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Here are a few excerpt from a book I recently read, "War and Peace," by Leo Tolstoy.

"Ah, my friend!" said he, taking Pierre by the elbow; and there was in his voice a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in it before. "How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I am near sixty, dear friend... I too... All will end in death, all! Death is awful..." and he burst into tears.

With downcast eyes she let her hands fall, and sat and pondered. She saw in her imagination what her husband should be: a man, a strong, commanding, and strangely attractive being, who would suddenly carry her off into his own world, so different from hers, so full of happiness. She imagined herself pressing to her bosom her own child, just such a baby as she had seen the evening before with the daughter of her old nurse. Her husband stood looking affectionately at her and at their baby—“But no, this is impossible, I am too homely,” she said to herself.

"Gently, gently! Can't you lift him more gently?" exclaimed the sovereign, apparently suffering more keenly than the dying soldier, and he rode away. 

Rostof saw the tears that filled his monarch's eyes, and heard him say in French to Czartorisky as he rode away:

"What is so terrible as war? What a terrible thing!"

And Rostof got up and began to wander among the watch fires, and dreamed of what bliss it would be to die - as to losing his life, he did not dare to think of that! - but simply to die in the presence of his sovereign. He was really in love, not only with the Tsar, but also with the glory of the Russian army and the hope of impending victory. And he was not the only one who experienced this feeling on the memorable days that preceded the Battle of Austerlitz: nine-tenths of the men composing the Russian army were at that time in love, though perhaps less ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the Russian army.

In spite of the fact that Boris had come with the intention of confessing his love, and had, therefore decided to be tenderly sentimental, he immediately began in a tone of irritation to complain of woman's inconstancy; pointing out how easy it was for women to shift from gloom to glee, and that their moods depended wholly on the one who happened to be dancing attendance upon them. Julie took offense at this, and declared that he was right; that women needed variety, and nothing was more annoying to anyone than to endure perpetual sameness.

"Then I advise you..." began Boris, with the intention of winging a sharp retort; but at that instant came the humiliating thought that he was on the point of leaving Moscow without attaining his wished-for end, and at the cost of wasted labor - a thing to which he was unaccustomed. He paused in the middle of his sentence, dropped his eyes to avoid seeing the look of disagreeable annoyance and indecision on her face, and said:

"However, it was not at all for the purpose of quarreling with you that I came here. On the contrary..." He looked at her to see whether she would encourage him to proceed. All expression of annoyance had suddenly vanished, and her restless, imploring eyes were fixed on him with greedy expectation. "I can always manage to keep out of her way," thought Boris. "Here I am in for it; might as well finish."

He flushed crimson, raised his eyes to hers, and said:

"You know my sentiments toward you..."

There was no need of saying more; Julie's face had become radiant with triumph and satisfaction; but she compelled Boris to tell her all that it is customary to say in such circumstances, to tell her that he loved her, and that he had never loved anyone else so passionately. She knew that in exchange for her Penza estates and Nizh forests she had a right to exact this; and she obtained what she wished.

The young couple laid their plans for the future establishment of a magnificent home in Petersburg, made calls, and got everything ready for a brilliant wedding.

"At first I was not particularly charmed with Moscow, because what a city ought to have, to be agreeable, is pretty women; isn't that so? Well, now I like it very much," said he, giving her a significant look. "Will you come to our party, countess? Please do," said he; and, stretching out his hand toward her bouquet, and lowering his voice, he added in French, "You will be the prettiest. Come, my dear countess, and, as a pledge, give me that flower"

Natasha did not realize what he was saying any more than he did, but she had a consciousness that in his incomprehensible words there was an improper meaning.

"Last evening my brother dined with me - we almost died of laughing - he eats nothing at all, and can only sigh for you, my charmer! He is in love, madly in love with you, my dear.

Natasha flushed crimson on hearing those words.

"How she blushes! How she blushes, my delightful one," pursued Helene. "Don't fail to come. Even if you are in love, that is no reason for making a nun of yourself. Even if you are engaged, I am sure that your future husband would prefer to have you go into society, rather than die of tedium in his absence."

