Category: Living

I went to bed last night around 10pm, after a lovely evening spent with some neighbors celebrating the new year. They have a dog about the same age as Rosie, but she’s a bit bigger, and she contracted a rare fungal infection a few years ago rooting around in the forests around our part of town which required removing her eyes. Regardless of that, however, Rosie and Sadie are best of friends – even though they live in western Massachusetts generally, and only visit Scarborough every other weekend or so – and it was fun to have them over for hors d’oeuvres and wine and conversation. The boy – it’s reaching the point where he deserves more than that, but I’ll mull that over – joined us as well and he’s showing slow but sure development as a conversationalist, which I take a certain pride in seeing.

Anyway, after cleaning up and turning on the dishwasher, putting away the bottles and leftover desserts and whatnot, I headed up to my room. I’ve been reading The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso, and for no good reason actually read the synonymous chapter in the book, which disappointingly turned out to be a painfully constructed parable that sort of, kind of, maybe linked some of the themes of the book, which is about the dense layers of change in political, philosophical, and theological thought that took place in the late 18th and early 19th century, embodied in the life story of Talleyrand, who Calasso – in much better parts of the book – defends against the charges brought by history against him, of cynicism and faithlessness. It was late, though, and having gotten mildly annoyed reading “The Ruin of Kasch” parable, I put the book down, turned out the light, gave Rosie a quick kiss – curled up against me on a cold, drafty night – and fell asleep.

As per my usual, I got up around 5:30am – this time of year, pitch black, the gusts outside still whistling albeit a bit quieter than when I drifted off. I got up, used the toilet, got a glass of water to get rid of the dry mouth that one suffers during the sub-zero parts of a Maine winter, and then played the New York Times game suite, in my usual order: first the Mini crossword, then the actual daily Crossword (surprisingly straightforward for a Saturday); then an odd find-a-word puzzle called Strands, then Connections, then World, and finally the Spelling Bee – the last being my favorite and thus what I save for last. Rosie didn’t stir a bit; as long as it’s dark out she does not care what my nighttime distractions are.

Then, finally, getting ready to grab a couple more hours of sleep, I checked the Wall Street Journal app to see if anything had happened.

It turns out something had: the US military had attacked a sovereign nation, abducted its dubiously elected president and his equally dubiously empowered First Lady, shuffled them to New York to be indicted on some bizarrely collected criminal charges in order to placate certain constitutional scholars, and announced that the US would be temporarily running government operations in Venezuela until there were elections to replace the unpopular leftist government that we had extracted by force.

Oh my, I thought. While not at all off script for the current administration, still, this was a significant event. But I had hosted a delightful end-of-holidays get together the night before, and was tired, and my eyes closed on their own.

I woke up feeling great about three hours later, daylight now being as strong as it could manage for early January in the far northern latitudes, and Rosie being more than ready for her morning walk. That took a good ten minutes of prep time, between bathroom time, getting dressed, bundling up in boots and wool coat and toque and gloves, finding the dog bags, finding the right collar, and then getting out into the cold – -12C with windchill down to -20C for those looking for reasons not to visit Maine this month. We went for our walk and then came back to the house. I took off the outer layers, fed the puppy dog her well-deserved breakfast, and then started some chores. I unloaded the dishwasher from the prior night, cleaned the bathrooms (they needed it, should have done it before the company came over alas), and took a quick look at the fridge to decide what to do for dinner tonight.

Then I went to the living room, put on the television, and opened up my laptop for a more general look at the news.

Remember, it was now 10am NewYork time, on Saturday morning.. The US had performed its military extraction operation around 3am, so far as I could parse from the “breaking news” chain in the Wall Street Journal site. On television, it actually took several minutes to find reporting on the story – I even caught CNN between reports and it was running a fluff piece on travel in 2026 – and online, the news headlines were big and bold, and backed by little if any substance.

Oh well, I thought, it’s the morning. I made breakfast for the boy, realizing we’d need to go to the grocery store to restock some basics (a loaf of bread, bacon, cold cuts for the week, that sort of thing) which is always good: minor chores on the weekend help build father-son time organically and they also give me a window into his changing tastes in life. Which is good, because the country in which we live and whose citizenship we hold just engaged in an overt if extraconstitutional act of war against a sovereign state, signalling a risk that the boy may need to think about what will happen if he gets drafted for military service.

