… trust. For much of today, she’s been working up some remarks.

She was asked to structure her remarks around a work of literature, and she chose John Updike’s short story, “Trust Me,” a man’s recollection of his father having failed (for a few terrifying moments) to catch him as he – three or four years old – jumped for the first time into a swimming pool. “Trust me,” the father had said, and the child trusted him, but because the father in fact was not able to catch him right away, he came who knows how close to drowning.

Years later the narrator realizes that despite this abject failure of trustworthiness, and despite his mother (who was sitting nearby during the incident) having flown into so intense a rage that she violently slapped her husband’s face as he helped his son recover (her anger, writes the narrator, “seemed directed at him as much as at his father”), it’s his father he ended up trusting all his life. “It was his mother he distrusted, her swift sure-handed anger.”

The rest of the story recounts later failures of trusting and being trusted in the man’s life: He assures his girlfriend she can ski on a slope that’s in fact too challenging for her, and she falls apart – the two of them have to walk down the long icy run. His seventeen year old son assures him some hash brownies friends made for the son’s birthday “won’t do anything” to him, so the narrator eats one and becomes seriously and hilariously high as he tries to take the subway back to his apartment. He’s on a pleasant comfortable jet leaving Rome, and as he’s settling in for the flight the plane runs into bad trouble and has to return to the airport.

In most of the recalled incidents, the trauma involves a menacing uncontrollable world of water, ice, and snow: the “lapping agitation” of the swimming pool; the Atlantic ocean which “visually interlocked with the calm silver edge of the [airplane’s] wing: Olympian surfaces serenely oblivious of the immense tension between them;” the snowy woods that circled the man and his terrified girlfriend as they made their way down the mountain:

[T]he woods around them, perceived at so unusually slow a speed, wore a magical frozen strangeness, the ironical calm of airplane rivets.

Ironical because those rivets too, the narrator muses, say “Trust me, [yet] in his heart [he] refused, and this refusal in him formed a hollow space terror could always flood.”

**************************

He expresses no anger at his son for feeding him drugs, but when the narrator calls his girlfriend and tells her what’s happened, she flies into a rage (“Oh, that’s disgusting!”) and hangs up on him.

The story ends with him once again musing.

The click [of the phone] sounded like a slap, the same echoing slap that had once exploded next to his ear. Except that his father had become his son, and his mother was his girl friend. This much remained true: it had not been his fault, and in surviving he was somehow blamed.

It seems not so much the fact of survival, though, as his lack of “sure-handed anger,” his failure to believe that when you get right down to it life is a risk almost not worth taking, that makes the narrator an object of blame. The narrator is more willing to assume the risks of life, more willing to be vulnerable in the ways you’re vulnerable when you trust someone, than some of the other people he encounters. (His ex-wife, for instance, has a fear of flying.)

Despite everyone’s inclination toward terror when they realize (as the narrator did, age three) their frailty in relation to a betraying human and a menacing natural world, the point is to persist in trusting, to resist one’s tendency to be “flooded” with terror. “There are few fates worse than sustained, self-protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one’s human environment,” writes the philosopher Annette Baier. “The worst pathology of trust is a life-poisoning reaction to any betrayal of trust.” The various rages against the narrator disclose, perhaps, elements of this pathology, and he rightly shrinks from them.

And when absence of trust becomes not just personal, but social?

Where a society has degenerated to the point that there are few institutions of trust, it is hard to see how things may be transformed so as to let trust in. Consider the society, for example, where trust is only found in small family groups: where there are few other examples of loyalty-based trust and few or no examples of trust based on habits of expecting virtue or prudence. Consider a society, in other words, where civic engagement is at an absolute minimum and utter cynicism prevails: where there is little of what James Coleman describes as social capital. In such a society, trust is likely to lack any dynamic and it may require dramatic developments or interventions if things are to be turned around.

This line, which concludes an article announcing UD‘s own ‘thesda as “the next Aspen,” instantly made UD think of a couple of lines from Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

“The saved know each other by their neatness and reserve. He doesn’t have showy ways is how you know a saved person.”

************************

The Aspenization is happening
in South Bethesda; UD lives
in North Bethesda (the
Garrett Park part of North Bethesda),
which – given what it looks like when
you take a picture off of UD‘s
back deck on January 30, 2015 at 7:50
in the morning – isn’t very showy at all.

Looks downright rural.

UD and La Kid got home after dark last night (office hours; Tabata after work). Mr UD dropped them off and began backing out of the driveway to head to Chipotle.

Suddenly, in the snowy dark, UD spotted a small living thing sitting on one of the steps to the front door. What was it?

“Look.” She prodded La Kid.

“What is it?”

“A rat? A rabbit? A cat?”

“Why doesn’t it move? We’re inches away!”

“I don’t know.”

“Go away!” shouted La Kid. We moved closer, trying to scare it. It didn’t budge, and we still couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Call Daddy! Daddy!” La Kid called. He’d already left.

“There’s too much wildlife here,” wailed UD. “What is it? Why won’t it move? MOVE,” she screamed.

Then, as the moonlight deepened, she saw an unmistakeable rabbit-shadow.

“Hop away! Hop hop hop hop away!” they yelled. The minutes ticked by, and UD and La Kid were cold. “No wonder the owls and the hawks and the foxes like it so much here,” grumbled UD. “Big open lawns full of motionless rabbits.” They edged closer, and finally the thing bounced off…

… government (“Boring is Good”).

