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WHAT DO I KNOW – February 2007
Chapter 1
What Do I Know
Long ago, one of our young daughters brought her aunt a small stuffed animal. “Hi, I’m Fluffy,” the animal said in a tiny voice. “Well, what do you know, Fluffy?” the obliging aunt replied. The little animal thought for a moment and then said softly, “Hardly anything.” The following is more about what I think and feel than about what I know.
My wife once heard a preacher implore, "Help me, Oh Lord, to be tolerant of other people, no matter how wrong I know them to be!" She also had an acquaintance in college who said, "I'll listen to you, but you can't make me change my mind." I have a friend who wrote, “It may not be possible for people to understand each other." Evidently sharing ideas isn't as simple as we might hope. Nonetheless, these are some of mine. I'd be intrigued and honored to hear yours.
I went to school. I have a B.A. in American literature, a Master of Library Science degree, and a Master of Sacred Theology from an Episcopal seminary. I was a graduate student in religious studies for several years in the mid-1960’s. Although I have a poor memory, I still recall some of what I learned. Years ago when an otherwise well-informed acquaintance claimed the ocean was 100 miles deep I was able to correct him with confidence, although he still didn’t believe me.
The chief trouble with my formal education was its lack of context. In my freshman year at college I took a required survey of Western Civilization, a course I might now enjoy. Back then it was a continuation of the workbook exercises we had in high school. Facts were presented to us, and we wrote them down. No one explained when or where the past began, what the sources of our knowledge of it were, or how much we thought we knew of what we thought there was to know. We were given no sense of participation in a common search for knowledge. It was many years before I learned this might even be a possibility.
My science courses were better at orienting me in time and space. I had assumed that doctors had a fairly good understanding of human physiology, on the order of what a skilled mechanic would know about automobile engines, and that they could fix most problems. I learned in college biology that I was wrong about this. Biology was presented as a series of facts as well but with more enthusiasm and humility than history had been taught.
It was apparent to me even then that understanding and wisdom had as much to do with experience as with formal education. When I was in the army I overheard a conversation between two young men from rural Tennessee who were as limited in their perspective as anyone I’d ever known. They were talking about the one thing they understood, hunting and camping in the woods near their homes. On this subject they were eloquent. They could have spoken for the Nature Conservancy. They were Henry Thoreau and John Muir communicating in a vocabulary of a hundred words. This kind of knowledge is hard to come by second hand.
It’s unfair to blame my seminary professors for their narrow view, as that was their business, but I think now of how rich a study of the bible could have been, in the full context of middle-eastern and Mediterranean history and philosophy. We might have learned that the earliest civilizations were henotheistic worshippers of Mother Nature who found spirit in all things but favored the one or more who seemed to serve them best. Why not assume that a deep faith will hold up in a broad view? Graduate school was better, but I was no longer sure of what I wanted to know.
I’ve read thousands of books since college. In the army I found that a paperback fit perfectly into the pockets of my field jacket. One book to occupy that pocket was a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim that I found in the barracks at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I read it standing in the chow line. When I finished a page I’d tear it out and hand it to my friend Doug, who was in line behind me. The idea of Jim, a young man with talent in the abstract, spoke to both of us. Doug was the son of a physics professor. He’d written his term papers sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium and had flunked out of college. He spent a lot of time on the basketball court at Fort Sill. Shooting baskets was his only real skill. Doug lost the chance to go to Europe with our missile battalion because he’d turned in his boots for replacements and had only a single pair when men were being selected. We’re the creatures of nature, nurture, and other factors too obscure to calculate. The last time I saw Doug he was sitting despondently on his duffle bag at Oro Grande, New Mexico. I heard later that he was recruited by the C.I.A., which could have been a good match. Oro Grande is mentioned in Cormac McCarthy’s The Cities of the Plain, and probably nowhere else.
I’ve carried a book ever since. Always having a book with you is the best advice I can offer anyone. It passes the time usefully, and it can be helpful in making friends. My mother-in-law once asked my wife why I always brought a book when we came to visit. It was just a habit by then, but I can see why it bothered her. -- Reading is the most exciting activity I know of. I’ll be ready for large print and talking books when I need them. I recently read Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, a history of Western culture from 1500 to the present. Barzun was ninety three when he wrote this fat book after a lifetime of scholarship. I read The Modern Mind, an intellectual history of the 20th century, by Peter Watson, a chatty biographical encyclopedia of twentieth century thinkers. Harold Bloom’s Genius, a few pages each about a hundred dead geniuses from Homer to Ralph Ellison, inspires me to visit writers I’ve ignored. I enjoy surveys like these. They’re entertaining, and they give me a sense of accomplishment although it doesn’t last. A few years ago I found a terrific reference book on the great men and women of the nineteenth century at the library where I was working. Reading it ten minutes each day while I ate my sandwich, it took several months to get through it. Every one of the major nineteenth figures was included, but the only name I can remember now is the unforgettable British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
I’ve finally decided what I should have done with my life. This is a question that has troubled me in recent years. I had realized that if I were somehow able to start life again with the energy and prospects of a young man, I still wouldn’t know what to be. Now I know. I’d like to have been an intellectual historian and have taught a course on the ideas of the last two centuries in their full social and scientific context. I doubt that I had either the mind or the stamina to carry this off, but that’s not the point. I wasn’t a physician either, or a physicist, a professional artist or poet, a builder of bridges, or a leader of men, but now I know I probably didn’t want to be any of those. I wanted to be Jacques Barzun and Harold Bloom. I also wanted to play the violin. I had even less talent for this, but it’s what I would have liked to have done if I could.
I’m sure that not even Professor Barzun, who seemed quite modest when we saw him on C-Span a while ago, would claim to know terribly much. Who but the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men or even what evil, good, or beauty really are? Who knows why there is something and not nothing and whether it makes a difference? Who knows anything really, or what knowing means? I’ll keep at it, though. We had a neighbor once whose license plate read “ITRYD.” Considering his particular circumstances, we found this sobering.
