Artefact

At the Museu das Artes Decoratives, once the collection of a member of the Espirito Sancto family, obnoxiously located in the Largo das Portas do Sol, there is a strange tapestry, Tournai, 16th century, says the legend, with well preserved colors and an odd theme. The illustration shows a procession of 5 giraffes, upon whose backs, in kind of boats, ride little people. The giraffes are accompanied by a strange retinue of musicians (fifes, drums, trumpets), some of whom are gigantic, all of whom have weird, twisted faces, some with African features. The necks of the giraffes are hung with ropes up which scramble tiny men, as if the necks were masts of galleons. In the foreground, a giantess holds up a bowl of what looks like gruel out of which with little red spoons eat the little people in a boat on the back of a giraffe. The drawing is ungainly, which only adds to the oddness of the whole experience. The catalog says that there was a fashion in 16th century Portugal to commission tapestries with pictures of strange oriental processions. Oh? Somehow, I am left feeling underinformed.

(A friend says, sight unseen, that it could be part of a larger illustration of the famous Manoeline embassy to Rome in which various exotic wild animals have been sent, including the Durer hippopotamus -- which, see above).

A walk around Thebes

How do I convey the pleasure of Krawczuk's Seven Against Thebes? I could try to explain them, but would that amount to the same thing?

The book is a kind of stroll through things Theban. It starts with a paraphrase of Plutarch's essay on Socrates' protective spirit which reads like a kind of Platonic dialog; its action is set in the city of Thebes in the year 379 B.C.: several notables are assembled in the house of Charon for a party; they entertain themselves with philosophical discussion; suddenly a messenger arrives to report that seven plotters left Athens the previous day and, having crossed Kitaeon, would be in Thebes that very night. Tonight must therefore be the night.

Incredibly, the book then makes a series of learned detours to discuss the previous two occasions on which seven heroes set out against the city of Thebes, the Theban mythological cycle, the Mycenaean civilization, the possible Egyptian or Phoenician sources of it, the several famous Thebaids, all but one now lost, some Theban antiquities and monuments, local places of worship, Spartan excavations of Theban antiquities and attempts to decipher (by appealing to Egyptian priests) linear B inscriptions, the Farnese bull (which is on a Theban theme), Pythagoreans of Greater Greece, and, indeed, Socrates' protective spirit, before returning to the Plutarch story, the coup attempt in Thebes and -- yes -- the fall of its pro-Spartan tyrant.

The pace of the book is a pleasurable andante, the language accessible -- easy without being condescending (Krawczuk writes to an audience whose familiarity with some things he can take for granted) -- and there are numerous entertaining asides:

It has not escaped the attention of the contemporaries -- people alive in the 5th ad 4th centuries B.C. -- that they were witnessing an interesting development: the old epic style was dying while a new way of speaking was arising. Were something similar happening in our times, doubtless a great river of works, articles and essays would pour forth with titles like On the condition of the epic, In defense of the true values of the epic, On the limits of experiment in epic production, Some problems of research on the theory and practice of the epic. There would be symposia and conferences. Countless persons would acquire PhDs and habilitations. Most the statements would be long-sentenced, intelligently impenetrable, and wisely sensitive the the slightest breezes from the ideological Olympus.

The book isn't a book, but a kind of conversation with a witty, charming older gentleman, tremendously learned, but not eggheaded; entertaining without any intention to teach or indoctrinate; something akin to a long walk on a sunny autumn day through a park.

Pure pleasure, in short.

Really, why are not more people reading it?

Another Valois woman

Frances Yates' Valois Tapestries add another poignant note to the horrible epic of the downfall of the French royal household of the same name. It is the story of Christina of Lorraine, the favorite grand-daughter of Catherine de' Medici. The old queen saw in the girl a similarity both physical and of character; and negotiated for her a good match to a familiar party, the Grand Duke of Toscany, a Medici himself. The Granduca sent negotiators to Paris and the negotiations were intense, not without an air of brinkmanship, while around them the world was caving in; France was gripped by a three-cornered civil war (the king, the Catholics, the protestants -- and God against all). The deal seemed nearly worked out and the ceremony set to proceed when suddenly the king decided to assassinate the Guises, the very men he had himself proposed as proxies in the marriage ceremony. (Cross-border royal weddings were conducted by proxy since the man could not leave his job to attend and the woman would not travel to him until she has been properly married). It is at this point that the young Christina -- 24 year old -- stepped in decisively assuming a leading role in the negotiations, an unheard of thing at the time. One can easily guess: get me out of here, she was thinking to herself, anything, anywhere, but get me out of here. Just when the getting out seemed good, she realized that those to whom her fate was entrusted were irresponsible, unreliable, liable to change course on the dime; and that with them -- her family for Chrissake -- her own safety and happiness counted for nothing; that she was really alone; and that if she wanted her life to take a particular turn, she had to make sure of it herself. And she did by all sorts of daring and unheard of acts, including forcing her grandfather (she was an orphan) to commit to escort her through war ravaged France to the Italian border. When at last she arrived in Florence, it was not just the good weather of the place, and the kindness of her new husband, and the extravagant intermezzi of 1589, but most of all, the peace and safety of her new home that welcomed her. She had made her escape. Look at her: another great Valois woman of steely resolve and brilliant intelligence. Look at the contentedly self-aware power beneath that barely concealed smirk of self-satisfaction. It says: I got away.

Tuwim: breaking off friendships

Lechon and Tuwim were very close friends in the 1920’s and 30’s. They were both noted poet-members of the Skamander group, which was a kind of riotous café-party society, and they shared a wild, explosive, pure-nonsense sense of humor – with Slonimski they were a kind of Monty Python Trinity of Poland. This last was their closest tie: they fooled around together, often dangerously, egging each other on to acts of sheer madness. And though both later claimed that their friendship didn’t go beyond that, it did: they avidly read each other’s poetry, and called each other at odd hours of the night to talk about their poems. It was an intense, rich friendship of two very well matched minds. To many their friendship was a sign that assimilation was possible: such close companionship between a polonized Jew from Lodz (Tuwim) and a son of Polish gentry from the east (Lechon): close, warm, intense and – entirely personal, thoroughly unpolitical.

The war changed all that. In one dramatic telephone conversation in New York in 1944 things came to a break. In it, Tuwim claimed that Russians were a lot better than Germans – this seemed obvious to him since Russians were not programmatically exterminating the Jews; but then Russians were programmatically exterminating Polish gentry (which Germans also were, but less assiduously); to Lechon the difference between the two seemed nil and to claim otherwise an act of – well what? Betrayal? Tribalism? Cruel indifference?

Lechon hung up and sent Tuwim a letter breaking off their friendship.

Which of course he didn’t have to do.

*

A friend once wrote to me about the sad fact that friendships do not last:

So many things can happen. You discover he is a card-carrying member of the KKK or the SS and you have to write him off because, well, there are limits. Or he decides that he was just born again and writes _you_ off because you are a heathen. Or he gets married (with tots!), after which it's curtain drawing for anything and anyone that came before (family life keeps him busy busy, ya know). Or he is swallowed whole by his career and never heard of again, certainly not by you. Or one of you fails to live up to expectations and slowly but irrevocably the articles of separation are consummated. &c &c. It takes nothing short of a minor miracle for anything to endure.

I have often thought about this letter and I think about it now, especially the first sentence: that one would write off a friend – “there are limits” – on the strength of political difference. Admittedly, a big difference since my friend was quoting rather extreme instances – Nazis, KKR; but then from Lechon’s point of view, praising the Russian regime at a time when the regime was murdering Polish prisoners of war was probably just such an extreme view. So he – literally – wrote off his friendship with Tuwim on political grounds.

*

But he didn’t have to.

Here in Portugal the political divide of the Salazar times split the old ruling class, dividing deeply a small society connected through blood and marriage and bonds of friendship. Yet I know of at least one instance in which members loyal to the regime risked everything to save their friends of opposite political loyalties from persecution by their own side. When politics and loyalty to friends came into conflict, these men chose friendship above politics.

Perhaps in doing so they were harking back to the old way of doing things, the pre-Republican way, in which one’s first loyalty was his king and it was personal rather than political, a loyalty to an individual man, not an abstract entity, or a cause, or a nation, or a class; it was a personal loyalty to a man divorced from his qualities: the king could be a child, or a fool, or a tyrant, he could be Catholic or Protestant, pro- or anti-Pope, but one remained loyal to him all the same: the person of the king instead of a flag.

This is one possible view of friendship, friendship as a monarchist, absolutist loyalty: a personal loyalty which goes beyond all limits.

