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Anthony Shadid

Intrepid journalist Anthony Shadid died on Thursday while on assignment in Syria. If you don’t think you’re familiar with his work and you know anything  at all about what has been going on in the Middle East over the last 15 years, you actually probably have read quite a bit of his reporting. A tremendous loss.

Here is Nature has No Culture, an article he co-authored with Shiva Balaghi, about Abbas Kiarostami after he received the Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement Award  at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2000.

A battered SUV rumbles across a country road, winding through wheat fields. We hear a conversation between the passengers, who are trying to decipher the vague driving directions they’ve been given for finding a small village tucked in the hillside. They are to take a turn just beyond the solitary tree. As they drive along, they pass a majestic free-standing tree, its branches sprawled against a crisp cloudless sky. Moments later, they pass another solitary tree — and then another and another. Which of these trees marks the spot, they wonder? So begins Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Perhaps more than any other, this Kiarostami film treats the Iranian countryside as a character and not a placid backdrop. The landscapes — the contrasting colors of earth and sky, the stalks of wheat delicately moving to the breeze, the trees dotting the hillside — appear in characteristically long, uncut wide shots.

The title of the film is taken from the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad and in a pivotal scene of the film, Forugh’s poem is recited. A leading feminist poet who rose to prominence in the 1960s, Forugh drew on nature to construct strikingly visual metaphors describing the complexities of her quest for independence as a woman writer in Iran. At times, she depicted herself in her poetry as enclosed and detached, watching the world through the frame of a window. Yet Forugh’s most evocative statement of intellectual and personal growth came in a verse where she exclaimed that she would plant her hands in the garden and grow. In Forugh’s writings, nature and the garden, common tropes in classical Persian poetry, came to represent the elemental quality of gender politics, the unnaturalness of restrictions on women’s lives. Kiarostami draws on and extends Forugh’s interpretation of nature in both his film and photographs.

The photographs exhibited in Manhattan in spring 2000 echo scenes from The Wind Will Carry Us. Though they are not film stills or location shots, Kiarostami said there is little difference between his filmmaking and photography. In the end, he sees their qualities merging.

“The nature that is in the location of my films can be seen in my photography, and I want my films to become closer to my photography and more distant from storytelling,” he said. “It is true that these are completely separate milieus, but in my opinion, the ideal situation for me is for these two areas — photography and cinema — to become closer to one another.”

Long before he began his career as a filmmaker, Kiarostami trained as a painter at the School of Fine Arts at Tehran University. He went on to work as a graphic artist and as a commercial director. In 1969, one of his commercials caught the eye of Firuz Shirvanlu, the director of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Kiarostami was asked to establish a film division at the center. In 1970, he produced his first film, a short entitled Bread and Alley. [1] Since then, Kiarostami has directed nearly 30 films and has come to the attention of some of the leading figures of world cinema. [2] Akira Kurosawa has said, “When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place.” [3]

In his films, Kiarostami has explored the relationship between fiction and reality, the subjectivity of truth as framed by the camera’s lens. Resisting a comfortable narrative, Kiarostami challenges the viewer to engage with his films, rather than to view them passively. Photography, which he took up during the revolution at a time that he doubted his future as a filmmaker, offers him another way to interact with his audience; they are called on to actively participate in the generation of meaning in Kiarostami’s art. [4]

“I prefer the gaze of a viewer in front of a photograph to the kind of gaze that an audience of my films has in a theater,” Kiarostami said. “The expectation of a viewer in the theater is to look for the continuities and changes in a story. He has grown accustomed to sitting in a theater and listening to a story. But in a gallery, I have seen that the viewers look at each single photograph, their gaze is more focused on the photograph, because they do not expect to hear a story.”

Like his films, his photographs are presented without expected guideposts that explain their significance. There are no labels, no titles, no dates. It is left to the viewer to lend them a particular meaning. Though it may appear that his lens reveals an unchanging and placid nature, Kiarostami’s photographs, in fact, seem to reveal a deeply political use of the landscape. “Photographs of nature are universal,” he said. “A tree has no ethnicity, no birth certificate, no passport, no nationality, therefore what difference does it make where in the world this tree is? What is important is the similarity between all trees, the similarity between all skies, the similarity between all landscapes. Nature has no specific culture. I am emphasizing this lack of ethnicity of nature. Therefore I do not want to mark the specific time and place of my photographs.”