… – ou peut-être il serait mieux de dire Université de Moncton – which is generating controversy. Apparently some people on campus think it insults the dignity of the school by featuring students (actors, maybe) kissing passionately… uh, French kissing – in the library stacks…

It’s altogether a tonguey ad – lots of tongues hanging out of the mouths of students as they gambol about or play hockey or paihrfohrmuh zair wilduh enduh crayzee Franche roque moozeekuh…

But the ad – plus this morning’s metro ride to Foggy Bottom – has UD thinking about something else entirely. She notices that in this video everyone is beautiful. Some students are insanely beautiful, and some are merely somewhat beautiful, but everyone is beautiful. On the crowded metro this morning, she took a seat and her blazingly blond daughter stood near her; and near her daughter stood a staggeringly beautiful young man, the sort of person you kind of have to look at even though it’s a little impolite. The dude was chiseled: Closely cropped black hair, long elegant face with dramatic green eyes, aquiline nose, full lips, and cleft chin… UD thought Okay, the metro is the domain of the young and restless, the super-ambitious full-bodied hot-blooded denizens of DC … But these two are exceptionally beautiful…

But then La Kid and the guy left the train (UD had already, gazing at them, melded their DNA to produce a race of amazing specimens), off to their separate jobs, and now onto the train scrambled (see post immediately below) six random dudes, a group of friends, also in their twenties… And all of them were beautiful!

So is it just me? Am I seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? Or would turning on a camera anywhere at a place like the Moncton campus produce a steady array of beauties? Have I gotten to the point in life where the mere fact of being young makes you beautiful?

… renewing her ID card.
She had to. One of her
classes meets in the library,
and you can’t get in without
a card.

The process was very quick
and easy, and essentially
involved listening to the
student who processed her
tell her how his writing
courses at GW were “my most
difficult. It is so hard
to write well.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

When UD was in Bali
(summer, 2000) she bought a
bunch of metal bird cages.
One she put outside in
her back woods.

(Taken at 8:00 AM
this morning.)

… “Garrett Park’s Garrett,” by UD.

… as our train winds through the woods of
Mystic Connecticut.

After a busy Christmas break during which
La Kid played with one of her cousins,

we’re heading home.

… the illustrious back garden of John Kenneth Galbraith’s house on Professors’ Row comes into focus. UD walks around its big green square, stopping to check out the bones of various dogwoods and cherries. There’s a little brick amphitheater with curved urns; there’s a pergola on the way to the shed. The long balcony facing the garden also looks good for orations.

Inside and out, the enormous convoluted old house (there are big public rooms, but, in the way of old houses, many dark passageways with unexpected steps up and down) looks good for formal gatherings, and indeed Galbraith often met classes, held end-of-year celebrations, and hosted visiting dignitaries, here. The “large oak bookcase in John Kenneth Galbraith’s elegant sitting room in Cambridge” glimmers, in the day-long winter dusk, with title after title by and about him.

I remember his monumental physical presence in the chair just there, between two vast, sashed, windows; he sat amiably, almost without moving, rehearsing tales of Roosevelt and Kennedy.

“Ken and Kitty’s house on Francis Avenue was, for decades, Boston’s most glittering intellectual and political salon.” It is very quiet now, on a cold Christmas night. Underlit throughout, it whispers that history.

… says the elaborately decorated stained-glass window at the landing outside our bedroom in Cambridge.

UD thought: A nice thought for a house to which you retire each day after high-level government and academic battle. As did, I suppose, its last mucho-mucho-eminent owner.

(UD has visited the house a few times over the years, but had never been on the second floor, which is where the window is.)

The full couplet, from The Faerie Queen (Joseph Conrad put this version on his gravestone) goes like this:

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

Which gives it a less domestic, more cosmic, dusting…

Altogether, Maison des UDs (for a few days) seems to have functioned as Paul Fussell’s primary model for his chapter on houses of the upper classes. Fussell quotes Veblen on the main principle in play: “the veneration of the archaic.” The walls of most rooms retain the carefully preserved shells of some ancient servant-summoning technology; a circa 1950 refrigerator glimmers out of the darkness adjacent to an updated kitchen; the bones of those phones they use in old movies (Doc? You better get here on the double!) are strewn here and there.

I’m sure the views out of various windows are spectacular in the spring; but as usual UD is in Cambridge during its long dreary winter, so the setting is all about drab bushes and pale wasted lawns…

… every year they spend their Christmas.

UD will of course blog from there.

…to be with family. This year, rather than stay with family or at a hotel (Les UDs have a house in Cambridge, but they rent it out), we’ll stay at a friend’s house on Professors’ Row, a line of beautiful places steps from Harvard.

The term Professors’ Row, Boston Curbed writes, “is used now only with the bitterest of irony, given the costs of housing near Harvard and the pay of most Harvard faculty.” Which is to say that even, for instance, a $400,000 a year salary probably isn’t enough. You have to be edging up toward hedge fund territory.

No wonder Sheriff Ben Edelman sets his consulting fee so high.

UD will of course blog from these privileged precincts. She has been stomping around Harvard for decades (ever since she and Mr UD, a Harvard professor’s son, became an item) and she has blogged, a bit, about her impressions of Cambridge and its university people. She will now do so again.

… so haven’t been able to post. Will do so this evening.

… Ferdinand wishes
University Diaries readers
a bullish holiday season.