the cassandra pages

Books of 2021

Well, here is the list of books I read during the past year, and I am grateful for every one of them. Each became my companion for a time during this second pandemic year, and through many of them, I was joined by the intrepid members of my book group who met every Friday morning to discuss the next 50 or 100 pages of whatever novel we were reading together at the time. We helped each other finish a lot of long and sometimes difficult books, we kept each other company, and got to know each other better as friends. So although reading is, by its nature, solitary, it's hard for me to look down this list and not think of the experience with certain titles as a shared one. I know that this sort of group is not for everyone, but it's been good for me, and as facilitator for most of the books, it's really kept me on my toes.

If I could only recommend one of these books to you, I think it would be Milkman, by Anna Burns, written about Ireland during the Troubles: one of the freshest, most original pieces of writing I've read in years, with brilliantly-drawn characters who will win your sympathy. I've just finished Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, and admired her writing, though the story of a boy growing up on an island off the coast of Sicily is one that makes you cringe at times. While we're talking about islands, there was the Laexdal Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders, well worth anyone's reading time as a vivid portrait of human love, jealousy, greed, generosity and wisdom 1000 years ago, with characters who leap off the page and feel entirely recognizable. Finally, Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen is the first book of four about people living impossibly difficult lives on tiny islands off the coast of Norway. It's Nordic noir without even trying to be; I've only read the first in the series but found it absolutely compelling.

The year began with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which is a book that should be on every serious reader's shelf and taken down several times as we go through life, because with each reading, it reveals something new to you about yourself. I was very happy to read it with the book group; I think we all got more out of it than we would have alone.

Teju Cole's Black Paper is a collection of essays not just about race, but about the dark side of human nature as well as the forces of beauty that are its counterpoint, and most employ his signature style of interweaving seemingly-unrelated ideas or subjects to give a new perspective. Golden Apple of the Sun combines a series of photographs of his kitchen countertop during the pandemic with a concluding essay that is a searing indictment of racism from the early days of American colonial history. Fernweh, on the other hand, is a book of carefully-sequenced photographs taken in Switzerland that has been a consolation to me this year, not because they are pretty or conventional pictures, but because in depicting a place that at once feels closed but seductive, both artificial and natural, beyond-human and yet curated and manufactured, it somehow evoked the strangeness and alienation of the world in which we've found ourselves, but lands squarely on the side of beauty, offering a space in which to breathe. It has stayed on my bedside table since the day it arrived.

A confession: I started with the intention of reading all of Dante's The Divine Comedy, but found Inferno hard going: it's because the year itself was just too depressing to spend more of it in a fictional or imagined hell! On the other hand, I thought that Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was one of the most brilliantly-written books I've ever read. It's not well known, and it's written in a daunting stream-of-consciousness style with page-long sentences and few paragraph breaks, to which you simply have to surrender, allowing yourself to be swept along. The reward is that if you stay with it, your view of what it might mean to meet one's impending death, as a literate and conscious person, will be enlarged and changed.

Finally, I was surprised to find myself enchanted and then almost obsessed by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I had read almost all of Hesse's other works, but not this one, his last major novel, which sets up a hypothetical world in the future where education and culture are preserved and controlled by an elite group of celibate, secular, male intellectuals who live in near-monastic remove from the "real world" of ordinary people. The high achievers of this elite society became Masters of the "Glass Bead Game", a never-fully-described exercise in which participants make connections between disparate aspects of cultural artifacts or knowledge, such as relating a law of physics and a Bach sonata. The book provoked a great deal of thought about contemporary academia and tensions between the life of the mind and "real" everyday life in the world; European intellectual life prior to WWII; the preservation of human culture; relationships between men and women; and the interplay (or lack thereof) between political history and cultural/scientific achievement. If you didn't read it back in the 1960s, take a look now! To whet your appetite, I'll include, at the end of this post, my somewhat lame but colorful response to our group leader's challenge to create a mini "glass bead game" ourselves.

Happy reading in 2022, and, as always, please let us know in the comments what YOU read in 2021 and what books were highlights for you! I look forward to hearing from you.

 

2021

We Are All Equally Far From Love, Adania Shibli

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen

Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante #

Dubliners, James Joyce (excerpts)

Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

Time, Etal Adnan

Black Paper, Teju Cole

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse#

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.#

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje#

Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer

Real Presences, George Steiner

The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole

Fernweh, Teju Cole

The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)#

The Interior Circuit, Francisco Goldman

The Little Red Chairs, Edna O'Brien

Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness #

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a monograph by various authors

The Hostage, Brendan Behan

Milkman, Anna Burns#

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante

Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gluck

O Pioneers, Willa Cather #

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes

Agamemnon, Aeschylus #

The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch

Travels with Epicurus, Daniel M. Klein

The Return, Hisham Matar

A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar

Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, Luisa A. Igloria

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky #

# indicates a book read with my book group. Stats:  37 books total; 14 by women, 23 by men, vast majority read as e-books. 20 of these books were written originally in English, 17 read in translation.

