UD‘s mother used to quote the end of these lines a lot – every prospect pleases, / And only man is vile – because she thought the sentiment was funny, and because it seemed to apply to a lot of the places she found herself (UD recalls her reciting it one summer on a crowded Ocean City Maryland beach). UD finally checked the source of the lines – the notorious From Greenland’s Icy Mountains – and now sees that for Reginald Heber “vile” simply meant heathen…

… which is now one of America’s Coolest Small Towns. They must have lived there because of its proximity to Ocean City, where the Rapoport family (Joseph Rapoport was my father’s father) had a boardwalk amusement store (scroll down for news of it burning down in suspicious circumstances in 1954).

Les UDs stopped at Berlin for lunch on their way back from Assateague on Monday, eating at this diner, which turns out to be famous because it was featured (along with the rest of the town) in Runaway Bride.

The Atlantic Hotel (1895) dominates the town and has sitting rooms like this.

…UD went to Rehoboth Beach and watched the city replenish the beach. Now, from an apartment in Germantown, Maryland, she watches images of that just-dredged beach overwhelmed by waves, and she wonders if all that money was wasted.

So many of the Sandy images we’re seeing – of the Chesapeake Bay, Rehoboth Beach, Ocean City – show places flooded, if you will, with memories for old UD. Her father graduated from Ocean City High School. He spent summers working at his family’s businesses along the beach. Later, he bought a house on the Chesapeake, and UD went out fishing with him. Most of UD‘s summers for the last twenty years have taken place in Rehoboth Beach (see this blog’s category, Snapshots from Rehoboth). All of those boarded-up shops with their defiant messages to Sandy scrawled on window boards — she knows those shops, and the people who own them.

The storm was quiet here – some wind, some sound from the trees. UD’s Garrett Park house had a little basement flooding. No treefalls.

… but strongly optimistic, on a beautiful summer day at the Garrett Park pool, where UD has just finished her swim, and where she now (they’ve got wifi this year) blogs. The little square of orange light on her computer panel shivers and shakes, and it takes an awfully long time to go from one window to another, but UD will take what she can get by way of internet access (on Thursday her home computer problems should be solved). Hotel lobbies, Starbucks, and now the local pool — when computers disconnect, UD reconnects with her little ‘thesdan world.

Five people have emailed UD about the clout list at the University of Illinois (she’s afraid if she tries to link to an article, it’ll take forever), and she’s grateful to them. She’d already read an article or two about it, and had decided not to post on the subject. But since so many of her kind readers think of UD and University Diaries when they read coverage in the Chicago Trib and elsewhere about the well-established use of clout on the part of politicians and trustees to get unqualified students admitted to the flagship public campus, she’ll happily share her thoughts.

Used to be UD was real radical on the subject. When she first started going with Mr UD, he told her about various Harvard friends of his who’d been admitted with middling grades and scores because their parents were well-connected. She was scandalized, and did quite a bit of populist railing against it, which irritated Mr UD no end.

He tried to explain to her that no university merely looks at grades and scores — there are all sorts of special admits, like athletes and musicians and the geographically well-distributed (UD recalled her father saying that he wasn’t that impressive a candidate for Johns Hopkins, but “No one had ever applied to Hopkins from Ocean City High.”) and, yes, children of alumni. “The main question,” said he, “is Can they do well at the university? All of my friends did very well. Most graduated with honors. And you know all of them and how well they’ve done in life.”

Although her position has moderated a bit, UD remains scandalized by purely money admits — Duke and Brown seem particularly fond of them — where if your father is Ralph Lauren or Rudy Giuliani (how else to explain Andrew Giuliani?) you have a much better chance of getting in than someone more impressive and less wealthy. And sure, many of the University of Illinois admits she’s reading about sound unable to do well at the school — Mr UD’s minimal criterion. One in particular — a law school candidate — sounds terrible, and it’s sad to read the admissions dean begging the administration clout-slaves not to make him write an acceptance email to this person. He worries that the candidate’s wretched test scores will damage the law school’s competitive statistics; he’s sure the candidate will be unable to pass any bar exam.

UD takes both a case by case and a larger, political-atmosphere approach to the clout admissions phenomenon. Illinois is of course one of our most corrupt states. And bad clout admits certainly increase when you’ve got players like Blago at the bat.