Anatol was at the door, evidently on the lookout for the Rostofs. As soon as he had exchanged greetings with the count, he joined Natasha, and followed her into the room. The moment she saw him she was assailed, just as she had been at the theater, by a mixed sense of gratified vanity that she pleased him and of fear because of the absence of moral barriers between her and him.

Princess Maria, entirely bewildered and weak with fright, was sitting in the drawing-room when Rostof was brought in to her. When she saw his Russian face, and recognized by his manner and the first words he spoke that he was a man of her own class, she looked at him with her deep, radiant eyes, and began to speak in broken tones, her voice trembling with emotion.

Rostof immediately found something very romantic in this adventure. "An unprotected maiden, overwhelmed with grief, left alone at the mercy of rough, insurgent peasants! And what a strange fate has brought me here!" thought Rostof, as he listened to her and looked at her. "And what sweetness and gratitude in her features and her words" he said to himself, as he listened to her faltering tale.

"I had other obligations," he said to himself. "The people had to be appeased. Many other victims have perished, and are perishing, for the public good."

Not only did he not reproach himself for what he had done, he even found reason to congratulate himself that he had so happily succeeded in taking advantage of this fortuitous circumstance for punishing a criminal and at the same time pacifying the mob.

"Vereshchagin was tried and condemned to death," said Rostopchin to himself, though Vereshchagin had been condemned only to hard labor. "He was a spy and a traitor; I could not leave him unpunished, and, besides, I killed two birds with one stone. I offered a victim to pacify the people, and I punished an evildoer."

By the time he reached his suburban house and began to make his domestic arrangements, he had become perfectly calm.

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I came to bell hooks late. I was already in my 20s, already a parent, and firmly fed up with the ways that white middle class feminism Othered me. But I didn’t have the right words to express how I felt yet, and so for me reading bell hooks was less revelation and more confirmation. It was maddening to come to feminism as a young Black single mother and find people like me described as a problem to solve with no recognition of our humanity. So, the first time I read Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism I felt seen, more than that I felt validated. It was the feminism that hadn’t included me or women like me that was the problem, not my inability to connect with the words of white feminists. Even though they wrote books that were hailed at the time as necessary and relevant reads, hooks made it clear that they were not above critique. As she said in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, “we knew that there could be no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy.”

In this way bell hooks taught us another unforgettable lesson, that those who do some of the hardest work to make change possible will have missteps. The mythos that arises after an icon passes away hinges on their complexities being forgotten in favor of a handful of favorite and easy to absorb quotes. In the way of all icons, when that happens there is a danger of context being forgotten as well. But bell was more than her best quotes, more than her awards and successes, and the best way to honor her work is to think critically about what she said in her time as well as understanding that her experiences may not always be relevant. To remember the full, complicated person she was and learn from her is to wrestle with her growth, her flaws and understand that no feminism, no feminist could ever be perfect. As hooks herself said, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

bh: At the conference, I confessed that I have really violent impulses that sometimes listening to some panels I had wanted to come out and shoot people. The audience laughed, but I wasn’t being funny, and I wasn’t saying it to be cute or exhibitionist. I was acknowledging that the violent impulses don’t just exist out there in Black youth or in the underclass, but that they reside in people like myself as well—people who have our PhDs and our good jobs. But that doesn’t mean that my life is not tormented by rageful or irrational, violent impulses. It does mean that instead of shooting people, I go home and write a critique. My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex, clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless. I think Black people, across class, have many moments in our lives when we feel utterly powerless to change the direction of situations. And we don’t deal with this collectively, because we’re so in denial about it. 

LC: You’ve talked about how figures like Tupac Shakur and Ice Cube disrupt essential notions of Black masculinity. Your understanding of gangsta rap is very different from the dominant feminist line. 

bh: People presume that because I’m a feminist thinker they know I’m gonna trash rap, especially gangsta rap. I can challenge the sexism and misogyny of it, but I can embrace the rage that is implicit in it and the sense of powerlessness that undergirds it.

