Further Musings

My evenings with Wendell are slowly drawing to a close as I work my way through his fiction.  He’s been a lovely voice and mentor to listen to… an apostle of rootedness and community in a time of great personal transition.

Most recently I finished That Distant Land, Berry’s collected short-stories about the Port William community.  These were by far the funniest writings I’ve read by him, and also some of the most poignant. The stories are set across a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s.  Telling stories about one community over such an arc of time means you get to see the characters grow up, love the land and the neighbors, and die off in a rhythmic wave that reminds me of both how little and how much our lives really are.

The giant Tol Proudfoot with hair that stands out like an old straw broom and his minute wife, Miss Minny, frame the largest section of the book.  Their late marriage, deep love, and infertility moved me as much as their antics made me laugh.  Wild man Uncle Burley Coulter chases coons with the hounds, grieves, regrets and grows as a character, and dies a death that is a premonition of the best New Yorker article I’ve ever read.

This was a treasure of a book.  I’m deeply grateful to have spend so many evenings with Wendell this year.

I just finished A World Lost, a brief novel set in Port William and written by Wendell Berry.  This one tells the story of Andy Catlett’s journey to understand the murder of his favorite uncle and namesake, Uncle Andy.  I continue to read these stories because the move me.  In a town where I am still unconnected I miss the deep emotional connections to others.  Berry reminds me of that connection and for that I’m grateful.

A World Lost is a brief, thoughtful tale that ruminates on its main characters.  The grown Andy recounts his boyhood encounters with Uncle Andy and he studies his memories from his childhood and what he learned in the years since.  The tale isn’t a murder mystery but rather a character sketch by a man who looked up to his uncle with the worship and adoration that only a small boy can give.  His uncle is as different a man from his father as a man can be.  Uncle Andy is as brash, impulsive, and often full of liquor as his father is steady, intense, and sober.

For reasons that no one in the book knows, Uncle Andy was married to a frail needy woman named Judith of whom nothing was every asked.  In return, she asks everything of everyone.  Berry’s words about who she became after her husband’s death haunt me and are his most powerful descriptions:

As her afflictions grew she seemed to become increasingly self-concerned.  Her sufferings finally were not at all conditioned by the understanding that others also suffered; she suffered in an almost pristine innocence, as if she were the world’s unique sufferer and the world waited curiously to hear of her pains.  She was so prompt and extravagant in pitying herself that she drove all competitors.

…

One afternoon when I was fifteen I called out to one of my friends, and in the same instant looked across the street and saw Aunt Judith (now blind from glaucoma).  She had recognized my voice, and she turned to stare sightlessly towards me … I went on as I intended to go, pretending under her following blind gaze that it was not my voice that she had heard and that I was not myself.

For want of compassion – aware that I would inevitably fail to be compassionate enough, but also for want of enough compassion – I denied that I was who I was, and so made myself less than I was.  This was my first conscious experience of a shame that was irremediable and hopeless – a shame, as I now suppose, that Uncle Andrew may have met in himself, in her presence, many a time.

This surely was the punishment that she dealt out, wittingly or not, willingly or not, to Uncle Andrew and to the rest of us.  And if at times in the past I could abandon her to the self-martyrdom of the self-absorbed, and though I see now better than then how impossible she was, still I am sorry.  For I can no longer forget that loss and illness and trouble, however a person may exploit them, cannot be exploited without being suffered.  Aunt Judith exploited them and suffered them, and suffered her exploitation of them.  She suffered and she was alone.

And so she is inescapable.  In my mind I will always see her standing there in the street, her head tilted stiffly up, hopelessly hoping for some earthly pity greater than her pity for herself.” Selections from Chapter VIII.

Another bit of prose from Wendell Berry that I’ve come back to more than once.  It reminds me of all I wish I had asked my grandparents.  Had I only been wise enough to ask.  But as Berry says “a boy’s mind is different from a man’s by precisely a lifetime.”  And so it is that I read this wistfully.