I’d like to suggest that it is the better view: after all, it isn’t clear what one might stand to gain from writing off a friend on political grounds: the cause isn’t likely to be aided by a small rift like this – small from the point of view of the “cause”; if anything, our friend, so cruelly written off, is only likely to harden his political views (since we love most those things for which we have been obliged to pay the highest price); both he and we shall have lost a friendship, which is a tremendous personal loss for both; a very heavy price to pay in order to gain – nothing.

By writing off a friend in this manner, I suppose, we declare our loyalty to our political views, but of what use are our political views to us? Will they warm us in winter? Feed us when we are hungry? Will they share our joys or comfort us in loss? Will they drop by on an afternoon to see how we are doing and stay to talk nonsense over coffee and first one, then two, then three cups of port? And will they then stumble away at 3 o’clock in the morning, kissing us sloppily goodbye and declaring their undying love as we pack them off into a taxi?

*

Tuwim lived for another nine years after the break; Lechon, twelve. Certainly, both were tragically affected by it; but it is Lechon who left us a more thorough record of his suffering. The record comes in three forms, an unifinished essay which Lechon continued to work on until his death; a poem entitled Tuwim; and his journal entries.

In the last years of his life, in exile in New York, Lechon suffered from manic depression; he took the talking cure – the only one available then – and as part of it kept a thorough journal. The journal survives and is one of the most remarkable – and beautiful, and forgotten – literary flowers of Polish twentieth century. It is a wonderful miscellany of a thinking, sensitive mind, expressed in most touching language. The entries cover everything: lousy works about Tuwim, optimism in life, drunkenness, the homeless, psychoanalysis, reflections on reading one’s own journal, the strange custom of celebrating anniversaries, an evaluation – poor, or hopeful – of his own poetry, tears at the reading of Quo Vadis, a Polish peasant parish in America, the wonders of architecture – the skyscrapers, Polish graves in America, a dream about the Soviet prosecutor Vishinski, someone’s indecent poem, fifteenth anniversary of the break out of the war (“we go on without Poland, and go on”), love for the dearest person, etc.

Through it, like a silver thread, slinks the figure of Tuwim. Here he marks over the course of three years his progress on his essay on Tuwim: there are over one hundred such entries: “A page about Tuwim”, “A page – in fact less – about Tuwim”, “Three pages about Tuwim”, enigmatic notes of a journal hidden beneath the journal.

The essay was begun under the impulse of a dream. Two weeks after the news of the death of Tuwim, Lechon had a dream:

In a dream I saw Tuwim in some horrible tortures, which he survived; later there was some sort of a banquet in Warsaw in his honor, and I was present. It was in some dingy, poorly lit hall, like something in Divine Comedy (…) I was speaking to Tuwim, and there was still a lot left to say when suddenly there appeared between us a fellow in coat-tails and at that moment Tuwim turned away from me and I understood that I have been trapped, that the KGB had me.

This dream would haunt Lechon till his dying day; to the last he would work on his essay on Tuwim, forever unfinished. Only a poem about Tuwim was finished. It read:

I see your silver hair and your sharply outlined face
And your hand, which like an oar, pushes off reality;
You slink at night, poor Cagliostro,
Through empty streets of not your Warsaw.

With your senses torn by the tempest
You try to inhale from new streets the magic of old,
Under the new street lights which have sice lit them
You erect with mad gaze the shadows of former buildings.

You cry because you hear the rain pour through old eaves,
And still not believing that no one will stop you
You stretch out your hand in the dark, you innocent criminal,
Towards that hand stretched out from afar, again brotherly.

A valediction forbidding mourning

by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

How do the French do it?

Economic questions seem to escape me. How is it possible for the French to produce a movie like Rossignol? The music is of course beautiful, and the visuals are absolutely breathtaking (double bonus points if, like me, you are into Chinese porcelain). And I am really very happy they did it. But what I want to know is -- who pays for it and how does it ever break even?

While mindlessly watching Mezzo (and plying myself with drink) last week, I happened on the 2004 Paris Opera production of Sylvia, with the incredible, amazing, wonderful Marie-Agnes Gillot (see her here in the role with which she earned her Etoile). (The woman is nine feet tall and eats three men for breakfast). The production was really excellent, and, like Rossignol, it, too, is available on DVD. Incredible.

Of course, it is enough to see Mlle Gillot in action but once to develop just the sort of obsession which might lead one to go heavily into debt in order to produce a film like Aurore, which is, I am told (my copy has not yet arrived) basically an excuse for Mlle Gillot to dance. Which is, again, really wonderful, but, again, I want to know: how did they do it? Did someone buttonhole a big-time producer and say: "90 minutes of Gillot dancing in oriental outfits, what do you say? And did the producer gasp in amazement and the audacity of the thought and exclaim: What a brainwave! A blockbuster! I'm going into it?

Of course, one man's drink is another's poison. The reviewer on the International Film Database writes:

What a boring dancing film! Don't expect fairy-tales. It is simple a serials of modern dancing. All actors are null and without life. It seems that dancing is the only active elements in the film. The princess dances for 1/3 of film; the painter danced with her; the 3 prince from remote country bring dancing group to perform in the castle. And they are performing modern dancing in the environment of middle ages! The plot is too simple even for fairy tales. The king is simple stupid. The queen is simple kind. The minister is simple weird. The young prince is simple naive. The princes from remote countries simply want to marry the princess. The princess simply want to dance! The set is also crazy. Trees and grasses are blue, and there are spotlight on dancers in the castle, just like a modern theater. Why not build some balcony?

What is amazing is that, judging from the English of this delightful comment, the reviewer must be... French.

Amazing.

The lessons of Niniveh

The digging up of the Niniveh library (I recommend you hear this excellent program about it) was a revelation: 2600 years ago there existed a vast body of culture -- myth, literature, poetry, science, philosophy, religion; and one day in BC 612 it was all simply -- wiped out. Or nearly: a few fragments survived: some Biblical stories (Noah was a Summerian), some astrology (zodiac), some odd body art practices (bishop's mitre and vicar's tonsure were once Chaldean).

When contemplating these meager survivors, one is torn between two thoughts: amazement at their tenacious survival (what do fishmen mean to us today that we should wear their dress?); and the utterness of the utter destruction of everything else: 95% of what is recorded in the clay tablets had been lost prior to the library's rediscovery; and in any case the tablets were never more than 20% of the original library; 80% of it of it is thus lost for good.

One wonders: what did we lose irrevocably? A Homer? A Hesiod? A Confucius? An Epicure?


Of course, cultural production, like banking, is cyclical and wholesale destructions are part of the business. The Babylonian antiquities were wiped out by the Medes; the Persian by Alexander; the Chinese by Qin Shihuang; the Roman by the Catholics; the Mayan by the Mayas and the Khmer by the Khmers; the Saylendras by who knows who. And so on.

Note: it isn't always a matter of foreign invasions. Roman antiquities were destroyed by Romans (even if in the name of a foreign God); and Qin Shihuang The Book Burner is to this day regarded as the most Chinese of all Emperors. The destruction is an inside job as often as not.

In the west we have been witnessing such an inside job of destruction these 200 years: a wholesale attack on the art of the past in the name of modernity. The need to be "up to date" (whatever that means) is cited as the reason to build sick buildings, sew uncomfortable clothing, and serve odd food on square plates on glass-and-stainless-steel furniture under harsh lights.

The theory used to justify this attack on the past is the Hegelian/Marxists drivel that each age must have its proper art. But the theory is a lie: it is but a fig-leaf to cover the real shame: that every artist feels obliged to make his own way, to strike out in new direction. Only thus, he feels, will he earn immortality. In this the artists is wrong: the greatest artists, and almost always the most famous, were usually second generation followers, not first generation innovators. But the truth of the theory isn't important, only how artists have always felt: innovate or die. Take Khoirilios (why he should be anglicized as Choerilus beats me), the last of the aoidoi:

Oh happy was he, that capable aoidos serving his Muses,
Who lived in times when the meadows still lay untouched.
By now all has been claimed and every art has its boundaries
And we arrive stragglers, bringing up the rear.

Though I look out, I see no new chariot upon which to jump.

(Epicorum Gracorum Fragmenta, Kinkel).

Simply put, this is the wish that someone might burn and bury what had gone before, Homer especially, to make the room necessary that poor but ambitious Khoirilios might stand the chance. Few artists have had the courage to put it this plain: the neoclassicists assassinated the Baroque in the name of good taste; Corbusier proposed to tear up the historic center of Paris in the name of The Brilliant Future.

The simple truth is that every cultural production sooner or later reaches the point of surfeit, the point at which everything has been tried and perfected and all that remains are footnotes. Cross-generic experimentation, variations on old themes.