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Gross Compensation

A really bad* article in New York Magazine this week about how our terrifyingly Galt superbankers have a sad because… oh, paging Taibbi. Thank you, sir:

When I read things like this I’m simultaneously amazed by two things. The first is the unbelievable tone-deafness of people who would complain out loud, during a time when millions of people around the country are literally losing their homes, that their bonuses – not their total compensation, mind you, but just their cash bonuses, paid in addition to their salaries and their stock packages – are barely enough to cover the mortgage payments for their new condos, the taxis they take when walking is too burdensome, and their girlfriends with expensive tastes.

The second thing that amazes me is that Sherman is buying all this. I don’t know this reporter at all, and I’m happy to concede that he probably hangs out with more Wall Street people than I do. But I’m still in touch with plenty of people in the business, and I have yet to have any investment bankers crying on my shoulder about how the Dodd-Frank bill is forcing them into generic breakfast cereals.

Now, I’m sure if you put it to them the right way – “Hey, Mr. Habitually Overpaid Banker, do you think Barack Obama and the Dodd-Frank bill are ruining your bonus season?” – you’ll get a good percentage of people who’ll take that cheese and cough out the desired quote.

But in reality? Please. Wall Street people complain a lot, but in the last six months, the grave impact of Dodd-Frank on bonuses hasn’t even been within ten miles of the things these people are really panicked about. The comments I’ve heard have been more like, “My asshole has been puckered completely shut for four months in a row over this Europe business,” or, “If the ECB doesn’t come up with a Greek bailout package, I’m going to have to sell my children for dog food.”


*bad, as in pathetic, whining and, as Taibbi explains, exhibiting a very poor understanding of the article’s own subject and focus. And our banker superhero wealth creators don’t have the sense or sensibility to even deflect this line of questioning in a time of suffering by so many of their fellow citizens. I would say their liberal arts educations failed them, but of course you skip all of that unnecessary language, history, philosophy and humanities when you opt for b-school. Geniuses. It’s almost enough to make one a Calvinist. Almost.

NY mag is ridiculously trashy already, which I know because we have a subscription thanks to one of Mrs. G’s former interns who now works there. But this is quite a combination of unfiltered and mis-aimed fluffing that is so uninformed as to seem subversive. But it’s not.

Thanks, RB.

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Civilisations

I’ve been re-reading an old issue of Harper’s Magazine from 2007 that I came across in the home kids office while looking for something else – love when that happens, though it’s something that is being disappeared by our ability to search the internet and find only what we want (but that’s another issue for another Friday).

Anyway, there’s a fantastic article by Pankaj Mishra in that issue, a review of two books on India and China. A man after my own heart, the article is called It’s a round world after all: India, China, and the global economy and Mishra provides full service by going back to the musings of Henry Luce in Time and Life to show how western commentators, governments, markets and financial sectors (currently, we are ruled in all but name by a mash-up of these last three two) have consistently gotten China and India wrong, with vast and mostly irredeemable consequences for all of us. Unfortunately, this fine piece of history and journalism is behind a paywall and hence, will not be our focus right now, but I encourage you to seek it out if at all possible (come hither, internets!).

What I will share is this review by Mishra of Civilisation: The West and Rest by Niall Ferguson, wherein he essentially uses Ferguson’s book to chart the same map – the folly of our solipsistic worldview regarding Asia, history, basically any other people. After starting off with an analogy using my favorite protag and yours, Nick Carraway, for a side riff on Ferguson’s earlier book, the Pity of War, he gets on to the matter at hand:

This wistful vision of an empire on which the sun need never have set had an immediately obvious defect. It grossly underestimated – in fact, ignored altogether – the growing strength of anti-colonial movements across Asia, which, whatever happened in Europe, would have undermined Britain’s dwindling capacity to manage its vast overseas holdings. At the time, however, The Pity of War seemed boyishly and engagingly revisionist, and it established Ferguson’s reputation: he was opinionated, ‘provocative’ and amusing, all things that seem to be more cherished in Britain’s intellectual culture than in any other.

In retrospect, The Pity of War’s Stoddardesque laments about the needless emasculation of Anglo-Saxon power announced a theme that would become more pronounced as Ferguson, setting aside his expertise in economic history, emerged as an evangelist-cum-historian of empire. He was already arguing in The Cash Nexus, published a few months before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, that ‘the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy’ – if necessary by military force. ‘Let me come clean,’ he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in April 2003, a few weeks after the shock-and-awe campaign began in Iraq, ‘I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang.’

