When the Light Comes Up Slowly, Slowly

He says, “You are very brave.”

She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?”

He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.” 

 Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” published in 2014, had been taunting me from my bookshelf for quite a few years and I started it and stopped it and started again more times than I could count. It moves so slowly, so deliberately, with attention to such fine details of sensory perception, and all of it rendered more arduous to navigate (for impatient readers like me) by switches in time, back and forth. The effect approximates what I think it must be like to be blind—to be a blind young girl whose loving father has built a miniature of her town in Nazi-occupied France so she might learn to navigate it safely, a girl who learns to live one step at a time, who wakes each morning and lives her difficult and beautiful life as it is, tap-tap-tapping along the cobblestone streets with her walking stick, counting the sewer drains as she goes as markers of her progress. A fiercely resolute girl who as a young teenager will find herself hiding in the attic of her house alone while a Nazi with no good intent is prowling her house below, and she prepares herself at the entrance to the attic with a knife in her hands and thinks to herself: Come and get me. 

It pays many times over to persevere with the story of this young girl, Marie Laure, and that of Werner, conscripted as a teenager from a poor, mining town in Germany, gifted at mechanics and physics and telemetry--the science of wireless transmission and tracking of data (Doerr includes in the opening page, this dark quote from Goebbels: "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio."). 

Marie Laure loses sight as age six, and she will have to learn to navigate her blindness and the much darker pitch of the war that envelopes her and everything she loves when the Nazis occupy France and the Allied forces invade. Werner, bright blonde but diminutive for his age, is prized for his genius and, after time at a brutal Nazi youth camp, is attached to a special Army unit assigned to ferret out resistance.

Marie Laure’s father is a locksmith employed by the Museum of Natural History in Paris. They flee the capital when the Nazi occupation is imminent and embark on an arduous journey to the seaside town of Saint Malo, to the home of Marie Laure’s reclusive great-uncle Entienne and his housekeeper. There, the father, surreptitiously aiding the resistance, constructs the miniature of her new town. The chapters are short—one imagines the blind learn to navigate by living more closely to the present moment, one short step at a time, a series of discreet sensory episodes—and these will keep the reader going.

The same attention to detail renders viscerally what it is like to live in the eye of total warfare in a time of siege when the Allied forces invade, the way it consumes everyone and everything in its path, raining destruction on everything. I confess to growing frustrated with this story at times (mustn’t the world be frustrating for the blind, at least when they are young and still learning to navigate?), especially those scenes of war when Allied bombing is turning Saint Malo to rubble—so disorienting when Werner and his comrades are barely staying alive beneath the ruble of a hotel they had been using as a base. So much darkness, so hard to see.

But it is love, war’s opposite, that heralds the light, when Werner, escaped from the rubble, witnesses Marie Laure treading her way perilously through the streets with her cane. He has seen so much death and destruction, has stood by silently in the face of enormous cruelty and crime, a teenager himself still, trapped in a murderous regime. The story begins to fall into place, all the threads coming together, the dawning light illuminating slowly everything we couldn’t see. In time, Marie Laure is left to fend for herself alone in her great uncle’s house, pursued by two German soldiers with very different aims—Werner, who is in love, and a corpulent and cancer-stricken officer in search of a diamond (said to be a blessing or a curse or both) that Marie Laure’s father bequeathed to her. The narrative of this pursuit is a page-turner.

This book is about many things—bravery and its opposite, kindness and its opposite, love and war, the immense and gorgeous intricacy of the natural world and its durability in the face of unnatural forces of destruction. The novel is unsparing in its depiction of the bottomless and savage cruelty of the Nazis, and it does cause one to contemplate what must have happened to German society in the years preceding the war. But this is no polemic about fascism and the story’s German characters are rendered sympathetically; there is not a polemical word in the novel. Still, whether Doerr intended it or not, the story is also, I believe, a powerful anti-war narrative. The beauty of the natural world and of the normal, natural life Doerr depicts before and long after the war seem pitted against its opposite—the war, so deeply and profoundly unnatural, so abnormal, so destructive of normalcy.

Some of us, maybe most, busy ourselves blindly with coping in a world we assume to be fundamentally adversarial, one in which we assume we are fundamentally alone. But this work is also, finally, about the connectedness of all things, of all lives, across time. Like Marie Laure and Werner, our narratives, all of ours, have crossed at some point or will, though we may never know it in this lifetime. This beautiful novel gives us a glimpse of a brilliant light that courses through all of time, through all of our lives, whether we see it or not.  

 

 

 

A Very Lucky Young Lady: The Worst Person in the World

 (Reader alert: despite my best efforts I may not have succeeded in disguising certain spoiler alerts)

“I feel like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life,” says Julie the heroine of the Norwegian-language sensation, The Worst Person in the World, and it struck me later this may be more literally true than is at first apparent, truer than she means. A movie about a contemporary 20-something turned 30-year-old woman—beautiful and bright and privileged—as she roves about between romances, parties and careers might strike you as feather light (and would have struck me as leadenly boring if you’d described it to me that way). But in telling the story of an extraordinarily fortunate contemporary young woman, this movie manages to be visually compelling (there is always a lot to look at) and emotionally provocative. Given some time I think The Worst Person in the World may be about the weightiest movie I have seen in a long time. It is never boring.  

Julie’s story is told in 12 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue. Prologue is medical school where she has a promising start but decides mid-stream that she wants to pursue psychology. That doesn’t last long at all, and the next thing is photography. She’s working in a bookstore when her career aspirations seem to take a backseat to her love life. She meets 40-year old Aksel, a graphic novel artist of some renown, at a party and goes home with him, where he sagely tells her that they should stop before it gets started because, owing to their difference in age, it isn’t going to last. Leaving his flat, she decides then and there that she is in love with him, turns back and tumbles into his bed. During this incarnation of herself she writes an essay, "Oral Sex in the Era of Me-Too" that goes viral. Aksel will turn out to be right, it won’t last (he is nevertheless stunned and heartbroken when she breaks it to him). In a chapter entitled “Cheating,” Julie wanders out of a book party for Aksel and into another party, uninvited, where she meets Eivind, also living with someone else. They get drunk and have an eccentric erotic encounter that actually involves no cheating. But it spells the end of Aksel and Julie. She moves in with Eivind, whose ex has schooled him in all the ways to feel guilty about first world privilege. (“People die of thirst in Chile because avocados require so much water.”) Julie and Eivind as a couple will, we learn, also have an expiration date.

But while Julie and Aksel are over as an item, the film isn’t done with Aksel whose wrenching post-Julie saga becomes the pivot-point of a story that turns terminally serious at approximately the point when Julie ceases to be a 20-something. The weight of Aksel’s story and his suffering is such that Aksel unavoidably becomes the main character, and Julie the supporting role.