 

 

Hermit Diary 44. Lockdown Language Learning

When coping with this interminable disruption to our lives, daily routines help -- so say the psychologists.  I've tried. Predictably, some routines have been more successful than others. Daily exercise gets maybe a B, that is, after my Achilles tendonitis got better - which also required a daily routine of PT stretches and tendon massage. I've done almost no strength training, though, just walking. Practicing the piano barely rates a C, though I've been doing better lately. I've read a lot, and will give myself a A for that. Cooking with some energy and ingenuity. Drawing and artwork, OK, but not every day by any means. Meditation? Yoga? Nope. Writing has been tough. I've tried to give myself some fun -- each day I do the NY Times mini crossword and several days a week I do the Spelling Bee puzzle, putting the answers on a spreadsheet and looking them up the next day, because I'm too cheap to buy a games subscription to the Times. I've been getting dressed (jeans and a top or sweater at least) every day, taking care of my non-professionally-cut hair, putting on earrings and even a little lipstick, because without that basic self-care I know I'm lost.

But where I've apparently been the most diligent is on Duolingo. When I passed the 300-day streak mark, I went back to figure out what date I started -- it was right at the end of last December. I've "studied" several languages on Duolingo over the years: French, Spanish, a bit of Italian and German. When I began this time, we had recently come back from Greece, and I decided to study some modern Greek, since I still remembered some ancient Greek from my college days but had been frustrated while traveling by my ability to "read" signs but say practically nothing. Then, in early March, the pandemic began. Somewhere right around there, I switched to Latin, and did the whole course on Duolingo, which is short and easy, and only comprises three checkpoints. Then I went back to the Greek and have kept it up every day since, using only three or four "streak freezes" to protect my streak in case I forget.

The app reminds you, occasionally, "15 minutes of Duolingo a day can teach you a language. What can 15 minutes of social media do?" Well, the latter phrase makes is a good point, but can you really learn a language this way? I wasn't so sure. I had learned some basic Spanish on Duolingo that definitely helped during our travels to Mexico City, and the French lessons clarified my weak areas in that language. Starting essentially from scratch with the Greek (I knew the alphabet so that wasn't an obstacle, but very few words or phrases) I was barely able to tell if the conjugations and declensions bore any relationship to ancient Greek, because Duolingo doesn't teach you that way. Different concepts are presented, sort of without you realizing it, under the subject heading of, say, "Animals" or "Clothing." Nobody says, "the third person singular of the verb to have is such-and-such", you just get sentences like "The woman has a child" and "The boy has a dog" until you've got it, and then "I have a husband" and "I have a cat" introduce the first-person singular form of the verb, also without telling you, or asking you to memorize a conjugation. In fact, you're never shown a verb table, or how to decline nouns, adjectives, or pronouns. Nobody tells you the rules, and nobody tells you the exceptions; you just have to figure it out by making mistakes and puzzling over the correct answer. For someone who has studied languages the traditional way, I found myself doubting I was learning anything except how to say inane and useless things like "My pet is a hamster."

So at first I got frustrated, which is why I switched languages. In the meantime, I ordered a modern Greek grammar book and a small dictionary/phrase book. After I finished the Latin lessons, I went back to the Greek. To my surprise, I actually remembered some of what I'd learned, and then started being a bit more methodical about it: writing notes, keeping lists of vocabulary, and making flash cards. I also started studying the basic grammar, just to get a better idea what the rules were -- sentence order, for one thing, and pitfalls for English speakers like the fact that modern Greek requires articles before most nouns, including first names: "the Eleni" instead of just "Helen."

In Duolingo, the first two practice levels (of five) for each skill or subject area don't require you to do difficult listening exercises, or write much Greek translation either from written English sentences, or from audio Greek. I progressed through two and a half checkpoints, going through the first two levels of each skill. Then, doubting myself, I went back to the beginning and started trying to complete all five levels -- and it got a lot harder, very fast. However, my retention started to improve, and my listening skills took a leap forward: modern Greek pronunciation is completely different from what I had learned from my classics profs.

So, am I learning, with my 15 minutes a day? Yes, slowly, just because I've been at it for a long time now. I'm not impressed with my concentration or overall effort. It's the persistence and repetition that have paid some benefits.