Similarly, many of our corrupt, provincial southern states have long regarded colleges and universities as patronage machines, charitable arms of the legislature designed to give jobs to governors’ wives and advanced degrees to children of the prominent. So when there’s a background of deep-rooted cultural corruption, you want to pay particular attention to clout practices.

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

Update: Wrote this yesterday. Apologies for light posting — continued connectivity difficulties. They’re on their way to being solved.

It’s always been a little dicey, trying to get away with failing to educate your children, and stealing taxpayer money, in America, a country with a meaningful law enforcement establishment. Massive systemic welfare fraud as a way of life occasionally gets you in trouble in this country — just ask Lakewood NJ’s rabbi and his flock.

And now the major ultraorthodox yeshiva in New York City has to pay back eight million of the ten million it stole from the state through truly remarkable, contemptible, long-term, deceit. Which this blog will not detail (it violates our obscenity standards), but by all means read the article yourself.

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

Why is UD confident they’ll keep stealing? It’s structural, babe. You educate a community to feel no affiliation with the US beyond lockstep voting as their rabbi instructs them … whaddaya think’s gonna happen? The “US” – that abstraction out there – exists to provide money for one’s life of grand and petty crime, and there’s nothing at all wrong with devoutly pious God-fearers lying and cheating and swindling THAT thing, that vacuous entity out there that can be made to discharge money. It’s just the way they think, and that is that.

That’s the problem with cults; and it’s why self-respecting governments surveil and, when the fraud gets too too too much, pursue them legally.

Spring Break, USA!

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

Look at ongoing spring break in Miami Beach.

Compare it to last year’s spring break in Miami Beach.

As you know, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” and at some point gun-mad, cheap hotel and booze-mad, no-government-interference-mad states like Texas and Florida are going to have to get sane, which UD thinks in this case means accepting the fact that when you proudly broadcast your gunny rummy scummy ways to the world, the world will respond. If you build tacky, they will come. And as the violence gets worse year after year, you’re going to need police-state-quality surveillance, which UD is sure your permanent residents are going to love. They bought their five million dollar condo for sunny, carefree Florida, after all.

Now, Florida – all shot up and beaten and exhausted – is grandly claiming that it never wanted spring breakers. “We don’t ask for spring break, we don’t promote it, we don’t encourage it, we just endure it, and frankly it’s something we don’t want to endure.” Fine words, Mr Churchill, and, now that it’s not just a source of revenue but a human and public relations disaster, you will fight it on the beaches etc. But of course you have promoted it; yours is not just a party city, but a mega-club party city, and a warm, longtime home for drug and gun dealers.

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

Note what an even more sleaze-friendly city – New Orleans – did before last year’s Mardi Gras:

[The governor put] a statewide mask mandate in place as well as occupancy limits on bars, restaurants and other businesses.

New Orleans Democratic Mayor LaToya Cantrell, also a Democrat, went even further by closing bars completely in the city, even those allowed to operate as restaurants. City officials also closed iconic Bourbon Street to cars and limited pedestrian access for the final weekend of the season.

Next thing you know they’ll be confiscating weapons!

[Donald appears in the amber light of a door. He has a tragic radiance in his red satin robe following the lines of his body. The “Varsouviana” rises audibly as he enters the Lincoln bedroom.]

DONALD [with faintly hysterical vivacity]: I have just washed my hair… THIS FAKE ELECTION CAN NO LONGER STAND!

KAYLEIGH: Such fine hair!

DONALD [accepting the compliment]: It’s a problem. Didn’t I get a call?

KAYLEIGH: Who from, Donald?

DONALD : Amy Coney Barrett.

KAYLEIGH: Why, not yet, honey.

DONALD: How strange! I —

[Donald stands quite still for some moments — a silver-backed mirror in his hand and a look of sorrowful perplexity as though all human experience shows on his face. He finally speaks but with sudden hysteria.]

DONALD: What’s going on here? What’s happened here? I want an explanation of what’s happened here.

KAYLEIGH: Hush, hush, honey! Please.

DONALD: Why are you looking at me like that? Is something wrong with me?

KAYLEIGH: Please, Donald. You look wonderful, Donald… I understand you are going on a trip… A wonderful trip…

DONALD: Yes! I’m anxious to get out of here. This place is a trap! … I’m ready to go… I can smell the sea air. The rest of my time I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean. I will die–with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking model, a very young one with a small blond bob and a big silver necklace. “Poor man,” they’ll say, “the quinine did him no good. That unwashed grape has transported his soul to heaven.” And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard–at noon–in the blaze of summer–and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes!