Not at all incidentally, alongside Aksel’s story is a motif that reveals itself over and over throughout the film. Children. Aksel wanted them, Julie didn’t. They attend a summer overnight party where a guest’s young child throws a tantrum and at night they overhear the parents having a vicious argument about the stresses of child rearing. At that party she crashes where she meets Eivind, she mischievously spoofs a cluster of mothers by pretending to be a pediatrician and claiming that "the latest research" shows hugging and cuddling your children will traumatize them. Eivind and Julie both forswear children, but later, after their demise as a couple, Julie is pleased to spot him from the window of her apartment on the street, married and blissfully pushing a stroller.

This meditation on progeny, on regeneration, is reinforced by what I regard as the film's most inspired moment: During a birthday celebration for Julie at her mother's home (where the essay on oral sex is awkwardly received) the camera veers to  photographs of family ancestors arranged in frames on a piano. The tepid ambiance of a 21st century birthday party is suspended and the narrative suddenly shifts to tell the stories of five or six women, long since passed on, who were not nearly so lucky. This one died prematurely, that one went blind. None of them had the choices that all of us--women and men--take for granted today, but lived the lives that were granted them, a solemn and bracing reminder of the preeminence of fortune and circumstance, and of the simple, inarguable truth that we owe our lives (whatever they are like) to those who bore us. 

Julie is far from the worst person in the world, but the title is meant to tease out the judgement, the disapproval of the way Julie lives her life and the choices she does and doesn't make that some of us who see this sly, inventive, intelligent, frequently funny and finally searing film may be unable to avoid. “I never follow through on anything,” she tearfully confesses to Aksel, long after they are history as a couple.

Well, she’s right, she doesn’t and those of us who like to think we follow through on things might wish she would grow up. More than that, she is luckier than she deserves to be. A pivotal point in the story arrives when Julie is confronted with a life-altering choice; many a viewer will feel certain they know the choice she would probably make if she had her own way. But then, just like that, out of the blue, the choice is made for her, and she is relieved of the dilemma or even the difficulty of making a decision. Lucky, lucky young lady.

But here is the thing....Julie is neither immature nor lacking in self-awareness. She has seen up close in Aksel what the stakes are in life, how contingent her own good fortune is--and she continues to be more or less pleased with herself and the world. This quality may madden some, but it is also part of what makes this story endearing: Julie is not ashamed to be happy. 

At least one reviewer has fallen it seems for the bait and decided that even if Julie is not the worst person in the world, the story is the worst sort of celebration of conscienceless privilege. Talk about missing the point. A smarter “conservative” critical take might have focused on something other than Julie and her over-lucky life, something else entirely: the absence of any religious, spiritual or metaphysical response to the starkness of the story. Scandavian countries are said to be among the least religious in the world and in the entire course of the movie—in which we see any number of visual shots (becoming and not-so-becoming) of Oslo—I don’t believe there is so much as a parting or passing shot of a church or a cross or religious iconography of any kind. The tangible world is what there is.

Which only sharpens the knife edge that lay (very, very barely) hidden beneath this charming story of a charmed young lady. The Worst Person in the World is finally a smart, sometimes funny, believable and ultimately solemn meditation on a question of terminal importance—What will we do with our short-lived freedom?— whose poignancy is underscored by a young woman who insists on answering it her own way.

Prague: A Fairy Tale in Stone

 

Hradcany Castle and the St. Vitus Cathedral enclosed in the castle walls, loom over the city of Prague like its own 24-hour star—luminescent at night, brilliant and brimming during the day—an ever-present reminder of the city’s vast history. The castle, built on a high hill in the 9th century, was home to the princes and kings of Bohemia, the western region of the current Czech Republic, and today houses the offices of the President of the Republic. Construction on the present-day gothic cathedral was begun in the 14th century, but the original church was built in 934 by Prince Wenceslas, the first ruler of Bohemia and (a Christian revered for his devotion to the poor) the “Good King Wenceslas” of the Christmas carol. Wenceslas Square, where stands a statue of the prince, is the site of public gatherings in Prague, including the massive gathering in 1989 to celebrate the “Velvet Revolution” when the communist party was overthrown.

As viewed from the Charles Bridge, a stone edifice arching over the city’s Vlatva River, the castle and cathedral and the centuries-old red roof buildings that populate the slope leading up to the castle complex—and the grand buildings that line the bank of the other side of the Vlatva—are a magnificent sight, the object of countless thousands of tourist photographs. The bridge was built by Charles IV, a King of Bohemia, in the 14th century (he chose the name Charles at his confirmation because, as an heir to the House of Luxembourg, he had served in a French court; his mother’s side of the family was Czech). He built churches throughout Prague and founded Charles University, to this day the leading university in the Czech Republic. It was under his rule that Prague became an intellectual center of Europe. The cobble-stone bridge is traversed by many thousands of tourists every year and offers a vista of a city evocative of medieval piety, Old World refinement and enlightenment civilization, and modern turbulence and revolution.

For those who live here, the castle complex brooding over the city, and the layers of history everywhere, must exert a civilizing influence—and a sobering one, bearing down with the weight of the centuries. Much of ancient Bohemia’s modern history has been tragic: born as “Czechoslovakia” in 1918, the Czech Republic is a young country buffeted by the tumult of a Europe that—in the words of Hanna P., a lifelong resident of Prague who lectured our tour group—“is too small, has too many people, and too many nationalities.”

A riveting account of the modern Czech Republic can be found in Madelyn Albright's Prague Winter. The former secretary of state provides a compelling survey of ancient Bohemia and Prague as a backdrop to the history of her own family and childhood, encompassing some of the most dramatic years in the Republic’s history. She was born in Prague in 1937 and lived there until age 12 when the family emigrated to England after the Nazi invasion. Her father was Josef Korbel, a diplomat who served under Edward Benes in the government-in-exile in London, until the defeat of the Nazis, when the family returned to Prague. Later, Korbel was named ambassador to Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. When the Communist Party came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Korbel resigned from the government and the family emigrated to the United States. Korbel founded a prestigious school of international relations at the University of Denver.

Czechoslovakia had been founded as a multinational democracy in the aftermath of World War I under the leadership of Thomas Masaryk, who envisioned a democracy aligned with those of western Europe, Great Britain and the United States. But just twenty years after its founding, the country would be at the center of questions that one way or another had convulsed Europe for centuries. Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? Where are the borders? An ascendant Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the territory of Sudetenland, bordering Germany. He made much of claims that ethnic Germans who had lived in the region for generations were discriminated against, harassed and otherwise treated as second-class citizens.

The Sudetenland had been a natural border between Bohemia and Germany since the Middle Ages, the mountainous region serving as a protective buffer. In Albright’s telling the claims of discrimination had some basis in truth but were substantially exaggerated. Moreover, the multinational nature of the Czech state, including Germans, had been inherent in the vision of the country’s birth. Edward Benes, who succeeded Masaryk as president, was relying on a treaty with France for assurance that if Germany attacked, the French would come to their aid. And that England and Russia would follow suit.