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), Ferguson’s next book, appeared in America with a more didactic subtitle: ‘The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power’. The word ‘empire’ still caused some unease in the US, whose own national myths originated in an early, short-lived and selective anti-imperialism. An exasperated Ferguson – ‘the United States,’ he claimed, ‘is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name’ – set out to rescue the word from the discredit into which political correctness had apparently cast it. Britain’s 19th-century empire ‘undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.’ ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world,’ he went on, in a typical counterfactual manoeuvre, colonised peoples, such as Indians, would not have what are now their most valuable ideas and institutions – parliamentary democracy, individual freedom and the English language.

America should now follow Britain’s example, Ferguson argued, neglecting to ask why it needed to make the modern world if Britain had already done such a great job. He agreed with the neocon Max Boot that the United States should re-create across Asia the ‘enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’. ‘The work needs to begin, and swiftly,’ he wrote, ‘to encourage American students at the country’s leading universities to think more seriously about careers overseas.’

Ferguson’s proposed ‘Anglobalisation’ of the world was little more than an updated version of American ‘modernisation theory’, first proposed as an alternative to Communism during the Cold War, and now married to revolutionary violence of the kind for which Communist regimes had been reviled. It makes for melancholy reading in 2011. But in the first heady year of the global war on terror, easy victories over the ragtag army of the Taliban ignited megalomaniacal fantasies about the ‘Rest’ across a broad ideological spectrum in Anglo-America, from Ann Coulter arguing that ‘we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ to the unctuous ‘Empire-Lite’ of Michael Ignatieff and the ‘liberal imperialism’ peddled by Robert Cooper, one of Blair’s fly-by-night gurus. ‘Islamofascism’ seemed as evil as Nazism, Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, a generation-long battle loomed, and invocations of Winston Churchill – ‘the greatest’, according to Ferguson, ‘of all Anglo-Americans’, his resolute defence of English-speaking peoples commemorated by a bust in the Bush White House – seemed to stiffen spines all across the Eastern Seaboard.

The reception a writer receives in a favourable political context can be the making of him. This applies particularly well to Ferguson, whose books are known less for their original scholarly contribution than for containing some provocative counterfactuals. In Britain, his bluster about the white man’s burden, though largely ignored by academic historians, gained substance from a general rightward shift in political and cultural discourse, which made it imperative for such apostles of public opinion as Andrew Marr to treat Ferguson with reverence. But his apotheosis came in the United States, where – backed by the prestige of Oxbridge and, more important, a successful television series – he became a wise Greek counsellor to many aspiring Romans. He did not have to renounce long-held principles to be elevated to a professorship at Harvard, primetime punditry on CNN and Fox, and high-altitude wonkfests at Davos and Aspen. He quickly and frictionlessly became the most conspicuous refugee from post-imperial Britain to cheerlead Washington’s (and New York’s) consensus.

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Back to the Well, again

Someone, a person unknown to me, at the ______ last night asked me to name my favorite book. Typical _____-talk. After a few beats, I said it was really four – Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. This is from Justine, opened at random to page 108. By the way, I can’t find this text  anywhere on the internets, which feels like a kind of theft in reverse, were that possible.

They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red waters of Mareotis, in each other’s arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood. He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover’s share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her. She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself. What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life. He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson. And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him? This was deeply wounding. My vanity gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature she kept hidden from me.

Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein. It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions. Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but cooly, like a husband of a king. It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner life, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his  consciousness. It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife – and at times confused their names. There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others. I took this to be his little daughter, for it si children who deliver the final coup de grace in all these terrible transactions of the heart.

Mm hmm.

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Renaissance façade

Me and the boys were in NY last December and met up with the fourth of our party at The Strand (Union Square, a good a place as any) where I bought a beautiful second edition of Proust’s The Sweet Cheat Gone. I think it’s unofficially the next to the last volume in À la recherche du temps perdu. Anyway, right now I’m editing my movie about Venice, and that concludes my flimsy rationale for posting this bit of chapter three from Sweet Cheat Gone, on a lovely afternoon, no less. That, and a well-worn regard for you.