Uncle Jack forsook his present worries, and the conversation, belong then to him and Grandpa, took up the burden of times only they had known.  They spoke of horses and mules and men and days.

Now I can wish that I had stayed and listened and tried to remember.   Now I can wish I had foreseen then what I would want to know now, and had asked the questions I now wish I had asked.

What did their elders remember of the Civil War, and of the time before that?  What did they tell about slavery?  After the war, how were things rearranged between the races?  Was the Klan active here?  What did it do?  Who was in it?  What was it like here before the railroad came, or all-weather roads, when the only dependable transportation to and from Port William was by the river?  What did they remember of the still-standing ancient forests?  How did they make it through the depression of the 1890s?  The drouth of 1908?

But a boy’s mind is different from an old man’s by precisely a lifetime.  And so the talk of that day went out into that day’s air and light and the silence beyond, and the silence has kept it.”

Andy Catlett: Early Travels.  Pgs 70& 71.

Recently I’ve been reading another Wendell Berry novel, Andy Catlett: Early Travels.

I am loving Berry’s books because the feel so quiet and I long for that so much.  Reading them is like sitting beside a lazy river on a sunny day.  It’s beautiful just to glance at, but the longer you sit with it and the quieter you get, the more you like it.  The more its beauty seeps into the soul a bit.

I’ve come back to a couple of  passages more than once.  I like the one below because it makes me wonder about my ability to become like the Mom in her gracious, faithful love . . . and I wonder what about being a Christian demands that we do have vision for change in ourselves and the people around us . . .

“My mother I believe I knew fairly well from a fairly early age.  Looking back, I love her simply as I knew her to be.  And I wonder, too, at what she came to be as she grew older and the trials of motherhood and other early difficulties fell away from her.  In her old age she seemed to me to become almost purely generous and wise.  Unlike my father, for whom love was always involved with fear and exasperation and who felt personally affronted by any unremedied flaw, she accepted what she could not help and came finally to a quietness within herself that signified great faith, and no fear at all.

But I had to grow and age into knowledge of my father, and I am afraid to say yet that I know him fairly well.  Insofar as he was a critic of the people and places he loved, he was as much a visionary all his life as I was to be at any age – though at the age of nine I could not have envisioned that.  He bore the burden of his certainty that some things could be improved, and of his vision of how to improve them.  And over and over again he suffered enormous frustration at his or anybody’s inability to make the needed correction.

Both he and my mother were motivated by great love, bu hers abounded quietly, and his was instant and ungraduated, always at full flow.

One morning as I was watching him shave, I asked experimentally, “Daddy, what would you do if I died?”

His reply was shocking, for it came while the sound of my voice seemed still in the air, and with a force of passion that I had not until then imagined: “I would cry my eyes out!”

I recently finished a beautiful novel by Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter.  It’s the fictional autobiography of twice widowed woman born in 1923 and dying in the 2002.  Her life story takes place within 20 miles of her place of birth on the banks of the Kentucky river.

The book is Hannah’s story, but it’s also the story her town, Port William, and its people: her parents, her husbands, their parents, and her children.

I loved this book for its profound thankfulness.  She writes: ”This is my story, my giving of thanks.”  And it is.  It’s a long prayer/reflection about her life, about the good parts and the hard parts.

I connected with her grief and with her thankfulness.  I feel profoundly uprooted from Chapel Hill.  I’m profoundly grateful for the many people I know and have known there.  And yet there is a separation that grieves.  My most emotional connections in the past and not the present.  The phone helps a lot.  But nine weeks into Greenville and the separation is still real . . . and I know the gap is growing . . .

And Hannah’s grief helped give shape to mine.

She mourns for the separation wrought on her by losing her children to the wider world.  To her surprise and grief, as she sends her children off to college . . . and they slip away.  Off to investment banking in California, to teaching in Lexington, to college professorship a few hours away.  It takes them from her stable community, built on knowing the land and helping each other.  Her children wandered up to their grandparents on afternoons for helpful chores or visits, now their children see Grandma Hannah once a month or once a year on visits.  Their problems are beyond Hannah’s reach or knowledge.