I remember at the beginning of the pandemic how people were saying, "Oh, with all this time, we ought to be able to write that novel, learn a language, study classical guitar, read Ulysses or War and Peace..." and then, when our concentration went to hell, our sleep became terrible, we fought with our partners or kids or became consumed by loneliness and confinement, and we didn't even know what day it was -- that was when we got obsessed by the news and started riding a rollercoaster of anxiety and depression, amid other days that felt more normal and optimistic. A lot of us felt guilty or confused about why we couldn't seem to do the things that we thought we were going to do -- I had hoped to finish writing a book, for instance, and I'm nowhere close. A friend sent me an article written by someone funny, who was trying to express her depression and lack of motivation, and she describes herself telling her therapist, 'I feel like I should be learning Portuguese" and the therapist says, "Don't you DARE learn Portuguese!" And no matter how well we may have managed in one area, I bet most of us feel like that in many others, and wish somebody would just say, "Don't you dare...!" and let us off our self-hung hook.

My sister-in-law, a retired academic who's gifted in languages, is studying Arabic for the third time in her life, and this time it's finally taking hold. She's taking a rigorous online course, and working on it for many many hours a day, and I think that's fantastic. But I can't do that, and don't really want to. Fifteen minutes a day works for me, and I've made enough progress that when I see a Greek sentence I know the parts of speech I'm seeing, even if I don't know the words, and my vocabulary is growing. Will I ever use it? Who knows. I think what this exercise has shown me is that the little-bit-every-day approach does pay off over time in language study, just as it does in a drawing practice. A seemingly daunting but desired goal is broken down into manageable little bits, and you commit to it, try not to get discouraged and give up, and eventually you see you've actually made progress. That's all.

But we're not all the same. Also at the beginning of the pandemic, someone created a humorous set of twelve staged photos showing people of different Zodiac signs reacting to the new reality. One person was in pajamas all day, another was happily boozing, another in a cleaning frenzy, and so on. And there was my sign, Virgo, looking neatly pulled together, at her desk, working away. Great. I'm not a believer in astrology, though I do have many of the characteristics thought to be "typical" for a Virgo. What I appreciated, besides the humor, was not that Virgos are organized, annoying workaholics, but that it illustrated so clearly how different we all are -- a fact that's been borne out throughout this thing and that is totally OK. "Don't you dare learn Portuguese!" you Gemini - it will make you miserable!

So, I'm curious how it's played out for you. What has worked, and what hasn't? And are you beating yourself up or accepting yourself as you are, because, honestly, having compassion and gentleness for ourselves is the first and most important practice of all. Then, only then, maybe you can find 15 minutes a day to practice something else.

 

Fact vs Opinion

During a recent long drive, my husband and I listened to some podcasts. One of them was an interview with a researcher from the Pew Research Center, talking about a recent survey Pew has conducted to determine Americans' ability to distinguish factual statements from opinion statements.

The differentiation between factual and opinion statements used in this study – the capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence – is commonly used by others as well, but may vary somewhat from how “facts” are sometimes discussed in debates – as statements that are true.¹ While Americans’ sense of what is true and false is important, this study was not intended as a knowledge quiz of news content. Instead, this study was intended to explore whether the public sees distinctions between news that is based upon objective evidence and news that is not.

The statements presented were political; five were written to appeal more to Democrats and five appealed more to Republicans. A lot of testing was done beforehand to make sure that respondents understood exactly what was being asked of them:

In the survey, respondents read a series of news statements and were asked to put each statement in one of two categories:

1. A factual statement, regardless of whether it was accurate or inaccurate. In other words, they were to choose this classification if they thought that the statement could be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

2. An opinion statement, regardless of whether they agreed with the statement or not. In other words, they were to choose this classification if they thought that it was based on the values and beliefs of the journalist or the source making the statement, and could not definitively be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

So what were the results?

...a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong.

Do you find that disturbing? I do. But I'm not surprised, either.

The people who did the best on the test were those with a high level of political awareness (36% identified all five factual news statements) and those who were "digitally savvy" (44% identified all five opinion statements correctly.)

 And though political awareness and digital savviness are related to education in predictable ways, these relationships persist even when accounting for an individual’s education level.

And as you can imagine, political bias also played a part in skewing the responses. This was shown when respondents were matched with their party affiliations, and made clearer when they were asked if they agreed or not with the statements they called "opinion." But that really wasn't the entire point of the survey -- it was to determine if the respondents could distinguish between a factual statement and an opinion at all. That's a critical thinking skill. For instance:

Overall, Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side. Consider, for example, the factual statement “President Barack Obama was born in the United States” – one that may be perceived as more congenial to the political left and less so to the political right. Nearly nine-in-ten Democrats (89%) correctly identified it as a factual statement, compared with 63% of Republicans. On the other hand, almost four-in-ten Democrats (37%) incorrectly classified the left-appealing opinion statement “Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy” as factual, compared with about half as many Republicans (17%).

and further:

When Americans see a news statement as factual, they overwhelmingly also believe it to be accurate. This is true for both statements they correctly and incorrectly identified as factual, though small portions of the public did call statements both factual and inaccurate.