My mother had brought me for a few weeks to Venice and — as there may be beauty in the most precious as well as in the humblest things — I was receiving there impressions analogous to those which I had felt so often in the past at Combray, but transposed into a wholly different and far richer key. When at ten o’clock in the morning my shutters were thrown open, I saw ablaze in the sunlight, instead of the black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, the Golden Angel on the Campanile of San Marco. In its dazzling glitter, which made it almost impossible to fix it in space, it promised me with its outstretched arms, for the moment, half an hour later, when I was to appear on the Piazzetta, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will. I could see nothing but itself, so long as I remained in bed, but as the whole world is merely a vast sun-dial, a single lighted segment of which enables us to tell what o’clock it is, on the very first morning I was reminded of the shops in the Place de l’Eglise at Combray, which, on Sunday mornings, were always on the point of shutting when I arrived for mass, while the straw in the market place smelt strongly in the already hot sunlight. But on the second morning, what I saw, when I awoke, what made me get out of bed (because they had taken the place in my consciousness and in my desire of my memories of Combray), were the impressions of my first morning stroll in Venice, Venice whose daily life was no less real than that of Combray, where as at Combray on Sunday mornings one had the delight of emerging upon a festive street, but where that street was paved with water of a sapphire blue, refreshed by little ripples of cooler air, and of so solid a colour that my tired eyes might, in quest of relaxation and without fear of its giving way, rest their gaze upon it. Like, at Combray, the worthy folk of the Rue de l’Oiseau, so in this strange town also, the inhabitants did indeed emerge from houses drawn up in line, side by side, along the principal street, but the part played there by houses that cast a patch of shade before them was in Venice entrusted to palaces of porphyry and jasper, over the arched door of which the head of a bearded god (projecting from its alignment, like the knocker on a door at Combray) had the effect of darkening with its shadow, not the brownness of the soil but the splendid blue of the water. On the piazza , the shadow that would have been cast at Combray by the linen-draper’s awning and the barber’s pole, turned into the tiny blue flowers scattered at its feet upon the desert of sun-scorched tiles by the silhouette of a Renaissance façade, which is not to say that, when the sun was hot, we were not obliged, in Venice as at Combray, to pull down the blinds between ourselves and the Canal, but they hung behind the quatrefoils and foliage of gothic windows. Of this sort was the window in our hotel behind the pillars of which my mother sat waiting for me, gazing at the Canal with a patience which she would not have displayed in the old days at Combray, at that time when, reposing in myself hopes which had never been realised, she was unwilling to let me see how much she loved me. Nowadays she was well aware that an apparent coldness on her part would alter nothing, and the affection that she lavished upon me was like those forbidden foods which are no longer withheld from invalids, when it is certain that they are past recovery. To be sure, the humble details which gave an individuality to the window of my aunt Léonie’s bedroom, seen from the Rue de l’Oiseau, the asymmetry of its position not midway between the windows on either side of it, the exceptional height of its wooden ledge, the slanting bar which kept the shutters closed, the two curtains of glossy blue satin, divided and kept apart by their rod, the equivalent of all these things existed in this hotel in Venice where I could hear also those words, so distinctive, so eloquent, which enable us to recognise at a distance the house to which we are going home to luncheon, and afterwards remain in our memory as testimony that, during a certain period of time, that house was ours; but the task of uttering them had, in Venice, devolved not, as at Combray, and indeed, to a certain extent, everywhere, upon the simplest, that is to say the least beautiful things, but upon the almost oriental arch of a façade which is reproduced among the casts in every museum as one of the supreme achievements of the domestic architecture of the middle ages; from a long way away and when I had barely passed San Giorgio Maggiore, I caught sight of this arched window which had already seen me, and the spring of its broken curves added to its smile of welcome the distinction of a loftier, scarcely comprehensible gaze. And since, behind those pillars of differently coloured marble, Mamma was sitting reading while she waited for me to return, her face shrouded in a tulle veil as agonising in its whiteness as her hair to myself who felt that my mother, wiping away her tears, had pinned it to her straw hat, partly with the idea of appearing ‘dressed’ in the eyes of the hotel staff, but principally so as to appear to me less ‘in mourning,’ less sad, almost consoled for the death of my grandmother; since, not having recognised me at first, as soon as I called to her from the gondola, she sent out to me, from the bottom of her heart, a love which stopped only where there was no longer any material substance to support it on the surface of her impassioned gaze which she brought as close to me as possible, which she tried to thrust forward to the advanced post of her lips, in a smile which seemed to be kissing me, in the framework and beneath the canopy of the more discreet smile of the arched window illuminated by the midday sun; for these reasons, that window has assumed in my memory the precious quality of things that have had, simultaneously, side by side with ourselves, their part in a certain hour that struck, the same for us and for them; and however full of admirable tracery its mullions may be, that illustrious window retains in my sight the intimate aspect of a man of genius with whom we have spent a month in some holiday resort, where he has acquired a friendly regard for us; and if, ever since then, whenever I see a cast of that window in a museum, I feel the tears starting to my eyes, it is simply because the window says to me the thing that touches me more than anything else in the world: “I remember your mother so well.”