She grieves for the transformation of her community.  More children move away than return.  Farms become subdivisions.  More neighbors become commuters.  And several centuries of a small town life have almost eroded away.

She mourns for death.  She is thankful in her bones for the people that she knows.  Even as the cataclysm of WWII reaches into Port William and takes her first husband, she grieves, and matures, and grows.  As old age takes her second she grieves and grows again.

And yet even as she’s grieved she’s thankful, profoundly thankful for her marriages (as different as they were), for her children, for the land she knows and loves, and for the people she was blessed to know all the years they overlapped with her in Port William.

Her thankfulness is the reason I loved this novel.  Every night, as I read before going to sleep, I felt like I do in worship, when the singing and the prayers wash over me.  I’m grateful to the point of silence.

I don’t agree with everything Berry writes about.  Small towns had their particular evils which he omits.  Commuters can have fulfilling and meaningful work.   Loans aren’t always oppressive.

But despite all that, he loves what he loves so dearly that it’s beautiful to read.  His vision of community, of being known and loved, and of the rootedness that comes from knowing and loving the land you live resonate with me.

It was a lovely, nourishing, moving book.  I’m thankful to have picked it up.

This week I finished The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball.  Her memoir chronicles the journey from vegetarian NYC writer to rural farmer.  The majority of the book focues on her & her husband’s adventures during their first year starting up a “whole diet” farm, which is a farm program where subscribers get every part of their diet from the farm (dairy, meat, maple syrup, veggies, and grains).

Kimball is an easy writer to read and her outsider descriptions of the dirty reality of farm life are engaging.  There are two storylines: she and her husband begin to shape their new farm together and she makes a journey from head-over-heels lover to committed spouse.  The remainder of the book focus on the foodie rewards of farming and spares no expense when raving about how tasty the various products turn out to be (be they fresh potatoes or newly prepared internal organs).

Overall it was a fun and easy read if you’re looking for something light to pick up, even more so if you’re a foodie or a gardener.  Because they farm on such a large scale I wasn’t as inspired as I have been by similar books.  Still, it was fun to hear about the adventures of farming with horses even if I’ll never do it.

Last week, after my department declined to offer me a job, Charity and I debated hanging up my academic spurs and resuming my career as a policy analyst.  As we discussed the pros and cons, one of the biggest draws of working as a policy analyst was a chance to work in Washington DC with the best and the brightest of the policy world on policies that really make a difference in people’s lives.

As such, it was fortuitous that at night I was reading The Right Stuff, an insightful account of the Mercury Space program by Tom Wolfe.  Ostensibly, the book is about the Mercury Seven, as the astronauts were known, who were selected from amongst the military’s hottest test pilots and their journey into space.

But in reality Wolfe’s keen descriptions of the pilots’ inner worlds are the real topic of the book.  They saw themselves as people at the top of the ziggurat of their profession, one of the most dangerous, demanding, and (because of the Cold War) necessary jobs in the world.  Being at the top of their professional pyramid was evidence that they had the right stuff.  When they started flying as new recruits their colleagues were sent off to fly prop planes and they were off to fly jets.  At each separation point they moved on and up the career ladder and accrued more evidence of their own inevitable climb to the top.

What has been striking to me is that these men are one version of an archetype: fundamentally they are the same as Wall Street bankers, White House bureaucrats, successful politicians, musicians, or even R-1 academics.  To reach the top of these professions one has to have a rock solid belief in your own worthiness.  This belief in your own success enables you to put the effort in where others might not.  Each victory further confirms your belief that you are sharp enough, good looking enough, talented enough, and have enough moxie.  You know your hard work will be rewarded.  You belong at the top, in the inner circle.

