I'm Fifty and I Don't Know Nothing

Dear Alice and Violet,

I heard about you quite a while ago, and I thought about you deeply at that time. Toni Morrison is the one who was telling me. . . about you, about your lives, about the songs your lives were singing in a blue, blue melody with overtones so pure and so sad.

Well, dears, I just want you to know that I understand and the questions you raise are. . . well, I just wanted to tell you you're not alone.

Here's what you said that caught my ear. Toni was talking, telling me, and I just started writing it down. I was driving at the time. (My writing gets so squiggly when I'm driving, like the line of a saxophone solo, and the sentences get out of place.)

For instance, "I'm 50 & I don't know," is what near-onto stopped me in my tracks, that is, if I hadn't been driving about 70 miles an hour past the big Watt Road truck stop. Now, there is a place NOT to stop in your tracks, with those double-semis roaring across lanes. The lanes from Nashville join in right there. Some lanes hot-foot-it up from the south and some come in from the west. Those drivers are not fooling when they hedge you, in a flash, with a blinking light saying, "Want over! NOW!"

"We born around the same time, me and you," said Violet. "We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don't just say I'm grown and ought to know. I don't. I'm fifty and I don't know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want. . . well, I didn't always. . . now I want. I want some fat in this life."

"Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it."

"You don't know either, do you?"

"I know enough to know how to behave."

"Is that it? Is that all it is?"

"Is that all what is?" There's more of this conversation excerpted here.

I do understand, Alice, Violet. Getting old is no trick. And sometimes you look up from your reading, or driving, or laundry, or sewing, or music, or writing of blogs and say, "Hey, wait a minute. Is this it?" And you're not sure what "behaving" has to do with it.

Well, I want to encourage you, not that I'm sure of everything, because I'm just me, but I've lived and come from a family of folks who have lived a long time.

My husband calls me a Communist, but I'm not. I'm just a socialist. And I'm not even a good socialist. I haven't even read Karl Marx. But I kind of believe that in some ways all things are equal. The sky up above our heads and the solid pavement or earth beneath us lend some equality to all things. And, it is the embrace of this equality and availability of good things that can grant to us the opportunity to say, "Yes. That is all there is. Isn't it fine!"

My mother said, the other day, that she was thinking about heaven. She said, "It's so close!" She wasn't fearful. She meant, "Isn't it grand." I was out the other day and saw eight deer in a field. My children were together at Thanksgiving and played kickball in the cold. They let me play even though once they observed my running style, they thought I'd better be the pitcher for both teams.

In spite of what you hear from various sides, both conservatives and liberals, "behaving" does have something to do with living a happy life. You can't spend up your capital. . . energy and money and emotional engagement on foolishness. You can't shut your window and breathe fresh air. You can't run after what doesn't exist and find it. How do I say that in the terminology of behaving? You can't covet something you don't have and enjoy what you've got. You can't be unfaithful to your husband, wife, and family and experience the delights of your husband, wife, and family. You can't lie and still believe. You can't curse and be blessed. You've got to behave yourself.

I'm way over fifty now. I don't know much. But, as much as I know anything, I know that love and faithfulness, beauty and truth, goodness and justice, with a good dose of humility thrown in are investments whose payback is the only payback. So that's what you invest in.

BRD

P.S. Christianity is, by the way, about second chances. That's why I believe in the gospel of Jesus. The story there is of redemption. A second chance at the fat of life. Today is always the day for new investment in that which is the real fat.

There is a commonly known passage from the Bible that talks about enjoying the beautiful fields of our lives and following after God and spiritual things in a way that brings fulfillment. It ends with these words, "Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." How fat is that?

The Road (Through the Smokies) by Cormac McCarthy

Dear Cormac,

Don't you hate reading the critics? Right or wrong they overstate to the point of nausea. So here am I writing a critique. "I'm sorry," as Papa said over and over and over again in your book.

I rather liked what this guy said. “The Road is the logical culmination of everything [McCarthy]’s written. It is also, paradoxically, his most humane and compassionate book . . . The question that the novel implicitly poses–how much can you subtract from human existence before it ceases to be human?–takes on heartbreaking force . . . One measure of a good writer is the ability to surprise. Terse, unsentimental, bleak–McCarthy’s readers have been down that road before. But who would ever have thought you’d call him touching?” –Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"Down that road before". . . his pun "intended". But what a metaphor it is. I don't think any of us tire of the journey of life, so how can we tire of the symbol. I was very taken with this story, for I am a perpetual student of life and have actually surveyed the subject of The Good, the Summum Bonum of life, and this book tackles it so "head on" that I could hardly fail to love it.