(You will be relieved to know, by the way, that Khoirilios has got his comeuppance: history preserved Homer and wiped out Khoirilios, the fragment I quote being nearly all that's left of him today. And, oh, don't bother picking holes in my translation: I wear my Greek extremely lightly).


The problem is in fact one of human brain capacity: there is only so much one can remember. When a culture is young -- i.e. there isn't much body to master -- it is easy to practice art. This is why in heroic times kings -- otherwise very busy people -- often are poets (Dom Dinis of Portugal, Quli Qutb Shah of Golconda): it's easy to master the stuff and add to it meaningfully. But as the art grows, it becomes manageable only to full time professionals -- which is why no ruler has written poetry these 400 years. And then -- then it slips beyond even the reach of the most capacious brains. Surely, all the literature we have written in the West these last 500 years is far too much for anyone to grasp? May anyone write anything today in safe knowledge that he is not treading on already staked out ground? More importantly, has everything good that can be written been written already? Even highly educated writers today have difficulty producing anything really new.



Here is a thought experiment.

Surely, watching this stuff (Bejart's Firebird) you might find it a refreshing, indeed, a revolutionary breakthrough compared to all the classical ballet stuff (which is really quite good but oh so familiarly dull by now). But -- royal ballet in France goes back to at least the 14th century while our records of it go back only to mid 1800's. So -- is it just possible that all these eurekish figures which Bejart so heartily invents for us have been danced before?

I'd say there is a very good chance of that: there is only so much one can do with two arms and two legs.

Therefore there is a sense in which Bejart can be fascinating, indeed, can produce at all only because so much of what had gone before had been lost. Losing, you see, has its advantages.

I wonder, should we set out on a program of forgetting ourselves? To clear the decks, I mean. (If so, then I suggest we start by forgetting the Divine Comedy. It would be oh so good to forget).




There is another aspect of all this: the remembering.

One day in the early 18th century King João V of Portugal ordered that an aqueduct be built to bring water from Monsanto to Lisbon. Hearing this, his chief engineer no doubt said to him: "Sire, modern pipe technology makes the high cost of an aqueduct unnecessary." But His Majesty replied: "Oh, I don't care about the water." And of course he didn't. The point was to have an aqueduct. It is the same point Louis Vaz de Camões made when he started his epic with

As armas e os barões assinalados

Which is, of course,

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

Both men were doing what we all like to do from time to time: making learned allusions to the glorious past.

Which is why what happened at Niniveh is nearly perfect. It cleared the decks making it possible for the succeeding generations to be great poets and philosophers again; almost certainly we stage Euripides today because we are not staging some Summerian classic instead. And almost certainly we have Euripides today because Euripides did not have the same Summerian classic to go up against.

If anything, the Medes may have been a little extreme at Niniveh. They really left us too little -- I mean zodiac and fishhats? The Holy Roman Catholic Church did a lot better: they left us Virgil and the aqueducts; and this really is close to perfect. One really hardly needs more: something to allude to, yes, but certainly not mountains of stuff, however good, with which to bury us.

Just the amount of knowledge which one may reasonably wear lightly.

What a day

Having risen not too early, and had a coffee in my garden in the slanting morning light, under blooming bouganvilea, I then bathed and shaved while listening to a hilarious BBC show on Renaissance Dance (see the dance newsletter). I then strolled through this beautiful city over the the Gulbenkian, stopping at Pao Doce (just milling with people, it being Sunday morning) for coffee and a bolo de Berlim. (They could not make one like this in Berlin if they busted their kidneys). At the Gulbenkian I oohed at the maki-es and aahed at the Mamluk glass (see below); then walked over to the Avenida Valbom where sitting at a table in the middle of the pedestrian boulevard, under delicious trees shot through with autumnal light, I was served steamed clams and Caril de Gambas -- as true South Indian Curry, complete with the compost tang of asafetida, as it gets. I then walked down through the Avenidas Novas -- these incredibly beautiful buildings bathed in the delicious early fall light -- to Londres, where I watched a Japanese documentary. It was an exchange of video letters between an artist and a poet shortly before the poet's death, slow, uneventful, funny, philosophical and touching in that subtle Japanese manner which so often passes for oriental inscrutability. I then returned home, had a whole bottle of vinho verde while listening to a concert on Radio France Musique -- Bach, Teleman, Rameau and watching several Bejart films on Mezzo (Bolero, Sacre du Printemps, etc.). I then turned in and read Krawczuk on Seven Against Thebes and around in Stanislaw Kostka -- about Niemcewicz negotiating in his poor English for the purchase of a pendant from a lady who was under the impression that they were negotiating the price of something else (hint-hint), and the the King of Naples, portrayed by Sontag in her novel (Volcano Lover) as a vulgar and perverse retard, while S.K. describes him as gentle and decorous, suggesting that either he was blind or she has failed to do her research.

It was, altogether, a very nice day; but not unlike the rest of them here.

I cannot describe this day to anyone, of course. If I do, they would hate me.

On being arch

The man is frequently arch and flippant, thereby presumably camouflaging his own discomfort with himself.

The effect is not what he actually hopes to produce: others find the archness and flippancy hurtful and turn away. (Americans, who confuse nicety for politeness, see this as rude).

He is uncertain why I do not and credits this to my warrior descent. He thinks this means that I do not care and assumes this not caring to be somehow be military. He's possibly wrong; the military class tend to be big on socialization and interconnectedness, which are alliance builders, and the military needs allies more than anyone else. See section 3 of last entry for what I think is a better explanation of the not caring.

I tell him that he'd have much greater success with the ladies if he'd just hang the flippancy and simply said how it was; but of course this is like telling a mouse to roar: he can't help being arch and flippant.

On the feeling of connectedness

1

When I was 23, I had a 16 year old girlfriend. It was a very steamy relationship -- we were well matched sexually, a very surprising thing given her age and our combined lack of experience. It was just one of those things, pure draw of chance: very intense and happy while it lasted, except, like most things in life, it didn't.

Many years later we met by chance. She confessed on that occasion that she had missed the way we used to feel connected: one soul one body, she said, a total mutual understanding. It was very touching to hear.

I didn't say then -- why ruin pleasant mis-perceptions, especially about our own selves -- but the thought struck me: the poor girl had had not the slightest inkling about the nature of the relationship! Because, of course, the reason why I left her was that, being a lot younger, she did not understand my world and could not keep up with my thoughts; and being of a totally different temperament she could not form the first impression of my hopes and plans for life; for these reasons -- and others -- she was simply not a suitable partner in my life at the time.

So, while she told me about the feeling of connection she missed, I thought to myself that the poor creature had managed to feel connected to me, while my feelings about the whole thing had all along been just the opposite.

How little in fact we were connected, and how contrary to her convictions, is perhaps best shown by the fact that she never understood why I left her: while basking in the feelings of great mutual understanding and connectedness she had had not the first clue of what was in fact long acoming.

Yet, she missed that illusory feeling; and refused to accept her surprise at my departure as evidence of its illusory nature. It had felt so good.

2

I have always attributed her naivte to her virginity. But now another friend, an adult male, 30, married, a man of great intelligence and vast reading, confesses to me that he feels lonely and unable to connect to people, women especially. That not feeling connected tortures him.

The confession is not a little alarming from a married man, especially since in one of his classes there has lately been a woman with whom he has been managing to connect by exchanging glances... But not to pontificate: the point is that the ocular footsie started as a glance exchanged in response to some drivel someone said. He thought the glance-exchange meant "Are you thinking what I am thinking?" Lately, he sent her an sms: "Why is it that I can always rely on you to catch my eye when I'm bored or amused?" She texted him back: "I guess we share the same sense of humor or eye for detail. I don't know, but I really enjoy it."

Wow. I didn't know one could derive so much pleasure from what was probably a random event. (After all, we accidentally exchange glances with strangers all the time; and there is rarely any reason to think we at the same divine their feelings).

You'd think that with his age, experience, and intelligence my friend would realize that there is no such thing as mutual understanding. After all, the mechanism goes like this:

a) an event takes place in brain A;
b) the body produces some outward signs of the event (or not);
c) brain B observes the behavior and from it deduces some kind of event in brain A; (the logic perhaps goes like this: his left eye twitched; my left eye twitches every time I feel irritated; surely, he must have been feeling irritated, then);
d) in consequence of this supposed recognition, a gizmo in brain B produces a feeling which we call connectedness -- or familiarity, or recognition, or eureka. (There is a brain module dedicated to the production of eureka states).