But in the aftermath of the first World War, no one had an appetite for fighting Hitler’s newly armed Germany. The Munich Agreement of 1938, ceding the Sudetenland to Germany, was concluded among everyone important—Britain, France, Germany—except the Czechs themselves. In the immediate aftermath it was lauded in the west as a victory of peacemaking, avoidance of war. Hungary and Poland, seizing on the precedent established by Munich, also laid claim to portions of the Czechoslovakia envisioned in its 1918 independence.

Can Americans imagine such a thing—other countries deciding where our boundaries should be? And this was more than an abrogation of a nation’s sovereignty, it was a negation of the idea of an independent Czech Republic itself, allowing Hitler to claim—when, of course, he later overran the country entirely—that Czechoslovakia was a “made up country.”

Is there any country, anywhere, that is not “made up”?

Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and created a “protectorate” over the entirety of Bohemia/Moravia. Two years later, in response to a courageous Czech resistance that was beginning to affect the German war effort, Reinhold Heydrich was appointed Acting Reich Protector. Arguably the most sinister figure, outside of Hitler himself, in the entire Third Reich, Heydrich presided over the Wannsee Conference where Nazi leaders, including Adolph Eichmann, planned the logistical details of annihilating European Jews. In occupied Czechoslovakia, he rounded up Jews and dissidents of every stripe, ordering the torture and execution of thousands. 

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

I visited Prague with a tour group in the middle of September. At that time, a vaccination card and record of a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of entry was required. The fortunes of pandemic have shifted again and on November 15 the State Department advised not travelling to the Czech Republic on the basis of a CDC travel notice indicating a high level of COVID-19 in the country.

When I was there, I found masking protocols and practices to be roughly similar to my own native Washington, DC—that is to say, a mixed bag. Outdoors, on the busy thoroughfare of the Charles Bridge for instance, masked walkers were in the minority. In shops and coffee houses, masks were more the norm; on the subway and heavily used (and packed) street trams, everyone is masked, and I saw no scofflaws. Who knows what the winter will bring? It is now generally recognized that COVID will be with us, at some level of intensity, indefinitely and the new omicron variant may scatter the cards.

Prague is a walkable city, though the cobblestones can be hard on the ankles (and on those with vociferous lower-back problems). Our tour group was warned early of an occasional issue with pickpockets on the streets, subways and trams, but I experienced no problems and never felt unsafe when I was out and about on my own, including a time or two after dark. The subways stations are clean, and the above-ground trams are efficient and user-friendly.

Lots of people speak English, though a visitor will certainly encounter those who don’t. One Uber driver who landed somewhere other than where I was waiting for him, knew only one English phrase: “I am here!” Since that was more Czech than I knew, we were unable to negotiate a rendezvous and we parted from each other on the phone in the throes of mutual incomprehension. I hopped on a tram and was back to the hotel in no time.

XXXXXXXXX

“My Praguers understand me,” Mozart is reported to have said of the city where, in 1787, the composer arrived like a modern-day celebrity. In January he premiered what is now known as the Prague Symphony and in October her performed the opera Don Giovanni for the first time. Mozart’s reception in Prague speaks to a reverence for fine music that preceded the composer’s stardom and survives today. The composer’s footprint is prominent in the city; the Estates Theater, not far from the Old Town Square, features Mozart’s work, including weekly performances of Don Giovanni. (Parts of the movie “Amadeus” were filmed in Prague.)

Anton Dvorak is the city’s favored son, closely followed by Bedrich Smetana whose work expressed Czech cultural pride. Smetana’s Vlatva River Symphony is a musical poem that follows the flow of the winding river; it is sometimes played on Czech airline planes when they land at Ruyzne Airport. There is a tiny but elegant Dvorak Museum in the old town that houses the composer’s personal piano.

It might be impossible to exhaust all the venues for classical music in Prague (and there is certainly no shortage of western popular music venues and clubs). But there is an extraordinary opportunity that no visitor should pass up in the church and synagogue concerts that take place most nights of the week throughout the city. These are especially good for the non-connoisseur (or anyone not inclined to spend three hours at an opera). For the equivalent of roughly $35 (there are websites offering much cheaper tickets) elite musicians and opera singers from the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Symphony Orchestra or the Bohemian National Orchestra play one-hour concerts in one or more of the elaborately ornate medieval churches and synagogues of Prague. Masks are mandatory. Concerts are comprised of short excerpts of 12 or 15 pieces from the masters—Dvorak, Smetana, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahams, Vivaldi. The Spanish and Maisel Synagogues of the Jewish quarter also have some more eclectic offerings; the Spanish Synagogue is featuring The Best of Gershwin on December 27.

XXXXXXX

I didn’t know the name of Alphonse Mucha before visiting Prague, but his posters on exhibit at The Municipal Hall were instantly familiar. His distinctive graphic style put a stamp on a genre and an era—Art Nouveau, La Belle Epoque—that high point of enthusiasm in the achievements of European civilization, in the years before the first world war demolished it. In these posters he brought a fine artist’s touch to advertising—for biscuits, liqueurs, tobacco products—and to publicity for theaters and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. (Mucha also has one of the most stunning stained-glass windows in the St. Vitus Cathedral.) The sexuality in these images seems to project forward to the modern advertising age and there is unforced joie de vivre, a real celebration of civilization and human achievement and human sensuousness. Spend some time with “Amants a Comedy,” one of the posters Mucha created for the Theater of the Renaissance, where Bernhardt was a star attraction; there’s a lot going on in that image.

Some of the posters on exhibit in the Municipal Hall are “enhanced” with digital magic: smoke billows from the cigarette in the advertisement for Job Rolling papers. Doesn’t do a lot for me, but I suppose it makes some sense: Mucha is certainly emblematic of a distinct time and era, but his images also speak to something perennially new, cutting-edge, of the moment. The Municipal Hall is a palatial building where the first Czech Republic was declared in 1918. Today its grand ballrooms and concert halls—many of the rooms and their ceilings are decorated with Mucha’s work—are used for pricey gatherings, wedding, celebrations, and official events and pageants. The posters on exhibit, the largest collection of Mucha’s work anywhere, are owned by the Czech tennis legend Ivan Lendl.

XXXXXXXX

If Mucha is the visual representative of pre-World War I European civilization at its most confident, the German speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka is the voice of its later disillusionment. Although readers trying to affix to Kafka any label—“post-World War I Writer of Alienation”—have found that nothing quite sticks. Kafka created something wholly original and personal—harrowingly, laceratingly personal—a dream world terrifying and comical, but also bracingly real and specific and rooted. It has invited countless interpretations; he wrote in a style uncannily inviting of the reader’s own personal projections and captured something true about anyone’s night visions. He was born and died in Prague and wrote exclusively in German. His diaries reflect the outside world—the war, Czech independence—only glancingly. For Kafka, the inner world was where the action was.

