, and all the information, I discovered, was freely available on the web. 

            By tracing back my Washburn ancestors, I learned that I’m descended from Charlemagne, from William the Conqueror, and from Malcolm III of Scotland, who killed the real-life Macbeth in revenge for Macbeth having killed Malcolm’s father, Duncan I.  (Malcolm III then re-took the throne of Scotland as well.)  Other ancestors include Lady Godiva and her husband (it remains the case that the story about her riding naked through the streets of the town may be apocryphal) and the Norse god Odin (yes, there apparently was some guy named Odin who had a potful of kids and who was later deified by the Scandinavians; in that case, I am descended from two different sons).  In the case of Odin, one of the genealogists wrote that “After Woden/Oden, who was worshipped as a god, we are on firmer historical ground. His various sons became the ancestors of the different Anglo-Saxon kingly lines.”  I come from two of them.

            Perhaps most intriguing of all, and likely the least credible, I traced one family line back to a woman named Anna (a Latinized/Anglicized version of her name, no doubt).  Her parents are unknown.  One of the genealogists, however, included a note that Anna was a cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  If one assumes that means first cousin, that makes me second cousin to Christ about 80 times removed (I have not counted the actual number of generations from Anna to me).  Sure. 

I also learned that I’m descended from one of the original 102 settlers who arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower in November of 1620.  In the case of one line that I followed back through the generations, I was able to get back to the year 22 through a line of Saxon kings.  Who would have thought there were sufficient surviving records to trace roots that far back?  My relatives also include the local Washburn family, famous in Minnesota grain milling history (and the namesake of my high school, Washburn), who went on to found General Mills. So I’m a distant cousin of the chap for whom my high school was named.

After I began to understand the breadth of the (European) history encapsulated in my genealogy, I put together a very large family tree that traced as many of my ancestors as I could.  It ended up being multiple pages; one challenge, of course, is that each time one goes back a generation, the number of people involved doubles.  Anyone familiar with basic statistics knows how quickly the numbers get very large when the exponent of 2 increases.  Fortunately for my paper supply and sanity, in many cases where I plotted parents and parents of parents and parents of parents of parents, etc., I had to note for many that his or her ancestors were not known. There were also a number of instances when the websites (WikiTree and Geni) included cautions, such as that the parents of someone were speculative and not supported by genealogical research, or that the person listed may never have existed.  In those cases, I stopped tracing the family line.  (Both WikiTree and Geni are great sites for anyone whose family roots have already been traced; they include source citations for entries or will indicate the sort of reservations I mentioned—uncertain parentage, uncertain existence.  Since the family links to the historical figures I mentioned are well-documented, I don’t have any qualms about claiming descent from them!)

As with most Americans, I suspect, the background of my other seven great-grandparents was far more common:  farmers, milkmaids, tradesmen.  I can’t even get very far back in history with them because I don’t know how to use the records that do exist, don’t want to pay to join a website that may or may not have information, and suspect that in many cases the records for “common” people are thin at best.  So I can get back in some cases to the early 1800s but no further; it’s only with Delia Barton’s forbearers that I can go back to the Middle Ages and before.

When I told Krystin and Elliott about descending from Odin, Elliott wrote back that “I’ll be sure to include Certified Norse God on all my future job applications.”  Another of our ancestors elicited a query from Elliott.  Osbern de Crépon (fitz Arfast), Abbot of St. Evroult, Steward of Normandy, lived ~985 - ~1040; “while protecting Duke William his throat was cut by Guillaume de Montgomerie, who in turn was killed in a revenge attack by the Duke’s followers.” Duke William in this case was the man who went on to become William the Conqueror who led the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.  Elliott wrote back, when I told him about de Crepon, “what an odd distinction to hold historically, being the person who died to save someone else who later went on to be important. Are you then just as important by extension, or just a foot note?”  I said he didn’t even rise to the level of a footnote; I’ve read a considerable amount of English history and had never heard of him.  No doubt he’s mentioned in the very finely detailed genealogies that have been written about many notable French families.  (He was murdered in France over 25 years before the Norman Conquest, when William was still a duke in France.)

[For those of you who may have forgotten it, and are interested, here’s the story of Lady Godiva.  My ancestor was Godgifu (in Latin, Godiva), “gift of God.”  She and her husband are clearly documented in numerous English records; they made many gifts to religious institutions.  According to the website Geni.com, she was born in 980 and died September 10, 1067—less than a year after the Norman Conquest.  Other sites have slightly different birth and death years.

Lady Godiva Buckingham, an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, was the beautiful wife of Leofric III, Earl of Mercia and lord of Coventry. She is known to have persuaded her husband to found monasteries at Coventry and Stow. The people of Coventry were suffering grievously under the earl’s oppressive taxation. Lady Godiva appealed again and again to her husband, who obstinately refused to remit the tolls. At last, weary of her entreaties, he said he would grant her request if she would ride naked through the streets of the town. According to legend, she consented to ride naked through the town on a white horse; Lady Godiva took him at his word, and after issuing a proclamation that all persons should keep within doors or shut their windows, she rode through, clothed only in her long hair.; Only one person disobeyed her orders to remain indoors behind closed shutters; this man, a tailor known afterward as “Peeping Tom”, bored a hole in his shutters that he might see Godiva pass and immediately became blind. Her husband kept his word and abolished the onerous taxes. The oldest form of this legend is in the 13th-century Flores Historiarum (Flowers of the Historians); A festival in her honor was instituted as part of Coventry Fair in 1678.The oldest form of the legend has Godiva passing through Coventry market from one end to the other while the people were assembled, attended only by two female (clothed) riders. This version is given in Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover (died 1236), a somewhat credulous collector of anecdotes, who quoted from an earlier writer. The still later story, with its episode of Peeping Tom, appeared first among 17th century chroniclers. Whether the Lady Godiva of this story is the Godiva or Godgifu (“gift of God”) of history is undecided.]

We ran into another of my ancestors, in a manner of speaking, when we traveled to Italy and visited Ravenna.  Theodoric “the Great,” was “king of the Ostrogoths, ruler of Italy, regent of the Visigoths, and a patricius [patrician] of the Roman Empire” who lived 454 – 526. He’s buried in the Mausoleo di Teodorico in Ravenna.

There is a mosaic in Ravenna, discovered under plaster, that “was erroneously identified as being a portrait of Justinian, and currently (after restoration) carries a caption above it identifying him as Justinian. But the church was Theodoric’s palace church; the mosaic bears no resemblance to other mosaics of Justinian (see another Ravenna mosaic on his Geni profile; and it unmistakably resembles the very fine gold medallion issued by Theodoric. There can be no doubt that this is Theodoric.”  So I got to see an ancestor of mine in person, as it were. 

I wrote much more about this than I intended, but I think it’s because I’ve been having fun.  At one point, when I was spending time each day on genealogy, Kathy would come home from work and inquire if I’d discovered I had any more famous ancestors.  I wish everyone could indulge in this kind of exploration; it certainly brings history alive.  (I’ve since read a little more British history and have run across the names of people on my family tree, so I can exclaim to myself, “hey, that’s a relative of mine.”)

Though there is a benevolence due to all mankind, none can question but a superior degree of it is to be paid to a father, a wife, or child. In the same manner, though our love should reach to the whole species, a greater proportion of it should exert itself towards that community in which Providence has placed us. This is our proper sphere of action, the province allotted us for the exercise of our civil virtues, and in which alone we have opportunities of expressing our goodwill to mankind.

            This falls in the “oddball findings” category.  I read about the results of a study by a psychologist at Binghamton University, Celia Klin, who found that if you end a text message with a period, it is perceived as less sincere than one that omits the period.

“Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on,” said Klin. “People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them -- emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

            Klin also found that an exclamation point makes a text message seem more sincere.  So punctuation is used to convey emotions as well as other information.  One of my doubts about this research is that it was conducted with undergraduates in her college. Who knows how generalizable it is?  One can imagine “not very.”

            In any case, he sniffs, it’s bad English not to end a message with a period.

When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.

            Ruminations on rights; may be a little preachy or dogmatic. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

No one has any rights except what we grant each other.  Many of the great documents cited in Western history refer to rights. 

The U.S. Declaration of Independence famously claims that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  They made that up.  They liked the words.  (“Pursuit of Happiness” was substituted for “Property” in the course of negotiating the text.  The fact the text was negotiated at all signals that they made up the rights they wanted enumerated.)

The Magna Carta (King John) declares that “We have granted to God, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free. . . .”  And “To all free men of our kingdom we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below. . . .”  So here rights (liberties) come from God and from the King.  Any rights from a monarch are extended on the monarch’s whim and can just as easily be withdrawn.

Any set of rights that comes from a deity is subject, of course, to the documents and interpretations of the particular religion.  The rights accorded to people varies widely across religions; rights under Islam aren’t the same as they are under Christianity or Buddhism.  Rights also vary by sex, as we know from the Catholic Church, certainly some (widespread) interpretations of the Koran, and in Hinduism.  So predicating rights on a religious foundation isn’t a way to get to any universal understanding of what they are.  One person’s rights are another person’s sin (e.g., premarital sex).  Moreover, religious documents are often deemed to be the product of divine revelation, so once again it matters whose revelation one wishes to accept.

One can read in various places, in books written at various times, about “natural rights.”  Again, the definition can only be in the mind of the writer, because “nature” in its wisdom has never provided us with its determinative list of rights.  There is certainly no right to life (not in the anti-abortion sense, in the much more generic sense):  the lion, in order to eat, kills the gazelle, the bird eats the bug, and the human kills the bison.

Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651), asserted that “the laws of nature (as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions.”  Here and elsewhere he argued for a government (“power”), and made up his own list of the “laws of nature.”  Without government, it is “war of every man against every man” and, in the absence of laws, “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.”  He observes, in his most well-known quote, that life in this state means “continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as the title indicates, simply declares certain rights.  “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. . . .  Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. . . .  No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”  And so on.

The U.N. declaration adopts what seems to be the only way to get around the problem of source documents:  just make a declaration and get people and countries to agree to it.  There’s no other approach that can be consistent.  Where the U.N. declaration fails, of course, is that there is not universal agreement on its contents, despite the title.  Planetary agreement on rights, and observance thereof, won’t come about in my lifetime, or maybe ever.  So one abandons humanity as a whole and moves to the local (national) level.

Any discussion of rights merges into a discussion of both the political and economic systems.  For both left and right in the U.S. and Europe, and much of the rest of the world, capitalism in some form and to some extent is the economic system of choice.

Perhaps one of the most fundamental dividing line between the two major parties in U.S. politics is over what we should agree on as rights.  Those on the left will argue for health care, education, employment, and housing and sustenance (or some combination of them).  Those on the right will argue primarily for liberty (another “right,” the definition of which varies with the speaker) but not for much else; of utmost importance appears to be the right to compete in the marketplace and to have a structure in place in which to compete.

As far one can tell, both the left and right agree on the need for laws and a legal structure, because without it, we’re back to the beginning:  no one has any rights at all.  So perhaps the more accurate statement is that without a social agreement on rights, there are no enforceable rights.

            Within about three hours after I had composed a portion of this text, I came upon a (British) review of Geoffrey Hodgson’s book Conceptualizing Capitalism:  Institutions, Evolution, Future.  “For Hodgson capitalism relies on six characteristics: a legal system allowing individual rights and freedom, widespread commodity exchange and markets where money is involved in exchange, private ownership of the means of production, production organised outside the household, wage labour and employment contracts and a developed financial system.”  He took the words right out of my mouth, even though he was writing about capitalism—but he does point to rights and freedom.  

The Pew Research Center issued the results of a survey that summarizes my point. On the first four items and the last, there appears to be substantial agreement on what “the government” should do.  But look at the difference on what one might consider the “social safety net” actions a government can take, or not.

As one who likes data (“data” = facts, not necessarily just numbers), the data from around the world suggest those on the left have the much better argument.  The countries that have the broader and stronger social safety net and related laws about minimum wage, family leave, and so on, are always at the top of the lists in international agency surveys of national well-being, health, education, and happiness.  Conversely, those with weak social support systems tend to score significantly lower on most measures of a healthy society.  (There are reams of data on this going back decades that I’m not going to dig up and cite here, but I’ve read them repeatedly.)

There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country.

            Here’s a trivial and definitely first-world problem (I generally dislike it when people dismiss a discussion as “first world,” meaning of course that it’s unimportant in the larger context of human problems on the globe).  As always in our family, the Friday after Thanksgiving is the day we drive up north of Minneapolis and cut down our Christmas tree and then spend the rest of the day putting on the lights and decorations—altogether, about an 8-hour venture. 

            So, should we continue to buy and cut a live tree, from both environmental and economic standpoints?  A Penn State horticulture professor, Ricky Bates, argues that we should.  They provide oxygen requirements for a lot of people, they are renewable (more seedlings are planted to replace the cut trees than the number of trees that are cut), the tree farms reduce soil erosion, create a habitat for wildlife (well, at least except for late November into December), and they sequester carbon.  It’s also good for the economy, supporting about 15,000 tree farms.  Finally, there’s no great advantage to artificial trees, which use just as much if not more energy and raw materials in production as Christmas tree farms do in machinery to manage the trees.

            So, at least according to one horticulturalist, having a live tree every year is fine.  So we will.

Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is therefore always represented as blind.

            Never had we consternated so much about taking or canceling a trip.  We had decided in the summer of 2015 that we would again take a winter vacation in Florida in early 2016.  As the departure date of January 28 drew near, however, Krystin’s precarious health caused us to hesitate the entire week preceding it.  She had been in the hospital for 9 days earlier in January for several ailments (all related to organ transplants and complications from diabetes—and a failure on her part to consistently follow her medical protocols involving nightly tube feeding and insulin administration); at a care conference prior to discharge that included her, Kathy, Pat, me, and 6-7 members of the medical staff, it was made clear to us that Krystin could not live alone for the time being.  (Whether she could ever live along again was an open question.)