Chapter 2
Who Am I
This isn’t an autobiography. I woke up at 3:00 am a few months ago and briefly thought of writing one. My life hasn’t been significant in its broad outline, but I’ve paid enough attention to the details that they might make an amusing book. I saw immediately, however, that even if I were willing to reveal myself, I couldn’t write so openly about my friends and family. My book would have to be one–sided, like Galileo’s daughter’s correspondence with her father. It’s a wonder that anyone can write an interesting autobiography without destroying all their human relationships. Perhaps no one can. I have nothing bad to say about my friends and relatives, but I feel sure they would all prefer to be left with their own self image. My wife and children are more important to me than anything else. As Calvin Trillin says, they’re either the center of your life or they aren’t. But this essay isn’t about them.
Who we are is not the same as what we’ve done, which is mostly what biography is about. Not surprisingly, I don’t really know who I am. I understand that my mind is a bundle of feelings and perceptions, produced by billions of nerve cells sending simultaneous messages which add up to a conscious memory in a way that’s marginally more complex than in the mind of a laboratory rat. Charles Sanders Pierce wrote, "Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.” A lovely thought, if not an encouraging one. I can see that despite possessing a driver’s license and passport I’m a minor incident in the history of the universe. What is my significance compared with that of a rat, a rock, or the gypsy moth caterpillars that are eating our oak leaves?
My self-image has changed little since I was a teenager. I don’t feel old at 71, but neither do I feel like a completed project. We seem always to be on the way, and the destination remains distant and unknown. If anything is important it must be the journey or its direction. I have the sense of learning a little over time and perhaps of becoming a slightly better person. If these are illusions, they’re agreeable ones. Why it should matter that we become wiser or kinder is a question for another chapter.
I’ve tried to take reasonable care of my body. I liked playing baseball and football when I was a young, decades after the playing fields of Eton had lost their character building significance and shortly before Little League began to interfere too seriously with young lives. I enjoyed the feeling of physical abandon and of doing something as well as I could. Ice hockey was satisfying because we were safely bundled up and didn’t have far to fall. I’m sorry we didn’t play soccer or rugby in those days. I jogged for a few years in middle age. I still enjoy daily walks and working around the house. Bodies are pleasant to use so long as they work well. They aren’t nearly as interesting as minds and as reading, writing, listening to music, and conversation.
A few things have changed for me as a person, in addition to marriage and children. (Those are determining for most of us, or should be.) I was afflicted for much of my life with a debilitating shyness, what is now called social phobia. The fears have faded considerably over the past thirty years. I hope I still have enough timidity to keep from becoming obnoxious, but it isn’t crippling any more. This is a gift of time and perhaps the result of exposure to enough people to convince me that we are remarkably alike and that, in ordinary circumstances and with rare exceptions, we don’t need to fear one another.
Chapter 3
Religion
I remember waiting for Santa Claus and hearing what could have been his reindeer on the roof. Teeth left under my pillow were replaced with dimes, but I knew my parents were responsible. I prayed to Lady Luck when I wanted a fever just high enough to keep me home from school. Otherwise I was raised as an Episcopalian.
I never liked going to church. I was bored and uncomfortable in good clothes. The sermons were uninteresting, the music was dreary, and the largely nineteenth century hymns seemed corny. The odor of dust and varnish was depressing. Was it really that bad? It was. I attended a summer bible school at a Presbyterian church in Ferguson, Missouri when I was ten. The teacher was a nice man who ran a local electrical supply store. He and his daughter talked movingly about how Jesus had cured his sick wife and changed their lives. I didn’t doubt him, but I saw no significance for my own life in his experience.
Just before we moved to New York City, my grandparents took me on a seven week tour of the West in their 1940 Buick. I got up at dawn after we’d spent the night at the Pahaska Teepee Resort near the east entrance to Yellowstone Park and went outside alone. The bare peaks had caught the first rays of the sun, the only sound was of a mountain stream burbling in the tall pines below the cabin, and the air was electric with ozone. I felt suddenly that I was One-With-The-Universe. I was moved by this experience, but I didn’t think of it as religious. -- A few days later, in a restaurant in West Yellowstone, Montana I watched in amazement while a man slurped his soup. The next day, on my twelfth birthday in Pocatello, Idaho, I saw a boy my age in the row ahead of us at the movies put his arms around the girls sitting on either side of him. The world was full of wonders.
The year that I was thirteen we lived in Jackson Heights, New York. The Episcopal Young People’s Fellowship had square dancing once a week. I was in the choir and felt socially comfortable for the first time in my life, and the last time for many years.
I don’t know when or why I decided to become an Episcopal minister. Perhaps it had to do with the square dancing, or it may have seemed like a useful but not too difficult thing to do. I don’t believe I ever thought of it as having to do with God. How is that possible? You’re asking the wrong man. I baulked several times in school, once when I started college as a pre-med student and again at the end of my first year in seminary. After two years in the army, I returned to seminary and graduated.
Seminary was a great experience. I’ve often thought that everyone should have a chance to go. Our curriculum was artificially narrow, but somehow our studies touched on all of life, and we broadened the process at meals and late in the evenings at Walsh’s Bar and Grill. The world is the world whatever lens you view it through. -- One thing I learned in seminary is that we shouldn’t judge people. We do of course, and most people still seem to think we should, but we shouldn’t
A year and a half of the active ministry was sufficient. I did the job, and I didn’t dislike it. It just didn’t seem like what I ought to be doing. It might have turned out differently if the man I worked for, a decent but autocratic social conservative, had been more like clergymen I met later, but I doubt it. Years of volunteering in an upscale and liberal Philadelphia parish were a much better experience. Eventually the liberal rector left and was replaced by an evangelical who didn’t need my services. Except for the annual Christmas pageants we hadn’t been to church in years when we started attending a secular humanist Unitarian/Universalist Fellowship on Cape Cod in 1999.