 

This is a failure of the educational system, and it certainly has a profound effect on electoral politics, as well as explaining some of the reasons why we're in this current predicament. People without critical thinking skills can be easily and successfully manipulated, as they are now being, by politicians, foreign governments, and biased media. The truly frightening part is how long it would take to correct such a failure - and how little political will there is, and has been, for an educated, critical, and independent electorate.

If you want to try the test yourself, it's online here.

 

Patience

Rough surf at Block Island. Fountain pen, grey ink, 8.5" x 5.5" on beige toned paper. First stage.

I was curious whether it would be possible to render such a complicated scene in pen and ink, without washes or color. It's difficult! This was the first state of the drawing. Later I added some white and brown colored pencil to increase the tonal range, and take advantage of the toned paper used for the drawing; I think I like it better as a drawing without, but the white makes it easier to "read" the scene. I'm not sure if the Block Island scene will end up as a painting or print or series of drawings, but I'm glad I did this study.

Rough surf at Block Island. Fountain pen, grey ink, colored pencil. 8.5" x 5.5" on beige toned paper. Second stage.

The real challenge -- and absorbing pleasure -- is to start with a blank page and, an hour or two later, see a depiction of the scene. That's the magic of drawing; it's what attracted me as a child and why I've kept drawing all my life. You're creating something from nothing, only through the work of your eye and your hand. Drawing can be so many things, done in so many styles. Sometimes I like to make a careful detailed study in order to help myself see what's actually there, where the structure and form lie, and so I can later make decisions about what to emphasize or leave out. But there is also genuine pleasure in the act of drawing itself - watching the tool move across the paper, seeing the marks emerge under your hand, feeling the tooth of the paper or its smoothness, watching shapes and forms develop, the unconscious process of making decisions as you work. It makes me angry when I think how many teachers and critics have disparaged students' abilities and their innate love of drawing, often discouraging them forever, and both forced students into particular styles or taken talented students apart for drawing in their own way. (My friend, the illustrator Priya Sebastien has recently written about this in her own life.) Drawing should be about joy and discovery, concentration and pleasure. It should be personal. It's so elemental, too, so fundamentally human - as the earliest cave paintings show us. How can anyone be so arrogant as to say, "this is the right way to draw, this is wrong?" And what harm they do!

Jose Maria Velasco, View of Chiquihuite Hill, watercolor on paper.

I've been inspired recently by looking closely at the work of Jose Maria Velasco (1840-1912) the legendary 19th. C. Mexican landscape painter. His drawings, watercolors and paintings are all marked by careful observation, immaculate draftsmanship, and patience -- while never losing sight of the whole, and as I stood in the gallery, moving closer and further away, what struck me the most was the extraordinary patience it must have taken for him to get it right: not just the details in the drawing, but the tonality, the exact precision of the colors he mixed. Each time I go to Mexico City I visit the National Gallery in order to see these paintings again: they remain fresh, alive, vibrant, and beautiful - even though they are very much in the academic tradition.

Jose Maria Velasco, Mexican landscape and detail, oil.

So many of us have lost that ability to be patient, either with our eyes or with our tools, perhaps because of the premium that has been placed on spontaneity and originality in modern art, and on speed and output in modern life in general. What we forget is that even the great innovators, like Picasso, were also great draftsmen, and they didn't acquire the skill to innovate, play, invent, and adapt without learning to see, and to draw extremely well. Patient, careful observation is the foundation of the most memorable art, from the great masters to Lucien Freud. You have to see first, and drawing is a way to see fully. To do that, you have to settle down for a while, a good long while, and put in the time. Then you can let it go into abstraction, allow your emotional response to dominate -- whatever is right for you at that time, with that subject. But if you don't know what an eye, or a fish, or a particular rock looks like to begin with, how are you ever going to capture its essence, let alone distort it at will?

Jose Maria Velasco, Rocks, oil study.

I say this because patience has always been a problem for me, in art, in practicing the piano, in slowing down enough to read carefully. I absolutely refused to play scales or etudes on the piano or flute, and my technique has always been weak as a result. In other areas, calligraphy for instance, I was willing to write pages and pages of examples. Some of the problem is just my impatient nature, my tendency to get bored, and an innate ability to "get by" on less-than-full attention. Some of it is the preference for expressive brushwork or an energetic line -- or sight-reading a new piece of music. Some of it is restlessness: the internal desire to move on to the next thing when the first one isn't finished. At the same time, I'm capable of being very attentive and patient when I remember to be, or when I insist on it for myself. I'm always glad when I give myself an exercise in slowing down, because I always learn something valuable and notice things I'd otherwise miss. Drawing is the back-to-basics practice that is the foundation for everything else. My friends who are professional orchestra players still practice every day; I need to draw every day too.