Over the last eight years I’ve found that I have this desire to work at the highest levels (though not in academia).  I can have a virtually unshakable belief in my own abilities and my own ability to produce good outcomes in certain arenas.  When I look away from academia towards working in policy, one reason is that I truly believe that I have what it takes to be a top-flight policy analyst, to sort the wheat from the chaff, to enter the ring, take the bruises, and play the game with success.  At it’s most generous I have the desire to be truly excellent, to make a difference, and to serve in the job.  And in truth, I’m not tempted to be Machiavellian, to shove down another to get to the top.

It isn’t the work, the responsibility, or influence that is terrifying.  It is the tremendous personal output necessary when you are that important, to be able to succeed at the top of anyone of these careers.  Stories of the powerful often laced with the tremendous personal destruction that the powerful and ambitious are willing to incur to climb.  Divorces, alienated children and spouses, despised coworkers, the cultivation of an amazing arrogance abound.

It is sobering for me to think that, even knowing that, I’m still drawn to work in these places.  I’m tempted to make the trade-off.  Our pastor often says, no one says on their deathbed “I wish I had worked more.”  Working among with the best and brightest is so appealing that I don’t believe him.  I wonder, will I regret that I didn’t work hard enough to be a policy analyst?

Wolfe’s test pilots are an extreme case in that their work regularly destroyed them, literally.  Wolfe doesn’t dwell on it much, except for the first chapter, but the mortality rate of non-combat Navy pilots was 23% over a twenty year career.  For the test pilots this must have been worse.  Their wives and children at home lived within earshot of the base fire trucks that attended every emergency.  They lived in waking terror of the sight of two grave, black-clad men coming knocking on their front door in the hour after the sirens.  It is quite the vision of what an unbounded commitment to work can get you.  And its a reality that the men willingly chose.

It’s even more tragic in those who choose to try but don’t make it.  Maybe it’s lack of talent, maybe it’s lack of effort, maybe it’s just bad luck.  Whatever it is, it has been pretty horrific to watch over the last couple of years amongst my friends and coworkers.  They let their personal and spiritual lives burn away to pursue the dream . . . and reap none of the rewards.  Some pull away in time, but for many who I’m watching, they don’t.  It’s horrifying, as horrifying as the descriptions of the corpses littered across the first chapter of The Right Stuff.

As you can tell, I really liked this book and am profoundly grateful for the wisdom it has given me about my own desires and those of others.  Many of my friends harbor no such desires.  Some of them have suffered enough from those that have the Right Stuff enough to be nauseated by this kind of kind of culture.  For me, it articulated a vision of this archetype.  And that was it was certainly worth the read.

At the recommendation of one of several friends whose spouses have recently had affairs Charity and I have picked up Not “Just Friends” by Dr. Shirley Glass (who is Ira Glass‘s mom!).

The book is the story of affairs from initial attraction to emotional affairs to physical affairs to healing or divorce.  It’s a remarkably sad book to read as she details the stories of how affairs affected the marriages of Konrad and Katie, Sam and Sarah, and many other alliterative couples.

To my mind, the first two chapters should be required reading for any engaged or married couple.  Chapter One, “The Slippery Slope,” talks about practical marriage saving boundaries, “walls and windows,” that keep others out of the private spaces of marriage and give marriage partners a view into the relationship a spouse has with members of the opposite sex.  It also describes common places that affairs develop: at work, with neighbors or friends, and online.

Chapter Two, “Crossing into a Double Life,” walks through what happens as one partner begins to engage in an affair.  Emotional intimacy with the “friend” increases, secrecy starts as the partner starts to rationalize that the unwitting spouse doesn’t need to know everything, and finally sexually explicit discussion happens, the last step before a physical affair.  At this point the cheating spouse enters a double life of lying and compartmentalization.  Sigh.

The rest of the book details how what happens when an affair comes to light and how each of the three parties involved deals with the aftermath.  I skimmed these for what I found interesting for my friends.

The first two chapters are worth reading for the practical advice about protecting your marriage.  They tell you the story of how an affair begins so you will realize the dangerous road you are walking down should you wander (or charge) down it.  The rest of the book has some very wise things to say as well about why affair partners are more attractive than your spouse (it’s not a real relationship with real demands and stresses) and about why singles entering into affairs almost always get the short end of the stick as well (the cheating spouse almost never leaves for you and almost always lies to you about the real state of his or her marriage).