            Inasmuch as Pat hadn’t the space for her, and there are no institutional care settings for people in Krystin’s situation that are covered by insurance, by default Krystin returned home to live with Kathy and me.  I told Kathy at the time that she was at least qualified for candidacy for beatification for consenting without hesitation or dismay to taking Krystin in.  [By then Kathy had known Krystin for over 6 years, and while not a surrogate mother, she had come to care for Krystin (and Krystin very much for Kathy), and I think a mothering instinct kicked in to some extent, if I may write that without meaning to be sexist.]

The challenge that Krystin presented her entire life has been non-compliance.  Not in the sense of parental or social pressure to conform to pious norms, rather in the sense of following the medical advice and counseling she received to preserve her health.  Even when she was small, her maternal grandfather perceptively observed that Krystin’s whole persona was “defiant.”  I commend and admire a healthy defiance of social norms if undertaken thoughtfully—says he who rarely engages in non-conventional behavior of any kind.  But defiance in addressing the chronic illness of diabetes is life-threatening and ultimately fatal, and the intermediate-term consequences (i.e., short of the grave) are breakdowns in organs and systems.

            The conundrum we faced (“we” being Pat, Kathy, and the entire medical establishment) was the disconnect between Krystin’s obvious will to live, which she shares with the rest of us, and her unwillingness or inability to do what was medically necessary to stay alive.  That disconnect, which we had labeled “defiance” earlier in her life, now seemed to be something different, something with no apparent label—medical or flip.

            So Krystin moved in with us mid-January.  At that point her body had partially rejected the transplanted pancreas (for reasons that were unclear).  So she was again diabetic and back to finger pricks for blood tests and syringe pricks for insulin injections—the essential and core elements of diabetes care that Krystin had hated her entire life.  (I could empathize with the dislike for the blood tests:  having done them myself from time to time, just to learn what Krystin was going through and to test my own blood sugars, I can attest that those finger pricks HURT.)  It was the failure to regularly do blood tests and take insulin for over a decade that resulted in her current condition.  To have been released from these aversive tasks with the pancreas transplant had been a godsend for Krystin.  To have to resume them again 13 months after the transplant was a depressing blow.  This reversion to diabetes came on top of recurring stomach, esophagus, blood clotting, and pain issues.

            Kathy and I were to be her health-care “minders” after she moved in with us.  Following a second 2-day hospital stay in late January precipitated by a miscue between Krystin and her physicians on the need for continuing insulin administration, we were provided a copy of her medication list and post-discharge instructions.  The list of meds was 2 pages long and discharge instructions were about 10 pages.  We received these documents two days before we were to leave for Florida.  I did not count the number of oral and email exchanges Kathy and I had quizzing ourselves on the wisdom of going to Florida and leaving Krystin alone in the house, we the minders absent.

            These events in Krystin’s medical saga have prompted interesting colloquies between (1) Kathy and me, (2) Elliott and me, and (3) Pat and me.  I come out as the sap but I defend my position.  Elliott, Pat, and Kathy, to varying degrees (Kathy probably least), take the view that Krystin willfully ignored her diabetes for years, even though she knew what she was supposed to do, so all of these complications and problems are her fault and she has to take the consequences.  (Krystin herself is forthright in accepting the responsibility.  She has said to me several times in recent years that she knows her circumstances are a consequence of her past behavior and that no one else is to blame.)

            I, on the other hand, tend to a more determinist view of the universe and human behavior and to the view that broad personality traits are genetic (moderated, of course, by experience).  So my conclusion is that Krystin could no more have not been “defiant” than I could develop the personality needed to gain elective office.  Wouldn’t and won’t ever happen.  Thus I do not assign blame and am willing to be more sympathetic.

            My sympathy, however, did not obviate the need on Krystin’s part to do everything the physicians told her to do if she were to continue to live.  I warned her before she was released to live with us—in as gentle and fatherly a way as I could muster—that this stay with Kathy and me was getting closer to a “last chance” for her.  The medical professionals were clearly frustrated with Krystin for failing to conscientiously follow the necessary regimen, a failure that had resulted in several extended hospitalizations in the preceding three months.  Pat, Kathy, and I were frustrated as well (and had been for years), even though our assessments of the genesis of the behavior differed.  If she continued to decline, even with our modest ministrations, the outlook was bleak. 

            The departure for Florida for 10 days in some ways seemed like we were abandoning our responsibilities.  All of this verbal to-and-fro between Kathy and me occurred right around our 4^th wedding anniversary, January 27.  I commented to Kathy that inheriting responsibility for my medically-fragile 31-year-old daughter certainly hadn’t been part of any “marital bargain” with me (however implicit such bargains may be for most couples).  Even though I made it clear to Krystin, and assured Kathy, that the period of her residence with us was not indefinite, it was nonetheless an unexpected intrusion on our life as a late-married couple.  In my mind, anyway, it was also a somewhat unfair intrusion for Kathy because Kathy—however much she was willing to help—was not Krystin’s mother.

            I composed the preceding paragraphs in flight to Fort Lauderdale, still uncertain we should have left.  The medical people had offered no advice (nor had we asked for it), and only tried to be sure there would be occasional home health nurse visits and that we and Pat would stay in touch with Krystin during our absence.  (Pat would do so in any case, irrespective of our travels.)  Had they been asked, my sense was that they would have advised us not to leave (but that’s pure speculation).  What finally persuaded me was a rather long email from Pat to Kathy and me urging us to go and promising she’d be sure Krystin was taken care of in our absence.

The insulting although unrelated exclamation point to these ruminations was that our cab didn’t show up to take us to the airport on January 28.  So we had to drive ourselves out; Pat, bless her heart, went out that evening and picked up the car so that we didn’t face a parking ramp bill of $250+ when we returned.  We won’t be using that cab company ever again.

The Krystin story continued as the year progressed.  She went back into the hospital in mid-February, after living at our house was not working out well for her health.  We couldn’t be the health czars and she wasn’t managing things well.  She remained in the (University) hospital for over three months (!), until mid-May.  There were a number of medical ups and downs during that extended stay (including blacking out and esophageal tears, for example), and Krystin was bored silly for much of it.  Krystin learned later that the physicians were not sure she’d survive.  But she did!  As you can imagine, the hospital stay meant a lot of daily walks across campus for me.

She was finally released to a group home that has round-the-clock staffing.  Odd to think of my daughter in a group home, which I always think of as places for people who have some kind of disability, mental or physical, that’s more obvious than hers.  She has a disability—she can’t handle her medical regimen.  The place is a home in a quiet residential neighborhood in the suburb of Brooklyn Park; Krystin has the downstairs apartment, which means she has more room than she had in her own apartment or living with us.  (The other three residents of the group home are blind or nearly so and have some mild mental impairment.)  While this will probably turn out to be the best option for her, we initially had such high hopes for her moving into her own apartment and out from under parental wings. I don’t find this to be an easy solution.

Fortunately, Krystin took to the place well and assumed responsibility for the grocery shopping and some of the cooking.  Her diet is now appropriate and her meds are being administered under the watchful eyes of the staff.  The result is that she’s been healthy and reasonably active and was able to spend part of Thanksgiving weekend with us, including participating in our long-standing ritual of the trip to cut down the Christmas tree and decorating it on the day after Thanksgiving.

The only hiccup in the positive path since last summer is that she was admitted to the psychiatric ward of the hospital in early November because she was hallucinating (bacteria on her, in her food, etc.).  I immediately suspected drug-interaction effects; when I spoke with her psychiatrist, he agreed, and changed some of the meds.  With that change, the problem seemed to largely disappear. 

As the end of the year approaches, we’re hoping that 2017 can be a peaceful and healthy and happy year for Krystin.  She still intends to get back to work, on a part-time basis, at her University job (and it is still available to her because the unit for which she worked is short-staffed and can always use her help).

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

            I’ve decided that I don’t need to see any more estates of the extremely wealthy that are later left to states or localities to become public museums and gardens.  When we were in Florida, we visited Vizcaya, the estate of John Deering, the chief executive of International Harvester early in the 20^th Century.  It was a lovely and enormous mansion, and the gardens on the grounds were pleasant to walk in. 

My disenchantment with these grandiose establishments began (I think) when we toured Sanssouci Palace (Frederick the Great’s summer palace in Potsdam) and the other Hohenzollern palaces, and more so Versailles 10 years ago.   While the buildings and grounds are spectacular, I had a hard time fully enjoying them when I knew that millions of French people at the time it was built were living in penury and by the sweat of their brow.  That same sentiment recurred when we visited the Hapsburg estates in Austria and a couple of enormous homes in Scotland and Ireland.  We’ve also seen the palatial homes of American entrepreneurs such as the Duponts.  These thoughts returned while we wandered through Vizcaya:  would be fun to live there, with adequate staff to maintain the building and grounds, but the back story of how the money was accumulated to build it disturbs me.  The architecture and the art collections are fabulous—funded from the labor of people who worked for terrible wages and most of whom led lives we would all find horrendous.

It is ridiculous for any man to criticize on the works of another, who has not distinguished himself by his own performances.

            Part of our Florida itinerary included staying for 3 days with former neighbors who retired and moved to a huge retirement community just outside Ft. Lauderdale.  Mark & Rochelle were marvelous hosts and we had a great time staying with them (even including the visit to Vizcaya). 

            One of the interesting byproducts of our visit with Mark & Rochelle was that we had the chance to see what life can be like in a community of mostly-retired people.  (“Mostly” because the minimum age is 55, and that requirement only applies to one member of a couple, so there are people in their early to mid-50s who live here and continue to be employed.)  The complex has a population of about 9,000 spread over many buildings; there are separate associations within the complex.  (It’s composed only of condos and there are no provisions for nursing care—it’s a place where one must be able to live independently.)  The number of people who live there is large enough to support its own restaurant, movie theater, and a multitude of other amenities.  There are also a multitude of groups in which one can participate, everything from jewelry making to wood working to billiards to ceramics, etc.  Probably very much like many other such complexes.

We decided, on reflection, that when we reach the point of living out of Minnesota for 2-3 months of the winter, we could comfortably spend time at a place like that.

I have this peculiar reservation about activities in senior living communities, a reservation about which I can’t quite parse the logic.  Somehow, joining groups/clubs in such a community seems to me “artificial” whereas my lifelong community of friends, built up over decades, is “real.”  Friends who I’ve known for years, “chosen” by dint of common interests, somehow seem more legitimate than friends acquired because we happened to land in the same housing development.  I suppose that my circle of long-time friends were acquired for the same reason—it’s just that the “housing development” is (primarily) the Twin Cities rather than a senior community.  I’m not even arguing that friendships developed in the senior communities can’t be just as strong as those I’ve had for years; I don’t really know what I’m arguing.  But I do have this vague sentiment that I can’t analyze rationally.  I can say it’s not keeping me awake nights.

Good nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit, and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty.

            Elliott, Kathy, and I were talking one night about the desirability (or not) of being able to live forever.  We agreed that doing so isn’t all that appealing.  After the first 500 years or so (or pick your number), life would be repetitious.  And think of trying to keep track of all the grandchildren down 10 generations.  (Even if one didn’t have children in the first 100 years, presumably it would be possible to do so in one’s second or third century—if we figure out to keep people alive indefinitely, one assumes we’d have the ability to extend reproductive capacity as well.)  In my experience, those who’ve lived into their 8^th and 9^th decades often have a relaxed attitude about human trauma and seemingly alarming human events:  they’ve seen much of it before.  One might learn that there is indeed “nothing new under the sun” by the time one gets to be 500 years old.

            Having said that, after Kathy and I visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida while vacationing there in January, I do wish I could live to perhaps 200 years old—because I’d like to see if humanity figures out how to travel to the stars.  As we watched the various videos of different aspects of the U.S. space program over the last 50 years, we each concluded that we would not have been among those who volunteered to be astronauts.  I’m delighted there are people who want to do so, and am a big supporter of the space program and space exploration, but I’ll want to travel in space when it becomes as common as flying from Minneapolis to Miami. 

Given normal life expectancy, and given the pace at which humans are actually traveling in space routinely, I won’t be going there—or seeing if humans can travel beyond the solar system.  (Traveling to Mars, which is on NASA’s timetable, is only barely interesting to me.  Big deal—travel to a planet next door.  I want to see if humans can get out into the Milky Way and to the other hundred billion galaxies that exist.  And no, I didn’t make up that number; it’s the rough estimate by astronomers of the number of other galaxies in the universe.)

Alas, it appears unlikely such travel will happen in the next 20+ years, so I’ll die too early.  Meantime, I’ll cheer on medical research so I might be able to stick around a few more decades to see what happens.

Apropos of the urge to live forever, cryonics could offer those of us now living (but who won’t make it to medical advances required to live forever), the chance to come back alive later.  But that would not be without its problems.  “Dislocated in time, alienated from society and coming to grips with the certainty that everyone and everything they had ever known is irretrievably lost, they would likely suffer symptoms of intense trauma. And that’s not to mention the fact that some may have to deal with a whole new body because only their head was preserved.”  Assuming, incorrectly, it would not be possible to generate a new body from one’s genes.  If it’s possible to be preserved indefinitely and then revived, surely growing a new body would be a minor difficulty.

Were all the vexations of life put together, we should find that a great part of them proceed from those calumnies and reproaches we spread abroad concerning one another.

            A few more Florida notes.  As I’ve observed before, a winter trip from Minnesota to Florida is primarily for warmth and green.  With all due respect to Florida friends, the volume and magnitude of cultural or other interesting sites and activities in southern Florida are significantly less than in other parts of the country.  That being said, we visited two places worth the time if one is in the area and one’s interests lie in the two very different directions they represent.

            One was the Kennedy Space Center, which I mentioned earlier.  As one might expect, the displays for the visitors are a paean to the exploration of space and history of the U. S. space program.  If the space program isn’t of interest to you, this is not the place to spend a day—and it does take most of a day.  The visitor center experience—long (but interesting) bus tour, films, objects, rockets, and a retired space shuttle—is entirely funded by admission fees, and the people who’ve put it together have done a nice job.  Personally, I found the shuttle Atlantis the most interesting piece—the retired real thing, and it shows signs of use.

            The other site we visited surprised me.  I had no idea that John Ringling, of the Ringling Brothers circus family, collected art on a large scale.  When Kathy suggested stopping at The Ringling (as it is named) as we were driving from Port Charlotte to St. Petersburg, I played the role of good husband and said “sure,” even though I had little interest in visiting what I thought would be a circus museum.