The point is this: the eureka experience is not directly caused by the event in brain A; and the chain of events by which brain B identifies the internal event in brain A is open to all sorts of errors. Thus when in the end the sensation of connectedness is produced, we have no idea whether it in fact corresponds to the truth. It's cognitive value is close to zero.

But the fellow -- a grown male, I repeat -- values the experience as much as my girlfriend once did.

A mystery.

3

In defense of his addiction to the feeling of connectedness, he proposes that being understood must be a universal human need. I am not so sure. Being understood -- or rather, creating an impression in another brain concerning our internal states -- is only important to those who operate within the social hierarchy and have something to gain (or possibly to lose) from the quality of impression created. Take a retired single man who has no need to superiors or frighten subordinates or reassure allies: what need has he of creating an impression in any external brain?

The Occasional Dance Newsletter (1)

Irrelevant but amusing factoids from the dance scene, past and present.

Barbara Segal, dance researcher, on Early Music Show, BBC Radio 3:

Factoid 1: Sudden death

Sometime in the 14th century, one royal fete, or extravaganza, or masque in France involved Five Men of the Woods, five grotesque dancers made up like trees with ropes and feathers and wax. The danger of this get up was realized and, unusually for the time, fire precautions had been taken, use of torches having been banned during the event. Then the king's brother decided to approach with a candle to see who it was that was dancing -- because, well, King's brothers are not brain surgeons; and because who will say to the King's brother "stop, what are you doing?" And there may have been another reason as well: one of the five was in fact the King himself, Charles II. But court members, least of all kings, were not supposed to dances grotesques. Grotesques, figures representing forces of evil, darkness and magic, who were then, in the royal fetes, defeated or dispelled by the King and his dancing courtiers, were supposed to be danced by professional musicians. So the King danced incognito, and the King's brother, recognizing the steps perhaps, may have wished to assure himself that it is not in fact his brother among the grotesquers.

Or perhaps he had seen an opportunity. For then -- whoa! -- the five men went up in flames! The audience probably thought it was all part of the show and clapped hands; only the King's aunt, who alone had been taken into the secret, realized what is happening -- Holy Christmas, Chuck's on Fire! -- and throwing a cape upon the King and saved him. The others, says Barbara Segal, were not so lucky.

A real aristocratic jock thing, this: the four spent what was probably weeks, and a fortune, to prepare the get up and practice the steps, probably in secret, sneaking out at strange hours, and skipping court duties. Say, isn't this dangerous, said one one day in a rare moment of reflection. Dangerous-schmangerous, said another. That's why we're doing it. Come on, it's just a dance, don't be such a %#@! woos.

Then they did it and -- went straight to hell in one incredible instant.

Factoid 2: Fame

At the height of his fame, Jack Kemp, Shakespeare's famous clown, left the company to dance - or jig - from London to Norwich, over the period of 9 days. (27 days actually, but 9 of actual dancing). He was followed by a piper and wore bells at his ankles as he danced. This made him famous; he wrote down an account of it and published it as The Nine Days' Wonder, and a pretty wood cut illustrating the event survives. Jack did not play with wax and candles. There were no casualties.

Reflections

The glass body of this tall Mamluk cup -- much too large ever to be drunk from -- it is part of the Gulbenkian collection of Mamluk glass -- appears to be yellow tinged; the brightly enameled birds -- ducks on the wing, hopoes, hawks capturing pigeons, herons -- have been enameled on both the outside and inside surfaces of the cup. One sees clearly the ones on the front but also, in vague outlines, as if through fog or water or sheets of rain, those on the opposite side of the vessel.

Look again: in the back, on the left, an Iznik bowl, seen right through the glass cabinet and into the next room; on the right, behind and barely visible, an Iznik wall panel. At the top, reflection of the window and the world outside.

It is reasonable to say that the artist who made this glass would have been happy with its setting.

Plain bloody wrong

This was at Bonhams last week: a Roman Aphrodite, formerly in Graham Geddes hands. A lot like my "Indian" Gulbenkian Venus, I'm afraid, both in pose and folds of flesh. Minus the Egyptian glaze, of course.

So I was mistaken then. How very not surprising: a connoisseur is truly only as good as the sum total of everything he has seen. But then -- there is that matter of the jewelry -- the necklace and armlets on the Gulbenkian Venus are unmistakably Indian.

Er... Or are they?

Freedom from the question of national identity

Questions of national identity remain important in Eastern Europe, as in all of Europe in general. They dominate not only politics, and public discourse in general, but also artistic production. At the same time they are completely missing from, say, modern American or Japanese or Chinese cultural production, a clear sign that one can live quite well (or, rather, just as miserably) without asking himself about his national identity at all. (There are plenty of other problems with which to screw up ourselves: sexual identity, relationships, race, environment, diet, etc.) Why Europeans should have put themselves through the misery of the national wringer for over 200 years now totally escapes me. Yet they do; and if they find something shallow about American cultural production, the chief reason is usually just that: its lack of occupation with questions of national identity. Perhaps the very reason also why American cultural production -- which really is shallow, if for a reason not related to national identity in my honest opinion -- is such a hit with the same Europeans. ("Please get me away from this hell").

The freedom from the question of national identity is thus both -- odious and liberating. How odd.

Tangetially to the discursus on national identities

In Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Tuwim's issues with national identity were not his alone, but everyone's. Parnicki's End of The Harmony of Nations, a novel set in Greek Central Asia in 189 B.C. is about just that -- national identity.

This is the proposition: by 189 B.C., Greeks have ruled in Bactria for over 100 years by right of Alexander's conquest; recently they have also undertaken a conquest of India; their king and his army have set off a few years ago and have been making fabulous conquests since. As a result, the conquering Greek army, a very small minority in Bactria, has now dwindled as a proportion of the empire to a point at which it was simply no longer possible to rule using the Greek element alone. Demetrios, the conqueror king, resolves to admit all talent, regardless of ethnicity, to positions of power; he thereby proposes what is in effect a constitutional revolution: to make all his citizens legally equal to Greeks. He expects Bactrian Greeks won't like it and fears a revolt. He sends his Indian policeman to prevent it from happening.

Parnicki probably wrote the book in Russian Central Asia where he had the chance to observe the Soviet multi-ethnic state at work. Parnicki's feelings about the Soviet state are not difficult to divine; but he did seem to like the multi-ethnic, nationality-blind pretense of it. To him -- a man of confused national identities -- he had not learned to speak Polish until his teens -- and international exposure -- he had grown up in Moscow, Siberia, and China -- there must have been something attractive about it. The arguments in favor of King Demetrios' scheme, offered in the novel by the kings' various functionaries, seem quite convincing.

As a very young man, Parnicki decided to become a Polish writer; but his writing -- all about far away places -- Egypt, Byzantium, Bactria, Vinland -- and his life -- he actually lived less than half his life in Poland -- indicate that he refused to become typically provincial and domestic; and that he wanted to think of life's bigger problems outside of the box of a particular nationality.

The following is a fragment of the novel.

I have translated it to see whether it could at all be translated; whether a translation would at all be legible in English. This short text, like all of Parnicki's texts, is extraordinarily complex. It is a thinking man's prose: prose written for someone who can follow its twists and turns and -- enjoy them.

Now, reading over this translation I have the impression that this text can at least be followed in English, even if it can hardly be enjoyed as it stands. Yet, I cannot help thinking that the Polish text seems easier to follow. Why this should be makes for an afternoon of interesting speculation.

Another day, perhaps.

*

Dramatis Personae:

Heliodoros, Greek, chief of Bactrian police, in the administration of the The Great King Demetrios
Antimachos, Greek, king of Margiana, brother and subsidiary of the Great King; he has just declared himself god, a move which Heliodoros suspects may be a preliminary to rebellion
Spitamenes, Sogdian (ie. non-Greek), special envoy of the Great King, freshly arrived from India
Mancuras, Indian, special envoy of the Great King, freshly arrived from India
Dioneia, very young Greek wife of Heliodor

Action takes place on board of a ship called The Harmony of Nations, sailing down the river Oxos, in Bactria, part of the Greek empire in Asia. Heliodor had planted a scroll which he hopes Antimachos will discover.