Here’s a summary on preventing infidelity from the end of the book.

1. Maintain appropriate walls and windows. Keep the windows open at home. Put up privacy walls with others who could threaten your marriage.
2. Recognize that work can be a danger zone. Don’t lunch alone or take coffee breaks with the same person all the time. When you travel with a co-worker, meet in public rooms, not in a room with a bed.
3. Avoid emotional intimacy with attractive alternatives to your committed relationship. Resist the desire to rescue an unhappy soul who pours his or her heart out to you.
4. Protect your marriage by discussing relationship issues at home. If you do need to talk to someone else about your marriage, be sure that person is a friend of the marriage. If the friend disparages marriage, respond with something positive about your own relationship.
5. Keep old flames from re-igniting. If a former lover is coming to the class reunion, invite your partner to come along. If you value your marriage, think twice about having lunch with an old flame.
6. Don’t go over the line when you’re online with Internet friends. Discuss your online friendships with your partner and show him/her your e-mail if he/she is interested. Invite your partner to join in your correspondence so your Internet friend won’t get any wrong ideas. Don’t exchange sexual fantasies online.
7. Make sure your social network is supportive of your marriage. Surround yourself with friends who are happily married and who don’t believe in fooling around.

This week I finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis. It’s the story of three small companies who saw the housing bubble coming, put their money were their mouths were, and made tens of millions in doing so.

In weaving his tale Lewis does an excellent job of explaining how loans made to people with no proven income and no down payment (so called “liar loans”) eventually were sold to retirees as the safest investments money can buy.  Learning about the financial wizardry was interesting, but more interesting were the personalities.  The financial system a jungle filled with honest fools, contemptible fools, and villains.  The main characters encountered them all.  It takes someone special to spit in the face of a trillion dollar industry, endure the scorn of your peers for a year, and still proclaim that the emperor has no clothes.

The Big Short was a gripping read personally.  For one, I’m working on a paper examining the spread of the financial crisis that this book describes.  For two, as state budgets move further and further into the red because of this crisis, fewer and fewer academic jobs post for next year.  While the innards of the book can be arcane, the consequences couldn’t be more real for me today.

One of the great treats of Christmas break is the time and space to read a non-work related book or two.   This week I’ve read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

It’s the story of a year when she and her family of four live off only food either they grow and raise on their one acre garden or buy from local producers (milk, flour and hard cheese mostly).  Each family member had one exception.  In my opinion they choose very wisely: coffee, spices, dried fruits, and hot chocolate.

Kingsolver is a wonderful writer.  Her she is describing the land, food and family she loves and her warm for them love shines through.  It helps that she lives in a part of Virginia very much like my hometown.  Plus, having gardened a little bit over the last few years, I can identify with her adventures with asparagus, squash, and other fruits from various seasons.  It was also interesting to read about her adventures with chickens and turkeys, something I have no experience with.

I really resonated with much of her way of growing great food, cooking it, and eating it as a family in a tight community.  At the end of they year she totaled up her receipts and compared to the previous year saved over $5,000 in groceries (wow!).  Plus, the quality and variety of what she ate was pretty spectacular.

I’d loved her emphasis on bio-diversity, both for taste and food security reasons.  She grew lots of “heritage breed” plants and animals that were colorful, tasty and unique.  I’m thankful that people are growing breeds of squash and turkey for their taste rather than their transportability and ability to survive in a factory farm setting.  Give me some taste!

I felt lectured in a few parts (especially about “food miles”) but overall I really enjoyed this fun, lusty, modern story of a year of growing.  It inspired me want to grow and make more food and gave me a few concrete ideas (cheese making anyone?).  When we end up in a new home that has more sun I think we just might plant a bigger garden and a lot of fruit bearing trees.