            I was pleased to discover that The Ringling is comprised of a noteworthy art museum, a reconstructed Renaissance Italian theater, a circus museum (of course), and the summer home of the Ringlings.  Kathy accepted my fatigue with visiting the opulent homes of the extraordinarily wealthy (although by comparison with many of the rich, Ringling made his money in a fairly innocent way, presenting a circus), so we skipped the house.  The art museum is a gem, with an impressive collection of 14^th to 19^th Century European art, including at least five Rubens.  My guess is that it’s a better collection than the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for the same period and type.  It’s housed in an attractive pink stucco Italianate building on the well-kept grounds and gardens of the Ringling estate, which faces on the Gulf of Mexico. 

            Even the circus museum was interesting, particularly for the Pullman railroad car the Ringlings had built for their travels across the country with the circus.  I suppose looking at the private rail care of the wealthy is similar to the wandering through their mansions, but this was a novelty for me because I’d never seen up close a well-appointed Pullman.  I told the staff member as I exited that given my choice, I’d much rather travel by Pullman than air except when time is of the essence.  Trains are a so much more comfortable, civilized way to travel.  (She emphatically agreed.)

            Ringling and his wife donated the entire estate to Florida upon his death in 1936 (she had died earlier) for all the people of Florida to enjoy.  He was nearly bankrupt when he died, however, so the State of Florida was in court with his creditors for a decade before finally gaining control of the estate and museum in 1946.  It then basically neglected the estate for 50 years; apparently the buildings were deteriorating, roofs were leaking, and the art collection was in danger of being damaged.  It took nearly $100 million in state and private funds to restore and rehabilitate the buildings and grounds, in the 2000s, after control of the site was given to Florida State University.  From the standpoint of a visitor, the governors of the site did a superb job.

            I read somewhere that The Ringling is the 16^th largest art museum in the U.S.  I bet that means that Florida State has the largest collegiate art collection in the country, if not the world.  The University of Minnesota art museum pales by comparison.

One of the best springs of generous and worthy actions, is having generous and worthy thoughts of ourselves: whoever has a mean opinion of the dignity of his nature will act in no higher a rank than he has allotted himself in his own estimation.

            I love shells.  As we always do when by an ocean shore, we collected shells.  Lots of them.  We found our best ones when staying with our friends Ann Sonnesyn and Brian Love at their winter home in Port Charlotte.  We found many small (3-4”) conch shells as well as a multitude other varieties of shell.  Conch shells just washed ashore stink.  I boiled them at Ann and Brian’s, and managed to make their entire house reek of dead snails.  (No, we didn’t pick up any live snails—if I found a shell with a live snail in it, I tossed it back in the ocean.)  Even after boiling them, and soaking them in a bleach solution, and bagging in Zip-loc baggies, they made our rental car stink.  When we got to St. Petersburg, we discovered we had an efficiency apartment, not a hotel room, so I used the large kettle to re-soak the shells in a stronger bleach solution and re-boiled them.  They still reeked.  I finally went to a local grocery store and bought more Zip-loc bags and double-bagged them.  We could still smell them. 

When we got home, I left them outside overnight in sub-zero temperatures, soaked them in a vinegar solution, washed them in soapy water, and then rubbed them with baby oil—all of these steps recommended by what seemed to be knowledgeable websites.  Now most of the smell was gone—but not completely, so I decided to leave the conch shells (which were the ones that smelled) in the garage for the rest of the winter.  The one treatment that’s supposed to work really well I couldn’t do at the time:  bury them in soil and let the ants and germs do their work on the organic residues in the shells.  Supposedly after being buried for a couple of weeks, shells come out completely clean after they’re washed.  (I can report that after I brought the shells in the house last summer, and rewashed them, they no longer smell.)

            Also as always, I collected shells with no idea what to do with them once I got them home.  In the you-can-always-find-somebody-famous-who-shares-your-idiosyncrasy category, I felt a mild sense of satisfaction when the Star-Tribune ran an article on the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s passion for shell collecting.  I read the article on my cell phone while we were sitting for 7 hours in the Tampa airport waiting for the completion of mechanical repairs to the plane in which we were going to fly home. 

In his memoirs, Neruda wrote that “In reality, the best that I collected in my life were my seashells.”  The reporter, Daniel Bergerson, poignantly described seashells, reflecting my sentiments:  they “are the creations of seemingly pathetic, forgettable creatures (a.k.a. sea snails and clams) who somehow craft impossibly perfect artifacts that serve as a testament of their short time on this earth.”  Humans, in contrast, write poems (and prose) in the quest for immortality because we lack the beautiful exoskeletons of the clams and snails—”our lives fade sooner than the ink,” and if preserved, the ink lasts centuries.  I think many of our words outlast the seashells—but in most cases, the seashells are more appealing.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

            An otherwise uninteresting book review by Adam Mars-Jones in the London Review of Books about a novel I’ll never read nonetheless had a couple of interesting phrases.  I only looked at the article because it was about bereavement and death depicted in novel form and drew on work by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who did the pioneering research on death and dying (setting out five stages of grief:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).  I read much of her work and associated research when my mother died in 1989, so I’m interested to see how the thinking on the topic has evolved.  The book review didn’t dive into the research findings much (of course), but the author of the review had an ear—pen?—keyboard?—for the nifty phrase.  [The claim of the five stages, and their order, has been contested in the years since Kubler-Ross’s book was originally published in 1969.]

            “People used to die, now they have end-of-life issues.”  I’m not sure which I think is better, although personally I think—this is purposely a guarded statement—I’d like to have a period to say goodbye and make sure my affairs in order. 

            “We go to our deaths asymptotically, never getting there because ‘we’ and ‘there’ can’t exist at the same moment.”  Never thought about death as asymptotic but I guess it’s true.

            “So missing someone, of which mourning is the fullest version. . . .”  Again, what an interesting way of thinking about missing and mourning, and one that strikes me as accurate.

            Mars-Jones also cited Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing at two different times following the death of his five-year-old son.  At first, three days after his son’s death, Emerson felt deep despair.  Writing later, he wrote that “the only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. . . .  In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, --no more.  I cannot get it nearer to me.”  In other words, like the loss of property, an inconvenience but leaving him no better or worse off.  His son had disappeared and there seemed to be no residue of pain.  I’m not sure I or most people I know would find themselves in that place.  I am still pained when I think about the (too-early) death of my mother or the loss of close friends (rare, fortunately for me).  I’ve also been told, by people who’ve had the experience, that a parent never truly gets over the death of their own child.

            Dying in the 20^th Century and to the present is an experience quite different from death in earlier ages.  Setting aside fatal accident or stroke/aneurism/etc., it is different because “at least in the developed world we are likely to approach death along a corridor of lesser oblivions, leaving the feast not just dazed but consensually sozzled with everything that medical science can introduce into our bloodstreams.”  A wonderful phrase, “consensually sozzled.”  And one has to wonder if being sozzled isn’t almost worse than simply dying.  To this day some of the family members—including me—believe that my great-aunt Inez, who died at age 83, four months before my mother, was hallucinogenic and just plain crazy her last couple of years of life because of the pharmacopeia of drugs she was taking.

            I’ve always been fond of Dylan Thomas’s admonition:  “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at the close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  My sentiments exactly; I don’t want to leave.  But Mars-Jones relates the circumstances surrounding the death of Kubler-Ross, who wasn’t pleased about dying and who may have been somewhat deranged at the end.  It seems, said one who commented on her passing, that she “had entered the sixth and final stage of dying [not one that Kubler-Ross had identified]:  anger at God for NOT letting her die.  Not her books, patients or students, but her own experience of illness had brought her to this final stage.  She could only rage against the ‘staying’ of the light.” 

            The contradiction between raging against the dying of the light and my strongly-felt view that people should be permitted to control their exit from life hadn’t occurred to me.  Perhaps there is no contradiction; perhaps one can reach a point where the dying of the light is welcome rather than something to be fought.  Such as when one is consensually sozzled and there’s no hope of escaping the drug-induced and low-quality life.

            Finally, although written in the context of the book review focused on death and dying, this phrase jumped out at me because of many posts I see on Facebook:  “the trader in vacuous serenity.”  Boy, is there a lot of vacuous serenity on Facebook—and elsewhere in the world.  It describes televangelists as well (at least those who aren’t the fire-and-brimstone preachers).

It would be a good appendix to the Art of Living and Dying, if any one would write the Art of Growing Old, and teach men to resign their pretensions to the pleasures and gallantries of youth, in proportion to the alteration they find in themselves by the approach of age and infirmities. The infirmities of this stage of life would be much fewer, if we did not affect those which attend the more vigorous and active part of our days; but, instead of studying to be wiser, or being contented with our present follies, the ambition of many of us is also to be the same sort of fools we formerly have been.

            Sort of a continuation on my diatribe against Scalia’s jurisprudence.  I wonder if anyone else has contemplated the Founding Fathers’ views of the need for flexibility in the constitution they wrote.  Justice Scalia argued for sticking to original intent and, as I wrote, I think that’s silly.  But it occurs to me that the Founding Fathers may not have had strong opinions on the matter—because change was not something that happened very much or quickly.

            It has been 229 years since the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787.  If one looked backward 229 years from 1787, to 1558, one would not have observed significant changes in daily (or political or social) life.  Gutenberg developed the printing press around 1440, so books became widespread; Galileo made advances in astronomy and cosmology in the early 1600s; van Leeuwenhoek devised the microscope in the early 1670s and prepared the way for modern biology; and there were incremental advances in science on other fronts, but daily life was unaffected by these discoveries.  The night was still lit by candle, transportation was by foot or horse, and heat and cooking came from fire.  Letters took weeks (in the country) or months (across the ocean).  It’s true that they were on the cusp of significant changes (e.g., the telegraph and the railroad in the 1830s), but those were in the same unknown future we all face. 

Even though the men who assembled to draft the constitution were a well-educated group, I doubt that any of them could have imagined the changes that would take place in the 229 years following their work, given the small changes that had occurred in the preceding 229 years.  From their perspective, things in the nature of political life were likely to go on as they had for centuries.  What they could not envision were the stresses that modern society would place on their government structure, particularly federalism.  In 1787 there were no significant national problems (other than in foreign policy and the national debt left over from the Revolutionary War); in 2016, many of the problems (climate, environment, transportation, corporate, health) are national, not local, and require national action.

They were also a reasonably smart group of men; my surmisal is that had anyone been able to alert them about the changes that would be wrought by science and technology in the following 229 years, and the pressures those changes would put on the constitutional structure they created, they would have scoffed at the idea that what they wrote in 1787 should bind their country in 2016.

           

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

            In telling a friend about the history of the house in which we live, I recalled that my great aunt Inez, whom I visited for a couple days at a time when a child, was a stickler for table manners, and she drilled them into me.  I did the same thing with our kids.  But once they’d seen the way that Australians and Scots eat, I had to give up.  Although Scots and Australians don’t get their food to their mouths in exactly the same way, both use a knife and fork in a far more effective and efficient manner than Americans do.  Elliott argues that table manners are entirely artificial (he’s right), but I tell him that people will nonetheless judge him (somewhat) if he eats like he’s lined up at a trough.

            As I am fond of quoting Mark Twain, “Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted, just the same.”  People tend not to believe that, but in my experience, in many instances in life it is true.

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

            When I left the position I’d had at the University for over 26 years and moved to the College of Education and Human Development in March of 2014, I did so with three years of funding for my salary from the central administration.  (That was an extremely generous gesture on the part of the administration; it certainly wasn’t something they were obligated in any way to do.  I wouldn’t have made the move, however, if that funding had not been available.)  I knew the move was a calculated risk:  at the end of the three years, the college might not have funding for me (or I might not have found a good niche).  As it turned out, the college did not have the funding; I’d seen the budget and there is a recurring deficit that it needs to address.  Keeping me around could not be high on the priority list—I understood that.

            So in March I was asked to meet with the dean, who said she wanted to talk to me in person about the letter of non-renewal that I would be receiving.  Under the terms of my appointment, I was entitled to a one-year notice (a provision that applies to all professional appointees who’ve been at the university for 11 or more years).  Under usual circumstances, that would have meant that my appointment would end in March, 2017.  I would become eligible for full Social Security benefits (age 66) in August, 2017, and the dean was aware of that, so she was considerate enough to extend my appointment by the additional five months from March to August (a gesture typical of her, which tells you something about her thoughtfulness as an administrator).

            I had no quarrel with the dean’s decision and have nothing but positive things to say about my work with her.  Now, however, I had to face up to the fact that I would, absent any action on my part, be retired on my 66^th birthday.  I told the dean that I was ambivalent about the prospect.  On the one hand, I have a number of friends who are my age—plus or minus a couple of years—who are retired and seem to be having a great time.  Maybe after 42+ years at the University, it was indeed time to hang it up.  On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I was quite ready (psychologically) to retire and thought I could make additional contributions to the university.  There was also the fact that Kathy can’t retire for a few more years (she’s five years younger than I am) without facing a substantial reduction in retirement benefits, and I wasn’t sure I want to be retired for a long time after she’s still working.  I know that she didn’t want that, either.

            The more I thought about this extended terminal period—March 2016 to August 2017—the less I liked it.  Because of academic and administrative rearrangements in the college, I foresaw that there would be less and less work for me to do (and no sensible administrator will give recurring responsibilities to someone who will exit in a year or so).  I really did not want to sit around twiddling my thumbs for a year, trying to invent work for myself.  So I asked for—and received—a buyout; the University and college administration were sympathetic to my perceived plight and decided to let me leave early with pay.  It isn’t usual University practice but it is done from time to time, and my case seemed to fit the bill.  My last day of work was June 10 of this year.  Some of my colleagues were surprised, but I pointed out to them that I would turn 65 in August of 2016, so it wasn’t that I was bailing out that early, given our society’s perception of retirement age.

            I am not unhappy with what happened.  I had not expected to retire until I was 67 or 68, closer to the time when Kathy would retire, but in the intervening six months I’ve come to like this retirement gig.  Even six months later, though, it still seems weird.  I continue to have the sense (only beginning to fade) that this is just a long vacation and at some point I’ll have to get back to work.  It is odd, after over 40 years, to not drive to campus, read business emails in the morning, prepare for meetings, and write whatever I needed to write.  Poof, those demands are gone. 