There is a fine Kafka Museum in the “Lesser Town” of Prague. The exhibit is organized, intelligently, around Kafka’s “Letter to My Father,” a remarkable bloodletting (it was never read by his father), along with excerpts of letters to his friend and posthumous publisher Max Brod, diary fragments, and notes and letters to his several women friends. (In his short life of 40 years--he died of tuberculosis--he had several fraught relationships that never resulted in marriage.)

For Americans in the 21st century, it can be hard to absorb what a revelatory and searing personal document was the letter to his father; what a dramatic departure from decorum it was for this formal gentleman of Old World courtesies. Franz' father, Hermann Kafka, was a businessman, the owner of a clothing wholesale store, and—by his son’s account—a domineering, emotionally abusive loudmouth, unequipped to understand his son or even recognize that he had an existence outside of his father’s bourgeois expectations. Possibly, this portrait was unfair (children never really see their parents whole, as anyone who has once complained about his parents then gone on to be a parent himself, has learned). But it was from the crucible of his relationship with his father that Kafka extrapolated his vision of an unappeasable authority, a vision he managed through a unique literary genius to translate into something universal.

From the testimony of many who read him in the original German, this genius lay in the unique style of Kafka’s prose; even more than most writers, Kafka must lose something crucial in translation. His friends who heard him read his work aloud, and many reviewers and critics, have testified to a striking stateliness, a crystalline formality in his prose. In a 1996 forward to The Complete Stories, first published by Shocken Books in 1971, John Updike writes, “These lucid and fluent translations….can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity.” It is as if when he sat down to write he translated the world around him—and the visions in his head—into some higher linguistic register. As if he were, in the early part of the 20th century, recording scripture.

But there is something cult-like or over reverent that has grown up around Kafka and his aura of tortured aesthetic anxiety, something that may inhibit readers from approaching his fantastical stories and novels unburdened. This likely has to do with the veneration with which Brod and at least one early biographer regarded Kafka, as something close to a seer or a holy man. Kafka himself wrote about writing as a kind of sacred calling, a “form of prayer.” And it is surely related as well to the fact that the Nazi and Soviet regimes that followed his death came to make the writer’s visions of a torturous, lethal bureaucracy appear quite literally prophetic. (Kafka’s sisters perished in Nazi death camps.)

But something the Kafka Museum nicely illuminates is that he was a man embedded successfully in the world. And embedded in the city. “Prague won’t let you go,” he wrote. “The little mother has claws.” Though the city is never mentioned in his fiction, the labyrinth-like aura of its winding streets and the weight of ancient history is there. Surely, the Castle visible everywhere in the city must have figured in the imagination of his unfinished novel of that name. (He lived with his sister for a period in a tiny house on a slope leading up to the Castle.)

House where Kafka lived for a period
on a slope leading up to The Castle

Even for those with faint interest in the writer, the Kafka Museum offers a compelling glimpse at Prague in the early years of the 20th century, including some vintage film and photography. He trained as a lawyer and rose to some prominence in the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, adjudicating industrial injury claims. He expressed disdain for his job, mainly because it kept him from writing, but the fact is that he was quite good at it. One striking plaque informs us that Kafka and his boss presented a paper on “Organization of Accident Prevention in Austria” at the Second International Congress of the Rescue Sciences and Accident Prevention in Vienna in 1913. His reports on industrial accident prevention were published in professional journals and he might be regarded in hindsight as a pioneer of what we know today as the field of occupational safety.

For those of us reading him in translation, it can be hard to see the comedy in Kafka’s writing, but when he read his work aloud to friends he frequently broke out in laughter: if an individual was condemned, in his vision, to forever seek a redemption from which he was forever barred—then the effort was bound to take some outlandish turns. And “real life” certainly offers a harvest of slapstick, which Kafka found in his job, as expressed in a letter to Brod:

For I’ve got so much to do! In my four districts—apart from all my other jobs—people fall of the scaffolding as if they were drunk, or fall into the machines, all the beams topple, all embankments give way, all ladders slide, whatever people carry up falls down, whatever they hand down they stumble over. And I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware.

Kafka was writing on this side of the great war. Modernism, and all its anxieties, was nascent. The old world and all its comforting verities of caste and community and religious belonging were being cast aside. A man no longer had a craft or a vocation or a calling—he had a job, and he was gone to work in the great grinding engine of capitalism, renting himself out for someone else’s profit. He was on his own now to find such meaning as he could, with no signs or signals from without. Kafka found a refuge of his own in writing about this predicament.

XXXXXXXXX

The Prague Jewish Quarter, an historic ghetto dating back to the 15th century, lies between the Vlatva River and the Old Town Square. Within its boundaries are five magnificently preserved synagogues--four of them built in medieval times and one, the stunningly ornate Spanish Synagogue, built in 1868. The five synagogues comprise The Jewish Museum of Prague; tickets at the Museum office purchase entry to the synagogues and to a Jewish graveyard with 12,000 tombstones, the oldest one dated 1478. Beneath the tombstones are more than 110,000 bodies; Jews were not permitted to be buried elsewhere in the city, so for successive generations earth was piled over the graves and bodies were buried on top of each other.

 

The Pinchas Synagogue, now a memorial to Czech’s who died in the Holocaust, includes on its upper floor a permanent exhibit of children’s artwork from the town of Terezin, 60 miles north of Prague, which was transformed during Nazi rule into a separate ghetto for deported Jews. Terezin, portrayed by the Germans as something like a model town, was in fact an overcrowded, disease-ridden concentration camp where more than 15,000 people died. And it served as a waystation for deportees who would be later transported to death camps further east.

In the face of this, though, Jewish leaders in the ghetto organized cultural events, lectures, and educational venues for the children, including classes in drawing and art that were led by a woman named Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who was a protégé of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Albright writes, “…the children produced more than four thousand drawings in pencil, crayon and watercolor; the subjects included virtually everything except what was not permitted—life as it truly was inside the ghetto. Many of the illustrations survived; when the ghetto was liberated a pair of suitcases was found in one of the children’s rooms, each crammed with pictures….”

Some of the artwork that survived was by Petr Ginz, described by Albright as the "improbably precocious son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father," a teenager who also edited a weekly magazine of articles written by the young people in Terezin.

"Possessed of a boundless appetite for self-improvement, Ginz was to be seen almost every evening sitting cross-legged on his bunk surrounded by writing and painting supplies," Albright writes. He kept a journal "in which he vowed to devote greater effort to drawing, bookbinding, increasing his weight, the study of Buddhism, linocuts, stenography, English, Russian, Plato and Blazac."

Petr was deported east in 1944 and died in Auschwitz. His diary was published after the war.