This week I finished the rare end-of-the-semester-pleasure-book: Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.  It’s an account of his short career as an investment banker in the 1980s.  It was laugh out loud funny in places and sharp witted about the life and values of an investment bank.  It reminded me a great deal of Power Broker in how it looked inside a large institution and showed the incentives it creates and the havoc they wreak.

It fed my growing feeling that I should be suspicious of the common wisdom that the institutions we interact with in life have our best interests in mind.  In this book it is the banks, the brokers, the government who come off looking poorly.  The government is ignorant of the havoc it has unleashed in deregulating savings and loans.  Local bankers gamble for redemption, wagering what’s left of their customer’s money in increasingly desperate bids to keep their jobs another month.  The investment bankers take advantage of their customer’s ignorance of the process and the market, working for their own profits instead of customer who is to ignorant to know they are getting screwed.

It all has me depressed about the institutions of the world.  It wasn’t the unabashed desire to make money that has me feeling glum, instead it was how the customers went like sheep to the slaughter, unable to understand what motivated the investment bankers.  The bankers themselves are hardly more admirable.   They used their monopoly position to ride the bubble up to the top, all the while congratulating themselves because the money they made proved how smart they really were.

All in all Liar’s Poker was a sharp read about that taught me a bit about bond trading in order to let me marvel at the dog-eat-dog, rich-get-richer world of Wall Street in the 1980s.  Helpful in understanding the 2000s and perhaps a bit about life as well.

If you’re feeling adventurous next time you make a turkey, I highly recommend this recipe.   It was fantastic and got lots of compliments about how moist it was.  Just have faith in the temperature recommendations and don’t be too scared of all the salt pork you wrap it in!

This weekend I’ve blown through The Checklist Manifesto, a fun little book written by Atul Gawande of the New Yorker article I just blogged about.

It’s very Malcom Gladwellish so if you enjoy learning some interesting, slightly geeky stuff then you’ll enjoy learning about how checklists are slowly changing the way operating rooms work, why airlines are as safe as they are, and how sky-scrapper building projects are organized.

Alternately, this is a great read for people trying to accomplish complex tasks that need to be completed by a team in a hurry.  Even if each task is unique (landing at different airports, starting different surgeries, investing in stocks) making sure the common ones get checked off and that the whole team understands what’s going on can be a very good thing.

Checklists also keep people from blowing past things that they know they should check, but don’t because everything will probably be alright even if they aren’t right.

I’m left wondering how to implement checklists in my work as a grad student soon to be a professor.  Perhaps one for reviewing articles or one for undergraduates on how to write papers.

I just finished this article in this week’s New Yorker titled Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? Certainly worth reading.

It was long, really long (as New Yorker articles are). But as someone who will one day face death and will probably watch many family members face death, the article is a blessing.  As the author notes, you only face death once so it’s an experience for which most families have little preparation.  This article at least gives you a sense for some of the tradeoffs.

Though it’s realistic about dying, the article is not gory.  That said, it can be hard to read as he talks about frankly about losing spouses and loved ones and the choices that they faced.

This morning I finished my first book of the year, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  The sub-title is The Story of Success and I think that’s a good summation of the book.  Outliers a pop-science book where Gladwell gives blends interesting examples to illustrate a series of points about what determines who succeeds and why.

One basic point is that the outrageously successful of the world are successful not just because they are smart and work hard (very hard) but also because history, family, and culture come together and provide them the chance to be outrageously successful.

For example, Bill Gates born 10 years earlier would not have had access to computers at all.   Bill Gates born into a different family would not have had a mom who raised money to put a computer in his Seattle high school. Bill Gates born in the same year but in Hendersonville would not have had been hired to program for power plant HR systems as a high schooler.

In making his points about success Gladwell fills the book with interesting tidbits about why Korean pilots crashed 17 times more often than American pilots pre-2000, why being born in January makes you four times more likely to be hockey all-star than your friend born in December, and why poor elementary school kids learn more during the school year than their rich peers and still end up behind in test performance by fifth grade.

Fun, interesting, and short if this kind of stuff interests you.