One of my problems with religion was that I had always assumed that religious doctrines were intended to be understood as metaphorical, as poetry, and no more than our best but inadequate efforts at expressing the ineffable. My father, an Episcopalian in his own way, claimed to be a pantheist. I didn’t think much about this at the time, as he enjoyed making unlikely statements to prime a good discussion. In retrospect I believe he was serious. I may be a pantheist as well, believing, as Spinoza put it, in “God, or Nature”.
I have my religious villains, like Saint Paul (although according to Gary Wills I’m wrong about St. Paul), Torquemada, Pius XII, the last two popes, and Martin Luther, and heroes like Abelard, Isaac Luria, Maimonades, Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, and the original Jesus Christ. Mohammed and the Buddha sound like they may have been good guys, too, in context. When I first read the seven principles of the Unitarian/Universalists, they sounded like what I’d believed all my life. They’re about truth and freedom, kindness and respect, social justice and conscience. There are often letters in the UU Magazine objecting to the use of the “seven principles” as a quasi-creed. Maybe they’re prerequisites for being human. I don’t really consider myself a Unitarian anyway.
It’s hard to decide what to believe, which is what you have to do if beliefs don’t pop into your head or haven’t been put there by others. Karen Armstrong says the mark of an authentic religion is that it leads to acts of kindness and social justice, rather than to vague promises for the future after certain requirements are met.
. I have no sense of changing my mind over the course of my life. Do others feel that way? Is it because we don’t change, or because it’s easy to disguise the changes? What I think now is that life originated with the accidental replication of large protein molecules some two billion years ago, and that Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Einstein, and you and I are direct descendents. Mind and spirit are metaphors for molecular activity in the nervous systems of complex organisms. And yet our search for beauty, truth, justice, and personal salvation is fully meaningful. Paradox-R-us, and I see this paradox as daily life, the best there is, the worst there is, and all there is.
There was an interesting article in the Times a day or two ago, “More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will,” by John Horgan. He’s writing about new books by Daniel M. Wegner, a Harvard psychologist, “The Illusion of Conscious Will”, and “The Meme Machine,” by Susan Blackmore. The titles say it all. Free will, the self, and a belief in personal identity are occult concepts, epiphenomena. Will is not a force but a feeling, an “intention invention” that follows rather than precedes action. I remember using similar arguments against free will in a long running discussion with a friend at the age of seventeen. Of course none of this makes much difference to how we live. We all say, “feets do your stuff,” and they do it, and we take note of our progress. William James said the same in the 1890’s, and E.O. Wilson, the ant man and socio-biologist, says it in the 1990’s.
If I were God, and out of the bounty or emptiness of my heart I wanted companions with whom to share the good of life, I’d let it happen as it has, by replication of protein molecules, and I’d watch it unroll into the social concept of religion and the fragile emotions of free will and personal value and responsibility. Then I might feel then that I’d sponsored a true friend and not a pet rock. The Times recently reviewed a book about that too, “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society,” by David Sloan Wilson.
The Buddha, Jesus, Bach, Goethe, Keats, Thoreau, Cézanne, Schweitzer, Camus’s fictional Dr. Rieux, and even people I know personally have lived their lives more nobly and effectively than I. We’re all in the same business, however. I’d say I believe in God as much as anyone can or does. Thoreau says:--“A man of true religion finds his open temple in the whole universe….. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages…. We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. … Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.” I’d like to attend a Church in which I could join with kindred spirits in a liturgy of music, poetry, and prose that characterized and symbolized our common quest.
A friend, a clergyman my age and still active in the ministry, said to me the other day, “The members of the Nauset Fellowship are wonderful people, and the Chapel in the Pines is a rich and loving atmosphere, but no worship happens there, and I’m a worshipping man. I suppose that’s the heart of the matter. It occurred to me a few years ago that I had never really worshipped anything or anyone. I’d never even considered it. When I was more of a theist than I am now, I had frequent conversations with God, but more as with a friend and colleague that the Master of the Universe. I would have felt like a fool prostrating myself, and I assumed I would have been told to cut the comedy. I can’t cheer at football games. -- Just recently, though, I looked up “worship” in Websters New Collegiate Dictionary. The first definition is, “Courtesy or reverence paid to worth.” Now worth is something I could be quite courteous to.
My search for truth, such as it is, rides off in all directions. Like Karen Armstrong, a favorite writer of my wife’s and mine, I could say that I’m a “seeker.” Surely there are countless paths to enlightenment: reading, writing, making, talking, walking, caring, loving. All my life my various colleagues have accused me of chiefly amusing myself. I dispute this, but as Thoreau says, “Have the gods sent us into this world to do chores, hold horses, and the like, and not given us any spending money?”
Chapter 5
Nature
Most of the high points in my life seem to have involved nature. Even before my out-of-body experience with ozone intoxication in Wyoming I lay awake at dusk in my grandparents’ house in Florida, marveling at the silhouette of the long-needled pines against a turquoise sky. I fulfilled a dream in middle age by taking my children to see the great trees in Muir Woods, which I’d visited on my trip west at the age of twelve. The most beautiful place I’ve even been is the Florida Everglades at dawn. Cape Cod, where we’ve come to rest, has its own unmatched calm and beauty.
We are nature, just as we are the government. We participate in the whole apparatus of evolution along with the lab rats and fruit flies, and when we tweak any part of the biosphere it tweaks us back. Some of us don’t see this and continue to ship crude oil in single-hulled tankers, cut old growth forests, and burn fossil fuel as fast as we can extract it. Once, we believed we were created separately and put in charge of the rest of the creation. Lately we’ve begun to set ourselves apart from the rest of nature through science and technology. It’s not that the things we do, like putting chemicals in our food and pollutants in the air, living in air-conditioned houses, watering lawns, driving SUV’s, and splicing genes are “unnatural” acts. Nothing we do is unnatural, because there is only one nature. The point is that we can’t weasel out, for whatever we do will have its natural consequences.