[A doctor and a nurse have appeared around the corner of the building and climbed the steps to the portico. The gravity of their profession is exaggerated–the unmistakable aura of the state institution with its cynical detachment. The doctor rings the doorbell.]

DONALD: What is it? … I wonder if it’s for me.

KAYLEIGH [brightly]: Someone is calling for Donald!

DONALD: Is it my friends from the Supreme Court?

KAYLEIGH: I think it is, Donald.

NURSE: Hello, Donald.

DONALD: Whoever you are–I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

August 14, 2019

SUNSET OVER THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY LAST NIGHT…

…was like a Hubble shot of Jupiter. Whirling skirling swirling squirreling grays and blues. The cloudy sky that ensued was all wrong for perseids, so we passed on the whole get up at two AM and drive down the hill to Big Meadows (we’re talking Shenandoah National Park here) thing. Talking to a guy who drives here every year from Michigan, UD learned that last night was unusually cloudy, so we’re hopeful at least one of the next three nights will be clear enough for fireballs.

Meanwhile, we hike among the deer and the bear (UD dreamt of bears last night, natch), and gawk at the long mountain/valley/mountain views. Gophers scurry the hallway outside our room.

Big Meadows Lodge is already the land that time forgot, but they’re celebrating their eightieth birthday (UD, tomorrow, in Luray, Virginia, will celebrate her 66th), so here in the main room (only place with internet) they’re piping in nonstop forties swing.

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

August 15, 2019

A MOON UNLIKE ANY UD HAS EVER SEEN

The irony was that we were there for the perseids; but sitting on our rickety beach chairs at the Big Meadows clearing last night, the real show turned out to be an absolutely full brilliantly lit moon that insinuated itself as a silver glint among horizonal clouds and then raised itself up to surreality right before our eyes. UD grabbed her binoculars and attempted to make credible the massive and intricately legible orb, its hollows and craters so blatant… When it climbed to higher clouds, they made a golden aura together, the moon now and then blindfolding itself with a black ribbon of atmosphere, and I sat there thinking about my mother who loved the night sky. And of course immediately came the thought that has so often for so long come to UD: We are here to experience the terrestrial wonder that our dead don’t get anymore. We’re doing it for them.

This morning I stood on the lodge’s balcony and watched three gold finches massacre the petals of some purple wildflowers. If butterflies are endangered, there’s no sign of it here. Fern oceans cover acres of woodland floor, and I’m not sure why but it’s very cool when your hike intersects with the Appalachian Trail. Zero-luxuries, zero-prestige Big Meadows Lodge draws an intriguing mix – Mennonites, naturalists, intellectuals, hikers. To my eye, plenty of Paul Fussell’s X’s (scroll down) populate the place, keening over their wildlife books and adjusting the length of their walking sticks. The stolidly downscale Great Room, all dusty wood floors and dusty jigsaw puzzles, buzzes with women in gingham dresses and sweaty kids playing checkers.

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

August 16, 2019

UD/BIRTHDAYS

She’s had a ton of great ones. At a restaurant on the edge of a Santorini cliff; in a cafe by a fast-rolling river in Telluride; at a balcony dining room at the top of a hotel overlooking Mexico City’s zocalo; and, many times, at the Bear Cafe (also alongside a babbling brook) in Woodstock, near our upstate NY house. Last night was another one of the greats – a big, boisterous gathering of family and friends at Moonshadows in Luray, down the hill from Shenandoah National Park. There were glitches galore – an immense detour plus immense thunderstorms on their trip from Washington for a group of late-arriving guests; worries about night vision for a guest who would need to drive the dark winding Skyline Drive back to the lodge… But in the event everything worked out perfectly, and UD felt love for all of these people who had gone to so much trouble for her.

Today the rain has cleared out and we’ve done a ton of hiking. If the sky stays clear, we’ll do another wee hours visit to Big Meadow (as close to a true dark sky as you’re likely to find on the east coast), set out our beach chairs, and look up. UD is so full of gratitude and joy today that she doesn’t care whether she sees any fireballs at all.