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Actual Surface of the Ground

Just back in town but had an interview planned for this morning with Jonathan Herz, Chief Architect for Sustainable Facilities with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. An authority on many aspects of sustainability, Herz was a great guest – very kind of him to talk with me. One thing he told me about as our conversation continued off-camera was a White House conference on conservation… in 1908. Here is President Roosevelt’s address from that conference, which was attended by many of the major industrialists, who saw that using up all natural resources was not in their best interest:

I welcome you to this Conference at the White House. You have come hither at my request, so that we may join together to consider the question of the conservation and use of the great fundamental sources of wealth of this Nation.

So vital is this question, that for the first time in our history the chief executive officers of the States separately, and of the States together forming the Nation, have met to consider it. It is the chief material question that confronts us, second only–and second always–to the great fundamental questions of morality. [Applause]

With the governors come men from each State chosen for their special acquaintance with the terms of the problem that is before us. Among them are experts in natural resources and representatives of national organizations concerned in the development and use of these resources; the Senators and Representatives in Congress; the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and the Inland Waterways Commission have likewise been invited to the Conference, which is therefore national in a peculiar sense.

This Conference on the conservation of natural resources is in effect a meeting of the representatives of all the people of the United States called to consider the weightiest problem now before the Nation; and the occasion for the meeting lies in the fact that the natural resources of our country are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.

With the rise of peoples from savagery to civilization, and with the consequent growth in the extent and variety of the needs of the average man, there comes a steadily increasing growth of the amount demanded by this average man from the actual resources of the country. And yet, rather curiously, at the same time that there comes that increase in what the average man demands from the resources, he is apt to grow to lose the sense of his dependence upon nature. He lives in big cities. He deals in industries that do not bring him in close touch with nature. He does not realize the demands he is making upon nature. For instance, he finds, as he has found before in many parts of this country, that it is cheaper to build his house of concrete than of wood, learning in this way only that he has allowed the woods to become exhausted. That is happening, as you know, in parts of this country at this very time.

Savages, and very primitive peoples generally, concern themselves only with superficial natural resources; with those which they obtain from the actual surface of the ground. As peoples become a little less primitive, their industries, although in a rude manner, are extended to resources below the surface; then, with what we call civilization and the extension of knowledge, more resources come into use, industries are multiplied, and foresight begins to become a necessary and prominent factor in life. Crops are cultivated; animals are domesticated; and metals are mastered.

We can not do any of these things without foresight, and we can not, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment as a nation. [Applause]

Every step of the progress of mankind is marked by the discovery and use of natural resources previously unused. Without such progressive knowledge and utilization of natural resources population could not grow, nor industries multiply, nor the hidden wealth of the earth be developed for the benefit of mankind.

From the first beginnings of civilization, on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates, the industrial progress of the world has gone on slowly, with occasional set-backs, but on the whole steadily, through tens of centuries to the present day.

It never does advance by jumps, gentlemen. It always goes slowly. There are occasional set-backs, but on the whole it goes steadily.

But of late the rapidity of the process has increased at such a rate that more space has been actually covered during the century and a quarter occupied by our national life than during the preceding six thousand years that take us back to the earliest monuments of Egypt, to the earliest cities of the Babylonian plain.

Now, I ask you to think what that means; and I am speaking with historic literalness. In the development, the use, and therefore the exhaustion of certain of the natural resources, the progress has been more rapid in the past century and a quarter than during all preceding time of which we have record.

When the founders of this nation met at Independence Hall in Philadelphia the conditions of commerce had not fundamentally changed from what they were when the Phoenician keels first furrowed the lonely waters of the Mediterranean.

