Month: February 2014

In an essay celebrating the American two-lane highway, Anne Helen Petersen explains why she finds the above map so beautiful:

Look at all those red lines! Those are the red lines of awesomeness, the red lines that I love. They’re the cross-hatching that fills in the vast “emptiness” between major metropolitan areas. But if you grew up where I did, where I live now, or in any of those substantial white areas, those red lines meant something familiar and, usually, beautiful. They cut through mountain passes, they wrap around bodies of water; there are places where the forest still threatens to take the whole enterprise under. They’re often isolated, usually dangerous, and absolutely my favorite way to travel.

Rural highways are the closest we come to the ways that people a century before us traversed and appreciated the land. The decrease in speed, either in accordance with posted speed limit or because of the truck hauling a horse trailer in front of you, forces you not only to consider the wildflowers of the field, but the towns you pass through on the way to your destination.

The literary critic James Wood moved to the States from Great Britain 18 years ago. In a long essay on “not going home,” he connects living abroad to the way he thinks and writes:

Edward Said says that it is no surprise that exiles are often novelists, chess players, intellectuals. ‘The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural, and its unreality resembles fiction.’ He reminds us that Georg Lukács considered the novel the great form of what Lukács called ‘transcendental homelessness’. I am not an exile, but it is sometimes hard to shake the ‘unreality’ Said speaks of. I watch my children grow up as Americans in the same way that I might read about, or create, fictional characters. They are not fictional, of course, but their Americanism can sometimes seem unreal to me. ‘I have an American seventh-grader,’ I say to myself with amazement, as I watch my 12-year-old daughter perform at one of those dastardly school events always held in gymnasiums. Doubtless, amazement attends all the stages of a child’s growth – all is unexpected. But there is also that strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything.

And then there is the same light veil thrown over everything when I go back to Britain. When I was first living in the States, I was eager to keep up with life ‘back at home’ – who was in the cabinet, the new music, what people were saying in the newspapers, how the schools were doing, the price of petrol, the shape of friends’ lives. It became harder to do so, because the meaning of these things grew less and less personal. For me, English reality has disappeared into memory, has ‘changed itself to past’, as Larkin has it. I know very little about modern daily life in London, or Edinburgh, or Durham. There’s a quality of masquerade when I return, as if I were putting on my wedding suit, to see if it still fits.

I feel a little of the same. It seems sometimes as if I have lived two entirely different lives – one for twenty-one years and another for the next twenty-nine. The two lives intersect and yet remain oddly distinct. For me, there was a different dynamic than James’: first there was emigrating almost accidentally (going to grad school), then simply not making a decision to return for a few years as I pursued a PhD, and then an active decision to become an American, as I tried my hand at Washington journalism, then the crushing realization in 1993 that I could never be a citizen, because of HIV. Where was home then? From then on, I lived in a nerve-wracking limbo for almost two decades,  becoming more and more rooted in my new country, but remaining an alien under constant threat of losing the right to stay here because I had survived an illness that was supposed to have killed me long ago.

So I was for a long time in a kind of double exile.

I was barred from travel to Britain without the real risk of never getting back in; and I was barred from permanent residence in the US. James talks of “homelooseness”. For me, it was more like the eradication of any idea of a home at all. When I got married, this hit me even more acutely. What else is a marital commitment but a commitment to a home? And yet, even then, I had none. If I had married a woman, such a marriage would have given me an automatic waiver from the HIV travel ban and I would have been able to live freely for ever after. But because I married a man, I was busily constructing a home that, at any point in my visa renewal process, could have been upended for life.

I once wrote that the challenge of the AIDS years was finding a place where the plague couldn’t get me. Even though I had the disease, I could find a place inside myself where it exercised no power over me and instilled no terror. That place became, in my consciousness, my only real home for decades. It wasn’t England or America. If it was anywhere, it was the tip of Cape Cod, where this continent beckons to Europe, where the dunes stretch out against the sky, and where the first Englishmen set foot on American sand. That utterly impermanent sandbar would be where I would pitch my tent. And, in many ways, it still is.

(Photos: Herring Cove tidal marshes near Provincetown, Massachusetts; and Saint Mary’s church in Reigate, Surrey, England, next to the school I attended from the age of 11 to 18.)

Edward Slingerland illuminates the Daoist concept of wu-wei, or “effortless action,” that characterizes “the dynamic, spontaneous, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective”:

The preoccupation with how to cultivate wu-wei was at the center of early Chinese controversies about how to attain the good life. Characterizations of wu-wei in other early Daoist texts, such as the Laozi, take the form of concise, cryptic poems rather than stories. … In the poems, the Laozian sage attains wu-wei by not trying, by simply relaxing into some sort of preexisting harmony with nature. The Daoist poems are characterized by an effortless ease and unselfconsciousness that also plays a central role in early Confucianism. This may come as a surprise, because Confucianism is typically associated with hidebound traditionalism and stuffy ritual—both of which strike us as the opposite of wu-wei. It can’t be denied that the Confucians do a lot to earn this reputation. In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the length of the steps with which he is to enter a room. His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine, form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort.

In a review of Brilliant Blunders, a new book that chronicles famous mistakes in scientific history, Freeman Dyson revisits a critical period for the theory of evolution. He turns his attention to Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose theory of inheritance would have made a powerful complement to Darwin’s groundbreaking ideas, had Darwin known about it:

Mendel … published his laws of heredity, with a full account of the experiments on which the laws were based, in 1866, seven years after Darwin had published The Origin of Species. Mendel was familiar with Darwin’s ideas and was well aware that his own discoveries would give powerful support to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the cause of evolution. Mendelian inheritance by random variation would provide the raw material for Darwinian selection to work on.

Mendel had to make a fateful choice. If he chose to call Darwin’s attention to his work, Darwin would have understood its importance, and Mendel would inevitably have become involved in the acrimonious public disputes that were raging all over Europe about Darwin’s ideas. If Mendel chose to remain silent, he could continue to pursue his true vocation, to serve his God as a monk and later as abbot of his monastery. … [H]e had to choose between worldly fame and divine service. Being the man he was, he chose divine service. Unfortunately, his God played a cruel joke on him, giving him divine gifts as a scientist and mediocre talents as an abbot. He abandoned the chance to be a world-famous scientist and became an unsuccessful religious administrator.

Darwin’s blindness and Mendel’s reticence combined to delay the progress of science by thirty years. But thirty years is a short time in the history of science. In the end, after both men were dead and their personal shortcomings forgotten, their partial visions of the truth came together to create the modern theory of evolution.