My cousin Geoff says he knows you, that he used to drink with you in a bar somewhere in the Southwest, maybe in Mesilla near where routes 180 and 85 separate but before route 70 joins 180 going west. You know that little place? That was long ago, for he has not been to the Southwest for a long time. He liked you though. Maybe I have seen you. Do you ever come back and visit Knoxville, disguised to avoid Knox News reporters, disguised as a University of Tennessee professor who has tired of wearing orange. I think Knoxville is a good place to live and work and write blogs. You are welcome to come back any time.

The roads of Knoxville have always been an important part of the place. I remember talking with this woman who lived in Cosby. Her daddy was a moonshiner. He carried his shining goods back and forth along "Thunder Road" to Knoxville and beyond. She may or may not have followed her father's liquid tradition, but she could play a lick on a dulcimer. She knew the roads of the Smokies well. I've spent some time with a few of the Old Timers too. Old Timers are the folks who had actually lived on the land that is now the Smoky Mountains National Park. And Old Timers knew how to survive, and knew how to trail through those mountains with no more than a deer path to guide them.

The people of the Smokies were a unique breed of folks. They cleared a very rough land. And a successful year barely got them through until Spring. The wild vegetation would spring up so quickly that it reclaimed the south 20 'bout as fast as the settlers claimed the north 20. Yet they remained hopeful and found unique expressions in singing, and story telling, and such. You can still join with a group that does shape note singing--I saw the next sing advertised in this week's papers. I suppose they need new members to survive these days so they put it in the papers. Next thing you know they'll be on YouTube.



Passing on things to our children is one of the things The Road talks about isn't. It is one of the goods we have to offer our loved offspring. The Smoky Mountains were always good for a story. One of the great story tellers was Wiley Oakley. He called himself the roaming man of the Smokies. He could have, I suspect, entertained Papa and the boy had they come across him while walking through those mountains.
This was Wiley.

I remember one mountain oldster showing me the trees that now stand on the home site of his birth. His pathos reminds me of the losses that your characters faced. It was a different set of circumstances, less dire of course. Yet the Old Timers of the Smoky Mountains felt a great loss when they lost the land where they were birthed. And many never strayed too far from where they had been born . . . even now. Close enough, they've stayed, to visit the graves at plots now only reachable by vehicles with special permissions and assists. Graves slowly being taken by the soft reaches of the biospheric multiplicity that is the Smokies. At least that was not lost.

Have you, (I'll bet you have) ever sought out morels? Yes? But they are hard to find even in the best of times. Hidden, camouflaged in the greys and ripples of the earth. They have always been a precious find like the one you described in The Road, and one that was always a great secret. It was never polite to ask where an Old Timer found their morels. That kind of prying just wasn't done.

The Old Timers of the Smoky Mountains led a gray and sparse existence, but one of hope, nonetheless. This, you captured and were, perhaps, inspired by as you wrote of the man and boy crossing this terrain. What route, I'm wondering were they traveling? I picture them plodding through the heart of the Smokies from Gatlinburg to Cherokee, crossing over near Newfound Gap. But the story doesn't really hold up under this theory. Mentions of Rock City make me believe the duo passed along the edge of the mountains on Route 129. Of course, Rock City signs are plentiful and from quite a distance, even as far as Bristol. None on Route 441 through the mountains, through the National Park.

What was in your mind?

Not place so much as theme, I bet. What makes 'good' in a human soul? What fires 'hope'? Salvation? What does that mean when we are stripped done to two people plus 'love'? You have drawn a good landscape for us to enter and think about those things.

You spent part of your life near Knoxville. I spent part of my early life near Pittsburgh. I read that the movie version of your book was set in the Pennsylvania environs. Yes, there is a bleak cast upon the face of Western P.A. (When they say PA, they say the P separately from the A). Coal and steel fired through that area and burned it up. Pittsburgh took a big hit. Fortunately, for hope, the city has rebounded and is doing better these days. Perhaps that will happen to your post apocalyptic world. Will morel mushrooms survive, thrive, and feed the sparse population of earth? Or is that even necessary for hope to live and fire the souls of even the last earthy citizens?