LJ: In Feminism Is for Everybody, you write, “If women and men want to know love we have to yearn for feminism.” Can you talk about this connection between love and feminism? 

bh: I keep telling people that I’m going to be the high priestess of love for the next few years, and so many people keep saying, “Oh, well, bell hooks is turning soft ‘cause she’s focusing on love.” And I think, Oh, no, not the love I’m talking about—because I’m really talking about a love that’s grounded in a vision of mutuality and communion and sharing; to me that is so deeply related to feminism because I feel like as long as we have gender inequality and inequity and sexism and patriarchy, we can’t have mutuality. What we have is a constant paradigm of domination, a constant sense that in the world there’s always a top and bottom in our relationships, there’s always a subordinated person and a person who is dominant. 

One thing that I have felt strongly over the years is that while I have seen relationships between heterosexual men and women change a lot, what I often see is that if the man assumes a more nurturing, more emotional and giving position, the woman is often cold and aloof and ungiving. We certainly see this in a lot of movies—even in a movie like High Fidelity, which I really enjoyed, we still see that you have a certain kind of warmth posited with the man and a coldness in the energy of the so-called New Woman, the young, professional career woman. It seems to me that this is still within the same old paradigm of every relationship [having] a submissive party and a dominant party. It’s just that people are more comfortable now with men taking on the submissive roles, but that’s not what feminist visions of true love are about, because those visions are about mutuality. They’re about a world where we can both be self-actualized in a relationship, whether it’s two men together or two women together or two transgendered people or whatever our arrangements. Mutuality is at the heart of this vision of a more politicized understanding of love as a force that transforms domination.

LJ: To me there’s something about that model of looking at things that very much naturalizes gender roles—it says that this is the way men are and this is the way women are. 

bh: When I go out into the high schools or just into an everyday world talking about feminism, the people from 6 to 25, that’s exactly what they bring up. That’s exactly their wall of resistance. I don’t even have difficulty with us saying that there’s some kind of hardcore biological determinism, because what we really know is that everything can be changed through socialization. So even if you want to say we start off in some kind of binary that is oppositional, it can be altered at birth. So let’s talk about why people have such resistance to altering that—[people] who believe in some kind of fixed biological destiny—since we’re quite willing to alter all other kinds of destinies. Sometimes when I think of the incredible revolution people have made with technology, moving from being fearful of technology to people of all classes in our nation believing everybody should know how to use a computer…we know that people can make incredible leaps away from anything that we call natural or biologically determined. And I find it interesting that whenever we’re talking about gender equality, people want to fix biology in some kind of absolute unchanging space rather than say, Nothing has been altered more in the scientific revolutions of modernity than this thing we might call biology.

SH: Do you think it’s true that writers carry around a great sadness? And do we have that sadness because we’re writers, or are we writers because we have that sadness? 

bh: It’s so interesting that you ask that, Silas, ’cause my morning meditation has to do with grief because I often feel such a tremendous sense of grief about what’s happening in our world, what’s happening to people around me, the disconnects, and my dysfunctional family and others. But I don’t know that I think it’s so much writers but people who are choosing to be aware. It’s hard to wake up, in the Buddhist sense. I mean, to open your eyes and see what’s happening in our world without feeling that grief. And the point that Thich Nhat Hanh always says—the Vietnamese Buddhist monk—is I gotta take that grief and use it as compost, you know, for my garden. That’s the challenge for me. I feel like that grief has been with me since I was a child facing the brutal racism of Kentucky, the extreme patriarchal sexism of my parents and our religion, and, you know, just trying to find that place of through the pain and the sadness to a place where one can say as Jackie Wilson in his song, “Your Love Has Lifted Me Higher.” That’s the thing, when I go out to my land and I look out at the hills and I think about that scripture that says, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” So there again we have that evocation of nature and the environment, and that which helps us, restores us, which gives us a way to keep a hold on life. For me, it’s keeping that grief balanced, but I don’t know an aware person who doesn’t have that grief.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor Frankl.