You turn to Homer–some of you did in your school days, even if you do not now [laughter]–and you will see that he spoke, not of the Mediterranean but of one corner of the Egean only, as a limitless waste of water which no one had traversed. There is now no nook of the earth that we are not searching.

When our forefathers met in Independence Hall, the differences were those of degrees, not of kind, and they were not in all cases even those of degree. Mining was carried on fundamentally as it had been carried on by the Pharaohs in the countries adjacent to the Red Sea. Explorers now-a-days by the shores of the Red Sea strike countries that they call new, but they find in them mines, with sculptures of the Pharaohs, showing that those mines were worked out and exhausted thousands of years before the Christian era.

In 1776 the wares of the merchants of Boston, of Charleston, like the wares of the merchants of Nineveh and Sidon, if they went by water, were carried by boats propelled by sails or oars; if they went by land were carried in wagons drawn by beasts of draft or in packs on the backs of beasts of burden. The ships that crossed the high seas were better than the ships that three thousand years before crossed the Egean, but they were of the same type, after all–they were wooden ships propelled by sails. There the difference was one of degree in our favor. On shore the difference was one of degree against us, for on land the roads, at the end of the eighteenth century, when this country became a nation, were not as good as the roads of the Roman Empire, while the service of the posts, at any rate prior to the days of Benjamin Franklin, was probably inferior. In the previous eighteen hundred years there had been a retrogression in roads and in postal service.

In Washington’s time anthracite coal was known only as a useless black stone; and the great fields of bituminous coal were undiscovered. As steam was unknown, the use of coal for power production was undreamed of. Water was practically the only source of power, saved the labor of men and animals; and this power was used only in the most primitive fashion. But a few small iron deposits had been found in this country, and the use of iron by our countrymen was very small. Wood was practically the only fuel, and what lumber was sawed was consumed locally, while the forests were regarded chiefly as obstructions to settlement and cultivation. The man who cut down a tree was held to have conferred a service upon his fellows.

Such was the degree of progress to which civilized mankind had attained when this nation began its career. It is almost impossible for us in this day to realize how little our Revolutionary ancestors knew of the great store of natural resources whose discovery and use have been such vital factors in the growth and greatness of this Nation, and how little they required to take from this store in order to satisfy their needs.

Since then our knowledge and use of the resources of the present territory of the United States have increased a hundred-fold. Indeed, the growth of this Nation by leaps and bounds makes one of the most striking and important chapters in the history of the world. Its growth has been due to the rapid development, and alas that it should be said!

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Pervasiveness in the Larvarium Project

Because it’s one of the high points of our civilization, which may or may not feel like they’re passing you by at the moment, or like its greatest moments are in the past, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Long live the written word. Part 1, Chapter 8:

On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:
“Mais va donc jouer avec lui,” said Mlle Larivière, pushing
Ada, whose young hips disjointedly jerked from the shock.
“Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so
fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady
in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak.“
Ada turned to him with a shrug. The touch of her cold
fingers and damp palm and the self-conscious way she tossed
back her hair as they walked down the main avenue of the park
made him self-conscious too, and under the pretext of picking
up a fir cone he disengaged his hand. He threw the cone at a
woman of marble bending over a stamnos but only managed
to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken
jar.
“There is nothing more banal in the world,” said Ada, “than
pitching stones at a hawfinch.“
“Sorry,” said Van, “I did not intend to scare that bird. But
then, I’m not a country lad, who knows a cone from a stone.
What games, au fond, does she expect us to play?”
“Je l’ignore,” replied Ada. “I really don’t care very much how
her poor mind works. Cache-cache, I suppose, or climbing trees.”
“Oh, I’m good at that,” said Van, “in fact, I can even
brachiate.“
“No,” she said, “we are going to play my games. Games I
have invented all by myself. Games Lucette, I hope, will be
able to play next year with me, the poor pet. Come, let us start.
The present series belongs to the shadow-and-shine group, two
of which I’m going to show you.”
“I see,” said Van.
“You will in a moment,” rejoined the pretty prig. “First of
all we must find a nice stick.”
“Look,” said Van, still smarting a bit, “there goes another
haw-haw finch.”
By then they had reached the rond-point—a small arena en-
circled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy bloom. Over-
head the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like
a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hang-
ing by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both under-
stand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then.
“Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there,
no?” he said, pointing.
“Yes,” she answered. “I discovered it long ago. The teil is the
flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches,
but still catches her every time” (impossible to reproduce the
right intonation while rendering the entire sense—after eight
decades!—but she did say something extravagant, something
quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and
then down).
Looking down and gesturing with a sharp green stake bor-
rowed from the peonies, Ada explained the first game.
The shadows of leaves on the sand were variously interrupted
by roundlets of live light. The player chose his roundlet—the
best, the brightest he could find—and firmly outlined it with
the point of his stick; whereupon the yellow round light would
appear to grow convex like the brimming surface of some golden
dye. Then the player delicately scooped out the earth with his
stick or fingers within the roundlet. The level of that gleaming
infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and
finally dwindle to one precious drop. That player won who
made the most goblets in, say, twenty minutes.
Van asked suspiciously if that was all.
No, it was not. As she dug a firm little circle around a par-
ticularly fine goldgout, Ada squatted and moved, squatting,
with her black hair falling over her ivory-smooth moving knees
while her haunches and hands worked, one hand holding the
stick, the other brushing back bothersome strands of hair. A
gentle breeze suddenly eclipsed her fleck. When that occurred,
the player lost one point, even if the leaf or the cloud hastened
to move aside.
All right. What was the other game?
The other game (in a singsong voice) might seem a little
more complicated. To play it properly one had to wait for p.m.
to provide longer shadows. The player—
“Stop saying ‘the player.’ It is either you or me.”
“Say, you. You outline my shadow behind me on the sand.
I move. You outline it again. Then you mark out the next
boundary (handing him the stick). If I now move back—”
“You know,” said Van, throwing the stick away, “personally
I think these are the most boring and stupid games anybody has
ever invented, anywhere, any time, a.m. or p.m.”
She said nothing but her nostrils narrowed. She retrieved the
stick and stuck it back, furiously, where it belonged, deep into
the loam next to a grateful flower to which she looped it with
a silent nod. She walked back to the house. He wondered if
her walk would be more graceful when she grew up.
“I’m a rude brutal boy, please forgive me,” he said.
She inclined her head without looking back. In token of
partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed
into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before
she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used
to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the
nights became really sultry—this was the latitude of Sicily, after
all.
“A splendid idea,” said Van. “By the way, do fireflies burn
one if they fly into you? I’m just asking. Just a city boy’s silly
question.”
She showed him next where the hammock—a whole set of
hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets—was stored:
this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs,
the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was
stuffed by the nest of a bird—no need to identify it. A pointer
of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where
croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled
down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who
were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.
“As we all are at that age,” said Van and stooped to pick up
a curved tortoiseshell comb—the kind that girls use to hold up
their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite re-
cently, but when, in whose hairdo?
“One of the maids,” said Ada. “That tattered chapbook must
also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical
romance by a pastor.”
“Playing croquet with you,” said Van, “should be rather like
using flamingoes and hedgehogs.”
“Our reading lists do not match,” replied Ada. “That Palace
in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often
promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable
prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s
stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish
state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly.
We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage,
but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne
which is really an elm.” Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s
poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like
it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors
and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?
“And now,” she said, and stopped, staring at him.
“Yes?” he said, “and now?”
“Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you—after you
trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent
and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium,
it’s in the room next to mine” (which he never saw, never—
how odd, come to think of it!).
She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered
into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-
flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite
of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass
windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching
and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird
population), the smell of the hutches—damp earth, rich roots,
old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat—was pretty appalling.
Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches
and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression re-
placed the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the

beginning of their innocent games on that day.

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In the Midst of War

Roger_Fry_-_Virginia_Woolf

Whatever you are tying to do – be a family, be civilized, be an artist (there are, admittedly, more than these three possibilities) – it’s both more difficult to do in the midst of a war and a type of war all in itself. Battling opposing forces and circumstances beyond your control, encountering unforeseen obstacles, the similarities are all there.

Perhaps no writer ties all of these struggles together in one like Virginia Woolf. Your mileage may vary of course, but, it’s all there in To the Lighthouse (1927). This is from the second section, Time Passes:

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?

So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes, and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.

[Here Mr Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was past midnight.]