The Old Timers of the Smokies hoped and lived on little. They never wasted bread or bullets or friends or love or even many words, except for Wiley Oakley. But the ones I've met personally, Wiley's sister, Lucy (I think it was), Glen Caldwell, one of the park rangers, and others--they met life with a kind of fire that could survive on little and they brought to that life a great respect for land and people, continuance and love. That, there, is the Road, post apocalypse or not.

BRD

Starbuck, A Cup of Courage

Dear Herman Melville,

There are some human characteristics that seem to be falling away in this modern world . It's not so much that we don't need them any more, but that we have been insulated from the practice of the real stuff, the rehearsal of the scales and triads, so much that when time comes for the center stage performance we find ourselves shuffling through our sheets.

Musing over a cup of Starbucks, est. just 1971, I've been thinking about courage. And, as I think, it seems like it's about 50% opaque. It's fading and I'm not sure what to do about it.

Now, foolhardy, we've got that, with skateboarders jumping and sliding down railings, with universities investing, not so much in the education of philosophers, but in the pummeling of orange and white clad gents against blue and silver ones. Foolhardy we've got. But courageous? Sipping my cupajo, I'm not sure.

I like the description of the first mate in Moby Dick. Now that is about courage. "I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale," he says, with Ishmael noting that "The most reliable and useful courage arises from a fair estimate of the encountered peril." But we here in 2008 have so been insulated from certain kinds of perils, that we haven't played our scales in the practice of building our repetoire of courage. We haven't even sailed a skiff in anything but virtual waters, so how could we ever properly turn our faces into the typhoon if encountering a whale of a perilous moment. We wouldn't know what to fear and what to courageously stand against.

An "utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward," you say during your description of life with the first mate of the Pequod, who considered courage to be one of the great staple outfits, hauled on board with salt pork and tobacco for a long, hazardous voyage; a staple to be used with discretion so that the barrel containing it will not be found sparse when it is most needed. When I think of a coffee urn run dry, I find myself a bit nervous. Avast, what would I do on shipboard?

"The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit." The "welded iron of his soul" addressed the "wild, watery, loneliness" of his life with a conscientious courage, and one that we might well model ourselves after, (I with cup in hand rather than harpoon.)

To Starbuck, "courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions." But, it was a thing that he had refined through practice over the years. Perhaps, we moderns need to spend a little more time on whalers to get ourselves practiced up in courage.

Ten Most Important Studies for a Young Person (Items 2 and 3)

Dear Stevie,

As I said in my last post, you asked me to suggest some important works for you to study in this, your first year out of school. You have studied hard already, through high school, college, grad school, and of course all those athletic trials. Now you are free. Free not to "NOT study," but free to study what you choose.

I was very touched that you asked me what I thought would be good for you to study. And I have been thinking alot about what I wanted to recommend. I am working on a list of ten suggestions in no particular order.

One. Read your Bible as a disciplined regular practice. See last post!

Two. America in the King Years, An historical trilogy studying the period between 1954 and 1968.


The introduction to the third volumne of Taylor Branch's Pulitzer prize winning study of America in the King years begins with these words.

"Non-violence is an orphan among democratic ideas. It has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government, the vote, has no other meaning. Every ballot is a piece of non-violence signifying hard won consent to raise politics above fire power and bloody conquest. . . But the whole architecture of representative democracy springs from the handiwork of non-violence."

Your heart is already filled with the kinds of thinking about issues of justice that make me proud. This history will just fill in some important information that will help you understand our world, what it was, what it is, and what it should become in relation to class and race. The books center around Martin Luther King, Jr. but really cover all the main action of the Civil Rights Era.

Three. Get a solid foundation for understanding classical music. I have used a metaphor at times which has been offensive for some people. And I may be all wrong. The metaphor is this. Popular music is like eating McDonald's hamburgers. Everybody likes them. They are easy to get. They are cheap. Classical music is like a fine steak. They aren't always available, and when they are, they are expensive. The taste is more refined, but oh so much better than a Big Mac. And it is true that not everybody likes classical music, but my opinion is that it is lack of education and understanding that blocks their appreciation. I would hate to see you miss the depth and delight of classical music.

Here is where you should start, as I said in a post, some time ago, the lectures of Robert Greenberg, entitled, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. This is about 40 hours of listening, so it is a large undertaking. I did it while driving to and fro to work. and it is done best in chunks. Listen to lectures, which include large portions of great musical works as samples, then check out some CDs from the library that are from the periods he is teaching about and listen to them. The Greenberg Lectures are pretty standard fare at public library audio sections.