XXXXXXXXXXXX

Somewhere near the hotel I was staying with my tour group must have been a grade school. In the morning when I would walk outside for exercise and to look for coffee, I would see parents walking their young children to the school. This made me happy, especially the first day or two I was in Prague, reminding me that while I was thousands of miles from home, I hadn’t left the planet. (I had not travelled outside North America since 1996!) The Moms or dads looked prepared for a workday—whether at an office, or COVID-bound, at home—and wore that slightly harried, or hurried, look of nervous anticipation for whatever lay ahead. Yet, unmistakably, you could see that these few moments, walking their child to school—the child chattering away about whatever loomed ahead for her in school, whatever lunacy passed through his imagination—was the high point, the very happiest part of their day. I passed one day a congregant of teenagers in the afternoon when school was out. Fidgeting with their phones, gossiping and conspiring in Czech, they looked and sounded like American teenagers anywhere—a confederacy of the superior, momentarily under the thumb of their idiot guardians.

Permit me, if you will, that most banal of all travel observations: People Are the Same Wherever You Go. So they are, and it can be counted as one of the great virtues of travel outside one’s boundaries to be reminded of it. But back at home here in my colossal country surrounded by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors, I couldn’t help reflecting on how differently Czechs must look out at the world around them.

We are shaped by the history we inherit. No one can say that American history has been serene, but consider what Czechs have experienced in a period still within memory of its oldest citizens:

After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, a government-in-exile took up residence in London, headed by Benes. In May 1942, in a daring operation planned and approved by the government-in-exile, Heydrich was assassinated. Two members of the Czech army, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, parachuted into the hills surrounding the route Heydrich’s car took from his home to the Prague Castle every day and ambushed him. The attempt nearly went awry, but Heydrich died later in a hospital in Prague.

The act was a spectacular assertion of the legitimacy of the government-in-exile, leading to the dissolution of the Munich agreement by the western powers that had endorsed it. It also resulted in a brutal policy of retributive violence by the Nazis. The assassins were falsely linked to the town of Lidice, which was razed and bulldozed. Some 400 men and women were massacred, and more than 80 children were sent to death camps.

Albright in her book explores the kind of rearview mirror second guessing that historians can do: Was the assassination worth the collective punishment that was visited upon the Czech people? She comes down, sensibly I think, on the side of the assassins, noting that the act galvanized the war effort, inspiring allied soldiers (including the later arriving Americans), and weakened the Nazi’s in strategic ways. Today, Kubis and Gabcek are revered as heroes of the Czech Republic.

In 1945, with the defeat of the Nazis, Edward Benes returned from exile in London to a newly independent Czechoslovakia. In a sad but perhaps predictable irony, the “problem” at the heart of the Munich Agreement boomeranged when the Czech government expelled ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland. The plan had been to transfer only those who had collaborated with the Nazis, but bitterness about the experience under Heydrich, and toward the Germans generally, was everywhere; armed citizens carried out forced expulsions that were frequently violent. Some 15,000 Germans died in the course of the expulsions, and in the end more than 2 million Germans were forcibly removed. Albright writes with great intelligence about this dark and complicated legacy, for which Vaclav Havel, years later, offered a deft apology.

In a national election in May 1946, the Czech Communist Party surprised everyone (except perhaps the Communists) by garnering 38 percent of the vote (“Communism sounds very nice when you read about it in a book,” is how Hannah explained it), giving them a majority in the parliament and the right to name a prime minister. It also gave them the power, through a flurry of Bolshevik maneuvering, to snuff out the organs of civil society in the country and put an end to democracy. The country became a Stalinist satellite. Twenty years after that and 30 years after the Munich Agreement, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to put an end to the “Prague Spring,” the Czech experiment with liberalization. On January 16, 1969, in protest of the Soviet takeover, a Czech student named Jan Palach set himself ablaze at Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague.

Fast forward twenty years again, tens of thousands of people gathered at Wenceslas Square to celebrate the Velvet Revolution and the peaceful overthrow of the Communist Party. In 1993, the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia split the country into the separate Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. This was a peaceful separation--sometimes referred to as the Velvet Divorce--but (if I did not misread the tone of our tour leader's comments) one that was not without some sadness or regret on the part of Czechs.

Wenceslas Square 1989/
Time Magazine
Credit: Corbis/VCG via Getty Image

 

With all this tumult in mind, I think about those Czech teenagers and wonder what they will bring to the future of their country. What must it be like to grow up as a citizen of a small country in a crowded continent with too many competing nationalities? To live at the crossroads of some of the finest and richest intellectual, musical and artistic currents—and the most disastrous political ideologies? How does it affect one’s consciousness to be surrounded, at nearly every turn, by centuries of history? Or to be taught that powerful friends abandoned your country in a dire time, and that malevolent neighbors twice overran it? What does it mean to live in the tortured crux of the most salient questions of nationality: Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? Where are the boundaries?

Czech citizens cannot be watching the drama on the Belarus/Polish border—or for that matter, Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine—without apprehension. On top of these forebodings from without, Czechia has experienced the same wave of populist discontent that has swept the rest of Europe and the United States. (Although they recently gave the heave-ho to the billionaire populist prime minister Andrej Babis, an ally of Hungary’s Victor Orban, after he was caught out in the Pandora Papers expose.)

Castles and canals, cobblestone bridges and charming narrow streets winding around ancient synagogues and churches. The Vlatva River flowing in and around it all like music. Prague—so brilliant, beautiful and radiant—is like a fairy tale. But like many a fairy tale, its beauty veils a solemn message or a sad warning, as well—something Franz Kafka, haunting the city’s streets like an open nerve, might have registered. In a striking poem entitled “Memories of Prague,” written at Terezin, young Petr Ginz was, to be sure, expressing his own grief of separation. But I think he captured, too, something of that melancholy in the city’s ancient stones.

How long since I last saw

The sunk sink low behind Petrin Hill?

With tearful eyes I gazed at you Prague

Enveloped in your evening shadows

How long since I last heard the pleasant rush of water

Over the weir in the Vlatva River?

I have long since forgotten the bustling life of Wenceslas Square.

Those unknown corners in the Old Town,

Those shady nooks and sleepy canals,

How are they? They cannot be grieving for me

As I do for them…..

Prague, you fairy tale in stone, how well I remember!

Czechs know history is no fairy tale. Perhaps so much history, so much tumult, has equipped them with a resilience and a clear-eyed realism that will help them navigate the future’s shoals. In any case, they have seen it all before.

Chimney Swifts and Quarantine (Written January 2021)

 

I was visiting a friend in Baltimore, a bird-lover who was taking me to the spot of a seasonal birdwatching attraction: the roosting of a great flock of Chimney Swifts in an old industrial chimney, still rising above its repurposed factory. Through some curious twist of evolution, Swifts roost on vertical surfaces, rather than upright, and are named because they roost communally in chimneys. Each fall, the Swifts returned to this industrial area for a few evenings on their migratory way South. Among the 15 or 20 people gathered to watch was a mother with her small boy, about five years old.

The boy and I struck up a conversation when he pointed to a picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a telephone poll and asked me, “Have you seen that cat?”