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

August 17, 2019

SKYLAND IS THE OTHER LODGE IN THE PARK…

… and unless you feel like a twisting hour-long drive down the hill and back, it’s the one and only meal alternative to Big Meadow Lodge. Our foursome (Peter Galbraith, first American ambassador to Croatia; Sarah Peck, recently retired Foreign Service officer; Mr UD, and UD) met there and on arrival stared from a silent stony hilltop at a garish orange sun settling into pink clouds. The nature/culture clash was equally garish, with raucous country tap dancing in the bar next to the dining room as we entered Skyland. Fa rumore, as the Italians have it; human beings love to make noise. Indeed after a long day of quiet hiking together, we ourselves really went at it over the meal, yelling about the partisan Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and what to do with ISIS prisoners languishing in camps.

Harvard’s highest-profile professor – seen here in New York City – has titled his latest opinion piece J’ACCUSE, aligning himself with an earlier martyred victim of antisemitism. The difference is that when Émile Zola wrote his J’Accuse, Alfred Dreyfus had been condemned to lifelong penal servitude, whereas Dershowitz is accused of penile pervitude.

And the New Yorker article he’s attacking hasn’t come out yet; Dershowitz bases his J’Accuse on rumors he’s heard about it.

The pride of Harvard is a serial j’accuser, having used the same headline in a 2012 piece j’accusing all Germans who have a problem with male circumcision of being Nazis. He likes to talk about his underwear and his many enemies, most prominently the fourteen year old prostitutes out to get him and I dunno if I were Harvard University I’d really be asking myself at this point if I want the institution mentioned up front in every article about a mad filer of lawsuits who harbors a seriously misplaced martyr complex.

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

UD thanks Andrew.

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

And now Scathing Online Schoolmarm will take a closer look at Dershowitz’s latest J’Accuse.

Before she analyzes particular sentences, SOS would like to make a general statement about this curious little essay which attacks a non-existent article.

It doesn’t read as though a human being wrote it. It reads like something issued by the government of Oceania, a flaming piece of hackwork, and SOS wonders why this is. For all its nutty attacks on Nazi, Jew-hating Norway, Dershowitz’s J’Accuse #1 kind of read like him; you heard his authentic madhatterdom in every phrase. But listen to J’Accuse #2:

[E]very American should be outraged at this partisan effort by a giant of the media to stifle the marketplace of ideas by exploiting the past credibility of The New Yorker to try destroy the reputation of a public intellectual with whom they disagree... This is the latest weapon in the partisan warfare that divides our nation.

Doesn’t the traffic pile-up of cliches and the general odor of forced emotion suggest that Dershowitz palmed that day’s effort at self-defense off on an atelier of assistants? Tell ’em I’m gonna sue!! shouts Dershowitz into the phone, and the assistants oblige:

… The New Yorker picked on the wrong innocent victim, because I have the will and resources to fight back against the falsehoods [it] is directing at me and those who want hear my voice… The truth is my weapon in this war of words, and the truth is unequivocally on my side.

The problem with defense attorneys who’ve gotten rich defending really scummy people is that high-minded rhetoric isn’t a good look for them. (From comments on an article about Dershowitz’s latest yowl: “When the lawyer for Claus Von Bulow, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump says that he’s on the level, what choice do we have but to believe him?”) The truth is my weapon! says Joan of Arc and… Alan Dershowitz? It’s why a lot of what he writes sounds more like The Onion than Zola. The man doth protest too much, and protesting too much leads to suspicions that a person has something to hide.

So when, at the end of the piece, Dershowitz cites an anonymous source assuring him that for a still-non-existent New Yorker piece about him, the author did research, some of which landed her on disreputable websites, one is simply gobsmacked.

[She] trolled the internet and came across a neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial website called Rense.com, which both the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center have declared to be anti-Semitic. This site accused me of beating and murdering my first wife.

Why would you write this? Why would you bring it up? You are asking SOS to regard you as Joan of Arc/Alfred Dreyfus because someone you won’t identify told you the writer of an attack on you that doesn’t exist looked at a disreputable website while researching you?

It is UD/SOS‘s humble opinion that the wear and tear of a long and kinda icky public life has caught up with this guy. He’s not as agile as he once was. Harvard can expect a lot more embarrassment.

The French philosopher, who wrote about the importance of accepting risk and living a truly alive existence, died fearlessly, attempting to rescue children from choppy waves in Saint-Tropez. They survived; she did not.

Risk and fear: From water, and from fire: As we speak, Saint-Tropez is directly menaced by a massive forest fire in the region.