Chapter 6
The Arts
I majored in English literature in college and took four years of French. I decided, for some reason, to take year-long surveys of both art history and music appreciation. These turned out to be my favorite courses. For 6 hours a week I sat in a darkened room and looked at slides or listened to music. The university gave an experimental humanities exam to all seniors the year I graduated. I might have been preparing for this test for four years. I smashed it and was very disappointed when I learned we wouldn’t be told our grades.
I’ve forgotten the details of most of what I learned about the arts in college. I feel bad about that, but there are advantages. I can tell myself that there may be some long forgotten scholarly justification for my tastes and preferences. At the same time I’m not burdened with the language and judgments of the past. I have a license to say, ‘I don’t know much about X, but I know what I like.’ Most of all, I have the pleasure of learning it all again.
I like a lot of things: most classical music and most plastic art from any time and place. I love ballet and enjoy some opera. I don’t feel that I have to like all of literature, surely no one does. I like poetry, although I don’t read much of it. I enjoy good movies which we almost never see. We watch the news and a little public TV. Television rarely seems to reward the time it takes. Sometimes music can carry you away and bring tears to your eyes. Prose and poetry can make your hair stand on end.
My son was involved in the theatre for a while. I mildly enjoy plays although I haven’t been to many in recent years. Drama was among the first arts (with the Greeks, or perhaps the cave dwellers) and remains the most significant. It’s how we explore the human condition in a far more elemental way than medicine, psychology, sociology, politics, etc.
Classical music has been very important to me since a high school friend sat me in front of his monaural co-axial speaker and blasted me with Shostokovitch’s tenth Symphony. Words about music seem particularly useless.
Trying to do something creative is even more satisfying than experiencing the work of others I write stories and novels, clumsy poems, essays, letters and email messages, and I often write down ideas and observations on life for no reason. I used to like writing computer programs and still like working around our house. Many people are creative in other ways, such as inventing gadgets and processes, helping people, teaching, running things, and raising consciousness and money for good causes.
Chapter 7
Writing
This is a long chapter because it’s mostly what I do these days. I know very little about writing, not formally at any rate. I’ve never taken courses or lessons. Recently I was in a writing group, and I welcome criticism from my few other readers. I don’t take all the advice that’s given to me. I’m not sure to what degree writing can be taught, but taking a course in creative writing might have forced me to begin writing sooner. All writers say the best advice is, “Just do it.” When I was ten, I told my father that I wanted to write a really good Hardy Boys story, and he said, as any parent would, "Why not write something of your own?" The normal reaction to this well meant advice was to write nothing for the next 40 years except school papers, sermons, computer instruction manuals, and articles for library journals. I daydreamed through high school in the easy going 'fifties, but I still thought I could write if I'd wanted to. However, as a sophomore at Rutgers, I had Paul Fussell for English. The future Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, author of scholarly studies, and of popular works such as the Dumbing of America, soon disabused me. What I've learned of writing since, I learned by composing guides and manuals for a boss who demanded clarity. My father and I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in 1954. I’ve read it several times, most recently to my son when he was six. What I particularly enjoyed in the Rings was the down to middle earth hobbits, fond of comforts, food, and gossip, and armed against monstrous evil with humor, kindness, and good sense. When I knew I couldn't read the Rings again for a few years and found nothing else quite like it, I decided to try some writing in homage to Tolkien and his wizardry. The rats may have stemmed from a Scientific American article which presented them as a highly intelligent and cooperative species, or from seeing rats at the Gloucester, Massachusetts waterfront at dusk. ("Hey, look at all the really big cats...") Wherever they came from, they became my hobbits, characters who didn't need to be drawn in the confusing detail that humans require, but who could embody generosity and humor, intellectual curiosity and respect for the natural world. I filled two spiral bound notebooks with the rats while riding on the Chestnut Hill Local in the mid-1980's. Then I bought a word processor. After I read the first chapter of the Waterrats to my son, he demanded that I read to him from the computer screen every evening what I had written that morning from 5 to 6 am. The story begins on Cape Cod and moves to an alternate world, with a topography and population to suit my fancy. When the Waterrats was finished, there seemed to be no reason not to try to sell it. I had sent a letter and sample chapters to fifteen publishers when Scribner’s Books for Young Readers asked to see the full manuscript. Scribner's said, encouragingly, that I had created "an engrossing imaginary world" with the Waterrats, but that a 700 page rat epic was too long for them to publish. They might, however, be interested in something of around 200 pages. I wrote Shadow Walkers over the next four months. The action takes place a few years before that of the Waterrats and is a less fantastic tale of small adventures on the rats' native Cape. I think of it as my Hobbit. I’ve written a number of novels since Shadow Walkers and made some initial effort to have them published but no effort in the last six or seven years. Writing is easy and pleasant. Marketing is hard and boring. The head of the business library at Penn once said I should sell my computer programs. “You’re the business guy,” I said. “You sell them, and I’ll split fifty-fifty.” He changed the subject. ------- I wrote a sequel to Shadow Walkers, Marshfield Manor, which I like even better. SYNOPSIS OF MARSHFIELD MANOR John, the youngest in a family of highly civilized Cape Cod water rats, survives a blizzard and feels a kinship with adventurous humans and a dog. Later, John takes a morning off from study to explore his surroundings and is seen by a curious boy. The rat and the boy meet again, on the Cape and in the nearby city, and eventually work together to save Marshfield Manor, a mysterious Colonial estate of historical and environmental importance. ----- John and his young companions go on a camping trip, escape from a snapping turtle, save a harbor from fire, and become trapped in the middle of an outdoor wedding. Partly because of his encounters with the boy, John and his brilliant and adventurous friend James decide to spend the summer in the city. Here, with John's resourceful cousins Hope and Larissa, they visit an art museum, rescue an old raccoon from the zoo, do historical research in the city library, and work together to solve the 200 year old mystery of Marshfield Manor in time to save it from demolition. ----- The rats are