“No, I haven’t seen that cat,” I said. “I don’t live in Baltimore.”

“I live in Baltimore,” he said.

“Oh, well I live in Washington, D.C. I’m here visiting a friend.”

“Washington?” he said. He looked at his mother as if for confirmation of something, then back at me. Then he exclaimed, “The news!”

Yeah, the news—way, way, way too much news.

Which was why I was grateful for this retreat to experience the natural world in the sky. More than seven months after the beginning of the pandemic, I’d had too many zoom meetings, too much time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.

Mind you, this was October.

And I am one of the lucky ones. I work in the “information sector” in a job that can be done from my home with little disruption. My daughter, now 22, is launched into the world on her own, and I can wake every morning missing her but grateful I do not have to supervise remote learning while working. I am reminded of these blessings every day.

It turns out that at 60 I may have something else in my favor—my advancing age. Some recent research looking at people’s responses to the stresses of the pandemic in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that adults aged 65 years or older had much lower rates of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or trauma- or a stress-related disorder than younger generations. The findings mirror those of other high-income countries, including Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands.

A couple of important caveats: these are older adults living in the community, not in nursing homes or retirement centers; and the data is from early in the first months of the pandemic. Still, the data suggest something interesting about the way people of different ages respond to a uniquely stressful event that has affected the entire human population. The authors surmise that older people may bring to the stresses and isolation of the pandemic features unique to their age group that have helped them to cope: the consolation of memories, the perspective that comes with having been through trials before and survived, a knack for savoring simple things in everyday life (a walk in the park, a conversation with a friend), and an appreciation for the quality of a few close relationships over having many superficial acquaintances.

These are a form of intelligence we know colloquially as “wisdom.” But wisdom, by definition, is a product of time and experience, only in the rarest of circumstances accessible to young people. While the rates of anxiety, depression and trauma-related stress were all under 10 percent for older people, the rates for people age 18-24 were staggering: 49%, 52% and 46%. Along with the revelation that 18 teenagers in Las Vegas had died by suicide between March and December last year, we can surmise that we have been witnessing an adolescent cataclysm in mental health.

The return to in-person schooling has been a fraught subject. I am well aware of the concerns that teachers and parents bring to the subject (and aware, too, that I speak from a position of privilege, not having to decide about sending a youngster into a school building).

But I fear that our young people--teenagers especially—are just missing out on too much. Even some partial return to school will not bring back, until the pandemic subsides, the ritual celebrations that are landmarks in a young person’s life: graduations, proms, sporting events that bring together students and the community in celebration. These are the real, true (as opposed to virtual) stuff of experience that leads to wisdom.

Which brings me back to the Swifts. As dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all points on the compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of humans—and for the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney in an ever-growing gathering as the birds arrived, 500 or more, from every part of the sky.

Just before the sun dipped below the horizon, they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive into the chimney where they would roost for the night. As they dove, the circling flight grew tighter like the funnel of a hurricane, winding its way to a finish as the last of the birds disappeared for the night.

I have never seen anything like it. The memory of it—and my pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of that terrible year. There is a music, a communal rhythm woven into the fabric of nature, and into our human nature as well. May this pandemic speedily end that we might return in person to celebrating birthdays and baptisms, brises and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and proms, weddings and funerals. These are own ritual gatherings, evolved over years to correspond to that music only you and I can hear, the real, true thing, the wisdom of our species and the only real news you need to know.

Dying in February (or Sometimes It Isn't All Pleasure. Sometimes You Suffer)

 

It seems so quaint now in my memory, a long-ago scandal that nevertheless feels familiar with its stock characters and set pieces, preserved for all time in something like one of those miniature snow-globes. Shake it out and all the predictable pieces are still there: a powerful congressman, unknown to many, but possessed of so much accumulated power over the years that he was drunk on it; a stripper with a fun stage name; and a well-known tourist attraction where their alcohol fueled tryst came to a public conclusion. Annabel Battistella, aka Fannie Foxx the Argentine Firecracker, who jumped into the Tidal Basin on the national mall after a night on the town with her paramour Wilbur Mills, powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, died Feb. 10 at age 84.

It was October 7, 1974, when Annabel ran out of a car being followed late at night by the police and jumped into the Tidal Basin—the rectangular pool of water between the Lincoln Monument and the Capitol. In the car was the congressman with whom she had spent the night partying and arguing at the Silver Slipper Club where she had performed. (The Silver Slipper, located on 13^th Street, closed in 1981.)

There were still just three networks from which everyone got their news and there was little or nothing to explore about this episode, nothing to “interpret”; there were no “hot takes” on Twitter, and nothing about the story “evolved” over time. It was just what it was—a story so familiar it might have happened in 1874 or 1924 or 1954. Fresh off his 19^th election as a representative from Arkansas—that’s 38 years in Congress—Mills, whose Ways and Means Committee vetted most any piece of legislation that required tax money, was suddenly on the front pages in a way he had never been before. Thoroughly soused, he showed up at one of Annabel’s shows and delivered a drunken monologue to jeering reporters. Shortly thereafter, he was stripped of his chairmanship, left Congress and the public eye in 1977, and spent the rest of his life recovering from alcoholism.

As for Annabel, the Post obituary told a desultory story of a bad marriage to a philandering cabaret pianist after leaving her native Buenos Aires, and her career as an exotic dancer in Miami and later in D.C., where she met Wilbur Mills. Of her leap into the Tidal Basin that night, she told the Post it was a desperate maneuver to disappear in the hopes of shielding Mills from publicity.

Alas.

After an arrest for public indecency in Orlando, Fla., in December of the same year, she gave up dancing. Moved around with her children. Married again and settled in St. Petersburg. The Post says she earned degrees in marine science (!!!!) and business administration.

The episode with Mills occurred just two months after Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency, a melancholy affair on the leeward side of American decline. Looking back on the incident in 1981, Annabel told the Post, “What happened, happened, so that cannot be repaired completely. But sometimes things can be mended enough to allow you to live comfortably and not be completely ashamed of yourself.”

XXXX

I recall my first peak at a Hustler Magazine, as a teenager in the 1970s, and can say without hesitation that it was not in any way alluring. It wasn’t supposed to be. Larry Flynt, the publisher, wasn’t playing to anything so fundamental as lust—he was an entrepreneur who knew that there was a market to be exploited in breaking boundaries, pushing the envelope, trespassing on taboos. It was all about excess. Some people might have regarded this as essentially sociopathic—it was, it is—but Larry Flynt was a pioneer and (I believe) a harbinger of the age of Trump. Unapologetic excess, in-your-face vulgarity, the flaunting of norms and standards, and a kind of malicious, malevolent celebration of crudity masquerading as democratic virtue. He died Feb. 10 at the age of 78.