But it’s Saturday morning, just after the holidays; no one will think about that, especially when people need to hit up the supermarket to restock on the basics that got used up during the holiday cooking season.

We took the dog for her late morning walk and met up with our friends from the night before. I didn’t bring up the fact that the country was essentially in a state of war because, you know, that’s a bit much for a morning dog walk, and it was more than likely that they were still unaware of it. We don’t live in a world where such an event would give pause to all broadcast media to allow for a presidential address; indeed, we live in a world where wars are ideally launched in media dead times so that no one need be bothered by it. As so it was: we talked about the weather (goddamn it is cold, and will be through next weekend); the recent proliferation of birders at the boat landing (there’s some kind of small eared owl which is particularly rare and now at any given moment there are three or four birder folk with their gigantic camera lenses propped up against their cars, looking out across the marsh); the inexhaustible attempts by Don and me to figure out how the dogs decide when to pee and whether or not to match the other when they have peed. We parted ways – they’re heading back to Massachusetts, so wished them safe travels, thinking of course only of traffic and weather, not about troop deployments from the various military bases along their route back – and that was that.

I spent the afternoon reading The Ruin of Kasch at a slow pace; Calasso’s style isn’t amenable to my normal speed reading. Every now and again I’d check the news sites on my phone – updates from Venezuela, predictable shock and dismay from the louder Democrats, but little to nothing from Democratic leadership and surprisingly little flag waving or triumphantalism from Republicans. Even the coverage of Trump’s news conference – rather late in the game, coming 8 hours after the operation ended – was if anything subdued, as if he were at bit tired now that the fun bit of launching missiles into the city of Caracas was over, and he wanted to grab a burger while he waits with the rest of us to hear how the US military will now “run things” down Venezuela way.

It struck me then that this was the perfect little war at the perfect time. It wasn’t a large scale land invasion – Putin didn’t get the memo that said such things just aren’t done in the 21st century, but Trump learned that lesson well, and a quick extraction with an open ended next step was just fine. Doing so in a media landscape which is so dilute that one actually had to seek out the news made it even more palatable; by the time most Americans will be aware of the action, there will already be yellow journalism worthy pictures of Maduro and Fils in the dock, under indictment in the Southern District of Manhattan for whatever federal crimes our erstwhile Justice Department cooked up for the occasion, and more importantly, those same Americans will have watched the Steelers-Ravens game and will know who will represent the AFC North in the NFL playoffs, and whether their game day parleys on DraftKings.com have paid off or not.

The moment in history – post-Cold War, post-post-Cold War; in the limbo of moving from an ineffective but well-observed UN forum for discussion to whatever comes next in great power politics; in the shadow of a true regional war in the Donetsk basin and a hideously tangled moral and ethnic conflict in the Middle East; in a moment of hyper transition in media, both personal and institutional; and in a moment of post-holiday languor, of fading hangovers and not-yet caffeinated returns to work and school and regular parenting – this moment in history is just perfect.

And thus Calasso, and The Ruin of Kursk. The parable I should write is about the beginning of America’s next endless war in Latin America, the Marines – or in this case the Army, the Marines being largely tied up elsewhere – playing the same role they have so many times, but this time with a different context and performative meaning. Talleyrand is, once again, the man of the age. I highly recommend the book.

In the spring of 2018, I went to the Royal Ballet in London to see a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor.  One of the three items on the programme was a revival of The Age of Anxiety, first performed in 1950 with choreography by Jerome Robbins (who also collaborated with Bernstein on the musicals On the Town and West Side Story).  Robbins used Berstein’s second symphony as the setting for his ballet, which had premiered in April the previous year, conducted by the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky.   (Here is an early recording of the symphony, with Bernstein conducting, from 1950.)  This score was Berstein’s musical reinterpretation of a long, book-length poem of the same name by the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, written in America towards the end of the second world war, and published in 1947.

Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety was immediately recognised as having captured something of the spirit of the age of those post-war years, but more for its snappy title than for its unperspicuous contents.  Today the poem remains better known for Bernstein’s musical adaptation and Robbins’s ballet – which Auden reportedly disliked – than for the ideas presented in verse.  It is structured as a discussion between four people who meet by chance in a New York bar, but this is no simple late night conversation or pub argument.  Rather, Auden offers his readers a sophisticated attempt to analyse the problematic spiritual condition of modern western societies, characterised by the loss of traditional faith and the loss of a sense of shared community.  The opportunity to exploit these absences for our own advantage, “the temptation to sin” – which, a few years earlier, Auden had described as “what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith” – is contrasted with the opportunity to establish community and solidarity with others, who share both our recognition of this loss and the sense of impossibility of recovering faith or community in their tradition senses.