OK. That is three. Enough for now. I will post again soon.

Love,

MOM aka brd
XOX

Read Your Bible, Pray Every Day

Dear Son,

Quite a while ago I promised to give you a list of the ten most important things that you should do in your first year of freedom. What is important to do? What is important to know?

I have thought about that for a while and hardly know where to start. I have several unfinished postings that talk about different things, literature, music, justice. But yesterday during the church service that I was attending, I realized where I should begin. You will, perhaps find this to be a repeat of what you have heard over the years, what you have heard from your grandmother. It is, however, the number one thing I have to suggest of all the things I might say.

Let me start with the "New Testament reading of the day" from the 17th Sunday after Pentecost.

1Tim 6:6 (NRSV) Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment;

7 for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it;

8 but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

9 But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.

10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

11 But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.

12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

13 In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pon'tius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you

14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ,

15 which he will bring about at the right time--he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.

16 It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

17 As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.

18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,

19 thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

It was that last phrase, "Life that really is life," that most captured my imagination. Where in our world do we find much active talk about finding life that really is life. Where do we hear teaching about the importance of doing good over the importance of getting rich. All about us from billboards to movies, from sitcoms to malls, from the internet to ball field scoreboards, hucksters are telling us what to buy, what material goods to want, what gusto to grab. Few are the messages that we receive that say, stop. Riches and goods are not the summum bonum.

However, you will find that as regular fare in the Bible. Your palette is whetted with words like, "Be ye kind, one to another."
"I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content."

"Real joy."

"Let him who glories, glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practice kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth."

So #1 on my list of ten things to do this year echos the old children's song, "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow." You won't grow into some predetermined ideal. You'll grow into you, and the you who is conscious of the life that can be lived above or beyond the surface of a society carefully constructed with Madison Avenue paper mache and glitter. You won't find the answers to every question that will arise in the course of living, but you will find direction and hope and good.

Invest in this discipline.

MOM aka brd

XOX

The Tenth Year

Dear Mother Teresa,

I miss you today, ten years after you slipped the surly bonds of earth. But it was more than ten years ago when I stood by a pond and cried, grieving your passing a year or two before you actually did. You had suffered a heart attack that day, from which you recovered. Yet that was when I knew it would not be long until you would be with us no more. And then I cried.



The lines of your pen were as jagged as the lines on your face. And I love both. And the words you wrote and your dear face were beautiful, always.

Here are some more of your words:

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think
that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person
who has nothing to eat.

Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.
What we need is to love without getting tired.

Keep the joy of loving God in your heart and share this joy with all you meet especially your family.

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.

You and I, we are the Church, no? We have to share with our people. Suffering today is because people are hoarding, not giving, not sharing. Jesus made it very clear. Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me. Give a glass of water, you give it to me. Receive a little child, you receive me.

It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing.
It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.

Yesterday is gone.
Tomorrow has not yet come.
We have only today.
Let us begin.

Yes, your words are beautiful, your life was beautiful, your face was beautiful. Oh, how I wish, I looked like you.

Missing you still,

Betsy

Alberto Gonzales Gone and the Loss of a Symbol

Dear Alberto,

I for one, given the fact that I haven't studied the details of the case (Polly and the Mooch may silently scream if he wishes) am sorry that you are leaving visible high office. And I loved what the quote in the New York Times:

“Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days,” you said. “I have lived the American dream.” Your father, the Times says, was a "Mexican-American construction worker who raised eight children in a two-room home near Houston." And he didn't live to see all of this national hulabaloo, neither good nor bad.

Your Mom was there at the swearing in and my guess is that she has scolded you a bit over these recent public difficulties. You politicians just don't seem to be able to figure out what "Is" is, much less, "Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Still, I'm sorry to see you walk away. The walk in was much happier I think.

I don't want to go on and on, but I wanted to say that I regret the loss of the symbol your presence brought to the offices of justice. My mind flits to the days of Bobby Kennedy when the brothers K were struggling within their own ethical selves to balance political pressure and a precious morality that set the stage for the Civil Rights movement. Without those days, or ones like them the United States could still be actively banning non-caucasians from high office. Now, you have been there. You have helped break barriers. Thank you for that.