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

Here is a famous sentence from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) — a rivulet of Clarissa’s consciousness:

This has the balance and beauty, the well-observed ‘interior’ feel, of the great modernist’s sentences. That is, this is not speech; it’s the intimate candid mulling mind, the mind observing London in motion and talking to itself about it. Woolf never forgets to meld the objective world and the subjective, to cast subjectivity as always in response to the world outside itself. All those repetitions – out, out, out; very, very – are the squirreling mind circling its deep familiar themes, its odd, personal, peculiar obsessions and dreads. The ever-circulating cabs function as an objective correlative for, a provocation in the direction of, nihilistic despair: They go in and out, in and out, around the taxi stands and the streets, perpetually, conveying the pointless fever and fret of existence (hence Clarissa’s sympathetic apprehension of what the frightened, shell-shocked Great War veteran Septimus Smith has communicated in killing himself).

The word perpetual, with its religious undertones, comes to this aggressively secular woman (“love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul”) from what has inevitably clung to her from having grown up in a religious (though itself rapidly secularizing) culture. Lux perpetuam, in traumatized godless post-war London, becomes the infernal machinery (tanks, cabs) of perpetual motion. (And perpetual, paired with sense, offers Woolf the assonance that gives her sentences their poetic feel, just as a routine assonantal phrase like taxi cabs does.)

In this sentence’s reference to the sea, we get three crucial elements of human awareness and engagement: nature, culture, consciousness. If you look at the sentence in isolation, it doesn’t make much sense: Why, in the midst of intense city life, would one feel oneself alone and adrift at sea? Why would one say such a silly thing as that it’s very very dangerous to live for even one day?

At sea: Well, that one’s not too hard. The phrase to be at sea conveys confusion, bewilderment, displacement to a wilderness; and the vast formless sea rising up in Clarissa’s mind in the midst of the sharply delimited city of forms communicates her psychic distance from the ongoingness of life, her preoccupation with the majesty and stupendousness and vacancy of death itself. For, having no religious frame (heaven; hell) in which to place, narrate, furnish the event, she can only summon up the strongest image possible of nothingness and separation from all people and things.

The day is like wide water, without sound.

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

And why does it feel exceedingly dangerous to live even one day?

Two reasons come to mind: First of all, very simply, life is in fact quite treacherous, moment to moment. Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s spectacular essay, “Aes Triplex,” for the best evocation of our ridiculous and noble denial of this reality. You are lazing on an elegant beach in Saint-Tropez. Just behind you fires rage in its beautiful forest, and in front of you the placid ocean is also a devourer.

But every day is dangerous as well because life is so seductive: “Heaven only knows why one loves it so.” But one does; almost everyone desperately loves life. So the danger life extends toward us as we rush to embrace it every day is the danger of being caught up in the lie that it never ends. (Freud: “To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.”) Both Woolf and James Joyce set their novels (I have Ulysses in mind) in one day; we follow their characters through one morning, afternoon, and night, and then the novel ends with the night. This is fiction allowing us access to the truth of our brevity.

In Ulysses, at the graveside of his friend Paddy Dignam, Martin Cunningham laments: “In the midst of life…”

In the midst of life, we are in death.

At the end of the same episode, Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, inverts this: “In the midst of death we are in life.”

… and a few posts ago she began to look at Sylvia Plath’s Berck Plage, which places the poet on that broad strand beside “the sea… this great abeyance.”

Already, in this first line, you see and hear her genius, the way great and abeyance share the long A, and the way the word abeyance has bay in it… And as for its meaning: The poem will mourn and rage at the way we manage our hideous human fate by living always in abeyance, indeed by being drawn in particular to places like beaches because there our effort to put a damper on thoughts of our barely pulled together lives moving toward disintegration is eased. We go to the beach because at the tranquilizing seaside world we find a living objective correlative of our efforts to pacify ourselves, to infantilize ourselves out of fear of debility and death. It’s as if nature itself, beside the ocean, wants us to calm down and easefully lie to ourselves about our harsh fate.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly..

Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?

What Philip Larkin, in an uncharacteristically upbeat poem, calls the miniature gaiety of seasides, is in Plath a sinister “hiding,” a mere front. What’s being hidden behind the soft small setting of the shore? The wearing of sunglasses there only underlines the hidden sinister aspect of a location where we’re lulled into lying about the suffering misshapen existence in which we’re actually stuck.

Yet at Berck Plage all we have to do is look up at the vast hospital complex fronting the strand to know our precise status:

On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things—-

I am not a smile.