Continue reading “The anxiety of age”

Last month, I travelled to a small industrial estate a few kilometres outside Reading, where I spent three hours undergoing a series of medical tests.  I am not ill, and I am not aware of any serious underlying health conditions or significant risk factors that I should be concerned about.  I was not being treated, instead I was participating in a medical research project, that aims to gather data about the health of a large number of people over a lengthy period of time.

Biobank was established in the UK between 2006 and 2010 and has a cohort of just over half-a-million volunteers, who were aged between 40 and 69 when they joined the project.  This makes it the largest and most detailed research study that traces the long-term health outcomes for people in the Western world, with vast amounts of data on biological, environmental, and lifestyle factors that impact the development of a range of diseases and health conditions.  I joined in 2009, and at the outset I went through a series of tests to get baseline data on my health.  These included blood and urine samples, measures of blood pressure, my weight and height, a series of online cognitive tests – the sorts of memory and pattern recognition exercises that teenagers now do for standardised testing – together with some lifestyle questions about diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and my own perceptions of my degree of social interaction or loneliness, and my levels of happiness.  Since then I have been asked several times to complete online questionnaires on various aspects of my health and my sense of well-being, and on a couple of occasions I have also worn a wristband containing a small tracking device for a week, which measured my movement and activity. 

Continue reading “Knowledge and human interests”

On a recent trip to Rome, I visited the Galleria Borghese where I stood for several minutes admiring Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1609/10). It is an impressive painting.  David, young and lean, but not overly muscular, holds his enemy’s head away from his body with his left hand, his facial expression more meditative than triumphant.  In his other hand he holds Goliath’s sword, which he has used against his dead foe.  Blood flows from Goliath’s neck, suggesting his decapitation has only just occurred, his fixed final facial expression is of shock and surprise, in contrast to the dispassion of his conqueror.  This is a picture that portrays victory in combat not exultantly but with nuance and sympathy.

Caravaggio had painted this scene at least twice previously: there is a version from 1606/07, now in Vienna, similar in construction, with David’s upper body once again half-covered by a thin white shirt, although in this version the different position of his right arm (which is almost invisible in the Rome painting), holding the sword behind his head, draws our gaze away from Goliath.  I think the Roman version has a stronger compositional structure.   Another version of the scene, from 1598/99, now in Madrid, shows the moment at which David severs the head from the body.  Goliath’s face, in the bottom right corner, is less expressive than in the later paintings, but David’s face is partially obscured by shadow: it is almost as if Goliath’s head has fallen from David’s body.  All three paintings remind us of Caravaggio’s innovative and virtuosic use of light and shadow in his construction of the scene, and his delight in the portrayal of young male flesh.  Beyond his technical mastery, he also interprets the story for us, the victory of the young, unknown Israeli shepherd boy over the giant Philistine warrior.

Continue reading “Severed heads”

Last month, from the comfort of my London home, I watched the final stage of the Tour de France around the streets of Paris, as one-hundred-and-sixty brightly clad cyclists completed the last day of the  race, whose total course measured just over 3,300km.  After a processional ride into the city, the contest began in earnest with the final section of the route taking the riders three times up the narrow, slippery, cobbled streets of Montmartre, past the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, and then down towards to the finish line on the Champs-Élysée.  It was a sporting spectacle of the highest quality, a hotly competitive finale – after three weeks of intense racing – set amidst the many famous monuments of the French capital, the whole route packed with enthusiastic spectators, despite the pouring rain.  I wish I could have been there in person, to see first-hand the culmination of the justly famous race in this justly famous city. 

It is hard to imagine anything comparable in London, except perhaps the five-day Test Match at the Oval that took place at the start of this month, in which India beat England by six runs, in one of the great games of recent cricket history.  It is not my intention to debate the relative merits of Tour cycling versus Test cricket, but rather to note that these great sporting moments took place in the two greatest cities of Europe, long time competitors, but nowadays more siblings than rivals: two cities that are slowly turning themselves into exemplars of modern democratic urbanism. 

Continue reading “A tale of two cities”