Three days already has the Harmony of Nations sailed from Tarmita towards Thera and nothing as yet seemed to suggest that Antimachos had found the tube which had been hidden in the base of the statue of the god of silence. There was of course a very simple method of discovering whether the tube had been discovered by the god-king, but Heliodor hesitated to resort to the method, fearing that it might lead to a meeting with Antimachos precisely in the one moment in which it would be most undesirable: in the moment of the discovery of the tube. He therefore preferred not to approach even the semicircular room, so similar in shape to his and Dionea’s marital bedroom, and to make sure that no one else approached either. And because it was practically impossible to stand guard all alone, he secured the help of Mancuras, to whom he did not reveal the nature of his plan, but with whom he had shared the previous day his supposed concern for the safety of the King of Margiana, undoubtedly threatened – or so he told the Indian – by a plot of a handful of men incensed by his act of his self-deification. He did inform Spitamenes to the same effect, by the way; since, from the moment of his first daytime conversation with Antimachos, held in the presence of the Sogdian, he was no longer as sure as he had been before, that the three – he, the Indian and the Sogdian – really represented a solid front -- defending the same interests, identically understood -- against the mysterious scheme of the brother of The Great King.

He lost this certainty thanks to Spitamenes’ constant presence at the side of the common enemy, often one on one. Of course, one could interpret it as observation, and as such part of the joint action of the three allies, but only seemingly so; for the most striking thing was not so much that Spitamenes constantly sought out the presence of Antimachos, but that the same desire – perhaps even more readily observable – seemed to be requited by Antimachos himself. One might assume of course that on his part it was only cunning defense – that suspecting that he is being observed, he himself observed back – suspected, he suspected back. But this possibility was undermined by the only one sentence which made up the spoken part of Spitamenes in the long daytime conversation – that first daytime conversation – between Antimachos and Heliodor. It was: “I will do it” and in itself was in fact quite innocent, for in itself it was no more than the offer of manual aid for his royal – er – divine -- majesty; but from the exchange of glances between the king and the Sogdian at the time when the sentence was spoken, Heliodor took the unpleasant impression that the two were signaling to each other their readiness to cooperate against the idea by the way of which the hidden tube would, as if accidentally, fall into the hands of Antimachos. Because this “I will do it” was a reply to the announcement, first by Heliodor that there is not a single mortal being on board who would dare to carry out Antimachos’ order to remove his bust from its current honored location and to place it in an obscure corner; and then by Antimachos himself, that if indeed all have such qualms, then he is most moved by this collective expression of divine worship for him, but his command must be carried out one way or another, and since no one from the nearly two thousand people on board would dare do it, he would therefore do it himself – with his own royal hands, without regard for how heavy the two may prove – his own bust, and the bust of the god of silence; not to mention their two plinths.

Heliodor had counted on this announcement; indeed, had waited for it from the very beginning of their conversation – and more: after all, the whole conversation had been designed and guided by him for no other purpose but the extraction of just this announcement from Antimachos. It crowned his, Heliodor’s, plan for the tube, a plan simply perfect in its simplicity, perfect in its apparent accidentality of execution. By the lights of this scheme, Antimachos, having moved with his own hands his own bust into an obscure corner, would then set about moving back into its former place the statue of the god of silence, and during the performance of this task would have to, unavoidably, notice the tube, either at the moment when he dropped it on the floor, when the opening in the base of the statue cleared the edge of the plinth (if he were to start moving the statue by first sliding it off it) or else noticing it on the plinth itself (if he began the moving of the god not by sliding it but by directly lifting it up). Whether he’d recognize it immediately as a tube well known to him from the past or not – did not matter. Once he noticed it, it would catch his attention. He’d take it into his hands. Noticing that tusk of one of the many minute elephants which ring the lid of the tube – that tusk which had been broken off by his own hands in childhood, he’d now certainly recognize it. But even if he still did not recognize it, the natural consequences of constantly mounting curiosity would be enough. It was practically impossible that he would not open it. It was even less likely that having opened it, he would not unroll the scroll. And, once having unrolled it, and having run his eyes over the text, he would now never be able to forget that if indeed he were preparing a coup d’etat, he’d have to reckon that against a family member violating the principle of family loyalty, the dynasty would not hesitate to use a terrible, but guaranteed to be effective weapon: it would open the borders of the kingdom to the northern barbarians.

And now this excellent in its simplicity plan of Heliodor was threatened by the only sentence spoken by another of the members of the triple alliance against Antimachos. There was even a moment when Heliodor considered his plan already in ruins. But he had been mistaken and how glad he was of that mistake! How thankful he was to Antimachos, when the last, folding his lips into a subtle, somewhat strange smile, said:

“Many thanks, but are we not a federation of kingdoms whose central motto is “Harmony of Nations of the Heart of Asia”? Surely, it would be a contravention of this rule if a person not recognizing the existence of gods other than Ahura Mazda were called upon to perform the undoubtedly unpleasant for him task of placing in places of sacred cult of the simulacra of beings about whom others say blasphemously: ‘they are divine’”.

The Sogdian did not reply, only offered a deep bow. Heliodor for a moment dispassionately pondered the strangeness of the subtle smile which accompanied Antimachos’ declaration of support for one of the central policies upon which his family based their rule over the heart of Asia – rule which with each passing decade seemed to earn ever more acceptance from the ruled. One could interpret this smile in a number of different ways, but of all possible interpretations the most likely seemed to Heliodor the suspicion that the words of Antimachos were an irony; not so much poking fun at the policy itself, but rather at Spitamenes personally, as if, with his smile, the king of Margiana were saying: “You are cunning, but it is I who figured you out, not you me; and it is not you who made fun of me, but I who made fun of you.” For, most likely, the readiness of the Sogdian to perform a task which no Greek on board dared was intended to say: “Neither you, nor the boy with a finger pressed to his lips are gods. So what difference does it make to me to move two prettily carved lumps of rock? And I will do it all the more gladly because it is amusing to push into an obscure corner the portrait of a madman, or perhaps a fool, who says about himself ‘I am god’”. And it was precisely to this decoded meaning that Antimachos replied with his mysterious smile: “I will not give you the pleasure of playing with that which I have declared worthy of the worship of the Greeks, but of course I do want you to know that I am aware of precisely how much my divinity is worth to you.” But even in the light of this interpretation – which Heliodor recognized as the most likely of all – that exchange of glances remained alarming, that exchange which took place between the two precisely in the moment in which the words “I will do it” fell from the Sogdian’s lips. As if they were saying to each other:

Spitamenes: “You have not forgotten how you are supposed to reply to my ‘I will do it?’”

Atimachos: “Relax. I have not forgotten.”

Or:

Spitamenes: “Look out. Heliodor wants nothing else but that you personally and with your own hands move the bust and the statue.”

Antimachos: “I know. (Or: You are right.) But do not worry. It is necessary that he should think me a greater fool than I am. Let him think that he had caught me.”

But then he could be worried for no good reason – this, too, he considered. After all, a person bearing the ring of The Great King may, due to his special commission, communicate with the Great King’s brother also in some other matters about which no one other than a member of the dynasty should know, and the exchange of glances may well have had to do only tangentially with the task of moving the statues. After all, even Heliodor had once experienced just such a thing: several times in his conversations with Dioneia they discussed the obesity of Teophilos, saying that there was about it something monstrous; and on some occasion Dioneia’s mother, speaking about one of her ancestors said that according to a family tradition in old age – and he lived very long – he had grown monstrously fat; and barely had those words fallen from her lips when her daughter and her son in law exchanged a meaningful glance. “You thought about Theophilos in that instant, did you not?” asked him Dioneia later.

Etc.

Tuwim: national identity

All his life Tuwim struggled with his national identity - or rather not with his national identity, but with others' perception of it. Until his last years he kept repeating the same message: that while he did not deny his Jewish roots, he had made the choice to be Polish and that the choice should be accepted by everybody. ("Why am I Polish?" he asked rhetorically in an interview once. "Because I feel like being Polish". Which is a perfectly sensible argument, if you ask me).

This did not work very well, and there were attacks on him from both sides -- from Jewish activists for "desertion", from Polish right wing for -- well, this is interesting, for what? Though the nationalists usually stated plainly antisemitic sentiments as reason for rejecting Tuwim -- some merely paraphrasing in various ways the dictum that "once a Jew forever a Jew" (i.e. can't make a purse, etc.) others adding some pseudo-theoretical apparatus, such as the presumed plagiaristic nature of his poetry ("only Aryans are truly creative") -- the real causes, I can't help feeling, were political. Tuwim was a russophile; and he had left wing sympathies; Polish nationalists saw both these attitudes as essentially anti-Polish and therefore saw Tuwim as irredeemably foreign and inherently unassimilable. They put both to his Jewishness.