kind, curious, and energetic creatures, but they must overcome a long tradition of rodent caution to become so dangerously involved in human affairs. Throughout the story, thoughtful analysis alternates with humor and fast-paced action. Kindness, honesty, books and scholarship, hard work, and respect for the natural world are valued. ----- I’ve written some human novels too. The one I like best is RiverQuest. SYNOPSIS OF RIVERQUEST It's the spring of 1960. Kennedy is running for President, the cold war has come to Cuba, and Elvis Presley has been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army. Bill "Bayonne" Wilkie is just out of the army too, and he has to survive a summer in his old neighborhood before he starts college in the fall. ----- Bill has settled down to work in his father's motorcycle repair shop when he gets a call from a Miss Zimmer at the college admissions office. When he arrives on campus, he finds the young and attractive Rachel Zimmer being threatened by a handsome older man. Bill steps in. ----- Rachel has seen Bill's high school and army records, and he seems like the ideal person to help her with a serious problem. She has just received a check for $10,000 and an urgent entreaty from her Uncle, Egon von Schauss, a brilliant mathematician and a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps. He wants her to come to see him in Arizona, and not to come alone. Her phone calls to her aunt and uncle have gone unanswered. ----- Bill and Rachel fly to Arizona. With the help of Doc Engle, a friend of the von Schauss's and a fellow mathematician, they discover that her aunt and uncle have been kidnapped in an effort to make von Schauss reveal a series of immensely powerful computer algorithms. ----- Bill enlists the help of his friend Cookie, a black artist who was an army buddy in Germany. Jim Cook is a former Special Forces sergeant and, as Bill promises, practically a one-man army. ----- The chase leads Bill, Rachel, Doc, and Cookie to the Florida keys, back to the von Schauss's chalet in the Arizona mountains, and to a lakeside cabin in the Maine woods and involves violence, mystery, romance, and hide-and-seek with the F.B.I. and the K.G.B. ----- RiverQuest is suitable for age 13 and up. It contains occasional profanity, non-graphic violence, implied sex, and personal and social values. -------
Newhouse is a fictional biography of my father, who left me many thousands of pages of his writings and letters. It will be a long haul. Perhaps my son will have to finish it, but I’ve enjoyed working on it. It’s fictionalized but as accurate as I can make it up until the time of his heart attack at 59 in 1967. After that it’s part biography and part fantasy as I try to give him the sort of adventure I think He would have enjoyed. In the hospital Martin Newhouse meets an invented character, Kostas Kickapopolus, a professor at the local university and a Greek patriot, who unwittingly enlists Martin in his plotting against the military dictatorship of 1960’s Greece. I may have decided, however, to combine Newhouse with another, purely fictional novel about buried gold. I’m also working on a re-writing of the original Waterrats called The Makers. It covers only the middle portion, which takes place in another universe, but in the new version the familiar characters, Peter, Sara, Luc, John, etc. and some new ones, begin the story as young humans but are soon whisked to another world and another species and carry on as semi-willing rats in a rat world. I suppose I have recognized that although it may be easier to write about entirely imaginary creatures, I actually know more about humans and really need them to give a story depth. I have no idea whether this is a good book, but it’s one I want to write. It isn’t a children’s story, not that any of my books were meant to be for children exclusively. I may never finish it.
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The Chaplain and the Pig is the draft of a novel about a teacher who has come back to Cape Cod in anger and disgrace and has his life renewed by contact with a number of rather strange people. If I had to, I would call it a human-imaginary animal, religio-philosophical thriller. -----
I’ve written thirty to forty short stories in the past few years. These are quick and fun, and I can get good comments on them. Some are based on old incidents in my not very exciting life, others are inspired by recent experiences, and still others are pure fantasy. I feel a little strange about writing short stories, as I almost never read them. I’ve also tried writing poetry. This too is entertaining. Manipulating words and thoughts can be a fascinating exercise (I suppose for a genuine poet it is more of a passion than an exercise), but it takes a great deal of time for a small and often unsatisfactory result. Still, like short stories it’s addictive. You begin to see the world in terms of stories and poems. A series of 20 of these stories are about Morris, a retired gangster living on Cape Cod.
I expect to keep writing as long as I can. I’ve found nothing in life more rewarding. I couldn’t write solely for myself, but although it would be nice it doesn’t seem necessary to have my writings published. I share them with friends and relatives and put them on the web, where a few people look at them.
Chapter 8
Science
I’ve been interested in science for as long as I can remember. My father taught me what he knew about nature, and we both learned more at our Indian Guides meetings. This was a father and son organization based on nature and Native American lore. I think it may have been started in St. Louis, where we lived at the time, by a Native American man named Joe Friday. It may still be going, although it’s hard to imagine contemporary fathers having the time. I hope it is, as it was a good organization. Now it would need to be a parent and child organization, not father and son. The camping trips could be interesting.
I studied chemistry and biology in college, shortly before the function of DNA was discovered. We subscribed to the Scientific American for a while when I was in my thirties, and I read all the articles I could understand. I still enjoy the Tuesday “Science Times.” Occasionally I read a book on science.
My most serious attempt since college to “do” sci/tech was taking two computer science courses in the early 1980’s. I loved them, but I recognized that I don’t have the kind of mind you need to work professionally in this field. I wrote down everything the teacher said with almost complete incomprehension, took it home, studied it and with great effort learned it well. Many other students, mostly freshmen, were asking intelligent questions in class.
Eventually we’ll figure out cold fusion or some other source of limitless energy. We’ll thoroughly engineer the genome, cure most diseases, and create intelligent life in the computer lab as well as finding it elsewhere in the universe. We’ll colonize the galaxy, and maybe we’ll download our brains to Eveready Bunnies and just keep going. We’ll do things we can’t even imagine now. In the process we may change life so much that we wouldn’t recognize it or wouldn’t have it as a gift, but it probably won’t be we who live it. We may destroy the earth or the universe or it may self-destruct without our help. We can’t stop the process, although we can try to direct it. There may be other universes that we can’t get at, at least not yet. Whatever we do, we won’t escape Nature.