She’s looking not at hotels but at the hospitals of Berck, many of which specialize in traumatic physical injury. Jean-Dominique Bauby found himself in one of those buildings among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.” So at Berck Plath found her perfect coincidence: the ultimate sunlit palliative for our condition, and an immediately adjacent anguish.

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

To be continued.

Am about to go out to dinner with our crowd.

… says Malcolm Lowry’s autobiographical narrator in his story, The Forest Path to the Spring, and he’s right; but useful only if a writer can narrate the man’s experience well.

You know UD as a mad lover of Lowry’s despairing novel, Under the Volcano. She admires just as much the totally different Forest Path, an extended meditation on happiness.

Like Lowry during the 1940’s, the narrator is an artist who lives as a squatter in a shack on the water in Dollarton, Canada. He writes a strange story, with no real plot beyond a spiritual one which traces, through his general love of nature and his particular daily ritual of carrying a water canister through the forest to a spring, his recognition of the character of happiness.

A long story like this one, with little event, has to carry you along on the strength of its mood and language, and Lowry’s open-hearted, earth-besotted prose accomplishes this from the outset. (Another great example of this sort of story is Katherine Anne Porter’s Holiday.) We are accompanying a man whose mood is happy, first, because the woman he loves is with him and loves the water and forest and sky as much as he does. And he’s also happy because, engrossed in natural life, he suspends his customary anxious self-consciousness.

His awareness is overwhelmingly of the earth, the “ever reclouding heavens” which, when they finally clear at evening, reveal a stand of pines that “write a Chinese poem on the moon.”

Awareness itself – this astoundingly sharp perception of the natural world – is a symptom of his happiness, one that he sees too in his lover:

[I]t was … her consciousness of everything that impressed me …

“Joy,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the overflowing consciousness of reality.” That overflow is what the writer gathers when he goes to the spring. “Ah the pathos and beauty and mystery of little springs and places where there is fresh water near the ocean… [S]uch happiness… was like what is really meant by freedom, which was like the spring, which was like our love, which was like the desire to be truly good.”

The writer says the same thing at the end of his long story as he remembers his years in Dollarton:

[I]t was as if we were clothed in the kind of reality which before we saw only at a distance…

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

Burdened, to be sure, by thoughts of the war in Europe (“The shadow of the war was over everything. And while people were dying in it, it was hard to be really happy within oneself. It was hard to know what was happy, what was good. Were we happy, good? Or, being happy at such a time, what could one do with one’s happiness?”), and, more immediately, by the gradual encroachment of the nearby city into his paradise, the writer nonetheless spends most of his time moving unselfconsciously through the natural world and reflecting upon that world.

His little community of fragile shacks and penurious squatters represents

something that man had lost, of which these shacks and cabins, brave against the elements, but at the mercy of the destroyer, were the helpless yet stalwart symbol, of man’s hunger and need for beauty, for the stars and the sunrise.

Part of the answer to the question of happiness has to do with the realization here of the perilousness, the jerry-built vulnerability, of oneself even as you brave the elements of mortal life. Part will have to do with – despite this – fashioning your life as “a continual sunrise… a continual awakening.”

An ideal of all-transcending serenity flickers occasionally in these pages – “the Tao… came into existence before Heaven and Earth, something so still, so changeless, and yet reaching everywhere, and in no danger of being exhausted…” – but the writer knows that he exists confused, in a human world of suffering. Like Thoreau, he also knows the extremity of his human-world-estranging gesture:

Often I would linger on the way and dream of our life. Was it possible to be so happy? Here we were living on the very windrow of existence, under conditions so poverty-stricken and abject in the eyes of the world they were actually condemned in the newspapers, or by the Board of Health, and yet it seemed that we were in heaven, and that the world outside – so portentous in its prescriptions for man of imaginary needs that were in reality his damnation – was hell.

He can’t keep his own hell off the forest path to the spring, though, and another part of happiness is somehow admitting into this new lucid consciousness one’s own ugliness:

Half-conscious I told myself that it was as though I had actually been on the lookout for something on the path that had seemed ready, on every side, to spring out of our paradise at us, that was nothing so much as the embodiment in some frightful animal form of those nameless somnambulisms, guilts, ghouls of past delirium, wounds to other souls and lives, ghosts of actions approximating to murder, even if not my own actions in this life, betrayals of self and I know not what, ready to leap out and destroy me, to destroy us, and our happiness…

These theatrics, though, these anticipated beasts, weren’t really what his unfolding spiritual life was about:

I became convinced that the significance of the experience lay not in the path at all, but in the possibility that in converting the very cannister I carried, the ladder down which I climbed every time I went to the spring – in converting both these derelicts to use I had prefigured something I should have done with my soul… [As] a man I had become tyrannized by the past, and… it was my duty to transcend it in the present.