(By way of a footnote, a short disquisition on Polish anti-semitism. This essentialist idea (i.e. that as a Jew Tuwim had a different, foreign essence, was Jewish chalk to Polish cheese) was ugly, but perhaps understandable: Poles, in the process of recreating Poland as a nation state in 1918 out of the corpse of what had once been a multi-ethnic state, experienced in the course of its recreation a violent and bloody separation from their former co-citizens; former co-citizens of Commonwealth who now, suddenly, turned out to be foreign bodies, intent on having their own states: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Czechs, Slovaks, Tartars, Germans. This was the pattern: the foreign element oozed out of the body politic, like a thorn rejected by the body by the means of putrid and painful fistula. The idea that one former group of the Commonweatlh -- the Jews -- should do the opposite -- not demerge, but on the contrary -- merge in, assimilate, dissolve, become inalienable part of the national fabric -- was in such a stark opposition to the attitudes of everyone else that it was hard, if not impossible, for Polish nationalists to conceptualize).

Tuwim was proud and easily provoked into altercation. Confronted on his ethnic identity, he refused to apologize or explain; and whenever attacked, heattacked back. When Jewish activists accused him of "desertion" he told them that their language (Yiddish) was ugly and their religion stupid; when Polish nationalists attacked him as somehow not Polish, or not fit to be Polish, he pointed out that they had had Jews in their own families; thus, in both cases, he opened himself to the charge of antisemitism. (As many other assimilating Jews did).

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Tuwim escaped, by way or Romania, France and Portugal to Brasil; then the US. There he lived on comfortable scholarships, feted by the diplomatic corps as a great poet, while in Poland his family and acquaintances were being murdered. He kept a meticulous journal, of the "eggs for breakfast, walk with dog, salmon for lunch" variety in order to know, in the future, what he did on each day of the Shoah; so that when he learned that so and so was killed on such and such a day, he could go back to his journal and see that on that day the weather had been balmy and he ate a sandwich with strawberry jam. To me this journal symbolizes most powerfully his sense of guilt -- the guilt of the survivor. This guilt made him rethink the issues, made him take his Jewishness more seriously. It caused him to arrive at a new synthesis of himself.

The Shoah also caused Tuwim to throw his lot with the communists. To his mind, Russians, of the two evils which descended upon Poland, seemed the lesser one: they at least did not try to exterminate the Jews. (That they had a final solution for Polish gentry did not touch Tuwim personally and was thus easy for him to overlook, or forget. This blindness made his break with Polish right wing, and with many ordinary Poles, including his oldest and closest friend, Lechon, final. Of that later).

After the war, breaking with most Polish emigres in the west, Tuwim returned to Poland. There he was feted and treated like a king -- because he was such a huge public relations catch for the Russians. For this he was immediately branded as a traitor by Polish nationalists. ("We told you so, once a Jew etc.").

But Tuwim's honeymoon with the Communists did not last. The break up came over the celebrations surrounding the unveiling of the monument of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Tuwim was at first asked to make the keynote speech. After he had submitted it, it was suggested to him that maybe it would be the third or fourth speech of the day. Then that perhaps it should be spoken not at the monument, but at some other, simultaneous event. Then that perhaps it should be not at any event, but on the radio, later that day. Or maybe the next.

Eventually, he appears to have gotten the message and withdrawn it.

Why was the speech turned down?

The speech was turned down because the communist regime, for all its lip service to the international solidarity of the proletariat, and all its attacks on the nazi fascists, was in fact a nationalist beast. It found it unacceptable that Tuwim's speech started with the declaration that he no longer felt either Jewish or Polish; that he in fact rejected those definitions; that before the horrible crime of the ghetto he felt simply human; that at the ghetto a terrible crime was committed by men against other men, not Germans against Poles, of Germans against Jews, or Jews against Poles, or Poles against Jews, or Jews against Jews or Germans against Germans, but by man against man; that every man ought to be shocked by it, not just Jews or Poles, and every man should be shamed by it, not just Germans or Poles; every man, not by virtue of his tribal membership, but by virtue of his humanity.

I stand before you, Tuwim had wanted to say in his speech, as neither Pole nor Jew, but as a man.

This the communists did not like. They were perfectly willing to accept the self definition Tuwim had offered all these years: of a polonized Jew, a man of Jewish roots but of Polish culture and, by virtue of no more than personal choice -- of Polish nation. They wanted Tuwim to say again that he felt Polish; they wanted him to be a great Polish poet who had seen the light and joined the Polish communist struggle. They did not want him to talk about universal human values. That he did, bothered them; it did not fit their ideology; to their minds, in his new-found internationalism Tuwim simply went too far; he took the Marxist-Leninist thing too seriously. He appeared to take, like all neophites, that international side of the business too seriously.

So the regime sidelined his speech.

No doubt they hoped he would see the light; no doubt he imagined they must come round to understand what he had wanted to say. As it happens, both were wrong, but a fatal heart attack made this discovery mercifully short. A few months later, Tuwim was dead.

*

And thus, when he finally appeared to resolve the question of his national identity for himself, late in his life, pushing sixty, the resolution being neither Polish nor Jewish but emphatically neither, Tuwim found his decision again rejected by his surroundings; again it was controversial.

Tuwim's decisions about his personal identity could never be accepted by anyone, it seems. (Homosexual activists might want to spare a thought here on the universality of the human condition).

What surprises me in all this is that Tuwim took so long to come to his decision; and that it took Shoah to show him the obvious light that we are none of us Poles or Jews or Germans; or anything; but that we are all men, ourselves, each of us a member of a nation of one: himself. But it surprises only because Tuwim was such an intelligent, witty man; that he was so slow in such an obvious conclusion surprises, even shocks. I made mine so much younger than he, and without the need for a world war. Why couldn't he?

On the other hand, that those around him did not understand or approve does not surprise. After all no one ever appears to approve whatever it is that I do, either. It seems that disapproval is the one constant, permanent condition of independence. To me it seems part and parcel of adulthood: if we want to live by our own lights, we simply have to learn to ignore others' opinions.

After all, whose business is it whether we are Polish or Jewish or what?

Suddenly, at four, wide awake

Suddenly, at four, I am wide awake. Or so it seems, but my mind, still caught up in the clammy vapors of sleep, isn't quite itself. It thinks odd thoughts; autobiographical thoughts; not quite of the what-if variety, but of the how different it could have been. (Not better or worse, just different). At four, the thought seems interesting, a kind of philosophical reflection; at four, the mind is too sleepy to know what it is doing.

The gist seems to be this.

Many years ago, in the middle of the last great automobile recession, I lived in Detroit, which was then a kind of bombed out hole in the ground -- unemployment, crime, graffiti, boarded up houses, not a tree in sight, stifling heat in the summer, arctic cold and howling wind in the winter. (It probably isn't much different now). Really, it would have been difficult to find a worse place to live. Why on earth was I living there?

I was barely a youth; totally inexperienced; without a clue. My parents, who had taken me to Detroit in the first place -- you move across the ocean to start a new life in the Promised Land, and what corner of it do you choose to settle in? -- had just compelled me to take up an education I was not interested in, of the technical variety, so that I, quote, would have a secure job. It was not a resounding vote of confidence in my ability to make it in the world on my own; it did not exactly inspire me with self-confidence.

I had not wanted to do it; there was resistance; words were spoken; there were tears, mother's tears (ah, mother's tears, how terrible). At length, we had reached an agreement: I would complete the degree, but then be free to pursue any unrelated course of life I chose. Already then I was thinking about moving on. Already the East beckoned.

During the summer, while waiting for the technical school to begin, I went to Hawaii. It was a religious camp; I had been invited, all expenses paid. Some churches will do anything to gain a soul and this one had some confidence in my worth -- my ability to achieve something without the technical education -- apparently; greater than my parents, at any rate. Perhaps therein lay the attraction. I went.

The prehistory of the religious thing would take too long to explain. Suffice this: it was that sort of last ditch effort which throws marriages on the rocks into that last cruise together -- to save things, the relationship. I was giving Jesus a chance and Jesus was laying it on thick: Hawaii and all.

It didn't work. It would take too long to explain why. About 9 PM one night I walked out of a prayer meeting and just kept walking until I finally tired and came to rest on a rock, under the blazing stars. I was single again. Alone. In the dark, under a great starry sky. I felt fine.

I was on the Big Island. I suppose it must be different now; there was only one development then, in Kona: the rest was still pineapple and sugarcane. At night the stars seemed to be just beyond one's fingertips' reach.

I must have been one of the last immigrants cutting sugarcane in Hawaii. I did it for four weeks to earn my return fare; I did it so that I could take up the technical education which I didn't want in a city I hated. When I think about it today, it boggles the mind: I worked in Hawaii in order to leave it for the Midwest. Really, does that make sense to you?

I then went back to Midwest, took four years to complete that education, then another to build up a small capital with which to leave for the Far East: five years in the West, waiting to go East. And yet there, on the Big Island, I had been halfway there already. Think how much time I could have saved, time and travel, if I had simply not bothered to go back to Detroit but headed East already then.