It’s equally weird to think that I never again have to work.  All of us know about and sometimes look forward to retirement (although many at a college or university do not, and I didn’t particularly), but we don’t—perhaps cannot—comprehend the notion that we never have to go into the job again and we’re free to do whatever we want to whenever we want to.  I’m still sort of awed by that prospect stretching out in front of me.

            A number of people told me “you have to have a plan.”  I vaguely agreed with that proposition—but because retirement came up fairly quickly, I didn’t have one.  I still don’t.  What I did do was tend to the gardens, read, tackle a couple of long-delayed house projects and tasks, spent time planning details for our upcoming 3½-week trip to Italy, and took up more of the housework.  It was my thought that since I no longer had professional commitments, I’d take over more of the house duties.  Kathy, of course, found that a splendid idea.  But I’m only agreeing to do the majority of the work until she retires—then it’s back to sharing!  I just take things day by day and manage to keep myself occupied.  I suppose once we get past the holidays, I’ll look for volunteer work, perhaps at some kind of social justice organization.

            The provost’s office was kind enough to host an elegant reception for me in the Campus Club, the faculty/staff dining club.  I got to see a number of old friends and was complimented (and startled) that the University president even showed up to send me off.

            Perhaps what has surprised me the most about retirement is that I lost much of my interest in higher education and the University.  I left with the understanding that I might return next year and teach a seminar on higher education, for example, but found that the more I’m away from campus, the less interest I have in doing so.  More generally, I lost some interest in things intellectual; over the summer and autumn I didn’t read anywhere near as widely on the scholarly web as I had before.  It was sort of a mental lethargy (and it included not doing much about this letter).  As the year closes, I find myself returning to the habits of a lifetime, so I hope not to become a complete ignoramus.

            One of my colleagues, a faculty friend in Psychology, also retired last spring.  She made an interesting point:  why do people offer “congratulations” when you tell them you’re retiring?  As she mused, is it because we lived long enough to retire?  We survived a job for decades and are to be congratulated?  The same thought had crossed my mind; I wasn’t quite sure what to say when people said “congratulations” to me, so I just nodded my head and said “thanks.”  The problem with that term is that it implies one can hardly wait to get away from one’s work, one managed to survive a tiresome career, and will now be free to do things they want to. 

            So what’s the best acknowledgement of retirement?  I’m sure “condolences” is the right word for those who loved their jobs (e.g., some professors, lawyers, doctors) but who cannot continue to meet the responsibilities—or who simply decide it is time to step away.  I poked around various places on web for a substitute for congratulations and I couldn’t find one.   There isn’t any single word that I can identify.  So I’m going to go with something like this for friends who retire:  ”I hope you enjoyed your work and that you look forward to spending your time in different ways that are rewarding and fun.”

            As perhaps many of us have, I noticed an article from the Associated Press about Americans’ retirement income, and the picture isn’t pretty.  I realized once again how comparatively well of I am/we are.  The headline pretty much tells the story:  “Secure retirement in sight only for a privileged few.”  Over a third of U.S. households in prime earning years and beyond had nothing saved for retirement and didn’t have pensions.  It is largely the richest 10% of households that have a secure retirement (which means not having to make a significant change in lifestyle after retirement).  Both Kathy and I are fortunate in having worked for/in working for an organization that has a well-funded and reasonably generous retirement plan, so we have every expectation of doing fine.

            The current talk in Washington about cutting Social Security benefits and increasing charges for Medicare recipients will only exacerbate the problems, I suspect.

There is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

            Sometimes life gets vexing.  Too many stressors, major and minor, can pile up at the same time.  That happened to me in mid-March.  We were dealing with the uncertainty of where Krystin would go to live once released from (what turned out to be over three months in) the hospital.  I was dealing with her bankruptcy attorney (a very nice guy, fortunately—the stressor was just dealing with the bills and paperwork).  I was trying to figure out what I thought about the idea of involuntary retirement in August, 2017.  So there were those rather major matters (even if the retirement wouldn’t occur for another 17 months, I couldn’t get it off my mind once I knew it was coming—and at that point hadn’t thought about leaving early).

            Not quite so major was the problem my long-time friend Steve Richardson was having with the City of Minneapolis.  Kathy’s son Spence lived in Steve’s house (which Steve inherited from his parents, the house he grew up in) for a couple of years; we/he paid no rent but Steve had the benefit of having someone in the house rather than having it stand vacant while he figures out what to do with it.  (Steve has lived in North Carolina for 30 years or so.)  The City people learned of the arrangement and went after Steve on the ground that he was a landlord and the house should have been registered as a rental property (and improved to meet City code requirements for rental property).  Both we and Steve were dismayed because there was no rent paid and no understanding it was a rental arrangement; Spence was doing long-term house-sitting.  In any event, Steve needed my help in trying to deal with the City.

And then we brought a minor stress on ourselves (me) voluntarily through exquisitely bad choice in timing:  the room with all my bookshelves and where I sit at my computer needed to be re-done before we can sell the house.  (We have no immediate plans to sell the house, but know that room had to be redone in any case.)  The wallpaper had to be removed and the room repainted.  Not a big deal in redecorating terms, but with five large bookshelves filled on all shelves, it is a major task to move all those books.  So I started the process, figuring we had no plans to entertain for awhile and I could spread boxes of books and whatnot in the dining room and living room for at least a couple of weeks.  Once I’d begun, we learned we’d be hosting a graduation/belated birthday party for Kathy’s son Spence—so I had to somehow make the place suitable for entertaining with boxes everywhere.  I did a small book purge—but see later in the letter, when I visit Marie Kondo.

I was glad that certain aspects of life remained stable:  Kathy was steady as a rock, Elliott continued as a student at Moorhead State doing his painting, and the cats continued to want attention and treats.

I knew that all of these matters would work themselves out in the weeks following, but that knowledge didn’t alleviate the pressures of the moment.  Any good psychologist can tell you that there are times when emotion overwhelms rationality even among the most coldly logical people.  (I only know this because one of the world’s great social psychologist, my friend of four decades Ellen Berscheid, told me this years ago.  I didn’t believe her at the time but over the years I have come to realize that of course she was right.)

What means this heaviness that hangs upon me?
This lethargy that creeps through all my senses?
Nature, oppress’d and harrass’d out with care,
Sinks down to rest.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense. 

            Slate ran an article on one behavior that almost surely dooms a relationship or marriage:  contempt reflected in behaviors like eye-rolling or sarcasm.  This, said researcher John Gottman (University of Washington), is “the kiss of death.” 

            I don’t have a lot to say about that other than to concur.  Yep.  I’ve seen contempt in relationships, and not only is it toxic in the relationship, it’s painful for observers as well. 

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

            Kathy and I got to talking about suicide one evening.  No, neither of us is considering it; we were trying to imagine the circumstances under which we would.  We thought about people at various times and places (e.g., if I had been brought to an extermination camp in Nazi Germany and seen my children and spouse sent to the crematorium, I would have exited).  I drew a distinction between what I call “clinical suicide,” an act that results from mental disarrangement of some kind, and “rational suicide,” which results from a coldly analytical assessment of one’s circumstances and a conclusion that (1) they are wholly aversive or unpleasant and (2) the odds that things will improve are vanishingly small.

I used the example of the loss of spouse and children as applicable to me:  if something were to happen to both of my children and to Kathy, I would think very hard about suicide because my primary reasons for living would have ceased to exist.  It would be a coldly analytical process.  I remember thinking—only fleetingly—about the option right after my divorce.  It was fleeting both because I had two people depending on me (Krystin and Elliott) and because I believed the odds of the situation improving were reasonably good (even though I dreaded the idea of dating again—but, in hindsight, that effort had fabulously results!).

Yes, I have a number of close friends who would surely be saddened at my demise—but their lives would, in short order, go on normally.  Maybe it’s my jaundiced point of view, but I don’t think for most of us, the death of even a close friend will have the devastating and long-lasting effect of the death of a child or a loved spouse/partner.  (I have a friend who, with his wife, lost their young adult daughter to illness many years ago.  He said they never fully recovered from the loss, even 20+ years later.)  I like to believe, as I’m sure most of us do, that a number of people would be pained at my death—whether self-selected or from accident or disease—but I also think it’s unrealistic to think those friends could serve as a source of continuing close support in the horrible case when I’d lost both spouse and children.  The operative term there is “close”:  of course they’d be there to help in the immediate period after a traumatic loss, as I would I for them, but they all have their own families and lives to live and couldn’t be spending hours and hours with me.

Kathy was astonished; she said that even if Spence and I were to die, she’d go on.  So, she observed, I need to be of value to others in order to go on living, and not focused entirely or partly on myself.  She said that she—and, she argued, most people—has sufficient interest in her own continued existence and her life, apart from the lives of others, that she would continue on even in the face of such an overwhelmingly depressing loss.  She also made the point that suicide is clearly very difficult to do, since so few actually carry it out.  I agreed with her latter point, and maybe this is big talk that wouldn’t be followed by the deed.  In the case of the former, however, I realized it’s true:  it’s far more important to me to be of value to others than it is to value myself.  I have no particular interest in continuing on the planet if I have no children or spouse with which to share existence.

As I’ve composed these few paragraphs, I wonder about the extent to which they constitute a somewhat sharp insult to all my friends.  I certainly don’t intend them to be read that way.

One of the reasons I can—at least abstractly—contemplate a voluntary exit is embodied in the words of Roger Ebert as he faced death.  “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.  I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path.  I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.  I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting.  My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip.  I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.”

Similarly, a hugely successful young (36) Stanford neurosurgeon suddenly found himself diagnosed with terminal cancer.  He died in March, 2015, but left behind a moving reflection on facing death.  The Bloomberg writer:

As he nears the end, Kalanithi comes closer and closer to the vital substance of living, stripped of the conceits, delusions, and false refuges with which we hedge ourselves against our own impermanence. He reflects:

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

            The last of Kalanthi’s reflections hold as true for retirement as for imminent death, I think.  Or it can if one is not careful about how one approaches that time left in life.

Our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.

            As you probably know from previous editions of this letter, Elliott and I occasionally have amusing email or text exchanges during the year.  Here are few excerpts.

 --  Elliott asked me: “Just out of curiosity. . . when was the last time you sent someone a letter specifically for the purpose of communicating casually, with the expectation of a response?”  He added that these annual letters, thank you notes, and invitations did not count.  I told him:  “My goodness, it has been a very long time.  Probably 20 years.  My ‘letters’ now are electronic.  But my use of email in that way is probably different from the way most people use it; few actually write ‘letters’ in an email format.  I do.”

--  I had to laugh, but I completely understood.  Elliott sent me an email with the subject field “I’m getting old.”  (He turned 26 in November.)  He commented in the message that “I’ve just realized I’m starting to be able to recall a good number of events from my life and then also think, ‘wow, that was 20 years ago.’  That arbitrary round number seems like a significant quantity of time.”  I told him, however, that “I don’t think I had that sense at your age.  I don’t think it crept up on me until I was in my mid-late 30s, when I could refer to events of 20 years earlier, when I was (mostly) an adult.  It’s when you do so consistently that it becomes mildly depressing--and even more so when it’s 30 and 40 years ago.  And now I’m reaching the point when it can be 50 years ago.”  Which is also annoying.  (I recently sent a message to a high-school classmate with whom I’m still reasonably close pointing out that this fall marked 50 years we’d been friends.  He urged that we make it another 50.)

--  I sent Elliott an article from the National Public Radio website reporting on research about the use of laptops for taking notes in class, although noted it was a little late for him because he would be graduating from college in December.  The article noted:  “As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, . . . the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there’s a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.”  One factor is that laptops and tablets can be an attractive diversion if a classroom isn’t interesting; probably more important is that “the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run. . . . ‘When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can. . . .  The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.’”

            Elliott didn’t disagree.  “I’ve never used my laptop in class. I don’t have as many traditional note-taking oriented lectures as I used to, being an upper level art student, but even last semester when I had art history, I still used a notebook and a pen. And I knew taking notes by hand was more useful psychologically.”  He also recalled something I had apparently said to him, and I have to trust his memory, because I don’t remember it.  “Plus, as I believe you have said yourself, there’s something primitively satisfying about the tactile sensation of dragging a pencil across paper and writing. Typing just didn’t have the same effect.”  It’s certainly something I could have said, so I agree with myself!

--  I ran across an article on a website titled “The Science Explorer,” which reported the development of new data storage device by British scientists at the University of Southampton.  It is “a small, coin-sized, glass disk [that] can store up to 360 terabytes per disc and remain stable at temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1832 degrees Fahrenheit). The device will also have a nearly unlimited lifespan, with scientists estimating that the device could last up to 13.8 billion years if used and stored at room temperature.”  So the records of all of humanity could be saved into the indefinite future.  I commented to Elliott that I wasn’t sure about the practical need for that kind of storage capacity at present.

            He demurred.  “Think about it.  Fifteen years ago nothing you could possibly create on a computer took more than a few KB.  Now people actually need terabyte hard drives.  If virtual reality or advanced AI [artificial intelligence] become real, I’m sure they will require many terabytes of storage space.  Memory requirements seem to be increasing geometrically.”  He may be right.  But at least right now, we don’t need too many of these coin-sized storage units.  Or at least none of individually do; one can see where the Smithsonian or the British Museum or the Library of Congress might.

--  Elliott reported in a text that he was “watching the 1953 Disney ‘Peter Pan’ with some classmates.  Did not remember how sexist and incredibly racist this film was.  Guess you don’t pick up on those things as a kid.”  I agreed but observed that movies like that reinforced prevailing social attitudes.

--  Elliott rode the bus home for the Thanksgiving weekend last year.  He texted me en route that he hoped that protesters were not blocking I94, the route the bus takes to Minneapolis.  (The protestors were calling attention to alleged police brutality toward people of color.)  He objected to people demonstrating in that fashion, “not even helping their cause, just inconveniencing lots of other people who have nothing to do with it.” 