The Times also quoted Senator John Sununu, (R-NH). “Our country needs a credible, effective attorney general who can work with Congress on critical issues ranging from immigration to investigating terrorism at home and abroad. Alberto Gonzales’s resignation will finally allow a new attorney general to take on this task.”
Who the heck does he think will understand issues of immigration better than you do? I fear that the politics of politics will block the new attorney general from effective action just as they have blocked you.

Sometimes I wonder whether politicians even see the obvious. Well, that's another topic.

I wish you well.

BRD

The Gospel According to Lemony Snicket

Dear Lemony Snicket,

You say, "The world is an awful, dangerous place and the sooner kids learn that, the better."

Oh dear. How true is this? The world is dangerous, without and within. Perhaps, if only the world were dangerous and awful beyond our own selves, then there would be one last safe place, a final safe house to which we could retreat and find our own internal noble selves, and respite. But, dear oh dear, however much we would like, we are not "noble enough" it seems.

Fortunately, as a child, I did not stand on a beach and receive the news that my home had been destroyed in a conflagration. (Used here the word conflagration means "house fire.") And I feel, sometimes, the worse for this, because I ended up naive. (See picture of Pollyanna here.) My education in some ways started way too late. Lemony, you are helping me come to some hard, cold, realizations! As your sister Kit warned at the beginning of the accounting of the 12th unfortunate event, "In every other place on Earth, nobility and integrity are vanishing quickly. If we're not careful, they'll vanish completely. Can you imagine," she asked, "a world in which wickedness and deception were running rampant?" Of course, the Baudelaire children, because of their wide experience in the wicked ways of the world, each nodded affirmatively (used here that means they answered "yes".)

But as I thought about your crusade to rid the world of the ignorance of evil that I had experienced as a child growing to curious adulthood, I was reminded of some preachers I had heard in the Baptist church that I haunted growing up. And I think I cannot fault them for my naivete, for they certainly gave strong and gloomy warnings. And more than a house conflagration, those traveling ministerial bards warned of an eternal burning lake designed for the devil and his angels, but wide enough to consume any number of wicked others.

As a child I did so want the same nobility that the Baudelaire children strive for. And, mind you, I did not wish for posthumous, eternal phlogiston. Phlogiston used in this case refers to rapid oxidation like that which takes place at a girl scout campfire only much bigger and lasting much longer. But I have discovered, like the Baudelaire bunch that the path to nobility is a windy one and peppered with. . . accidents. We become responsible for some of the very destructions we are trying to avoid or prevent. Sigh. And we wonder, if we, after all, are quite as dreadful and wicked as any. I can certainly chorus with Klaus Baudelaire, "I'm not sure we are noble." And hope with all of them that I am, we are, "noble enough." Perhaps that is all we can ask for in this world.

Cultural theorist, which is an expression that means someone who like to sit around and think about why people in groups do such and such a thing, Jean Baudrillard argued that in late Twentieth Century 'global' society the excess of signs and of meaning has caused a (quite paradoxical) effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal or Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a 'global village,' but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. I don't suppose Baudrillard is related to the Baudelaire children, but he would probably agree that one unfortunate event is like a pebble dropped in a pool that causes ripples across the whole pond. Or as you so pertinently quote the famous unfathomable question from Native Son by Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school in The Penultimate Peril, "Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?" And I suppose that whether the pebbly event has the power to petrify or to cause wholesale collapse really doesn't make much difference. The end is quite nasty either way.

Hm.m.m.m what was my point here? I think that I'm thinking that the gospel according to Lemony Snicket and that of some blustery evangelists is not very gospelesque when you consider that the meaning of the word gospel is good news, and that, oh dear, the idea that the world is a very dangerous place and after that the judgment, is quite bad news indeed.

Perhaps, we need a better gospel. And though, it's true, that we are very rarely noble enough to be saved from the fires of earth and hell, there does seem to be more to life, after all, than just unfortunate events.

With harrowing regards,

brd

Eugene Onegin and Ennui

Dear A. Pushkin,

I read your poetic novel recently. It was, sigh, ok. I have heard the operatic version a number of times and saw it on the Met broadcast. It's, yawn, nice. So I figured it was time I read the book.

In your poem, "Onegin's Journey," (was that an addendum to the main poem?) I noticed that concise couplet, which, to me expressed the point precisely.

Oh God, I'm young, I'm fresh, I'm strong
And I've got boredom, all day long.