Those derelict objects – his own dereliction – would not be rejected, avoided, denied, made ghoulish; they would be made useful in the capture of something beautiful.

Having, on the path, encountered and to some extent calmed these ghouls, the writer enters into a lucid stillness in which

I dreamed that my being had been transformed into the inlet itself… so that I seemed to contain the reflected sun deeply within my very soul, yet a sun which as I awoke was in turn transformed … into something perfectly simple, like a desire to be a better man, to be capable of more gentleness, understanding, love –

It is the same selfless stillness that Norman Maclean describes at the end of A River Runs Through It:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

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

The Dollarton shacks. Long bulldozed; now aestheticized.

Philosophers have taken to the pages of the New York Times in an effort to justify themselves; but Paul Shaffer’s comment (it’s this post’s headline) after Whitney Houston’s death does a better job of this than all of their efforts.

Shaffer’s comment has concision, modesty, and beauty; it acknowledges the existence of a philosophical (and aesthetic, and spiritual) tradition within which people have long thought and written about the almost-inexplicable disparities at war within us:

In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.

Faust’s famous complaint can be seen as the beginning of philosophical wisdom, whether we imagine that insight in terms of Platonic darks and lights or Freudian death- and life-drives … UD likes the way Shaffer says “some kind of sense,” because philosophy cautions against the possibility of making fully satisfactory sense out of this latest event in the history of human vitality/self-destruction. We all lead some variant of this energized and then at times totally-flopping-into-nothingness-and-defeat life; but when icons of vitalism, intensity, and creative energy (Houston, David Foster Wallace, Amy Winehouse, and, farther back, Lenny Bruce – our most powerful artists) run through those two currents of vivacity and void all their lives, right in front of us, and then ultimately (and early in the race) collapse, they rivet our attention to human bondage.

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

Les UDs were finishing dinner last night at Indian Ocean restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, with their friends Steve and Di Elkin, when La Kid called Mr UD about Houston. She was walking back from a charity event at which she and her George Washington University a cappella group, The Sirens, had performed. As UD watched Mr UD listening to her, she felt that weird maternal helpless thing where you understand how your kid feels and it’s bad but you can’t do anything about it.

The air was cool but pleasant; the wind was mild. We went to the Burren and the scary cliffs of Moher.

All around us as we drove, the long stone fields of Clare fell away to the ocean.

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

At night, in Galway City, we keep seeing belligerent drunks getting into fights.

Everyone’s talking about the economic collapse. People are furious, frustrated. They shake their heads, take long drags on their cigarettes. “There’ll be no getting out of it for ages.” Their faces swell with rage.

After dinner this evening with friends at Indian Ocean, we walked down Connecticut Avenue to Van Ness, and then up Chancery Center, to the Egyptian embassy. It was a clear, not too cold night, with a bright moon.

I hadn’t yet seen this street, full of new, massive embassies — with the Chinese particularly immense. It’s an all-over-the-place, neither-here-nor-there building, with the vague geometries of a synagogue.

As we walked up the hill to the embassy, a woman wearing the Egyptian flag as a dress passed us; she was surrounded by excited friends, some of whom carried a banner that read WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN.

You remember Walk Like an Egyptian.

(This, I know you remember.)

Men with Egyptian flag face paint thanked us for being there and said that tomorrow at one o’clock there will be another gathering.

This one was winding down. There were happy groups of young people, a guy in a Cat in the Hat hat, a child flying the flag, a woman calling up the hill toward the embassy: “Hassan! Yasmeen!”

The floodlit United Arab Emirates embassy, with its big gold dome, was magical. The Egyptian embassy next to it looked like a small version of the woeful Kennedy Center. (Here’s a blog whose first photo shows the UAE embassy; plenty of photos of a recent protest at the Egyptian embassy follow, complete with people holding WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN signs. I guess it’s a thing now.)

We wandered around; a bunch of people dressed in the national colors asked our friend Joe to take their picture. Much laughter.

Happiness everywhere.

I never take for granted living in this city, where you can walk three blocks from your restaurant and, under a white moon, join up for a moment with something unearthly.