Vincent Van Gogh, A Fishing Boat at Sea, pen and ink, 1888.

The sketchbooks of great draftsmen are always inspiring - I think of Turner, Whistler, Van Gogh, Sargent, Winslow Homer. Because they were working more quickly than in the studio, their drawings often contain an energy, embodied in the line or the brushstroke, that is as palpable as the wind. Yet, they had the skill, honed by years of practice, to use every minute well, through patient concentration, and I don't think they saw their studies as "lesser" works. Sargent, who made his living from society portraits, once said that his true legacy would be his watercolors, and that is proving to be the case. Van Gogh's drawings of landscapes, trees, and gardens are every bit as moving to me as his paintings. And when I stand in a museum in front of one of these drawings or watercolor studies, I also feel myself, and my connection with all the other artists who have also faced a scene and the next blank page.

J.M. Turner, Storm at Sea, watercolor without pencil underdrawing.

 

 

 

Earth Day

Today I've been thinking back to the very first Earth Day in 1970. I was a senior in high school, and on that day we went over for a program at the new Rogers Environmental Education Center that was being built in my rural central New York town. It was an entirely new concept: an "environmental education center" under the auspices of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, built on property that had once been a state "game farm" raising pheasants, quail, turkeys and other game birds for release on state lands for hunting. During my childhood, this was a place we went for picnics and to see the enormous native trout in the concrete ponds, feed the wild ducks, keeping a safe distance from mated pairs of Canada geese protecting their offspring, and wander around the cages that housed displays of "fancy" pheasants, game birds, and screeching peacocks.

On Earth Day, our class heard about concepts like recycling, sustainability, organic gardening, environmental pollution, and ecology, that were actually relatively terms at that time. The presenter was a charismatic state field biologist named Herm Weiskotten who had been hired as the center's first environmental educator. I loved everything I heard, and admired him, and that summer and for all the summers and some vacations through university I worked at the center as an intern. For two years after graduating I worked full-time as a naturalist and artist/exhibit and graphic designer under the CETA program, sharing an office with Herm, who had become my mentor, teacher, and friend. I was incredibly fortunate to know him and work so closely with him; he taught me a great deal, gave me confidence, and steadfastly encouraged me in my art and my love of the natural world. We went all over New York State together, laying out nature trails -- another new thing at the time -- and talking. I was responsible for sketching and drawing the illustrations for trail guides and exhibits, but Herm and I also shared a great love for native plants, especially the so-called primitive plants like ferns, mosses, horsetails, lichens and liverworts, and we searched together for rare species. During those years I'd work all day, come home, cook dinner for myself, and spend the evening in solitude practicing drawing and teaching myself how to paint detailed watercolors.

The field guide in the top picture was his. He gave it to me after it fell into a stream once when we were down in some gorge looking for limestone-loving ferns. The fern I've laid on the cover has always been pressed between its pages - it's an ebony spleenwort from one of those excursions. I took the book off the shelf today to see if it had Herm's name in it -- it doesn't -- but that's his handwriting inside the back cover: a note about where the species on pg 112 -- the silvery spleenwort, Athyrium thelypteroides -- was to be found.

He was born in England in 1922, orphaned, and adopted by American parents. He died in 1977 of a sudden, massive heart attack in his sleep; we had spoken by phone the night before with no hint of any serious problem, though he had had heart issues for a number of years. Now, almost ten years older than he was when he died, I still think of him nearly every day, and when I'm in the woods I feel his presence; I've sometimes wondered if his was a soul that didn't depart but has always stayed here, whether as a protective spirit or simply because he loved the earth too much to leave. I should write more about him someday -- there are hundreds of stories -- but I'm not sure I will, or really want to.

This warped and water-stained book is precious to me because it's one of the very few mementos I have. I have only a couple of photographs, none particularly good. The first gift he ever gave me was a paperback copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac; he also gave me a large book of American Wildflowers. But mostly we constantly brought each other interesting things we'd found: fossils, rocks, bones, wildflowers, feathers. Not long before he died, he showed up at my parents' home at the lake -- I had moved to New England -- with a couple of Iroquois arrowheads that he said he wanted to give my mother and me - he loved to roam the freshly-plowed fields by the Chenango River after work, and often participated in archaeological digs in the area, looking for artifacts. But that's it. The most important things were the intangible ways he helped me discover and be myself.

How would Herm feel about our earth today? I hate to even think about that question. He'd be happy for the strides we've made in sustainability, recycling, organic farming and local food, waste disposal, and certain resources that have been protected and cleaned up. He'd be sick about the decline of species, blatant disregard for biodiversity, about genetic engineering, continued pesticide overuse, and all the abuses of creationism and non-science -- but most of all about climate change. He would despise the politicians and their wars, deplore religious fundamentalism of all kinds, and be dismayed about the refugees. He'd also be sad to see that New York State has closed all their popular and well-attended environmental centers, which educated two generations of students and teachers, for lack of funds and, frankly, lack of political will and commitment.