While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies-even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence. What else remained for us as a material link with our former lives?

I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in numbers, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to "be happy." But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Meditations," by Marcus Aurelius.

The time of a man's life is as a point; the substance of it ever flowing, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to corruption. His soul is restless, fortune uncertain, and fame doubtful; to be brief, as a stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as a smoke, so are all that belong unto the soul. Our life is a warfare, and a mere pilgrimage. Fame after life is no better than oblivion. What is it then that will adhere and follow? Only one thing, philosophy. And philosophy doth consist in this, for a man to preserve that spirit which is within him, from all manner of contumelies and injuries, and above all pains or pleasures; never to do anything either rashly, or feignedly, or hypocritically: only to depend from himself, and his own proper actions: all things that happen unto him to embrace contentendly, as coming from Him from whom he himself also came; and above all things, with all meekness and a calm cheerfulness, to expect death, as being nothing else but the resolution of those elements, of which every creature is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common unto all, why should it be feared by any? Is not this according to nature? But nothing that is according to nature can be evil.

These two rules, thou must have always in a readiness. First, do nothing at all, but what reason proceeding from that regal and supreme part, shall for the good and benefit of men, suggest unto thee. And secondly, if any man that is present shall be able to rectify thee or to turn thee from some erroneous persuasion, that thou be always ready to change thy mind, and this change to proceed, not from any respect of any pleasure or credit thereon depending, but always from some probable apparent ground of justice, or of some public good thereby to be furthered; or from some other such inducement.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," by Adam Smith.

By the 37th of Henry VIII all interest above ten per cent was declared unlawful. More, it seems, had sometimes been taken before that. In the reign of Edward VI religious zeal prohibited all interest. This prohibition, however, like all others of the same kind, is said to have produced no effect, and probably rather increased than diminished the evil of usury. 

Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself, it has already been observed, into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent orders of every civilised society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived.

But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

National Trust

Our national divisions have reached a boiling point at exactly the same time as AI makes “deep fakes” easy to make and easier to get faked out by. Which means that every news cycle plays out the same way: 

1. Something happens that is captured in a pithy headline intended to generate maximum outrage from one side 

2. That side expresses said outrage, while the other side offers denials, justifications, and/or “whataboutisms” 

3. Video evidence comes out (because when is there ever anything happening on the planet that isn’t being captured by a cell phone camera or surveillance footage), which is either inconclusive yet somehow both sides crow “see?!?” or else it is conclusive in which one side says “see?!?” while the other side says “deep fake!” 

What’s missing in all of this back-and-forth is people with both the resources and objectivity to surveil all of the evidence and render facts, observations, and commentary so that the rest of us can decide whether this affirms, negates, or complicates our previous positions. I’m speaking, of course, about the media, a role once held by the likes of Cronkite and Jennings and Brokaw. And yet most of us feel that the media has been captured by either or both sides of any given argument, rendering it ineffective in breaking through the misinformation and in many cases deeply complicit in stoking misinformed positions. Which is a shame, because a functioning democracy requires, yes the passion of having a position and being outraged when something happens that offends that position, but also honest information from which to understand what’s really going on. 

Recall when Trump and Biden were campaigning against each other the second time, and early reports of Biden’s mental decline were dismissed as right-wing misinformation. Then that first debate happened and Biden showed on national TV that in fact he’d lost something on his fastball. And even though not all voters watch presidential debates, the chatter was loud enough and long enough that eventually it did get to all of America, leading to Biden closing his campaign and stepping aside for Harris. 

But perhaps that will be the last time we see Americans willing to change their positions when video evidence refutes their previous positions. It seems we’re so dug into our narratives that, when faced with incontrovertible evidence that negates something we previously believed, we are more apt to deny, justify, or cry “deep fake.” And there aren’t enough honest brokers, in the media or elsewhere, willing to put in the work to bring that evidence to light and assert the ramifications of that evidence in a way that people will trust the perspective and change their minds.