At the moment I’m particularly interested in evolutionary biology and “how the mind works,” the ‘computational’ theory. This is fascinating stuff. It can be seen as reductionism, positivistic, mechanistic, soulless, and anti-religious, but I don’t think it needs to be seen that way. Our lives are a grand adventure in biology, meaning, and value. What could be more exciting or more worthwhile that creating our own values out of primordial goop? There’s no necessary conflict between science and religion. Odd bits: Gender identity is largely biologically determined, like intelligence and creativity. "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Thoreau. "Reverence for life. Schweitzer. "A holy curiosity." Einstein Why is there a universe, and why is it so strange? Why do we care?
Chapter 9
History
My mild contention is that just about everything is history. The future has no existence, and the present has no duration. This leaves the past. The past is real and unchangeable but always subject to revision. It’s where the good things live: beauty, love, joy, our selves. Our most lively ‘present’ experience is the contemplation of the recent past, the “remembered present”, including our past anticipation of the future.
I read more history than anything else. I like fat books that go on for a long time. If I remembered everything I read I’d know a lot. As it is, I have a sense of how things were and are and I’m not surprised as often as I was once.
I have trouble with history written about the years before 1800, because I have less faith in the historian’s ability to understand other minds from earlier centuries. McCullogh makes John and Abigail Adams sound like the rather superior folks next door. Is that how they were, or is that his doing?
Chapter 10
Politics and Economics
I know particularly little about politics and economics. Obviously they affect our lives a good deal. My pension depends in part on the stock market. Our relative freedom and high standard of living compared with three quarters of the world is probably owed in good measure to our system of government. Other countries are rich in resources but don’t do well as societies. I just find these subjects dreary.
I don’t know what to make of politicians. Constantly to have to seek approval and deal in money and power seems like martyrdom to me. Why would brilliant and attractive people like Bill and Hillary want to do this to themselves? Why would wealthy and easy-going people like the Bush’s want to leave the ranch and wheel and deal and make an unholy mess in Washington? If you asked me to be President I’d do it out of a grim sense of duty, but I can’t imagine wanting to do it. Is it a sense of duty that drives most politicians? Why do I find this difficult to believe? I think it’s a personality quirk, an appetite that I don’t have and can’t appreciate. Politicians astound me, but I think most of them think they mean well.
The diversity of political opinion shouldn’t surprise us. We see every niche of the biosphere filled with some appropriate life form. Evidently the same thing happens in our minds. You would think, though, that more of us would see that in the long run greed and selfishness don’t really serve anyone and that, as Teddy Roosevelt said, we won’t do well as a nation until everyone in the nation does well.
A civilized nation should of course provide its citizens with a fair measure of education, health care, and opportunity, maintain a safety net, and take on as much responsibility for the rest of the world as it can. So why don’t we insist that our nation does this? We make unwise choices, but that's usually better than having them made for us. Prejudice against other races, cultures, beliefs, and life-styles is an admission of personal inadequacy. Capital punishment is a national disgrace. Our economic solutions should rely more on cooperation and good sense and less on productivity, which may be infinite in theory but is not so in practice.
We all vote as if we were rich or soon will be.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us." Pogo.
Chapter 11
Evil
My children probably have more to say about evil than I do. One way or another they deal in the dark side of things: animal rights, human welfare, drama and the arts, the sometime grim remains of the past. The constant reference to evil in the news bothers me. It's so clearly not thought through, and, whether intentionally or not, it begs the question of why bad things happen. I'm tempted to say evil is a metaphysical concept around which bits of our experience cluster, except that that's what all ideas are.
We don't talk about natural catastrophes as evil. Earthquakes, floods, epidemics, and famine have killed far more people than wars and other forms of civilized mayhem, and although we may curse God, we don't usually waste our energy blaming the weather.
The dictionary says evil relates to moral wrong, sin, and badness. All those require some code or standard by which to rate behavior. The Nazi's had strict standards, as did the Taliban, and so do the Christian Churches, the sects, and the Aryan nation. So does each one of us.
Even using my own standards, I have difficulty identifying evil. Presumably we are talking about evil persons and not places or things except metaphorically. Hitler, the man of the century in terms of causing mayhem, was a dreary fellow with a talent to weasel his way into power and use it as he thought best. Osama Bin Laden isn't a particularly sympathetic character, but he seems to believe in what he does. Luther probably caused more suffering than Torquemada, and I'm sure he meant well too. There are genuinely crazy people who keep grisly mementoes in their refrigerators, but they seem more like small scale natural disasters.
I’d define evil in my own terms as the acts of fellow human beings who are at least as sane and comfortable as I am and who choose to do wholly unnecessary harm. They aren’t hungry, injured, or sick in the head. They just want something and don’t care who they hurt. For example: cheating and lying to get more than a fair share; waging a war for political gain; callously damaging someone’s reputation; speeding. Iraq? You decide.
There was a weird kid in my grade school who was badly bullied. I could see this and deplored it, but I didn’t effectively try to stop it That seems to be what evil comes to for me, not so much terrorism, torture, genocide, treason, etc., which are dreadful but are usually the result of some powerful forces, but rather not caring , not trying, not being as kind and generous as you can.
Fortunately defining good is easier. It is being kind. I'd like to think the bad in each of us is a background that helps give a shape to our character, while the good, however sketchy, is who and what we really are. Why not?
Chapter 12
Love and Other Relationships
I think the physical and social sciences can say a lot about human relationships that’s interesting and probably true, without reducing them to mechanism. But there seems to be a good deal about social chemistry that isn’t understood, and that maybe isn’t even understandable by us. I don’t have a problem with that.
I suspect that to most people love feels like it involves a good deal of luck. It does to me. I suspect though that that’s largely an illusion. It makes sense to commit yourself to someone you find attractive and who seems genuinely to share your values, but I observe that remarkably disparate people seem able to be loving partners. Interests and qualities can be complementary as well as shared, although by and large I’d think that having many shared interests would make life easier and more agreeable. Common interests in books, music, nature, travel, food, sports, art, crafts, exercise, and almost anything else, add to the pleasure, but they don’t all have to be shared.