XXXX

I have visited San Francisco some six or eight times and have never—shame on me—gone to the City Lights Bookstore. Its founder and proprietor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died Feb. 22 at the age of 101. His name and his life were emblematic of the San Francisco that flourished in the decades after the World War—a beacon to artists and dreamers, beats and hippies and gay people and activists; the San Francisco now disappearing (heartbreak!) under a tidal wave of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, astronomical housing prices and homelessness. Ferlinghetti published Alan Ginsburg’s poem, “Howl,” and a period piece of his own that was a landmark—“Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of Dwight Eisenhower.”

Of his move to the City after the war and a stint in Europe, just as the Beat generation was emerging, Ferlinghetti was matter-of-fact. “I used to make up all these literary reasons why I came out here. But I realize it was really because it sounded like a European place to come. There was wine, and it just seemed more interesting than New York.”

XXXX

Rennie Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” tried for their role in the “unrest” at the 1968 Democratic convention, died Feb. 2 at the age of 80.

In my teenage years, I was deeply enamored of “the Sixties,” and as my peer group degenerated into Disco, I lamented being born ten years too late. One of my earliest “political” memories is of my oldest brother, who would have been 14 at the time, being outraged at the televised image of Chicago police beating the crap out of demonstrators in Grant Park outside the ’68 convention. Two years later, when four students were shot on the campus of Kent State, I recall an argument my brother was having with our grandfather, who lived in rural Ohio not an hour from Kent State. (Many years later, the grievance that many locals felt about the incident, and their vehemence about “outside agitators” who had created the disturbance, was still fresh.)

As a defendant in the trial following the Convention, he was convicted of conspiracy and later acquitted on appeal. He had been an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and authored, along with fellow Chicago defendant Tom Hayden, the famous Port Huron Statement.

Davis remained an activist but managed to steer clear of the dubious paths some of his compatriot followed. “I try not to be reckless,” Davis told the Post in 1971, “and try to avoid confrontation that can lead to prison or death, but I’ll never stop working…..”

XXXXXX

If Rennie Davis was a symbol of the political 1960s, then the Supremes—and the Motown sound—represented the cultural 1960s. Or, anyway, forever more would be a necessary part of the soundtrack to the 60s. MaryWilson, who died Feb. 8, grew up in a Detroit housing project and as a teenager hooked up with a vocal group that included Florence Ballard and Diana Ross. They signed with Barry Gordy’s Motown Records and teamed up with the legendary songwriting trio of that genre, Holland-Dozier and Holland. Their first number 1 song was “Where Did Our Love Go,” in 1964. I'd venture anyone my age can hear it in their heads—it had the sound of the city, the church, and the street corner altogether, smooth and silky and smart.

Mary Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and moved to Detroit when he was 3 to live with an aunt and uncle. She absorbed the grown-ups record collection—jazz and gospel and popular music—as well as (according to the Post) Doris Day movies. IN elementary school she sang in a talent show and later began visiting the Motown studio with Ross and Ballard and singing backup for $2.50 a piece. From 1964 to 1969 the Supremes had 19 top 20 hits, toured the world, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

XXXXXX

Lubomir Kavalek was an international grandmaster chess player from Czechoslavakia who died in February (exact date uncertain). As a young man only recently become an international champion, a fellow countryman summed up the nature of the game for him when the older man pronounced: “You are now nailed to the chess board, young man.”

I guess that’s the way it is. I went through a chess playing spell in my 30s, when I lived near Dupont Circle in DC and would take up games in the circle park, often with homeless men who hung out there (they were often very, very, very good). I never quite penetrated even the ceiling dividing advanced beginners from intermediate wanna-be’s, but I played enough to know why it was something more than a game. Kavalek was an assistant to Bobby Fischer, the driven American who defeated Boris Spassky in a Cold War Contest in 1972 (and later, reportedly, spiraled into mental illness). Kavalek was playing a tournament in Poland when the Soviets invaded his country in 1968, and he opted not to return but to join his father in Berlin where the older man had fled following the Communist take-over in 1968,

In later years, Kavalek wrote about chess for the Washington Post: Pawn sacrifices in the opening work in mysterious ways.

In an interview with the paper, he said: “Just to think about it as a game is degrading. It has certain elements of science and art and some competitive elements that even have to do with sport. It tests your imagination; it test a lot of things. Sometimes it is not all pleasure. Sometimes you suffer.”

It Will More Than Do: Jamie Raskin, National Hero

The presentation for the prosecution by Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) during this past week’s remarkable Senate hearing was very simply magnificent. It was stunning. It ought to be archived somewhere, prominently, to be replayed for generations to come so that they will know about the guilt of Donald Trump in inciting the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6 and about the intellectual and ideological ruin that is the current Republican Party.

His presentation was exacting, forensic, logically irrefutable, nearly flawless in execution and a masterpiece of rhetoric—some of the best of which was more or less extemporaneous, as when he embraced the “tag” put forward by Trump’s hapless and incompetent lawyers that the charges against the former president were a new “Raskin Doctrine.” The video evidence, much of which was new, brought home again the seriousness of what happened that day. That Raskin performed this brilliant service to his country in the immediate aftermath of the death of his college-age son by suicide….what can you say? 

In the Twitter-sphere and elsewhere a lot of people were disappointed or furious that Democrats “folded” when they declined Saturday to call witnesses. This was after a report from a moderate conservative who was with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy during an angry phone call with Donald Trump in the middle of the riot, urging the president to call off the rioters. Trump had (of course) expressed that the rioters were antifa, to which McCarthy angrily responded that no, they were his supporters. To which Trump reportedly said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people care more about the election than you do.” (And McCarthy reportedly responded, “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”)

A most damning bit of evidence. But Raskin and colleagues’ presentation was already damning as to Trump’s comportment during the riot. Their presentation was electrifying and sobering all at once, an effect that would have been diluted as the trial wore on. And Republicans were going to drag it out, endangering passage of Biden’s COVID relief and the confirmation of judges. And all the most damning witnesses imaginable were not going to get a conviction in this Senate, owing to the moral, intellectual and ideological rot of the Republican members—a rot that was now recorded, along with Trump’s guilt, on national television for all of time. Raskin was able to get the report about McCarthy's phone call on the record, which was enough. Mitch McConnell’s scorching condemnation of Trump after the acquittal—which may have been part of the bargaining that happened Saturday morning—underscored that despite the acquittal, this was no victory for Trump or Trumpism.

It was a massive defeat. His lawyers were a humiliated laughingstock, and everyone who watched it knows it. David Frum wrote a couple of great columns during the trial, one about the incompetent buffoonery that has always seemed to be endemic to anything Donald Trump touches, and a later one after the acquittal, titled “It’ll Do.”

It will more than do. There is nothing more important than that the Biden Administration have a successful first year---that means massive COVID relief and the acceleration of the vaccine rollout. We might, just possibly, be moving back toward something like normal by September. This will do more to neutralize Trumpism than all the witnesses that might have been called. That can happen now because the House managers quickly wrapped up a searing, brutally winning case against the former president.