“Keeping an open mind” does not appear to be a positive trait anymore. Nor is it valued to be the sort of voice of integrity that people look to for commentary, even if it means changing hotly held positions. Most of America distrusts the media and/or rightly complains they aren't doing the basic reporting of digging up information and holding power to account. Put it all together and I don’t like where this is all heading.

Be Outraged

 

In this 250th year of our American democracy, it feels like everyone is feeling the vulnerability of this form of government. Whether blasted by shocking actions or bombastic rhetoric, or eroded by a steady drip of subtle but impactful shifts, this grand experiment in rule of, by, and for the people is not impenetrable and in fact must be actively defended and cherished.

Even as much of the country feels a sustained cold blast, the heat of the national conversation is turned up to incendiary levels, stoked by both an unending news cycle and intense expression of differences in opinions on these newsworthy events. It seems intractable, because not only are we not agreeing about basic things or even agreeing to disagree, instead we are disagreeing about everything including about what it looks like to agree.

Is the goal for cooler heads to prevail? Even if we could take the temperature down a notch, I'm not even sure that's the right outcome to seek. We can be cordial, polite, and even deferential in expressing our differences of opinions, but if those differences are not mere intellectual pursuits but matters of life and death and dignity and humanity, then it is unproductive and insulting to insist on decorum while allowing injustice and brutality to continue. On the other hand, having a difference of opinions and being angry about those differences does not mean you are right and the other side is wrong and therefore you're entitled to be an a**hole, dehumanize one's opponents, and even wish or do physical harm to them.

When my kids were toddlers, logic went out the window once they got over-tired. At that point, you couldn't reason them back to reality. They were going to go down, and they were going to go down swinging. I worry we have reached this stage in our national discourse. We've lost the plot, forsaking our shared humanity and shared goals in order to satisfy our outrage by demonizing the other side.

What's worse (or perhaps better, if only so that everyone remains safe as opposed to inflicting physical harm on others), we no longer do battle directly with those who disagree with us, because we've figured out how to wall them off from our lives, both physically, on social media, and in our content sources. This is not how a democracy works. In a functioning democracy, there is a diversity of opinions, there is an agreed upon method for deciding who is in power, there is a side that runs things and there is an opposing side that keeps them honest. It is messy and it doesn't always work, but it is by far the least worst form of governing, and we have had some version of it for coming up on 250 years. And I don't know what is next for us.

Truly there is much to be outraged about. I wish that we retain that intensity, for it is warranted. But I also wish that we not become like over-tired toddlers, forgetting what is good for us and choosing instead to do things that are harmful to others and ultimately to ourselves. When are our differences of opinions existential matters that warrant outrage and force, and when are they acceptable disagreements for which hatred of and violence towards our opponents is to be condemned? O for the wisdom to know which and to act accordingly.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen.

Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister, and while they were thus employed, Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange. She could only imagine however, at last, that she drew his notice because there was a something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in any other person present. The supposition did not pain her. She liked him too little to care for his approbation.

"I dare say you will find him very agreeable."

"Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an evil."

"I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy, that you hardly ever forgave, that your resentment once created was unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its being created."

"I am," said he, with a firm voice.

"And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?"

"I hope not."

"It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first."

"Let me thank you again and again, in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the sake of discovering them."

"If you will thank me," he replied, "let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe I thought only of you."

Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her companion added, "You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever."

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”

Elizabeth's spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. "How could you begin?" said she. "I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first place?"

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview and Other Conversations."

One Hundred Years of Solitude was, as a perceptive critic once said, like a brick through a window. It let in the real life of the street, the noises and colors and sensations, and presented magical events—a trail of blood flowing across town and into a house, careful to avoid staining the rug; flowers from heaven—so straightforwardly they seem believable. Suddenly all the stories in Latin America were written in its shadow. Solitude was the most famous novel in the world, and perhaps the last (leaving aside the rather extra-literary case of The Satanic Verses) to have a demonstrable effect on it.