Values are another matter and not a simple one. It’s hard for me to imagine a relationship in which both parties didn’t in general value honesty and kindness, and perhaps also humor, curiosity, the notion of beauty, and some degree of social responsibility. But I don’t really know, because it’s hard for me to imagine an authentic individual human being who didn’t possess those values in some measure or at least aspire to them.
All that said, I think it’s the commitment that counts. The mutual will (another leap of faith) to be forever kind, patient, supportive, accepting, forgiving, forbearing, respectful, admiring, appreciative, playful, helpful, and finally self-sacrificing of everything, including life, except for the values that make you who you are. (There’s no point in being someone else.) And that’s not luck.
I’ve always been a friendly person and have always made friends, but mostly by propinquity and osmosis. By the end of the school year I would know and like many classmates. In the army I made friends of very unlikely comrades (I would have said). But I was so shy, and it was all so slow, that I must have wasted many opportunities to enlarge my life and that of others. I’m better at making friends now, bolder, more willing to take the initiative and bear the responsibility, but still not great. Perhaps residual shyness will help keep me from becoming a bore.
I would pass along to the young world what Nancy’s aunt Elizabeth said once. “We need all the friends we can get.” (Hardly an original statement, but it’s odd how some people can say an ordinary truth and make it theirs.) Making friends is a delight and also an investment that’s its own reward, like eating salmon.
Chapter 13
Faults
. This is difficult. Ideally, someone else, or better yet a committee, should list my faults. But who’d be bothered? I wouldn’t want to list yours. I doubt that I could even identify them, unless you were a politician. It’s not that I don’t have faults, but I’m not sure which they are. Is it good that sometimes I concentrate so well that almost nothing interrupts me, or is it bad that I can I seem to ignore everything and everyone? Good or bad that I don’t notice dirt and grime until it becomes spectacular. Is it convenient that I generally don’t care where I go or what I do, or is it an annoyance? It isn’t indifference, because by and large I find most things interesting and entertaining.
As a part of our annual review at the University of Pennsylvania, we were asked (optionally) to list our faults. I would counsel anyone who wishes to rise in the organization to do this. Simply list your faults as you know them (withholding only felonies and extreme moral depravity). It makes the managers happy, and your shortcomings are probably obvious anyway. But I would never do it. I said if they didn’t know what my faults were, why should I tell them? Not very grown up. – I don’t think they do this anymore, however.
Oh, all right:
1. I miss opportunities to be kind and useful because of my residual shyness. 2. I am too self-absorbed at times. (Many “writers” are real bastards along these lines.) 3. I honestly don’t think I’m an intellectual snob. (And I’d have a tough time being any other kind of snob!) I don’t think I’m “better” than anyone, whatever their lifestyle or interests, but I do find it difficult to understand how people can stand to spend time in certain activities (which I won’t list), and I try hard to conceal my puzzlement. 4. I don’t try hard enough to lose weight. 5. I eat meat. I think this is wrong, but I doubt I’ll stop. 6 I tend to flit from one thing to another. I always did, but it gets worse as I age. 7. I don’t feel very loving towards racists, sexists, homophobes, meanies, sadists, the greedy rich, braggarts, showoffs, zealots, fanatics, fundamentalists, polluters, litterers, the lazy, the noisy, the careless, the wasteful, etc. -- Who does? Well, the point is: one should. They’re fellow human beings. Take criminals. It’s hard to have sympathy for the wealthy white-collar criminal. Unless he’s mentally disturbed, he doesn’t need to steal. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the unemployed single mother who shoplifts. But they both have problems that might be otherwise addressed, if someone cared. It’s so complicated. Many people with unattractive problems are also weak and fearful, sick, abused, and ignorant, and richly deserving of help and sympathy. I think we should be bleeding hearts, but I’m simply not. 8. I worry too much about my wife and children, but what am I going to do?
Chapter 14
What’s it all about?
Well, of course I don’t know. I assume no one does. I’m not sure anyone even thinks they do. We’re all pretty sure about certain things. I’m pretty sure the ocean is seven miles deep, although I’ve never been to the bottom. But that isn’t knowing very much. Even physicists acknowledge they’re doing mathematical poetry when it comes to quarks and string theory. Many people claim to have a faith. Does that mean the Pope thinks he’s “right” about anything? I don’t know. Remember the preacher who asked for tolerance of other people, no matter how “wrong” he knew them to be. But maybe he didn’t really mean he “knew”. It does seem clear that neither knowledge nor belief predicts our behavior. Bin Laden is a smart man with, presumably, a deep faith. Your old uncle Bill (Harry, Bob, Joe, etc.), the finest person you’ve ever known, is dumb as a stick and never goes to church.
I do believe some things. I believe that we humans produce value. Rats and mice may produce value too, but I don’t know that much about them. I see us being kind, creating beauty, and discovering truth. Whatever the bigger picture is, I see that much. And having happened, nothing can not-have-happened. Memories fail, civilizations, worlds, and universes, matter and energy come and go, existence and non-existence battle it out, but what has been will always have been, and will always, in that sense, be.
So, tote that barge, lift that bale, read a book, lend a helping hand, smell the flowers. What you do is forever. Neither the good nor the bad is interred with our bones. -- Is that true? Do I really know? I’ve already answered that.
Chapter 15
Miscellaneous
Most of what I know or do is miscellaneous.
Work. I worked for thirty seven years excluding summer jobs but including the army, the Church, and two library jobs. The Church and the Army were interesting but, as Freud pointed out, rather confining. The Penn Library was splendid. I walked through the door nearly every morning for thirty two years with my heart singing. Well, almost every morning. It was fun, challenging, sociable, and even useful. I suppose most work is useful in context. If you don’t have heart trouble and love hot pretzels, a pretzel vender is better than a heart surgeon. I can’t imagine not having worked.