I told him I sympathized with the demonstrators, recalling that in 1972 there were massive student demonstrations against the decision of the Nixon administration to bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong harbor.  It is only through such (mostly peaceful) demonstrations that the otherwise inert public can be made to see something (even if the response to the demonstrations is negative).  Eventually (at least in the case of the Vietnam War), the message got through.  So an inconvenience, but I did not object.  Moreover, I told him, it was even more justifiable given the belief, probably correct (although undetermined at the time) that white supremacists showed up at the demonstrations last night and injured five people with gunfire.

Elliott was unpersuaded.  “This is at its heart a police brutality and racism issue.  So why not protest outside police precincts. Why jam up thousands of people just trying to go about their lives.  I’m already as equal rights minded as one can be.”  The only result of the demonstrations as they took place were to annoy him, not garner his support.  I pointed out that simply demonstrating at the precinct headquarters did not convey the seriousness of the message (in the eyes of those protesting, which I understood).  I also recalled that students demonstrating on campus against the Vietnam War would not have had the impact they did if they had not walked on to I94 at rush hour.  I reiterated my view that the demonstrations were fine; they disrupt a lot of self-satisfied people who don’t give a rat’s behind about the issues that alarm the protesters.  The demonstrations may irritate people, but they will be made aware of the issues.

Elliott stuck to his guns.  He observed that he knew about the issues of police brutality and agreed with the protestors.  But “jamming traffic is just making me hate the protesters.”  I observed that he knew about the issues because he’s attentive to the news.  Many others are not.

--  At one point Elliott made what I thought was the astonishing claim that Rembrandt and Hals were “good painters. Just not all that interesting to me. Good to study for technique but all very dull colors.”  I had asked Elliott if he was familiar with the work of Frans Hals (a painter whose work I have always liked).  He said he was; “standard 17th century Dutch portraiture. Very well done but I never found particularly compelling. Same with Rembrandt.”  I expressed surprise at his assessment.  In his view, they used “lots of brown, ochre, white.  Not much else most of the time.”  I said I’d have to take a second look at their paintings because that hadn’t been my impression.  A week or so later, however, he wrote to me again.  “I formally withdraw my prior comments re: Rembrandt being boring.  Upon closer inspection and attempting to make a copy of one of his portraits, they are loaded with color and very difficult to render.”

--  Early in the calendar year Elliott and I were exchanging messages about the presidential election and the Trump candidacy.  He posed some question; I responded that “recalling elections I’ve seen, and recalling history, we are seeing wildest campaign since 1912, and before that would have been pre Civil War.”  I had not, up to that point, seen any references to 1912, but I thought the comparison was apt, when the Republican Party was split apart by Theodore Roosevelt’s independent run for the presidency.  (Roosevelt received more votes than the Republican nominee, William Howard Taft, but they both lost to Woodrow Wilson—another instance where a third-party probably meant the election of a president that supporters of neither of the other two candidates preferred).  Two days later Minnesota Public Radio published an article that included this “What is coming looks more like the historic schism of 1912, when former President Theodore Roosevelt came back to challenge the re-election of his successor and fellow Republican, William H. Taft. That schism was exploited by Woodrow Wilson, the only Democrat elected between 1896 and 1932.”  Ha.

--  On a Monday in March, Elliott informed me that “just as a random experiment I’m going to try to see if I can spend a week being vegetarian.  Breakfast was easy because I still got eggs and hash browns.  We’ll see what happens at dinner.  This may not last 7 days.” 

I asked him if this experiment meant he was considering becoming a vegetarian.  He said no.  “I like meat.”  But he went on to observe that “although I’m sure any doctor would say we (people) could all do with eating a little less meat. It’s not great for your heart long term in the quantity we eat it.”  I agreed with him on that point.  “Less would be OK.  None would not.”  He reported that his residence hall always had large bowls of hummus at meals, which he likes.  He joked, however, that “I may or may not be crawling around like Gollum ranting about bacon by Friday.”

One day later:  “I’m starting to think already that this isn’t really going to be healthier because I’m just eating a lot more cheese and dairy.  Plus right now I’ve got a bunch of onion rings, where I might have only had a few and eaten chicken with it.”  I suggested that being a vegetarian might be easier when one has complete control of the menu rather than what’s on offer in a cafeteria.

            He didn’t make it.  “Made it three full days with no meat but had to cave now.  Just not enough options here to be a healthy vegetarian and I’m not going to eat cheese pizza and hummus for dinner twice in a row.”

--  During spring semester Elliott faced a problem that almost all college students confront at some point.  He texted me out of the blue:  “How can it be possible to write a paper with a hypothesis, provide evidence for and against that hypothesis, and then have no conclusion whatsoever at the end of the paper?”  I told him that I had been in an identical position several times when writing papers, and the only honest thing one can do is acknowledge that the evidence is ambiguous and that it would be stretching the truth to contend that the hypothesis is proven (or not).  He said that seemed to be about the only alternative available to him.  Unfortunately, in my experience anyway, some faculty members didn’t like such mushy conclusions.

--  Elliott reported that he “was listening to a discussion online which eventually wandered into venomous animals and dangerous plants in rainforests and deserts, etc., etc. And someone asked why anyone would ever go to these places voluntarily, at which point Penn Jillette just said, “don’t ever go anywhere where money doesn’t matter.” Words to live by as an adamant non-camper and naturalist.

            It took me a minute to figure out what he (Jillette) meant, but then realized I mostly agreed with him.  Italian cities are places where money matters—that is, it can get you out of a problem.  No amount of money will save you from an angry charging leopard.

--          I sent Elliott a brief article about Veblen goods, which are items people desire even more after their price increases.  Here’s a brief description:

You spot something you want: maybe a new coffee maker, maybe an iPhone. But it’s too expensive, so you hold off. Two months later, the price drops, so you buy it. Nothing to see here — just Consumer Economics 101.

Sometimes, though, the exact opposite happens. The price of a good goes down, and then fewer people want it. Or the price goes up, and then it suddenly flies off store shelves.

Such is the counterintuitive fate of so-called Veblen goods, named for Thorstein Veblen, the economist and sociologist who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” The most obvious examples are luxury goods like stratospherically priced wristwatches, designer handbags, and ancient bottles of wine. When you buy these goods, you get some utility — a $10,000 Rolex does tell time, after all — but you also buy the ability to broadcast a signal: Look what I can afford! As the price goes up, this signal gets amplified, making the good more desirable, at least to people in its target market.

I guess it’s a case of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it,” but there is considerable research demonstrating that buying Veblen goods do not make people as happy as buying experiences.  That conclusion has (finally) sunk in with me, although I’ve never knowingly purchased a Veblen good.  I believe that the research in the psychology of purchasing also shows that material goods—Veblen or not—do not bring the same level of satisfaction and happiness that life experiences do.  There is the initial excitement/thrill of owning something new, at least for many people, but that quickly wears off.  Experiences, however, last a lifetime.

            Elliott wrote back to me after reading the article.  “I saw this sort of research all through my psych classes. Possibly indirectly why I’ve mostly lost interest in buying ‘stuff’ and why I never have a birthday list. I spend money on games, which are an experience, I spend money with friends, and I spend money on stuff I NEED like new shorts. Which I buy as cheap as possible. I never buy things for the sake of having things any more.

            I told him he was too quick to draw the line that he did.  What to say about Kathy’s (clothing) or my (political) button collections?  What about a piece of art we buy to hang on the walls so they aren’t bare?  What about glassware we buy because we like to use it when we have dinner company?  While it’s certainly possible to get carried away buying “stuff,” and heaven knows many Baby Boomer have, one cannot declare that buying stuff per se is a waste of money.

One hope no sooner dies in us but another rises up in its stead. We are apt to fancy that we shall be happy and satisfied if we possess ourselves of such and such particular enjoyments; but either by reason of their emptiness, or the natural inquietude of the mind, we have no sooner gained one point, but we extend our hopes to another. We still find new inviting scenes and landscapes lying behind those which at a distance terminated our view.

            Courtesy of an article in the Huffington Post, I encountered a subculture I didn’t have any idea existed:  one where the men in a relationship/marriage (I guess it could be heterosexual or gay—I didn’t explore this subculture that extensively!) wear a genital cage.  The woman (or I suppose one of the males) dominates the relationship and holds the key to the device, and unlocks it only when she chooses, which may not be any more frequently than once a month.

My goodness, there are a significant number of websites devoted to the subject, including advice on which devices to purchase and how both the man and woman should approach using them.  I couldn’t tell, in the case of some of the stories reported, if they were fiction or true life.  After one click I inadvertently ended up on amazon (.com), where I could buy from many choices.  Even though I backed out of the site as fast I could, I suppose now somewhere in the vast amazon computer banks there is record of my interest in male sexual constraining devices.

I have a tendency to click on links to a wide variety of stories that either look interesting or sort of off-the-wall (as probably many of us do).  In this case, it was in the latter category, and I certainly got an eyeful.  But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised; I imagine there is an enormous number of subcultures with which I am totally unfamiliar.

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country’s ruin?

            In that same vein, albeit with a different result, somehow I stumbled onto a website titled “War on the Rocks,” led there by a link to an article that sounded interesting, “Wargaming in the Classroom:  An Odyssey.”  It appears that the website is about war and foreign policy and weapons, with articles such as “Why the F-22 Trumps the B-52 Against North Korea,” “Top Gun at 30:  A Retrospective from Two Naval Aviators,” “The Presidential Candidates Need Foreign Policy Help,” “Presence vs. Warfighting:  A Looming Dilemma in Defense Planning,” and so on.

            The article I read, however, was by a faculty member at the Marine Corps War College; he related his experiences trying to teach students about the Peloponnesian War and how he ended up “flipping” his classroom so that there was great use of (apparently highly sophisticated) video wargames.  He had students re-fight the Peloponnesian War (Athens versus Syracuse) as well as the Civil War and World War I.

            He was startled that four of the five Athenian teams he’d set up attacked Syracuse—exactly what had happened 2,500 years ago, and it had been a disaster for the Athenians.  But the students on the Athenian teams felt they had no choice, given resource constraints and military considerations.  In the case of World War I, he related that students earlier had discussed the July crisis that led to the start of the war and they (the students) shook their heads at how dumb the European leaders had been.  When placed in context in the video game, however, even after running the trial with six different classes, it never took more than four hours for war to erupt.

            The instructor’s point was that forcing students to deal with issues of politics, economics, resource constraints, and so on means they learned vastly more than they would just hearing lectures and reading history.  The students became deeply engaged in the choices they faced and were faced with the same hard choices that the leaders at the time faced.  He concluded that the approach had been an unqualified success in teaching his students.

            I came away with a different take, as I wrote to Elliott.  “Frightening that they end up in war anyway, even knowing the outcome.  Makes you wonder about the inevitability of conflict sometimes.”

            Elliott wrote back that “I would love to take this class.”  He went on to tell me that it was an odd coincidence that “I’ve been having this ongoing discussion with one of my classmates in regards to the abstract idea of ‘saving the human race’ through peace activism, environmentalism, etc. I want to be optimistic about all of those things but at the same time it’s hard to objectively look at the human race and not think we simply aren’t meant to make it. Our destructive capabilities have outpaced our cultural evolution exponentially, and we just are not designed to care about big picture issues in the way that becomes necessary in a globalized world.”

            I agreed with him.  “I have seen this general comment about humans in a number of places, as have you, probably.  It’s a difficult proposition to prove, although it may well be true.  I’d like to hope we can move to the big picture.”  One major step in the right direction, I added, would be to get the right-wingers out of political life.

Elliott continued.  “Plus, we’re just one more species on this planet. Most species that have ever lived are extinct.  And most that currently live will be extinct soon.  Why are we different?  Just because we have the capacity to ask that question and we WANT to stay alive doesn’t necessarily mean we somehow ‘deserve’ to exist forever.  Maybe the human race is transient.  Whether we destroy ourselves or we simply fail to leave the planet before the sun consumes it, what difference does it make?”

I told him I believed, and thought he did as well, that the answer to his final question is “none whatsoever.”  If one hypothesizes that there are or have been thousands of other species alive on other planets, perhaps even civilizations (that we cannot know of because of the limits on travel speed set by the laws of physics), they no doubt have risen and fallen.  And will continue to do so.  We may be just one of thousands or even millions of civilizations (of some kind) that have existed but no longer exist.

This also raises the “great filter” question, with which you may be familiar.  (From Reddit and Wikipedia)

The Great Filter is an answer to something called the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks the following question: given that we, humans, exist, and that we have no particular reason to believe Earth or humanity is special, why haven’t we heard from anyone in the cosmos yet?

The Great Filter theory says that one possible answer to this question is that there is some step (possibly more than one) in the process from “bare lifeless planet” to “galaxy-faring civilization” that must be very hard. If that step is behind us (that is, humanity passed it at some point in our evolution), that’s good news: it means we’re one of the first or one of the very few species that will reach our level of technology.

The concept originates in Robin Hanson’s argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a “Great Filter” which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human).

This probability threshold, which could lie behind us (in our past) or in front of us (in our future), might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction.  The main counter-intuitive conclusion of this observation is that the easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.

With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with “advanced explosive lasting life” must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. Hanson’s list, while incomplete, describes the following nine steps in an “evolutionary path” that results in the colonization of the observable universe:

1.    The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2.    Reproductive molecules (e.g., RNA)
3.    Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4.    Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
5.    Sexual reproduction
6.    Multi-cell life
7.    Tool-using animals with big brains
8.    Where we are now
9.    Colonization explosion.

According to the Great Filter hypothesis at least one of these steps — if the list were complete — must be improbable. If it’s not an early step (i.e., in our past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in our future and our prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human species. However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only thing that appears likely to keep us from step 9 is some sort of catastrophe or the resource exhaustion leading to impossibility to make the step due to consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources).  So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.

On the other hand, if the step is ahead of us, that’s very bad. It means there is some danger, likely completely unknown to us, that can wipe us out in a way that is very difficult or impossible to avoid. It would mean that, for example, we should be extremely careful with certain kinds of scientific experimentation that we do not fully understand.