MENDOZA: You always have yellow flowers in your house. What significance do they have? 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Nothing awful can happen to me if there are yellow flowers around. To be absolutely safe, I need yellow flowers (preferably yellow roses) and to be surrounded by women. 

MENDOZA: Mercedes always puts a rose on your desk. 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Always. What’s happened quite a few times is that I’m trying to work and not getting anywhere, nothing’s going right, I’m throwing away page after page. Then I look at the flower vase and find the reason … no rose. I shout for a flower, they bring it, and everything starts coming out right.

STREITFELD: I liked one other quote from The Paris Review article, where you told the writers who had long sentences that you had to use “breathing commas.” 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: My idea of a literary text is actual hypnotism. It’s very important that the rhythm does not have any stops and starts, because when you have a stop or a start, the reader can escape. There are too many other books waiting. Any hurdle and the reader will go pick up something else. Commas may seem like a grammatical sign, but I use them for respiratory purposes. The reader must not wake up.

STREITFELD: There is a stamp in Colombia with your face on it. 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I hope it’s only used for love letters.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 508

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel García Márquez.

“This is madness, Aurelito,” he exclaimed. 

“Not madness,” Aureliano said. “War. And don’t call me Aurelito anymore. Now I’m Colonel Aureliano Buendía.”

Pietro Crespi exhausted all manner of pleas. He went through incredible extremes of humiliation. He wept one whole afternoon in Úrsula’s lap and she would have sold her soul in order to comfort him. On rainy nights he could be seen prowling about the house with an umbrella, waiting for a light in Amaranta’s bedroom. He was never better dressed than at that time. His august head of a tormented emperor had acquired a strange air of grandeur. He begged Amaranta’s friends, the ones who sewed with her on the porch, to try to persuade her. He neglected his business. He would spend the day in the rear of the store writing wild notes, which he would send to Amaranta with flower petals and dried butterflies, and which she would return unopened. He would shut himself up for hours on end to play the zither. One night he sang. Macondo woke up in a kind of angelic stupor that was caused by a zither that deserved more than this world and a voice that led one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love. Pietro Crespi then saw the lights go on in every window in town except that of Amaranta. On November second, All Souls’ Day, his brother opened the store and found all the lamps lighted, all the music boxes opened, and all the clocks striking an interminable hour, and in the midst of that mad concert he found Pietro Crespi at the desk in the rear with his wrists cut by a razor and his hands thrust into a basin of benzoin.

On the eve of the execution, disobeying the orders not to bother him, Úrsula visited him in his bedroom. Encased in black, invested with a rare solemnity, she stood during the three minutes of the interview. “I know that you’re going to shoot Gerineldo,” she said calmly, “and that I can’t do anything to stop it. But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of José Arcadio Buendía, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you’re hiding and kill you with my own two hands.”

The truth was that Úrsula resisted growing old even when she had already lost count of her age and she was a bother on all sides as she tried to meddle in everything and as she annoyed strangers with her questions as to whether they had left a plaster Saint Joseph to be kept until the rains were over during the days of the war. No one knew exactly when she had begun to lose her sight. Even in her later years, when she could no longer get out of bed, it seemed that she was simply defeated by decrepitude, but no one discovered that she was blind. She had noticed it before the birth of José Arcadio. At first she thought it was a matter of a passing debility and she secretly took marrow syrup and put honey on her eyes, but quite soon she began to realize that she was irrevocably sinking into the darkness, to a point where she never had a clear notion of the invention of the electric light, for when they put in the first bulbs she was only able to perceive the glow. She did not tell anyone about it because it would have been a public recognition of her uselessness. She concentrated on a silent schooling in the distances of things and people’s voices, so that she would still be able to see with her memory what the shadows of her cataracts no longer allowed her to. Later on she was to discover the unforeseen help of odors, which were defined in the shadows with a strength that was much more convincing than that of bulk and color, and which saved her finally from the shame of admitting defeat. In the darkness of the room she was able to thread a needle and sew a buttonhole and she knew when the milk was about to boil. She knew with so much certainty the location of everything that she herself forgot that she was blind at times. On one occasion Fernanda had the whole house upset because she had lost her wedding ring, and Úrsula found it on a shelf in the children’s bedroom. Quite simply, while the others were going carelessly all about, she watched them with her four senses so that they never took her by surprise, and after some time she discovered that every member of the family, without realizing it, repeated the same path every day, the same actions, and almost repeated the same words at the same hour. Only when they deviated from meticulous routine did they run the risk of losing something. So when she heard Fernanda all upset because she had lost her ring, Úrsula remembered that the only thing different that she had done that day was to put the mattresses out in the sun because Meme had found a bedbug the night before. Since the children had been present at the fumigation, Úrsula figured that Fernanda had put the ring in the only place where they could not reach it: the shelf. Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