So much of my art and spirit spring from nature, my first and purest love. In much of my work, I realize I'm simply trying to say "Look!" with the same wonder and appreciation I did when leading people on nature walks, years ago. I was in love with the natural world even when I was a little girl; my mother and grandmother and aunts loved the outdoors and knew a lot about it. But it was Herm who gave me greater knowledge, a voice, and new ways to communicate what was inside me, and what was important. I thought I wanted to be a field biologist myself, for a long time, but my creative side won out; that's fine. But there's so much work to do, and so little time left; I feel the urgency, and the call to try harder -- those of us who are still here.

 

A sunrise on New England, and on some creative lives

We've just come back from a short, happy visit to the area on the Vermont-New Hampshire border where we used to live. How different it is from Quebec, and from this big international city! And how utterly familiar. We stayed with family, attended a twenty-year dinner given by our longtime client for their ongoing project, saw friends, negotiated with a local bookstore, and spent some time at AVA Gallery and Arts Center where I used to be quite involved on the board, the education committee, and as an artist. It has grown so much, with an expanded facility and program; classes and open studios for adults and children; its own green-certified building (a renovated factory) now filled with artists' studios as well as galleries, a media lab, a library, and wonderful teaching spaces. I was so delighted to see the most recent changes, visit my old friends there, and felt a small glow of pride at having been a part of it during the early years when survival was tenuous. And - especially good news - my husband will be having an exhibition there from April 17 - May 20, this spring!

A great photo from the AVA Gallery website

What I saw at the art center these past few days were art classes of senior citizens, developmentally-disabled people, and children -- not just motivated artistic adults -- all having fun, supporting each other, and being encouraged to make art, to be creative, to express themselves. I met some of the students, and heard first-hand how their lives had changed -- they were eager to talk about it. I was really moved, and powerfully reminded how important the arts have always been to me, and how much of a difference organizations like this can make. I talked with our longtime friends Murray Ngoima, who has taught there for ages, and Bente Torjusen, who has directed the organization for more then 25 years.

"I see the desire to be creative all the time among readers of my blog," I said. "People often write to me and tell me they have been encouraged by my writings about my own artistic process to get out their own paints again, or try writing poetry. That encourages me to keep writing about this and sharing my own work, but it also proves to me what I've always believed: that everyone is creative. It makes me sad that so many people feel reticent or even afraid to return to something they once loved or were attracted to, because they were discouraged in the past, or gave it up for one reason or another, or think if they can't achieve on some higher level it isn't worth it."

"Exactly!" Bente said. "'Compare yourself to yourself!' That way, people can just get on with it, and claim a part of themselves that they've forgotten or neglected -- and find community and happiness along the way. It actually transforms lives -- we see it here all the time."

Great Teachers

In case some of you haven't already discovered Jonathan's blog (and bookmarked it in your feed readers!), he's just written and illustrated a new post about a great teacher from his past. Since I know many of you are also great teachers, or are eternally grateful to those you had, you might enjoy it.

A Plea Against Anxiety

Yesterday morning I sat in the waiting room of the clinic where I have my annual medical exams. Something had changed since my last visit: a huge black television monitor occupied one wall, with the channel tuned to CNN.

It was impossible to ignore; the small waiting room had been turned into a screening room, where even patients who didn't want to watch were forced to listen. In the space of just a few minutes, I heard commentators speculate that this might be the day that North Korea decided to launch a missle. I heard reports of a new, deadly strain of bird flu in China, and an outbreak of meningitis among gay men in Los Angeles.  There was discouraging discussion about the gun control bill, and a story that parents in Japan are starting to refuse to allow their children to come to the U.S. for university study, because of a perception that the country is becoming too dangerous.

A white-coated tecnician came into the room to get a cup of coffee just as the meningitis story was playing; the screen showed large electron-micrographs as the journalist's voice intoned the latest statistics. Oh dear, said the man, turning to me with a dismayed look on his face. He stood for a few minutes, riveted to the screen, and then walked out the door to begin his day.

My doctor came to the door and called my name; I was glad to escape. But during the morning I had to come back to the waiting room several times, between visits to the nurse for blood work, an EKG, and various other appointments. Each time, I watched the behavior of the other people in the room, all of whom would turn to face the TV, shaking their heads at each grim, frightening story. Last year, most of them were absorbed in their cell phones. I looked for a magazine or newspaper; unlike former visits, this time there was only one, an old issue of Vanity Fair; instead I pulled a book out of my pack, but it was very difficult to concentrate on the words.

Finally I turned to one of the other women and said, "I'm American, and really, this is part of what I came to Canada to escape."