I did have one complaint about my library job. In the nineties we put a lot of effort into encouraging people to use our services. That was fine, although some of it was more for budget justification rather than for the public, but we didn’t make a corresponding formal effort to increase our value as a resource. Our efforts were individual and uncoordinated. I felt that if we had had more to offer we would have needed to market it less. The problem didn’t originate with the Library of course, or even with the University. With our manufacturing in China, our service industry in India, and our art and scholarship marginalized, what was left for us to sell but ourselves? The rough equivalent of taking in our own washing!
Sex. Sex is great, but I assume that the general preoccupation with eroticism is owing to the fact that most people don’t read. There isn’t much to say about sex, partly because it’s no one else’s business but mostly, as with music, because words are inadequate.
Sports is for sports fans. I don’t know why I’ve never been one. At various times I’ve enjoyed playing baseball, football, ping pong, and squash. I avoided going to football games when I was in high school because I felt silly cheering and conspicuous not cheering. I’ll now occasionally cheer for a team in the heat of the moment. The fact that, for so many people, any time left over from work and sex seems to go into spectator sports is mysterious to me, but wiser folks than I are ardent sports fans. I find the interest in professional basketball and football, auto racing, golf (except when Tiger Woods is playing), and swimming especially puzzling. What is there to watch? At least with baseball something happens, and you can usually see it. Darts and horseshoes are pleasant.
Computers. I discovered the power of online computer searching in the mid-1970’s, using several bibliographic utilities, and I learned to program in Pascal on a Univac mainframe in 1980. I bought my first computer in 1980 and have owned a half dozen since. I worked with computers constantly for nearly 25 years and wrote many computer programs in a number of languages. If I’d had an entrepreneurial cell in my body I’d surely have become, briefly, a dot com millionaire, but at least I had fun. There are few thrills equal to running a complex computer program and having it work.
Drink. I was drunk a few times (long ago), and I didn’t enjoy it. There’s something spooky about not being in control of yourself (or as much in control as possible). Not to mention the hangovers. Being a little high and then eating dinner is pleasant and seemingly harmless to most of us. I like the taste of most alcoholic beverages. I recommend to anyone who can manage to drink safely the pleasures of German beer, French wine, and Scotch whiskey.
Depression. I had a blessedly brief experience of clinical depression immediately after I retired, the classic occasion. There’s something very creepy about not being in control of yourself. Did I just say that in connection with drink? I believe I did. The experience was instructive. Now when I hear that someone is/was depressed, I don’t think that means they’re just feeling a little down.
Tobacco. It’s a shame that it causes serious illness. I never cared much for cigarettes, except as a social ritual or outside on a cold day, but I loved cigars, even cheap ones. I may take them up again when I’m less interested in clinging to life.
Drug abuse. I gather that the physiological mechanism of hard drugs is similar to that energized by alcohol, running, coffee, chocolate, etc. Steven Pinker suggests that a slight preference for immediate as opposed to delayed gratification was built into our hunter/gatherer brains and made more sense thousands of years ago. Abusing drugs seems disrespectful to the body. Our bodies may be no big deal, but they’re what we have.
Psychology. Clearly there is more going on with us than what’s in our conscious minds. Psychotherapy, drug therapy, support groups, etc. all seem reasonable measures to help deal with emotional problems. I like to read about the brain and the mind.
Activism. This comes up a lot when you’re around Unitarians. I’m not an activist. I’m practically an inactivist. Maybe the Republican Right will eventually drive me to it. We write our congressmen and give small amounts of money to many charities, mostly involving children and education. As a result, our mailbox is stuffed daily with bumf from non-profit organizations. We recycle it.
Food. My grandfather once said that finally all we have left are the pleasures of the table. He was a very smart man, but he didn’t read. I enjoy eating. I’m regularly surprised by how tasty something or other is. We had some really great salmon filet from the fish market the other day, and a surprisingly delicious bowl of clam chowder at Friendlys. Restaurant meals have to be awfully good, or awfully cheap, for me not to feel we’ve paid too much for them. We cook pretty well at home.
Likes. I like our house a lot. It’s efficient and comfortable. I particularly like the big windows in the living room that look out on the woods and the bird feeders. I like our brick fireplace. I like my winter hat and coat. I like the clothes that my wife wears. There are a few paintings and photographs in our house that I like. Our 1992 Honda still runs well and is a handsome design. – Since replaced by a 2004 Honda Civic, which we also like a lot.-- So many contemporary cars seem ugly. I like my 1952 Shopsmith. I like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Muir woods, Venice, Paris, tigers, nuthatches, Nauset Marsh, the stars, and other minds. I like most things, people, places, and ideas. This makes life easier.
Dislikes. There are some: I particularly dislike unkindness; it’s so unnecessary that it’s almost unforgivable, and yet we’re all guilty of it. I dislike cruelty, injustice; dishonesty; disrespect for others; what I consider to be unnecessary noise, such as other people’s loud music or talking, bad mufflers, motor boats, lawn mowers, power blowers, weed whackers; off road vehicles, personal water craft, private airplanes, and anything else that invades public space, like bright porch lights; the waste of anything, including natural and human resources and time; most television and movies; video games; rap; Budweiser, rhubarb, gambling. -- I don’t put a lot of energy into disliking things, even when I probably should.
Satisfaction, reputation, recognition, self-concept, happiness, etc: Peace and justice, knowledge, understanding, kindness, art, and health are worth pursuing with vigor. Wisdom, love, beauty, happiness, satisfaction, reputation, and all other forms of personal honor and salvation come only as gifts. Someone once asked me if I wanted recognition. I said I didn’t. How else do you answer a question like that? -- I would have liked to have done better with my life, and maybe I’ll do better yet. I can’t say that I haven’t had the opportunities. As Woody Allen says, “The only thing between me and greatness is me.”
Chapter 12
In Conclusion:
Be kind. Carry a book. Expect many people to be fairly decent when you get to know them. Be kind. Keep in mind that you’re part of nature. Keep learning. Leave your roots in the ground. Do what you do best. Enjoy. Be kind.
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