And Jamie Raskin is a national hero.  

The Cesspool that is Political Facebook and The Need to be Heard (or The Only News You Really Need to Know)

 

Didn’t Paul Simon have a song long ago that went, “I get all the news that I need from the weather report….”?

I like that guy, the guy who knows what he needs to know (namely, should he wear a wool coat or a light spring jacket?) and what he doesn’t need to know. There used to be a lot of guys like that, I like to think, guys who picked up the newspaper (the print kind you hold in your hands) took a look at the weather and the sports page, then chucked the rest. As to his political opinions, he borrowed those—completely and justifiably without shame—from his family or peer group or other affiliations: his union, his church, his softball team. He didn’t live for politics, he didn’t spend hours arguing with people about it, he certainly didn’t go to “rallies.” He considered this (when he thought about it at all) to be one of the geniuses of the exceptional country he lived in—that you might vote every couple of years, might write to or yell at your congressman everyone once-in-a-while, might campaign for someone you especially liked, but otherwise you could go about tending your own private garden of happiness. In this he was a great and wise political thinker.  

What happened to that guy? Now he’s got a Facebook page and a Twitter account and is a fucking expert on everything—macroeconomics, epidemiology, foreign policy. The exceptional documentary flick, The Social Dilemma, as everyone already knows, is a forensic exploration, led by the young tech wizards who built these tools, of how the algorithms of social media—especially Facebook—are designed to both addict its users and manipulate them. And of how, when the medium is used for political “discussion,” the algorithm invariably divides people into self-reinforcing echo chambers.

Not discussed is what the user brings to this equation, and what he or she brings, I know from personal experience, is an enormous hunger to be heard, to have one’s voice amplified into the universe. I can still remember, long before Facebook, when it first became possible to engage in online “discussions,” when it first became possible to sit at your PC and send your opinions out to the world.

Magical! 

I think we have never gotten over it. I think I am no exception.

Growing up in Washington, a culture of over-educated know-it-alls, I started out early as a wannabe know-it-all. When I was maybe 15 or 16, I was watching a show called “Agronsky and Company,” in which some D.C.-based journalists would hash out the week’s news. It was so quaint. Martin Agronsky was an old school press guy who looked typecast to play the reporter who keeps a bottle of hootch in his desk. (In fact, I think he did smoke a cigarette on the set; this was the 1970s). He would host some other scribes and columnists—Peter Lisagor, George Will, Hugh Sidey, Carl Rowan, James Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Drew—and they would mix it up a bit. Sometimes, someone might get a wee bit heated, but really it was all very polite and friendly.

I liked it and I think I formed then a wish that I never quite articulated or said out loud—a wish to be one of those guys on the show. To be a Serious Guy With Opinions You Should Hear. In retrospect, this now feels to me like an appalling thing to aspire to but judging from social media today it seems like it is a desire not exclusive to over-serious teenagers marinated in D.C. head culture.

That social media has amplified and exacerbated our divisions is well known, an argument that has itself been swept up into the tsunami of argument and division: when Twitter shut down Donald Trump’s account, the over-weening power of tech companies to control speech became the new debate, leaving some of us to wonder—how in the world would Abe Lincoln have ever delivered the Gettysburg Address without his Twitter account?

I can remember when Facebook seemed to be a teenage kid thing; at some point the kids moved on to Instagram and Snapchat and (later) TikTok, and Facebook became a middle-age phenomenon. Some people think Zuckerberg is evil personified, but a wise friend I know thinks he’s just a “deer in the headlights” and that’s almost certainly true. Although the tech wizards in The Social Dilemma insist that the algorithm was designed from the beginning to monetize and manipulate our every online footprint, they may not have known when it started how it would be exploited politically, how it would be used by people (like me) as a megaphone, as a tool to quench the thirst for being heard (not to mention how it would be exploited by “actors” genuinely interested in sowing chaos). 

For political “discussion,” it was never going to be anything but a cesspool. Even in “real life,” and under the best conditions, debate about difficult public issues or controversies is plagued by the “Simple and Blunt” problem—which is that a simple and blunt answer, or slogan, is easier to communicate, more memorable, and often more attractive than an answer that is highly nuanced and strives to contain all the complexities of a complex problem. (And this problem is compounded by the fact that sometimes—rarely, but not never!—a simple, blunt answer is the right one.)

On Facebook and Twitter, simple and blunt is all there is.

The architecture of Facebook was built for sharing pictures of your kids and your vacations and your cat or your dog. It is a truly remarkable tool for sharing those aspects of your life, for keeping in touch with far-flung friends. Facebook has brought me together—sometimes in “real life”—with more than a few old friends from childhood. Consider me conflicted and addicted.

XXXXXXXXXX

It was more than seven months after the beginning of the pandemic. I’d had too much isolation, too many zoom meetings, too much time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.

And mind you, this was only October.

So I will always be grateful to remember the night when a birdwatching friend in Baltimore took me to see where a great flock of Chimney Swifts, migrating south, came to roost for a period of nights at dusk in the old industrial chimney of a repurposed factory. Unable to roost upright on branches as most birds do, Chimney Swifts cling instead vertically to surfaces, and are so=named because they roost communally in the safety of brick chimneys.

We arrived about 6:45 and waited around scanning the sky for more than 30 minutes, wondering if they had migrated further south; the Swifts had been showing up for several nights already, attracting each night a small crowd of locals, birdwatchers and others in the know. Among the 15 or 20 people gathered to watch the night I was there was a mother with her small boy, about five years old.

The boy and I struck up a conversation when he pointed to a picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a telephone poll and asked me, “Have you seen that cat?”

“No, I haven’t seen that cat,” I said. “I don’t live in Baltimore.”

“I live in Baltimore,” he said.

“Oh, well I live in Washington, D.C. I’m here visiting a friend of mine.”

“Washington?” he said. He looked at his mother as if for confirmation of something, then back at me. Then he exclaimed, “The news!”

Yeah, the news—way, way, way too much news.

Slowly as dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all points on the compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of humans—and for the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney, the gathering ever growing as the birds kept arriving from every part of the sky, until there were likely more than 500 of them in a great communal flight around the chimney.

And then at some point—again determined by some innate clock or communal signaling—they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive into the chimney where they would roost for the night. (How is it decided who gets to go to sleep first?) As they dove, the circling flight grew tighter like the funnel of a hurricane winding and winding its way to a finish as the last of the birds disappeared for the night.

I have never seen anything like it. The memory of it—and my pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of that terrible year. Communal rhythms, a music understood only or best, by the species for whom it is intended, are woven into the fabric of nature. Into our human nature as well; birthdays, baptisms and brises and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and proms, weddings and funerals—may this cursed pandemic speedily pass so that we might return to these . For they are the ritual gatherings we have evolved over years to correspond to that music that only you and I can hear, and the only news you really need to know.