As it turned out, she was originally American too, from North Carolina, but we had a pretty different take on things. She was conservative, I more liberal. While I objected to being force-fed anxiety by inflammatory stories in the media, she insisted it was "important to be informed." "I'm really worried when I go to the U.S. now," she said. "If I go to a shopping center across the border I really look around me at the people; it seems like anything could happen. Everyone has guns." Well, yes, I agreed, many people do, and I think that's a big problem. But you have to look at the statistics as well; your chance of being killed in a Wal-Mart in Burlington, Vermont, is not extremely high.

We both finished our appointments and went home, where in the afternoon we learned what had happened in Boston, and the cycle of horror, speculation, analysis, and fear began spinning all over again.

I don't want to add yet another voice to that sad and mostly-well-meant cacophony. I've spent many days of my life in Boston, and my heart goes out to the people of that city. If there is something concrete I can do to help, I will do it.

What I've been thinking about is the television in the waiting room, a Canadian waiting room, that once was a quiet place where people read, or talked to a companion, or even simply sat and looked out the window. Its presence seems to me an ominous symbol of something that has gone very wrong in most western societies: our inability to be with ourselves, to cope with the essential human condition of solitude, especially in situations that cause our anxiety to rise. It concerns me that, in our secular, post-liberal-arts, technological, perpetually-connected society, so little effort goes into teaching children how to be alone, showing them the richness and solace of time spent with nature, with the arts and handcrafts, with books and music, with oneself walking in a city or sitting on a bench: eyes open, ears open, mind and heart awake to the dance of life flowing around us.

When I return to the United States, as I did just last week, I'm always struck by the palpable level of general anxiety, so much greater than it is here in Quebec. But is that anxiety, and the corresponding reactiveness -- even in the wake of tragedies such as have been experienced in the past decade -- justified? In today's New York Times, University of Maryland criminologist Gary LaFree states, “I think people are actually surprised when they learn that there’s been a steady decline in terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1970.” Speaking of both domestic and foreign plots, he noted that there were approximately 40 percent fewer attacks in America during the ten years after 9/11 than there had been in the previous decade. (LaFree is director of the highly-regarded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which studies terrorism and keep a Global Terrorism Database. He adds a note that nearly half the worldwide attacks, and 1/3 of those in the U.S., have never been solved.)

However, I think the media bears a large responsibility for fanning the flames of American anxiety.  Supposed neutral channels like CNN feed viewers an endless diet of anxiety-producing stories, while the left and right square off in loud, combative talk shows and news hours, each side trying to out-shout the other. Television is a very powerful medium. Is it any wonder that so many people feel under attack, vulnerable, and constantly anxious, worrying about what is going to happen to them or to their loved ones? It it any wonder that they feel like the entire world is taking sides, at war, that it's us-against-them, myself against the potential unknown assalilant, intruder, terrorist, crazy person lurking in every community? Furthermore, we know that violence begets violence, that copycat crimes proliferate, and that what a lot of perpetrators want the most is publicity.

If the U.S. wants to worry about drugs and terrorism slipping across its porous northern border, then I am concerned about the insidious infiltration of this kind of secular preaching, these incessant sermons of anxiety and fear originating from the south. And much more than that, I wonder if those of us who have chosen to live our lives differently can perhaps be more vocal and intentional about why, and how. The world has always been dangerous for a vast majority of its citizens, but we in the west have been able to ignore that too long. Living positively, with awareness and joy in each day -- in spite of the possibility of death, which can and does happen anywhere, anytime -- is actually possible, as our brothers and sisters in war-torn, poverty-ravaged societies can teach us. And to look closer to home on this sad day: who knows better the fullness of solitude, or the potential triumph of the human spirit, than the long-distance runner?

The 10,000 Hour Rule, and a Concert

Wednesday night we went to an event I'd been anticipating for weeks: violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, performing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the MSO. Mutter, a former child prodigy, now in her mid-40s, is one of only a handful of top-flight violin soloists in the world, but it seems as if she's as well-known for her long hair and signature strapless gowns as for her virtuosic playing. I heard her play once before, maybe ten years ago, in a much more intimate concert of violin sonatas that moved me a great deal; her recent recordings of Mozart have been flawless, but I wasn't sure what to expect last night.

I certainly didn't expect to be blown away by her playing, but that's what happened.

The form-fitting mermaid-like outfit (she wore the CD-cover dress the first night, a blue-grey one the second) was beautiful but ceased to be a distraction after the first few bars, when it became all about the music. The concentration and intensity she brought to the performance was captured in the photo La Presse ran with its review, but that's all the more remarkable when you consider the fact that she's been touring all over Europe and America this season, playing this same piece over and over. The ability to be "on" and give 110% night after night has to be one thing that separates the top performers from the next-lower tier of simply exceptional players. Of course, everyone has "off" nights, or "just so-so" nights. I've heard a number of acclaimed soloists perform and not been touched or excited at all - the performance here by Hilary Hahn last year was one of those; I also felt very lukewarm about a performance by Emmanuel Ax; by contrast I've heard some fantastic performances by young and unknown musicians. But the point is that you can't sustain a concert career at Mutter's level and not give extraordinary performances continually and reliably.