The reason it’s scary is that, should we discover life elsewhere in our solar system, we can infer that all the steps before that point must be pretty easy. If we find, for instance, multicellular “fish” in the oceans of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, we can reasonably infer that life arises and reaches multicellular forms pretty often. Otherwise, it would be very unlikely to have happened twice in the same solar system. That, then, would increase the probability that the Great Filter is ahead of us.  (For a fuller explanation, if you want it, from someone who’s thought a great deal about this subject, see http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf; Bostrom hopes that scientists find absolutely no sign of life on Mars or any other planet in the solar system.)

Elliott concluded:  “But on the other hand, I have faith that through necessity, the human race will invent a solution to climate change, space travel, etc. We seem to be good at that.”

I wrote to him “that’s where I come down, too.  ​But I’m at the stage in life where I may not see whether or not these solutions will actually come to be adopted.  (Maybe, one hopes, climate change, but space travel in any significant numbers is likely a bridge too far, given my expected lifespan.)  If one isn’t at least guardedly optimistic about those outcomes, we might as well all just commit suicide now.

I concluded:  You wrote “what difference does it make?”  I was having those same thoughts at the individual level, about myself yesterday (and at other times).  No, I’m certainly not contemplating suicide, but when I’m not pleased with life, and I know that there’s no heaven (or hell) awaiting me--that my sense of the universe will be exactly the same after my death as it was before my birth—I sometimes wonder what the point of sticking around is.  That and a sense that my generation is leaving the world worse off for our kids, unlike what my parent’s generation did for me.  I understand, of course, that my absence would make some people very sad (Kathy, Krystin, you--I assume!), so that alone is reason not to exit.  For the most part, the vast majority of the time, I enjoy life, but that doesn’t mean I attribute any meaning to it.  The notion of carpe diem is not irrelevant.  So when I am mildly depressed (never clinical depression, and never for long), I wonder “what’s the point?”

There is no greater sign of a bad cause, than when the patrons of it are reduced to the necessity of making use of the most wicked artifices to support it.
           

On the subject of the great filter—a favorite of mine—there was an article noted on the ScienceDaily website that I found interesting.

Related to the great filter question, as I’ve mentioned before, is the Drake Equation, developed in 1961 by astrophysicist Frank Drake to try to estimate the number of “active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations” in the Milky Way galaxy (which is only a tiny part of the entire universe).  Even for those of you (which includes me) who are allergic to algebraic equations, this one is understandable with the explanations of each variable.

N = R*  x  f(p)  x  n(e)  x  f(l)  x  f(i)  x  f(c)  x  L

N is the estimated number of active, communicative civilizations, a number that is derived from the variables that follow.

(i)        R* is the average rate of star formation in the Milky Way

(ii)       f(p) is the number of stars with planets

(iii)      n(e) is the number of planets that can potentially support life

(iv)      f(l) the proportion of those planets that actually develop life

(v)       f(i) the fraction of life-bearing planets that develop intelligent civilizations

(vi)      f(c) the fraction of the civilizations that have developed communications (detectable in space)

(vii)     the length of time, L, over which civilizations send detectable signals (that is, how long do the civilizations last?)

            Since Drake proposed it in 1961, there have been significant advances in astronomy (e.g., the discovery of planets circling stars).  The great difficulty with the Drake equation is that no one knows what the values of some of the variables are.  Who knows L, how long a civilization that has communication technology that gets out in the galaxy survives?  How do we figure out f(i) or f(c)?  At this point, those are pretty much sheer guesswork.  Of course, if we knew the numbers, or even had a range, we could calculate N.  But we don’t.

            A couple of astronomers at the University of Rochester and University of Washington this year tackled part of the question in a slightly different manner.  They drew on the Drake equation but to address another question:  “What is the number of advanced civilizations likely to have developed over the history of the observable universe?”  They decided not to try to identify L and instead just looked at whether any technologically-advanced civilization was likely to ever have existed.

            What they concluded was that “unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet [that is, f(i)] are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe’s first technological, or advanced, civilization.  They note that there have been three variables in the Drake equation for which there wasn’t even a guess:  how many stars had planets that could maybe have life, how often life might develop, and how long a civilization will last.  Now, however, “thanks to NASA’s Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in ‘habitable zones,’ where temperatures could support life as we know it. So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained.”  L is still unknown.  Humans have had technology for about 10,000 years, they say, and advanced communications technology only a matter of decades, so who knows how long other civilizations might last.

            Where the two astronomers get is here: they “find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.  ‘One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,’ says Frank. ‘To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history!’”

They also point out, however, that “‘the universe is more than 13 billion years old. . . .  That means that even if there have been a thousand civilizations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around -- roughly ten thousand years -- then all of them are likely already extinct. And others won’t evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another “contemporary” active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime.’  And as good astronomers, they remind us what the popular press almost always forgets:  “‘Given the vast distances between stars and the fixed speed of light we might never really be able to have a conversation with another civilization anyway. . . . If they were 50,000 light years away then every exchange would take 100,000 years to go back and forth.’”

They finally conclude:  “‘it is astonishingly likely that we are not the only time and place that an advance civilization has evolved.’”

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger: the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind; the latter to preserve themselves.

Early in the year Elliott detoured from human portraiture and did an oil sketch of our beloved, personable Bela:

Because of the lighting, this makes him appear much lighter and multi-colored than he is.  I told Elliott that, and pointed out that except for the white spot on his chest, Bela is entirely black.  Elliott retorted that only beginners and those trying to make invisible stage props use black, which is the complete absence of color.  I dunno; Bela is black.  But it was still a good representation of him.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Chill’d with tears, kill’d with fears, endless torments dwell about thee: yet who would live, and live without thee!

            Over the last year I have seen both Facebook posts and commentary in various news media about colleges and universities infringing on free speech in the name of “political correctness.”  In my view, most people outside higher education have a difficult time understanding the problem.  A few observations, with editorial help from a couple of friends (of color).

             First of all, I think very few white people (in the U.S.) can fully understand what it is like to be a person of color or minority (whether religious, ethnic, national origin, or whatever) who, frequently or not, sees and hears insults—intended or not.  I don’t pretend to be one of those white people who fully understand.  For those of us who grew up here, especially in the upper Midwest, in the 1950s, when we were part of a white male largely Christian ethos/culture that predominated, we never felt the sting of an insult based on identity—or never one that meant much.  We were in the majority, secure in our beings and beliefs.  (I have a (white) friend who once denigrated the impact of racist/religious insults on the grounds that he was insulted on the (all-white) playground when he was little and it didn’t affect him.  Talk about obtuse.)

            Most institutions of higher education have two supra-ordinate goals that can conflict.  One is to provide, within the available resources, the best possible learning environment it can for its students.  That means an environment where students are not afraid, not wary because of the color of their skin or their nation of origin or their religious faith.  Learning is impeded when a student is constantly worried about being attacked (physically or orally).  What is commonly called “hate speech” is anathema to a sound educational setting.

            The second goal of higher education is to serve as a bastion of free speech, a place where ideas can clash and students (and faculty and staff) can sort through what is said and try to find something approaching “truth.”  (This may be somewhat less true at denominational colleges, where propositions that contravene the religious precepts that guide the college may be off the table.  But certainly for all public and the vast majority of the private institutions, free speech is an overriding goal.)

            What colleges and universities are having a hard time doing is reconciling those two goals.  There is no right answer and there may not be any good way to reconcile them.  Various institutions have tried various approaches, with varying degrees of success (or ridicule).  How do you (1) create a learning space where non-majority students (whatever the measure of “majority” may be) can live and study without the sting of insults and the feeling of being threatened and (2) also create an intellectual space where people can say whatever is protected by the First Amendment?  What is a university to do when students hang signs from their dorm doors saying all Muslims are terrorists/should be shot or deported?  Or when a noose hangs out a window?  Or when students publicly insult people (e.g., walking across campus) with speech that is extremely offensive but not illegal?  The institutions cannot restrict free speech—and for the most part don’t want to because it’s inherent in academic debate, teaching, and research—but they also have to worry about the mental health of students who are subject to slurs and intimidation.

There is no way the institutions can win in these circumstances. 

            A faculty friend of mine observed that another aspect of this debate is “trigger warnings”:  an announcement in advance by the instructor that controversial topics will be coming up.  Some have scoffed at trigger warnings, but my friend and I agree that when used with care, they can be helpful for students.  (For example, talking graphically about rape or hangings or sexuality or any topic that reasonably could be expected to startle or upset some students, especially if the content might clash with deep-seated religious or other beliefs.)  My friend suggests, and I agree, that it is a matter of academic freedom:  a college/university cannot require faculty members to use trigger warnings (haven’t heard of such a case), but neither can it forbid them (as the University of Chicago proposed to do).  I can recall to this day that even I, a white-privileged majority male student, was surprised a couple of times in college lectures by the content of the class lecture and discussion.  But for anyone in my circumstances, it wasn’t difficult to get over.

            (I am reminded of a draft platform plank that was proposed for the Texas GOP:  it called for colleges and universities in Texas to refrain from teaching anything that might conflict with students’ family beliefs.  My response to colleagues at the time was that if that became state law, the U of Texas and all other institutions in Texas could just as well fold up their tents, since part of the instructional mission of most of these places is to broaden students’ understanding of the world—which, at some points, will certainly expose them to views that don’t align with the beliefs they acquired while growing up.)

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next to escape the censures of the world: if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public: a man is more sure of his conduct, when the verdict which he passes upon his own behaviour is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him.

            Perhaps you’ve read about Marie Kondo, or at least about her guide to “tidying up.”  She wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which was published in 2014, and became a bestseller.  There have been sequels, “Spark Joy, an illustrated guide to tidying things up even more, and Life-Changing Magic, a journal where you can ruminate on the pleasures of owning only your most cherished personal belongings.”  The Atlantic ran an interesting article by Arielle Bernstein about Kondo’s approach to possessions; the scattered quotations here are from the article.  Unusually, a number of the reader comments on the article were perceptive, and I’ve drawn on them as well.

            Bernstein points out, to start with, that while decluttering may be attractive to middle-class Americans, those who are refugees or immigrants, who may have lost everything, tend to hang on to things.  Some respond to the dramatic change by hanging on to nearly everything.  (Bernstein’s grandparents fled Europe just before the Holocaust, and had almost nothing.)  The same thing was true, in my experience, with those who lived through the Depression.

            Bernstein describes the “KonMari” philosophy.

At its heart, the KonMari method is a quest for purity. To Kondo, living your life surrounded by unnecessary items is “undisciplined,” while a well-tidied house filled with only the barest essentials is the ultimate sign of personal fulfillment. Kondo’s method involves going through all the things you own to determine whether or not they inspire feelings of joy. If something doesn’t immediately provoke a sense of happiness and contentment, you should get rid of it.

Kondo seems suspicious of the idea that our relationship with items might change over time. She instructs her readers to get rid of books we never finished, and clothes we only wore once or twice. She warns us not to give our precious things to our family and friends, unless they expressly ask for them. She’s especially skeptical of items that have sentimental value.

From Kondo’s book:

Just as the word implies, mementos are reminders of a time when these items gave us joy. The thought of disposing them sparks the fear that we’ll lose those precious memories along with them. But you don’t need to worry. Truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them. . . .  No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel in the here and now are most important.

Bernstein describes Kondo’s belief that “the first step to having a joyful life is through mindful consideration of your possessions. . . .  You either feel pure love for an object or you let it go. But beneath some of the self-help-inspired platitudes about how personally enriched you’ll feel after you’ve discarded items you don’t need, there’s an underlying tone of judgment about the emotional wellbeing of those who submit to living in clutter. Those who live in KonMari homes are presented as being more disciplined: invulnerable to the throes of nostalgia, impervious to the temptation of looking back at something that provokes mixed feelings.”

Bernstein suggests that Kondo is advancing “an elegant fantasy of paring back and scaling down at a time when simplicity is a hot trend.”  But, she observes, “if our life is made from the objects we collect over time, then surely our very sense of who we are is dependent upon the things we carry.”  She also points out that you have to be certain that you can readily replace those things you toss, such as clothes.  Being a minimalist requires a sense of trust (that replacements can be afforded and are available), something that refugees often don’t have after their material possessions have been taken or left behind.  (The poignant stories of the millions of refugees now traveling the world make Bernstein’s point.)

            Bernstein also related how she visited her parents’ home and was asked to help sort through the items in her childhood bedroom as well as all the belongings left by her grandparents.  She was initially happy to help—but then faced memories associated with various items that had mattered much to her earlier in life.  She couldn’t bring herself to part with much of it.  This sounds familiar to me (and is something Kathy ribs me about from time to time).  “I sat in front of my bookshelf and did exactly what Kondo cautions most against: I started my project of decluttering by going through the things that mattered most to me: the books I loved when I was a child; the CDs made by dear friends and stacked high in no particular order; the college textbooks I never remembered to return. Objects imbued with memories of a person I once was, and a person that part of me always will be.  I didn’t want to give any of it up.”

            One reader made an obvious point.  “Most of the ‘crap’ that fills our house are not things that inspire joy, but things that are used to support other things that do inspire joy. Yard tools. Pots and pans we only use twice a year. . . . So I haul things to corners of the basement where we don’t have to look at them the other 360 days a year that aren’t party prep, party, or party clean up.”  One wiseacre reflected my view.  “This is why I don’t do Halloween decorations. Christmas takes up enough space.”  In our basement, about 60-70 linear feet of shelf space.

            Another reader made salient points—and then went to one of the hearts of the matter. 

I’m not a big fan of Marie Kondo, for me. If it works for others, that’s fine. There is this bizarre notion of items bringing you “joy”, [sic] but I’m not going to spend months finding the perfectly balanced, aesthetically pleasing serving spoon, so that I have a perfect spoon bringing me joy. I’m going to selected a good spoon at a sensible price and spend my time on things that matter more.

And there are many things that don’t bring me joy, but which I need. My pill box does not bring me joy, but it is necessary to organize my medicines. Ditto my toothbrush. If I never had to use a vacuum cleaner again, I would indeed be joyful, but that’s not how things work.