At four a.m., it boggles the mind. All of it.

Tuwim: polonizing Jews

Tuwim, one of the greatest Polish poets of the 20th century, was a Łódź Jew: typical of his class -- educated middle class Jews in partitioned Poland -- his family polonized. His Mamusia raised him on Polish poetry, Polish fairy tales, and Litwo, ojczyzno moja*. They had no Yiddish at home. Typical of assimilating Jews, they thought the conservative Jews, those who kept the old customs and cultivated the old language, backward and uncivilized, a view easily aided by the fact that the more conservative Jews were usually poorer than they. (In the end, most value judgments are not particularly sophisticated: they are about money).

There is a mystery here -- a mystery to me, who was raised in a monolingual home -- the mystery of what happened in some of those assimilating Jewish homes. Aleksander Wat, for example, another polonized Jew of Tuwim's generation (and also a Polish poet) did not speak Yiddish while his father did not speak Polish. The two spoke to each other in German and Russian, acknowledging all the while that those were not their languages (because they spoke them less than perfectly). I can't get this through my head: what it is like to grow up with parents whose language you do not speak?

Yet, this should not amaze: many second generation Americans grow up like this today. Perhaps, deep conversations with parents are somehow not necessary for most parent-child relations. Who knows, perhaps not having a language in common actually helps? This would be typical: people seem generally the more likable the less we know them. That includes parents.

There is another mystery: why did the middle class Jews polonize? That other successful diaspora nation, the Chinese of South East Asia, generally assimilated to the ruling culture: English is Malaysia, American in the Philippines, Dutch in Indonesia, French in Vietnam. There was simply nothing to be gained by assuming the national identity of the conquered nation. If one was ready to give up his ethnic identity and assume another, then the identity of the ruling nation was preferable, it opened more doors.**

So, one is mystified: why did middle class Jews in partitioned Poland polonize rather than Germanize or Russify?

One answer sometimes given is that there is something attractive about the Polish culture. The expressive warmth of the extended Polish family are usually quoted here. But this may be different from North German families -- and therefore account for polonizing Germans -- but is it really different from the way Jewish families function? No one has suggested what could be a better reason for polonization: the pure pleasure of speaking Polish, I wonder why. Perhaps Polish speakers assume that all speakers of all languages get equal pleasure out of theirs; I am not convinced that this is true. Poles do take enormous pleasure in speaking their language and miss it more than anything else when in exile.

In fact, I do not buy either of these two arguments. I think the middle class Jews polonized in the way in which they christianized. It was typical of the assimilating Jews in Poland, if they took the step of abandoning the Old Religion, to adopt the minority Protestantism rather than the majority religion, Catholicism. This way they could justly claim that they were not just rushing in to join the bandwagon (the Catholic majority): such Jews could assimilate without assimilating entirely, they could preserve an area of independence, an area which has not capitulated to the run of the mill.

I think Jews polonized in the same way. Polonizing under Russian occupation achieved two purposes: on the one hand, it assimilated one to a "modern culture" (as assimilating Jews saw these things) -- one of playing Schubert on the piano, dining in the Belvedere, vacationing in the Antibes -- and yet it preserved one's stubborn resistance to the power that be, in this case, the majority (Russian) rule. This way one could have his cake and eat it: abandon one persecuted minority -- Jews -- in order to join another one -- Poles.

This way no one could accuse you of taking the easy way out.

______

*"Lithuania, my fatherland": the opening words of Pan Tadeusz. The Polish Armavirumque.

**See Anthony Reid's excellent Sojourners and Settlers for discussion of Chinese assimilation in SEA.

Tuwim: Mamusia

Julian Tuwim was a great poet but I can’t read him. He irritates me. I have the feeling the man never grew up.

This is perhaps its most striking symbol: in his fifties he still referred to his mother as Mamusia (“Mommy”). Of course, his is an extreme case of the general refusal to grow up: though adult Poles do not usually use the word Mamusia, most say Mama, which is also a childish form of the word whose proper form is Matka. When I say Matka in Polish, to the ears of my interlocutors it sounds harsh and confrontational. The diminutive, indicative of emotional warmth and attachment, is de rigeur. I wonder why it should be. Yet, even Anglo-Saxons, famous for their rugged individualism, usually say “Mom” rather than “mother”. So in this sense most of us do not grow up; Tuwim only more so than others.

The Other Lotte

The other Lotte, Lotte von Stein, was certainly the more interesting Lotte in Goethe's life. But she gets either no press or bad one. Mann barely mentions her in his Lotte in Weimar (dedicated to the earlier Lotte), clearly having had no clear notion of her; others' notions tend to portray her as neurotic or vicious or fake, forgetting that she was educated, cultured, strong willed, and of considerable social standing which she needed to protect. I wanted to strike a blow for her; I must have failed: a reader thinks this is the worst Lotte von Stein yet.

*

“So – you have returned.”

“So I have.”

“There were some doubts… some people even placed bets.”

“Ah, yes… I hope I didn’t ruin anyone by coming back… And you, did you bet?”

“I never bet, my Goethe. But I also did not bet because… I did not know how to bet. I didn’t know what to expect.”

“I didn’t know it, either. My return – it wasn’t decided until the last moment, you know. I hesitated until the last day. On my last night in Rome, in bed, I thought of giving up my seat in the post-carriage. But by then of course it was too late.”

“The passage had been paid.”

“Ah, yes, you know me: the bags packed, the good byes said, the letter announcing my return sent… It would have been such labor to undo all this. And it would have been – well, silly.”

“You mean it would have felt silly to have to explain it. It seemed easier to you to convince yourself that it had all been decided, the dice have been cast, any change was out of your hands, because it would have seemed unreasonable to change your mind. Unreasonable, or perhaps awkward.”

“Yes. It does sound rather silly when you put it this way, does it not?”

“Especially after you had gone to Italy, as you say, on the spur of the moment, in an act of poetic madness… This was much admired here: mad acts of inspiration rising above the customary, the triumph of the individual. Yet, in the end, you turn out a thoroughly reasonable poet.”

“Yes. How German of me.”

“German? I don’t know that it is German. Maybe not so German as – Frankfurtian? Very city-like: responsible and predictable. Reliable. But I did guess that you hesitated to the last. I know I would have.”

“To tell the truth, I am nor sure why I returned. I wanted to see old friends; see you, of course. But – “

“But?”

“I was not sure that I wanted to return – for good. I often thought I’d return, stay several months and then go back again… Whenever I thought about returning here, to Weimar, I imagined it most often as a temporary visit. Maybe extended, but temporary.”

“Then you know yourself less than I know you. I had no doubt that once you returned –if you returned – it would be forever.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think you have it in you to turn up here and then leave again.”

“Oh?”

“Of course! I suppose the prince probably knew this, too. That’s a very special skill of princes, you know, to know their subjects. One marvels at how they pick up this knowledge, this special skill of managing people. It’s the special skill of the princely blood, you know: part of the vast body of knowledge about how to be a prince.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, the salary, of course. When the word came from you from Venice two and a half years ago that you have absconded, that from Vienna, instead of coming back here you turned south and crossed the Brenner Pass, His Highness immediately decided to continue your salary as if nothing had happened; as if you have not – escaped.”

“Yes. He wrote me that all was well and that I was to stay in Italy as long as I liked and that whenever I chose to return was fine with the prince. Very generous of him, I must say. Very princely.”

“Ah, but that’s just it: it wasn’t generous. It was cunning. Look, he wrote: whenever you chose to return, meaning that you will. Some other, lesser person in his situation may have been mad at you, and cut you off, never wishing you to return. Another might cut you off precisely for the opposite reason, imagining that penury would force you to give up Italy and return, hat in hand, begging to be reinstated like some prodigal son. Of course, both would have been foolish. The first would have lost you irrevocably. The second would have forced you to make a living in Italy, which with your intelligence and resources you would have managed; which would have made it possible for you to stay there indefinitely and never to return. But His Highness is a crafty man, he has avoided both these mistakes. He paid. He paid and wrote “all is well, you may return anytime”. But also, as if to say, “don’t bother setting up in Italy; Italy is a mere sojourn, make the most of it: don’t try to be anything other than a tourist”. And it worked, hasn’t it? For two and a half years you remained – a tourist. You did not set up in Italy – because you did not even try and you did not try because – you did not have to and you didn’t have to because your salary was paid to you by our prince. So, you see? His highness has managed you expertly. His highness really knows how to be a prince!”

“Yes, that’s very insightful of you. But tell me something else, tell me why did you not think I could return to Weimar only for a while and then go back to Italy again?”