When Did We Last Walk a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

 

I was lucky to be invited by a work colleague of mine to a meet-and-greet with state representatives last month. Both were Republicans representing districts in or adjacent to big cities, one in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh and one in Northeast Philadelphia. Given how divisive things have become in politics, at a national and state and local level, someone asked during Q&A just what does it look like to work across the aisle to get things done for the state. Both politicians gave answers along the lines of making it a point to physically go to different parts of the state to meet people, for what better way to see and understand concerns at the human level so that they can use their political power to do something about it. 

It's a good answer, but one that is harder to actually than to just say. Hat tip to these two electeds for practicing what they preach, as I know they log a lot of miles, oftentimes away from their loved ones and their own constituents, in order to see firsthand what is happening all throughout the diverse communities that make up the state of Pennsylvania. 

Now, not all of us are elected officials charged with the wellbeing of an entire state. But, to the extent that we are both politically informed and want to make a difference in our generation, I think the same invitation to “walk a mile in my shoes” applies. It is all too common for all of us to lament that things don’t get done, that politics has become so toxic, and that the other side just doesn’t get it. But very few of us get to truly enclave ourselves among those just like us with no need to influence or be influenced by others not like us. 

Of course we may try. Where we live, where we bring our kids to play, and who we hang out with on Saturday night may feel like a comfort zone of others who think like us and share the same complaints and aspirations as we do. But the thing about our modern political system is that there’s no escaping the fact that everything that makes up our lives is influenced by political bodies that consist of people we voted for and people we didn’t vote for. Philadelphia, as blue a city as they come, is within the United States, whose president is the Republican candidate Donald Trump. Rural Pennsylvanians may not have any concentrations of Democrats for miles and miles, but their wellbeing is influenced in part by how well our largely blue metro areas are doing in industry and health care (and those largely blue metro areas, in turn, are depending on the reddest parts of this state for things essential to life, like energy and food). 

But here I’m speaking about relatively complicated things, which not all of us have bandwidth to weigh, like economic development policy and tax mix and immigration reform. More simply, how often have we truly walked a mile in the shoes of those whose political positions are diametrically different than ours? If you are a city mouse, would you not want country mice to see that our urban areas are not cesspools of crime and corruption but rather cathedrals of commerce and culture? If you are a country mouse, would you not want city mice to see what a more rural existence looks like, to better understand what your concerns are and why you hold them? 

I assume I am speaking to a more metro than rural audience, but let’s start with those country mice. When was the last time you spend more than 24 hours in a city, and really walked amongst its streets without getting into a car or holing up in a hotel room? If it's been a while, yet you hold negative opinions of such places informed by media or friends, how is that fair?

Now let me address the city mice. Tell me, when was the last time you hunted or fished or farmed or done any number of activities far from tall buildings and cell towers? Maybe it's been a while? Maybe never? Maybe not only never but "oh god I would never"? If so, how can you possibly claim to know or care about those different from you?

We are the fulfillment of our own worst fears of a divided society and the stalemate that causes in getting important stuff done, because we refuse to go to places different from what we’re used to. Kudos to the two state representatives I met last month. Sure, it’s partly their job to travel the state. But they were the first to say not all of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle share that commitment. Let’s hope more of them, and more of us, are more willing.