But now let’s get onto my big issue - books. I love books, and since I’ve been a child I’ve bought books. There are many books in my home, and they bring me great joy. Some are visually pleasing, some have fond memories, some I pick up and read again and again. My partner is also very fond of books, so double the number you just thought I had. I do purge books from time to time, but there’s a core set that’s always going to be with me. And that core set is in the 100s, not 10s. It’s not clutter, it’s my passion. And I don’t like being judged for that.

Another reader felt the pain.  “I am so with you on that last category. Out of all the things I’ve ever purged, donated, stripped out, sold and given away during various moves over the years, the only things I deeply regret are the books. Absolutely nothing else. I had to get rid of half my library and put half of the survivors into storage when I married, and a dozen years later it still hurts to think about it.” 

This touched a chord with me.  Sorting through my books when we had the room repainted was one of the more difficult tasks I have faced.  I ended up donating several grocery bags full to the public library (which sells them, which is fine).

            One commentator argued against the link of identity with objects:  “‘If our life is made from the objects we collect over time, then surely our very sense of who we are is dependent upon the things we carry.’”  I can’t imagine a more sad or misguided philosophy. If you don’t want to be a minimalist, that’s perfectly ok. But if you have no sense of self independent from your possessions, then you are living a very small life indeed.”

            There is a significant cultural aspect to Kondo’s approach.  “Many of the people Kondo helps in Japan remember, through their parents and grandparents, how difficult things were in post-WWII Japan. The prosperity that Japanese people experience today is a more recent development. Japanese people of a certain age know a lot about poverty and hard times, which is partly why clutter and hoarding are problems there. . . . Kondo’s theories about clutter and cleaning are resonating with people around the world, but they’re rooted in a very specific culture and arise from specific living conditions in a country with severe space limitations. The spiritual aspect of her theories comes from Shintoism, a religion most people haven’t the faintest clue about (including, most likely, the author of this article).”  (Another reader, apparently familiar with Japan, wrote that while decluttering by Kondo arises from Japanese culture, most Japanese don’t practice it and are hoarders.)

            I liked this reader’s response, particularly because between the two of us, Kathy and I have eight sets of china.  “After reading part of the book, I laid it down and touched it. No joy. I’m getting rid of the book. I will deal with my clutter on my own terms. And my three sets of dishes (my grandmother’s treasured Spode, the dated pottery I got as wedding presents, the stoneware I chose to replace the nasty Melmac we used when our kids were little), none of those sets are going anywhere!”

            But back to books.  So I’m trying to prune, but I’m stumped on what to keep and what to donate/toss.  I can’t figure out what the standards of judgment, the criteria, should be.  So I wrote to a few friends who I know have faced the same dilemma.  The responses were interesting but in the end they couldn’t guide me.

“I got rid of almost all textbooks, other than a few sentimental favorites.  Another rule I applied in some categories:  If you can’t imagine recommending it to someone else, purge it.”

“I saved books I hadn’t read AND still thought I’d get around to reading, a few that were so good I couldn’t bear to part with them, some that were gifts from special friends, travel books that weren’t totally out of date, cookbooks that I never use, language books that weren’t duplicative of others, some that I occasionally use for reference and those that felt good to have on the shelf, reflecting a values of the inhabitants of the house kind of thing.  The other very helpful hint I have, if you are serious about pruning, is to work one shelf at a time, remove all books and make three piles: 1) no question-must keep; 2) maybe-but only if there is space; and 3) send to a good home where someone else will keep it.  Then put the must keeps back on the shelf, box up the other two piles and store the maybe category and get rid of the third pile.”  (This WAS helpful.)

“Not much system to it. If I’d read a book and wouldn’t recommend it to [my spouse], it went out. Most novels I’d already read went out, except those I loved and didn’t want to part with or that I would recommend to [my spouse]. Non-fiction I mostly kept except those I somehow felt weren’t important enough or that I didn’t like. My method was somewhat gestalt (what did I feel when I looked at a book) but had to first get into a giveaway set of mind!”  (Getting into that mindset is key, I agree; I somehow don’t quite ever reach it for books.)

“[We] have really struggled with this.  Initially, we thought it would be pretty easy:  (1) keep unique reference materials, i.e. can it be easily found on the Internet? (2) keep books related to areas we have a particular interest in, i.e. American History, theater, art, design, [etc.], and (3) keep great literature; the classics.  What happened?  We got rid of old law school books, many undergraduate textbooks, a few summertime novels and a 1950s set of World Book.  Hardly a kids book, cookbook, management book or missal found its way out the door.”

Summer Brennan, writing in the Literary Hub, took on shrinking her library.  She captured many of my thoughts.

Kondo gives minimalism the hard sell when it comes to books, urging readers to ditch as many of them as they can. You may think that a book sparks joy, she argues, but you’re probably wrong and should get rid of it, especially if you haven’t read it yet.

Paring down one’s wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, “keep only the words they like?” For those of us for whom even the word ”book” sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect.

I wondered, can Kondo’s Spartan methods be adapted for someone who feels about books the way the National Rifle Association feels about guns, invoking the phrase “cold dead hands”? I decided to give it a try.

I went through my books one by one. Kondo says you shouldn’t open the books, but I broke that rule—not to read them, but to see what I might have long-ago stashed inside.  There was a surprising amount of stuff between the pages—letters, tickets, photographs, receipts.

It occurred to me that part of the reason why tackling the “books” stage of the Full Kondo seems so daunting is that to many of us our books don’t really belong in the category she has assigned. They are not impersonal units of knowledge, interchangeable and replaceable, but rather receptacles for the moments of our lives, whose pages have sopped up morning hopes and late-night sorrows, carried in honeymoon suitcases or clutched to broken hearts. They are mementos, which she cautions readers not to even attempt to contemplate getting rid of until the very last.

But to my surprise, I found plenty of books in my possession that did not spark joy either.  They filled three shopping bags. I separated the remaining books I was keeping into two piles—those I had read already, and those I hadn’t.

It’s a useful exercise to clear the cobwebs from one’s bookshelves once and a while, but don’t let anyone talk you into getting rid of your books if you don’t want to, read or unread. Ask yourself whether or not each book sparks joy, and ignore the minimalist proselytizing if it chafes you. After all, the romance of minimalism relies on invisible abundance. The elegantly empty apartment speaks not to genteel poverty, but to the kind of hoarded wealth that makes anything and everything replaceable and available at the click of a mouse. Things and the freedom from things, and then things again if you desire. If you miss a book after getting rid of it, Kondo consoles, you can always buy it again. Dispose and replace, repeat and repeat. Ah, what fleeting luxury.

            It has taken me awhile, but I have finally moved to the “dispose and replace” attitude for certain categories of things.  I had to escape the Depression mentality many of us inherited from our parents, a flight assisted by the accumulation of stuff “I might need or use some day” to the extent things were getting beyond “clutter.”  So out much went.  But as Brennan observes, that’s a luxury in which only those with sufficient incomes can indulge.

            As for the books I’ve retained, I look at them and ask myself, “what’s going to happen to them when I kick the bucket?”  My kids won’t want them (well, maybe a few), Kathy won’t want them.  What we must confess is that in addition to being a part of our lives, for certain rooms in a house they also serve as interior decoration.  Many people I know love being in a room with shelves and shelves of books.  One of the rooms I would most like to possess is Henry Higgins’s study in My Fair Lady.

A man governs himself by the dictates of virtue and good sense, who acts without zeal or passion in points that are of no consequence; but when the whole community is shaken, and the safety of the public endangered, the appearance of a philosophical or an affected indolence must arise either from stupidity or perfidiousness.

            This is political but not judgmental or partisan.  A guy named Nathan Collins wrote a very perceptive piece in Pacific Standard magazine:  “The Trouble With What the People Want.”  Collins took note of Bernie Sanders calling for a “people’s revolution” after he won the Michigan primary.  But what do the people want, Collins asked?

            The answer, he said, is “the people, as a group, don’t want anything. More precisely, it’s nearly impossible to find any specific candidate or political platform that even a small group of people can agree on.”  Social scientists, he maintained, sought the “will of the people” for years, but finally economist Kenneth Arrow put the idea to rest after study of interest-group decision-making.

            Collins reports that there are different reasons for concluding the people as a whole don’t want anything (that they can agree on).  One is that different voting methods produce different results.  Majority rule won’t necessarily lead to the same outcome as ranked-choice voting. 

But it’s worse than that—sometimes, a voting system will fail to produce any winner at all. . . .  Here’s how it works:  Suppose that Max, Nick, and Nathan want pizza. Nathan prefers Hawaiian to pepperoni, and pepperoni to vegetarian; Max prefers pepperoni to vegetarian to Hawaiian; and Nick prefers vegetarian to Hawaiian to pepperoni. Take a close look at those preferences, and you’ll realize that two of them prefer pepperoni to vegetarian, two of them prefer vegetarian to Hawaiian, and two of them prefer Hawaiian to pepperoni. So if the three guys were to vote on it, they wouldn’t be able to make a decision. If they’re going to eat pizza, someone has got to make a command decision.

            There have been a variety of proposals for voting to achieve the greatest degree of agreement, including ranked-choice and Borda count (each candidate (or alternative) gets 1 point for each last place vote received, 2 points for each next-to-last point vote, etc., all the way up to 10 points for each first place vote (where 10 is the number of candidates/alternatives; it could be any number). The candidate with the largest point total wins the election).  Each is subject to manipulation by voters.  Arrow demonstrated that “there’s only one way to make group choices that avoid the problems with majority rule and the Borda count, respect all possible preferences, and satisfy the no-brainer condition that if everyone prefers option A over option B, and no one prefers B to A, the group should choose A.  Unfortunately, that way is dictatorship.”

            Collins concludes, accurately, I think, that “this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for the people to want something. Indeed, the people really may want a revolution. It’s hardly unprecedented. But exactly what they want out of that revolution, well, that’s another matter—just look at the last 240 years of American history.”  (Just look at Jefferson and Hamilton, each of whom wanted nothing close to what the other wanted.)

            I have no doubt that this uncertainty about what the people want is as prevalent after the 2016 elections as it has been before.

Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.

            An event in April demonstrated to me something I already knew:  that I am pretty much out of touch with popular culture.  I knew Prince was a significant musician but I was astonished at the reaction when he died.  (Ditto, by the way, David Bowie.)  I told Kathy that I did not believe I knew any of Prince’s music, or if I did, I wasn’t aware that I knew it.  (Ditto David Bowie, again.)  Kathy rolled her eyes.

            Kathy had her own Prince story to tell.  Here are her own words, copied from her Facebook page with her permission.

In the fall of 1978, I transferred to the U of M from Bemidji State. I took a volunteer job as the student coordinator for films, concerts, and dances in Coffman Union. One day while in the second floor offices for the Coffman Union Program Council, Nadira, another student volunteer, brought her boyfriend in to meet me. She introduced me to this short kid with a giant afro named Prince. (I thought “Really? Prince??”) He quietly said “hello” and I believe that was the only word I heard from him. Nadira did all the talking. They handed me a demo tape and hoped I would listen to it and consider him for a concert in Coffman. Being completely unimpressed (and apparently too unaware of local talent to really be good at my volunteer job) with this quiet little person, I never even listened to the tape. Obviously Prince didn’t need a concert in the Coffman Great Hall to catapult him to fame. And I think it was best that I didn’t pursue what I had hoped would be a career as a concert promoter.

           

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.  [Well, for me, the second but not so much the first, which is why I enjoy getting together with friends.]

            I have speculated in the past that there must be a reason that people like lake homes/cabins and that homes built around lakes in cities are among the most expensive.  I did not presume to know what that reason was, other than to guess it is something rooted deep in our genetic heritage (perhaps the need for water).  Now I read research on the subject.

            A study out of Michigan State University finds that people with a view of the water are less stressed than those who do not have water in sight.  They call visibility of water “blue space,” and report that lower levels of stress are not linked with green space, just blue space.  The study was done in Wellington, New Zealand, and appears to have been methodologically sound.  (The blue space was ocean views.)  The author cautioned that the finding about green space may have been affected by the presence of human-made artifacts, such as sports fields; they don’t evaluate the effect of something like a forest. They also didn’t claim the same effect for large inland bodies of water, such as the Great Lakes.

            I bet this research can be replicated for lakes.  The experience of everyone I know who has a lake place suggests their findings are correct.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world. 

            At one point during spring semester 2016 Elliott told me his art class had been assigned a caricature of a famous criminal.  He did a few sketches; his favorite:

What I think turned out to be the final:

A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes. 

Text from Elliott that relieved my mind.  Not that I’ve ever been in a helicopter.

Just learned that contrary to very popular belief, helicopters do not fall like a brick if/when the engine should fail, and there is a way that pilots can maneuver the rotors to use the air coming up though the blades as the helicopter loses altitude to direct it and slow it. In fact a helicopter without an engine is even safer than a plane without an engine because a helicopter can glide and land relatively straight down at a much lower speed, whereas a plane needs a large flat area to land and can easily tumble and break apart while doing so. So helicopters are very safe.

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.

            A book review in the Chronicle of Higher Education caught my attention because it discussed a book focused on a thought I’ve had from time to time.  The book is In Praise of Forgetting by David Rieff; the title of the book review highlighted the main point:  “The Peril of Perpetual Revenge.”  The reviewer, a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, offered both commendation and criticism, par for a book review.

            The thesis of the book contests the proposition that “remembrance devoted to keeping alive the legacy of ‘oppression, defeat, injustice, and grievance’ is an ethical requirement or a political good.”  It is not necessarily a good idea to keep such events in the front of a nation’s or people’s collective memory.  Examples include Holocaust memorials and a site in Kosovo commemorating a battle 600 years ago that still energizes Serbia, the annihilation of the Serbian army in the Battle of Kosovo Polje, in 1389.  Rieff argues that Santayana was wrong; even learning the lessons of history doesn’t prevent them from being repeated (e.g., genocide has occurred since WWII despite widespread knowledge of the Holocaust).  Moreover, continuing to bear grudges that may date back decades or even centuries can impede movement toward a democratic society.