Onegin is not really a bad man, is he? But he is a bored one. And boredom disallows the kind of caring that engenders good, doesn't it. The want of good can degenerate to bad very quickly. In Onegin, it degenerates to a thoughtless flirtation and the killing of a friend. For that, Onegin pays with a life of more ennui and guilt. You don't really develop the guilt in your work, Alexander, but for 'Evgeny' ennui is punishment enough. Ennui, that is, and unrequited love.

Here is why I think Onegin is a generally good man.

1. He doesn't take advantage of Tatyana.
2. He writes in the margins of books.
3. His servants like him.

The first is obvious. In most pre-20th century literature, I think, protagonists get "good" points for respecting the life and sexual innocence of other human beings. This is probably no longer the case as far as I can guess, but when you were writing, it was true.

I might be questioned on my line of reasoning for my third point. But I think goodness used to be defined by how well servants and slaves liked their masters. To me this is strange, but reflects an interesting human trait. The very person who is in some ways the closest oppressor is deified for the kindliness of their oppression. Certainly Onegin is just a poor example of this, but literature runneth over with examples, from Harriet Stowe to Jane Austin, good is established not by active high virtue, but by the absence of high evil with the trimmings of petty virtue. (Perhaps I need to think more about this later but I think I've a headache now.)

Onegin wins my heart though, if perhaps he loses that of Tatyana, because he writes in the margins of his books.

Tatyana sees with trepidation
what kind of thought, what observation,
had drawn Eugene's especial heed
and where he'd silently agreed.
Her eyes along the margin flitting
pursue his pencil.
Everywhere his soul encountered there declares
itself in ways unwitting--
terse words or crosses in the book,
or else a query's wondering hook.

There is nothing I like better than an annotated book with margins full of reaction. How much we can learn about the reader from a simple exclamation point or underline. (I especially favor the double underline.) I have to tell you, this stanza was my very favorite of the entire book. There, as I droned along through the interminable passages of this overwritten book, my spirit was captured by your obvious appreciation of the marginal comment.

Lee Smith in her novel Saving Grace says you can get away with anything if you are nice about it. Of course neither her Florida Grace nor Onegin, whose delicate charm won many hearts, get away with anything in the end, for loved or not loved, they must live with themselves.

At this point I need to comment about Childe Harold, for it seems that this is the character that you drew upon for your skeleton of Onegin ("A Muscovite in Harold's Dress"). Lord Byron, whose portrait hung in Onegin's country library, said this of his Harold.

It had been easy to varnish over his faults, to make him do more and express less, but he never was intended as an example, further than to show that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature, and the stimulus of travel (except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected.

(Does anyone have a stick of gum?)

"Childe," as you know, means a youth destined for Knighthood. But neither Harold nor Onegin have the heart for nobility (whatever that is). Byron's description of Harold,

But long ere scarce a third of his pass'd by,
Worse than adversity the Childe befreel
He felt the fulness of satiety:
Then loath'd he in his native land to dwell,
Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell.

Whoa is this boring yet? So back to the point, poor Onegin, he is not a bad guy, but lost. He reminds me of the obese children suing McDonald's. Is there anything more pathetic than Harold, Onegin, and they, satieted and looking for something to eat.

Here's the thing, (I really need to take a shower) . . . I think U.S. Culture 2007 has been struck by a bad case of Oneginitis. You've had a century or so to think about this. Got a cure? Let me know, I've gotta go and take my Prozac.

Betsy

Call Me a Socialist or a Pirate

Avast Yusaf Hamied,

Call me a socialist, but I like what you are doing, have done, etc. Let capitalism fall if it must. (It won't.) I am also willing to call it good. (See Survey on this topic.)

I know that lots of people call you a pirate. Maybe being a pirate is good too, when what you are doing is saving Aids victims and heart patients, not just downloading MP3s. (I heard that your company provides the drugs for 40% of the Aids patients in third world countries. Is that so?)

Of course large pharmaceutical firms want to make a profit. And they should on some level, but I wonder what ever happened to motivation that comes from saving peoples lives? I'm thinking that since the government already pays for a good share of the research that sits behind most drugs, the idea of patents that block people from getting life-saving medicine is ludicrous and uncivilized. (Let's reserve the patents for Viagra.) If pharmaceutical companies find it hard to be motivated to make drugs without accruing the level of profits that will provide yachts ("It's a Sailor's Life for Me!") for every drug rep in the lower 48 states, then perhaps we could outsource the work to India.

I don't have much more to say, except, thanks, matey.

Betsy