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Miserable Places

One of the books I’m reading at present is Tracy Kidder’s 2003 Mountains Beyond Mountains, a gift from some friends this summer. The focus of the book is the work of Paul Farmer, physician and anthropologist, healing the sick, diseased and infirm in disaster-ravaged Haiti. Farmer is a remarkable man, Kidder’s book on him is great and you should pick it up. An excerpt from the author’s site:

It was two weeks before Christmas 1994, in a market town in the central plateau of Haiti, a patch of paved road called Mirebalais. Near the center of town there was a Haitian army outpost–a concrete wall enclosing a weedy parade field, a jail, and a mustard-colored barracks. I was sitting with an American Special Forces captain, named Jon Carroll, on the building’s second-story balcony. Evening was coming on, the town’s best hour, when the air changed from hot to balmy and the music from the radios in the rum shops and the horns of the tap-taps passing through town grew loud and bright and the general filth and poverty began to be obscured, the open sewers and the ragged clothing and the looks on the faces of malnourished children and the extended hands of elderly beggars plaintively saying, “Grangou,” which means “hungry” in Creole.

I was in Haiti to report on American soldiers. Twenty thousand of them had been sent to reinstate the country’s democratically elected government, and to strip away power from the military junta that had deposed it and ruled with great cruelty for three years. Captain Carroll had only eight men, and they were temporarily in charge of keeping the peace among 150,000 Haitians, spread across about one thousand square miles of rural Haiti. A seemingly impossible job, and yet, out here in the central plateau, political violence had all but ended. In the past month, there had been only one murder. Then again, it had been spectacularly grisly. A few weeks back, Captain Carroll’s men had fished the headless corpse of the assistant mayor of Mirebalais out of the Artibonite River. He was one of the elected officials being restored to power. Suspicion for his murder had fallen on one of the junta’s local functionaries, a rural sheriff named Nerva Juste, a frightening figure to most people in the region. Captain Carroll and his men had brought Juste in for questioning, but they hadn’t found any physical evidence or witnesses. So they had released him.

The captain was twenty-nine years old, a devout Baptist from Alabama. I liked him. From what I’d seen, he and his men had been trying earnestly to make improvements in this piece of Haiti, but Washington, which had decreed that this mission would not include “nation-building,” had given them virtually no tools for that job. On one occasion, the captain had ordered a U.S. Army medevac flight for a pregnant Haitian woman in distress, and his commanders had reprimanded him for his pains. Up on the balcony of the barracks now, Captain Carroll was fuming about his latest frustration when someone said there was an American out at the gate who wanted to see him.

There were five visitors actually, four of them Haitians. They stood in the gathering shadows in front of the barracks, while their American friend came forward. He told Captain Carroll that his name was Paul Farmer, that he was a doctor, and that he worked in a hospital here, some miles north of Mirebalais.

I remember thinking that Captain Carroll and Dr. Farmer made a mismatched pair, and that Farmer suffered in the comparison. The captain stood about six foot two, tanned and muscular. As usual, a wad of snuff enlarged his lower lip. Now and then he turned his head aside and spat. Farmer was about the same age but much more delicate-looking. He had short black hair and a high waist and long thin arms, and his nose came almost to a point. Next to the soldier, he looked skinny and pale, and for all of that he struck me as bold, indeed downright cocky.

He asked the captain if his team had any medical problems. The captain said they had some sick prisoners whom the local hospital had refused to treat. “I ended up buyin’ the medicine myself.”

Farmer flashed a smile. “You’ll spend less time in Purgatory.” Then he asked, “Who cut off the head of the assistant mayor?”

“I don’t know for sure,” said the captain.

“It’s very hard to live in Haiti and not know who cut off someone’s head,” said Farmer.

A circuitous argument followed. Farmer made it plain he didn’t like the American government’s plan for fixing Haiti’s economy, a plan that would aid business interests but do nothing, in his view, to relieve the suffering of the average Haitian. He clearly believed that the United States had helped to foster the coup–for one thing, by having trained a high official of the junta at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Two clear sides existed in Haiti, Farmer said–the forces of repression and the Haitian poor, the vast majority. Farmer was on the side of the poor. But, he told the captain, “it still seems fuzzy which side the American soldiers are on.” Locally, part of the fuzziness came from the fact that the captain had released the hated Nerva Juste.

I sensed that Farmer knew Haiti far better than the captain, and that he was trying to impart some important information. The people in this region were losing confidence in the captain, Farmer seemed to be saying, and this was a serious matter, obviously, for a team of nine soldiers trying to govern 150,000 people.

Thanks S and D.