            Rieff doesn’t argue for forgetting (e.g., the Holocaust) but seems to be saying that terrible events in history, if kept on the front burner, can deter progress in the world (however one wishes to define “progress”).  When the perpetrators of oppression and murder remain alive, the urge to revenge is difficult to resist.  When they are not, I have wondered if those whose forbearers were trampled or murdered have to let go in order to improve the lives of the living and their progeny.  What would the victims want when their oppressors are also dead?  I don’t know.  But I am reasonably confident that keeping alive the memory of the Battle of Kosovo Polje is not doing much good for the political health of the Balkans.

Men of warm imaginations and towering thoughts are apt to overlook the goods of fortune which are near them, for something that glitters in the sight at a distance; to neglect solid and substantial happiness for what is showy and superficial; and to contemn that good which lies within their reach, for that which they are not capable of attaining. Hope calculates its schemes for a long and durable life; presses forward to imaginary points of bliss; grasps at impossibilities; and consequently very often ensnares men into beggary, ruin, and dishonour.
           

            A friend of mine told us that she’d sent in for a genetic test of her nationality, a service being offered by several companies.  This seemed to me a dodgy enterprise because it just didn’t seem likely that the genes of the Danes would be different from the Polish or Greeks.  So I wrote to a couple of faculty colleagues in biology to ask about this testing.  They were kind enough to try to explain.

           

My understanding is that the various DNA testing companies offer a breakdown of your potential ancestry by region/ethnicity based on the percentage of an autosomal DNA markers (alleles/single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)) inherited from different population groups. The reliability of the test is affected by multiple factors, including the number and specific types of DNA markers tested, and sample size of the comparison population. The accuracies of these tests keeps going up, but for the geographically close, Dane, Greek, and Polish populations I do not know how definitive the DNA test results can be.

I would just say the details about how the tests were conducted and the percent ethnicity determined does matter.

I’m not an expert on ancestry testing, but I agree with [the preceding paragraphs]. These tests are getting pretty accurate, with some companies more reliable than others (23andMe is the most reliable in my opinion). But they are still not great at separating close populations, e.g., distinguishing Polish from Romanian ancestry. Also, cases where small proportions of the genome are estimated are not completely reliable -- for example, if they say you are 1% Greek, but you don’t think you have any Greek ancestry, you are probably right.

            So to my surprise, there is some validity to the tests.  “Some” is the key word.  I haven’t had it done for myself, but given what I now know about the ancestry of one of my great-grandparents, I should.  I have always thought of myself as ¼ German, ¼ Danish, ¼ Swedish, and ¼ British (a mix of English, Scot, and Irish).  The ancestor whose family I can trace was part of the British portion—but when one goes back far enough, the English were originally French (William the Conqueror, the Normans), and the Normans were originally Danish Vikings who settled in France.  Some of my ancestors in that branch also came from Italy.  It would be interesting to see how these tests account for that kind of branching ancestry.  Maybe that’s why they get 1% this or that—I probably am 1% Italian.

            If you want to do the testing, it would probably be wise to combine it with whatever genealogical information you have.  (My friend who had the testing done was astonished at the results, with genetic ancestry that she had no idea was there.)

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul. 

            Most of what I had to say about our trip to Italy I included in the narrative accompanying the photo albums for which I provided the link to all of you for whom I have email addresses.  But a few closing thoughts.

We had a marvelous time, although we started to get a bit travel weary by the end of 3 and 1/2 weeks, in part because we schedule activities of some sort nearly every day (we want to see as much as possible!).  Kathy had some sort of bug the last few days we were there but pushed through on adrenalin and medications.  Once we were home, she was sick for a week and spent most of it on the sofa or in bed.  When she went to the doctor, she was diagnosed with a viral respiratory infection--and the doctor knew immediately what she had and told Kathy it lasted 3 weeks.  It did.  But she recovered and is fine.

For those of you who might be interested in looking at the photo albums from Italy and my commentary on some of the pictures, and for whom I didn’t have an email address to send the links, they are here:

https://goo.gl/photos/VqmmvRaS7WMnBcQK9

https://goo.gl/photos/hMtuz1sWGC3fEpsf8

Directions:  open an album and click on the first picture; that should expand it to the full screen.  If you click on the little white circle with the "i" in it in the upper right, that will open a vertical bar on the side that has my comments.  I think if you then find the arrow on the right side of the photo or in any black space, you can just click through to the next picture and the comment box stays open from one to the next.

These are only cell phone pictures, so while you can scroll to enlarge parts of them, they get fuzzy pretty fast because they have a fairly low pixel count.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

            In a reluctant concession to modernity, I bought a paper shredder this fall.  I find it a wearisome sign of the times that we cannot simply toss into the paper recycling old bills and other documents that have account numbers on them.  I still have a hard time believing that if I tear apart a piece of paper with an account number, such that the number is divided, that someone is going to go diving through the recycling before it gets reduced to pulp in order to try to piece together account numbers and try to use them illegally. 

Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity. 

Elliott recalled for me a long-standing family joke.  When the kids were little and did something that warranted commendation, I would say “that’s pretty good!”  My wife/their mother Pat would get annoyed with me and tell me I had to say something more enthusiastic, like “that’s great!” or “wonderful job!” or some such.  So I did, once in awhile, but both the kids learned that “pretty good” from me was high praise indeed.

Elliott, who follows politics very closely, was a daily reader of FiveThirtyEight before the election.  He abstracted one exchange from the website.

Had to pull this bit from an article, in case you missed it. You and Silver are kindred spirits. 

micah: So polls could be off in Trump’s favor (he wins), they could be right (Clinton wins) or they could be off in Clinton’s favor (Clinton wins). She wins two of three — nicely matching the odds our models give her.

natesilver: Yeah, that’s not the worst way to think about it.

micah: Nate, rein in that effusive praise.

natesilver: My highest praise is “pretty good.” Pretty good is higher than very good.

If this reminds you of the culture of Lake Wobegon, you’d be right.

In doing what we ought we deserve no praise, because it is our duty.

A text exchange between Elliott and me the night after the November elections.

G:  Last night I was depressed.  Tonight I go to bed weary. I didn’t do much today.  Read an article today, said post-election depression doesn’t last long.  True in my case, I’m sure. [Has not turned out to be true.]

E:  Yea, went for a long walk and painted a bit.  Not much else.

[Apropos of his school trip to the Twin Cities the next day, November 10]

E:  We are going to about 6 [art museums].  Is mostly contemporary art which I never understand.  Honestly I am just going because I get credit for doing so and because it’s a good excuse to come home for couple days.  I desperately need to sit somewhere familiar and just debrief on all this stuff that has happened.

G:  We can do that.  But at some point shortly thereafter I want to quit paying attention to politics and get back to life.​

​

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.

            Although this is a bit long for an excerpt, I think many of you might enjoy it.  It’s the “last lecture”—and it literally was his last lecture—of a faculty member in Political Science who’s been a friend of mine for 30 years.  Here’s the final part of his lecture to his class.

V. What Should the Role of Politics Be in Our Lives?

I want to conclude by addressing a question that may seem odd coming from a political scientist: how much attention should we focus on government and politics?  I’ve argued (and, I believe, shown) that government can matter greatly in people’s lives.  But how much of our attention should we focus on government and politics, compared with other things that affect us? 

If you watch Fox News or MSNBC between the hours of 6 and 10, you would likely conclude that politics is all-important, and that it is in terrible shape. . . .  This could lead you to what I see in some of my friends, and frankly in some of you – an obsession with politics, often accompanied by a cynical and slightly bleak outlook on life.

What I want to leave you with in this my last lecture, is that politics is indeed very important, and deserves our attention. But, it is not the most important thing in one’s life, and should not be the center of one’s emotional life.  The most important things in our lives – our family, our loves, our faith, our joy in music or poetry or sports – are usually not much the result of politics.

David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote a column titled “The Stem and the Flower” that summed up well my view on this.  I want to close by stealing from him shamelessly.  I will paraphrase slightly, but what follows is really his, not mine:

On one hand, there are those who are completely cynical about politics and withdraw from it.  But this sort of cynicism is the luxury of privileged people.  If you live in a functioning society, you can say politicians are just a bunch of crooks.  But if you live in a place without rule of law, where a walk down a nighttime street can be terrifying, where tribalism leads to murder, you know that politics is a vital concern.

On the other hand, there are those who form their identity around politics and look to it to complete their natures.  These people drive a lot of radio and television.  Not long ago (and still on a few programs, like Charlie Rose’s show), shows would put together interesting people and they would talk about anything under the sun.  Today, most TV and radio talk is minute political analysis, driven by people who, absent other attachments, have fallen upon partisanship to give them a sense of righteousness and belonging.

Neither of these polar types really knows how to live.  So, if politics should not be nothing in life, but should also not be everything, what should it be?  We should start by acknowledging that except for a few occasions – the Civil War, the Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement – government is a slow trudge, oriented around essential but mundane tasks.

Imagine you are going to a picnic.  Government is properly in charge of maintaining the essential background order: making sure there is a park, that it is reasonably clean and safe, arranging public transportation so as many people as possible can get to it.  But if you remember the picnic afterward, these things won’t be what you remember.  You’ll remember the creative food, the interesting conversations and the fun activities.

Government is the hard work of creating a background order, but it is not the main substance of life.  It can set the stage, but it can’t be the play.

So one’s attitude toward politics should be a passionate devotion to a mundane and limited thing.  Government is essential, but it’s the stem of the flower, not the bloom.  Unless you are in the business of politics, making it or reporting on it (or teaching political science), politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind.  The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture, and fun.

As I leave my teaching career, I wish all of you long and satisfying lives filled with philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture, fun – and politics.

I wrote to my friend:  “Your language doesn’t appear to leave room for the social safety net role of government, which I believe strongly in.  I don’t take issue with your citation of Brooks, but I don’t think it goes far enough.”

He wrote back to tell me that “the safety net (and indeed, more of a safety net than we now have) is an integral part of it.”  He reiterated the point, however, that family, fun, friendship, and so on, should be the main purposes of life.

I am working hard to remember his good counsel.

There is nothing we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

          My brother and I co-own a small piece of land outside El Paso, Texas, that we inherited from my great aunt in 1989.  She bought it during those land-sale scams in the 1960s.  We have never seen it.  My parents were in El Paso for a meeting many years ago and did drive out to see it; my dad related that it was sand and sagebrush as far as the eye could see.  He thought it would take a couple of centuries of expansion on the part of El Paso for development ever to reach that piece of land.

            Every year I receive the tax bill (still in my great aunt’s name—I haven’t the slightest inclination to go to Texas to get the records changed).  It hasn’t varied for years:  about $30, and an assessed value of $1080.  I suspect that number is high.

            Kathy intelligently asked me this year, when I told her the usual tax bill had come, if we hadn’t paid more in taxes over the years than the land is worth.  I agreed that we probably had, but at $15 each, it wasn’t an onerous burden.  Personally, I’m holding out for fracking as a source of future wealth.  (But no, I do not think fracking is a good idea, at least as done at present, causing earthquakes in Oklahoma.)

 It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others. 

            We celebrated Kathy’s 60^th birthday in November.  I planned two surprise events for her, only one of which occurred.  We had a very pleasant dinner with a few friends at the Nicollet Island Inn the Saturday after her birthday, which was on the day before, Friday.  I also had planned one for Friday, inviting a few of her close (and pre-Gary) friends over for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

            The day before her birthday, Thursday, we had been planning to go to Moorhead for Elliott’s senior art show that afternoon.  We were going to stay overnight and return Friday morning.  Kathy was kind enough to volunteer to take two days of vacation and drive up and back with me.  That Thursday morning, however, Kathy was wary about going up to Moorhead because the weather forecast for central Minnesota for Friday was grim:  blizzard conditions.

            Family lore has it that my mother used to get (lightly) irritated with my father when she’d express a concern about something and his response was “don’t worry about it.”  This apparently happened frequently.  I don’t know if it’s a genetic personality trait or something I learned, but I told Kathy, apropos of the predicted blizzard, “don’t worry about it.  We’ll be fine.”  She wasn’t amused but went along with my dogged determination to get to Moorhead.

            The art show went well and we went out to dinner in Fargo afterward.  The first and probably last time I will ever be in Fargo.  We had dinner with my former wife Pat and one of her sisters, a very pleasant affair (yes, we get along fine and Kathy has no problems seeing Pat, either).

            Friday morning, alas, the weather forecast proved correct.  We dawdled until 10:00 trying to decide whether to drive back or stay overnight and return on Saturday.  When I learned that Elliott, Pat, and her sister were coming back to the Twin Cities, I told Kathy that I wanted to go, too, because at least we could have hung out with Elliott for a bit if he were also there.  She was even less excited about that than she had been about going in the first place.  (We had thought about going up early on Thursday and see a site or two in Fargo, but then I googled “top ten things to see in Fargo” and realized the list was extremely thin.  So we abandoned that plan, left later Thursday morning, and staying over on Friday was equally unappealing in terms of things to see and do.)

            So we drove home.  It took 7 hours (normally about 3½ hours or a bit more).  On either end, it was fine, but the middle five hours, from Alexandria to Albertville, was bumpty-bumpty-bumpty on I94 most of the way, because rain had turned to ice on the road.  The winds were high and the snow was blowing, nearly white-out in a few spots.  I just got behind trucks going a reasonable speed (about 28-30 MPH), but there was still a constant worry about a spin-out.  We saw 54 vehicles in the ditch, including quite a number of semis.

            My excuse for driving home was that I didn’t want my beloved wife to spend the evening of her 60^th birthday in Fargo.  So instead she spent nearly 7 hours in the car tense about sliding off the road or getting into an accident.  It was a dumb decision on my part, but fortunately we made it safe and sound.  I had, before we left, emailed the folks invited to the Friday night gathering telling them it was cancelled (because I wasn’t sure we’d actually make it back).  We got home about 5:00, but were glad we didn’t have a party because we were a little wrung out.  (Ironic that Pat, her sister, and Elliott wisely decided to stop driving, even though they had resolved to get back to the Twin Cities; they stayed overnight in Alexandria.)

Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue. 

Last year I wrote about when one becomes an adult.  Here is one season-related definition I ran across later:

Economists define adulthood as the moment at which your expenditure on Christmas presents first exceeds the value of the gifts you can expect to receive.

            On that note, I wish you all the best for the coming year.