Sitting between my husband and my dear friend Jon, a composer and professional musician, I was spellbound, not only by the lightening tempi she chose for the first and third movements, but by the range of emotion and tone she brought forth from her instrument - undoubtedly one of the two Stradivarius violins she owns. The orchestra played very well too; Mutter hadn't been in Montreal for 20 years, and I hope she enjoyed the warmth of the audience's appreciation.

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Later the three of us were talking about Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and his "10,000 hour rule" - that in order to master a field, people have to have practiced it for 10,000 hours. Noodling around the web for other people's takes on this idea, I see that the rule works out to 24 hours a day for a year and 3 months (think of new parents); 8 hours every single day for three years and a half; or 3 hours of daily practice - 21 hours a week - for 10 years.

As you might expect, I'm skeptical: it's a catchy idea that sells books and creates good fodder for blog discussion, but so much depends on how we define "mastery", and on the individual combinations of quality instruction, inherent talent, personal discipline (all practice hours are not equal), the level of feedback one receives...and on and on. There's no way that every aspiring violinist can become an Anne-Sophie Mutter on 3 hours a day for 10 years, and plenty of people who've put in that level of effort only to become highly-accomplished amateurs.

But I do think Gladwell makes a good point about the investment of time that's required to become good at anything. Thinking back over my own life, I decided I've certainly put in 10,000 hours or more of musical practice during the 50 years between age 5 and 55, but they've been split over choral singing, piano, flute, and voice training -- which has made me into a good, skilled, all-around amateur, but not nearly at the level of accomplishment or ease as people who've concentrated one discipline only and made it their life's focus. The most progress I ever made in music was during a period of four years, as an adult, when I was taking lessons from a very good teacher and practicing an hour every day: but that's only 1,440 hours. By contrast, my college roommate, a highly-accomplished piano major, practiced more like 4-5 hours every day during the four years of university - 7,200 hours - and that followed many years of long daily practice. It's a pretty big difference.

In other areas of my life, the most sustained effort has certainly been in my profession of graphic design. In writing, starting from a fairly skilled level, I began writing much more seriously at age 40 and told myself it would take ten years of daily disciplined effort to be good at it. That turned out to be just about exactly right, though of course, in writing as in any art, you never "arrive" at a fixed point and stop there.

What about your life: where have you put in the most effort, the greatest number of hours? Do you agree with Gladwell's "rule?"

(I realize, amusingly, that one of the things I do best, and most easily, is cook. (Let's call it 350 days per year, 2 hours per day, for 35 years - a mere 25,200 hours!)

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I admired Mutter's playing tremendously, and have some sense of what it has taken for her to achieve this, but I also realize it comes at a very high price. My friend Jon remarked, after the concert, "This is probably not very much fun for her," going on to describe the travel, the demands on her time, the social obligations, the fatigue, the repetition: he knows. We see the glamour and the fame, but she was a prodigy who stopped going to school at 13 and never had a normal childhood, went on to rapid stardom, international touring and recording; had two children, lost her first husband early to cancer, and has recently divorced from Andre Previn, her much-older second husband...it's not a life most people would choose or even be able to handle. On the other hand, for those moments of intensity and peak performance, there is no substitute - and I think she must know she is giving people like me a great gift. How do you ever quantify such things?

Changing Lives, One at a Time

My husband received this letter today:

"I read with sadness in my private school's alumni bulletin of your father's recent passing. Here below, for your family, is a personal reminiscence of this unusual, lovely man.

I studied Arabic and Near Eastern Studies with your father in 197x, and I remember, as if it were yesterday, sitting with our small class in his home at the school. As class began, he insisted we have tastes of exotic delicacies he offered us on a tray. When we protested we were not hungry (this was an evening class, after dinner) he rejoined, in his musical singsong voice with a twinkle in his eye, "One does not eat because one is hungry, one eats because food is offered." We dutifully partook of a morsel or two before delving into the dramatic history of this distant part of the world none of us had ever seen.

Thanks to your father, the Middle East began that year to open up in color and joy. Ever since it has seemed to me both human and accessible, even as the world news would have us believe it different and dangerous. I have never forgotten the warm way it was introduced to me.

My deepest sympathies and gratitude to all your family."

(New readers who aren't familiar with the stories of my father-in-law posted here over the past few years will find them collected, in reverse chronological order, under the title "The Fig and the Orchid.")