“Because, dear Goethe, you are too… too… decent. His Highness has paid you on the understanding that one day you will come back and continue in service here. You have accepted the salary –with it the implicit obligation to return into service. I am guessing that you feel guilty about the generous manner in which His Highness has treated you. And I am guessing that you feel you could not repay that generosity – by quitting. You do not have it in you. It would be too… ruthless. You are not ruthless. You are a nice fellow, my dear. Really, it’s very Frankfurtian, you know.”

“Somehow it doesn’t sound like a compliment on your lips.”

“Because it isn’t.”

“You have the same charming smile… as always.”

“One can see a fault in one’s friends character and yet not be offended by it. Some faults are charming. Like gluttony, for instance. Or stuttering.”

“Or decency.”

“Decency? How about – timidity.”

“Timidity?”

“Of course, my dear. I said decency, but I really should have said: timidity. Some see this trait of yours as politeness: never wishing to offend. But I – and his highness – we know better. You are a nice fellow because you cannot help it. You don’t know how to be rude. Or, should I say, how to be assertive. That’s why you left for Italy the way you did: surreptitiously, without a word of warning.”

“Ah, so we come to that.”

“Oh, I am not angry, if that is what you imagine.”

“No?”

“No.”

“And were you not then?”

“No, not really. At least I don’t think so. No, I wasn’t.”

“No?”

“Does it disappoint you?”

“You smile.”

“Of course. Your first letter to me from Italy – it gave me the idea that you expected me to be screaming mad with you.”

“And weren’t you?”

“No. I was upset that you left without warning, without saying good bye. This is why I say that you are timid rather than polite: a polite person would have taken leave properly. A timid person doesn’t know how to displease by telling an unpleasant truth – and will dodge uncomfortable meetings. A timid person will leave without leave-taking.”

“But I really did decide to go only once I reached Vienna. I didn’t know it yet at the time when I left Weimar that I would go to Italy and stay. So, I could not have warned you when we said good-bye because I didn’t know it then.”

“Oh, but it is all in character, my dear. While you were here, with us, it didn’t even occur to you that you could leave. You had to go all the way to Vienna, far away from us, your employers and your lovers, to dare such a daring thought, to hatch the plan. Do you see why I call this timidity? But don’t worry about it too much. It isn’t important.”

“But you aren’t angry.”

“Again, no.”

“And you weren’t then?”

“Again, no. And again: are you disappointed?”

“No, no, of course not. I am… relieved. I did think all these years that I may have hurt you by disappearing like that.”

“You did.”

“But you weren’t angry.”

“No, dear friend. It was not a good moment for me – I mean it was a bad moment in my life, you have chosen a bad moment to leave; I would have liked you to stay a little longer somewhere near. But I think I already knew by then that you were going to leave; I mean – that I was going to lose you one way or another. If not to Italy, then to France, if not to France, then to a new novel, or a new woman, or some such. I expected that.”

“You did?”

“Yes. Nothing is forever, especially not with poets, especially not with you. I never expected it to last.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I knew it would end someday. I just didn’t know when. So when you left I was very sad, of course, but I was also relieved: now I knew when the end was and it was then. It was decisive; over in one clean cut; over before I could even realize what was happening. There was no opportunity to struggle, to object. It was like sudden death: not much to do about it, but accept. That’s a good way to end things.”

“But Lotte… you must realize… it was too hard for me… our love… it was so circumscribed… I could have you so little: so little of you, of your time, of your letters… I felt imprisoned in out love – imprisoned I say, because while I was required to give it my all, in return I got very little. Seeing you only several times a week, mostly in company and in between only your letters. Your letters! You never wrote anything – politics, philosophy, literature, weather, court, yes, but – anything but anything relevant, anything but feelings, but love! You smile again.”

“You know why I wrote the kind of letters I did.”

“To be safe.”

“Well, yes, that too.”

“Is there another reason?”

“A woman, my dear, has nothing if she does not have her reputation.”

“You have certainly protected yours!”

“Well, dear Goethe, I had been warned. I knew – the whole Europe knew – that you like to make novels out of your loves. That poor Lotte of yours, the other one, she’ll be saddled with that awful book to her dying day. What am I talking about? She will be saddled with it forever. As long as people remember Werther they will remember her and the confusion you wrought in her little mind!”

“That’s not nice.”

“I am not trying to be nice. I am polite, but I am not nice. This is the truth: you have confused the poor girl and then made a book out of her. I never wished to be confused and I certainly did not wish to become a book.”

“Lotte – the other one – she will be famous for as long as people read my book. You smile.”

“I wonder if you will ever understand that some people do not care a fig for that.”

“For being immortal?”

“Immortal, famous, what’s the difference?… If by immortality you mean some future maid reading about me in bed, in her sleeping cap, with a cup of hot chocolate by the bed, and, when turning the pages, licking their finger and then rubbing that finger over the page where my name is written and my feelings described and analyzed… well, then, no, that is not the immortality I want!”

“But why?”

“It’s pride, dear Goethe. I wonder if you could understand it? I suppose most people imagine that not wanting to be talked about comes from not wishing to offend public mores, a matter of fear and submission before the public opinion. Of course this is often true. This is what people usually mean when they try to hush things up – to prevent a scandal. But there is a better cause not to be in the public eye: pride. One may simply not wish to be known or understood or analyzed or discussed or pitied or evaluated by another person. One may simply not wish it because it is demeaning, because they, whoever they are, do not deserve to know about us. Because we do not want to explain, because we do not have to explain. Because to explain is to concede to those to whom we explain the right to judge us. I wish to be very picky about the persons to whom I give such a right. Perhaps he has not yet been born.”

“Explain about us?”

“Oh, no, don’t be too flattered by my words. This is merely a matter of grammatical form and I should have chosen a different one. So let me restate: I may not want to be written about or read about or talked about. I may not want to explain myself. I may be too good to be in your book.”

“My books aren’t good enough?”

“Oh, don’t try to take me by pity. Your books are fine; some of the best ever. You know it and I agree. No, that’s not it. You see, I don’t want to be in any book, even the best book.”

“But why?”

“Because my innermost thoughts and feelings are mine and mine only and no one gets to know them; no one gets to finger them.”

“Is this why you never wrote to me about your feelings in your letters?”

“I suppose that was one reason. Never my innermost feelings, no. Never the important ones. I am happy to concede that Weimar bores me or that the summer weather makes me faint or that your poem moves me. I can say things like that as long as it doesn’t strike that special cord, the cord which must remain private.”

“Have I never struck that special cord in you?”
”Oh, I forgot, you are a writer and therefore you must be vain. Very well, I will tell you. Some of your letters did move me; a lot. But I will stop at this.”

“You will not tell me which?”

“I do not remember.”

“But you could go back…”

“…and look them up? Why would I do that?”

“For the sake of our love! Ten years of love and intellectual companionship! Ten years of platonic yearning, of secrecy, of rules, stupid, stupid rules, of decency which had to be observed, of veiled conversations in the company of totally irrelevant third persons… what suffering! What impediment! They say love thrives on impediment – well, certainly this one did! All those nights spent sleepless, dreaming of you, writing you these poems and letters… surely, I deserve at least to know that they have moved you, that they have touched your feelings!”

“I don’t think you are asking this for the sake of our love. You are asking this for the sake of your writer’s wounded pride. Anyway, you know that I cannot go back to your letters even if I could.”

“You did not really destroy them all? Tell me it’s not true!”

“Of course I did.”

“But you didn’t tell me! I had no warning!”

“Of course I didn’t tell you because if I did tell you, you would have kept copies of those letters for yourself. They were too precious as literature to be written, read and then – forgotten, right?”

“So that’s why you insisted that I swear to you that I am not making copies! So that you could be sure that the letters are wiped out once and for all, without a trace!”

“Yes.”

“Woman! You have the cunning of a snake!”

“And thanks to this, I remain as pure as a dove.”

“As pure as a dove… Not quite! Do you perhaps remember?... A certain autumn day in Zweibrucken? A key mysteriously appearing in my desk, the dark room, the drawn curtains, in the room a woman, unrecognizable for the dark, silent – you never said a word, except at the end to extract from me a promise.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, no, Goethe. You are mistaken. Whatever it is you are talking about – some assignation in Zweibrucken – is this why people go there? So, I suppose, do you – I know nothing about it and I don’t want to know.”

“Lotte, how can you?...”

“How can I what? Someone has played a practical joke on you, has sent you a woman, a common prostitute, who wore her hair like me and who wore my perfume… and you have of course believed it all completely. You are so naïve. Did you really think I would violate my sacred marriage vows?”

“It was you!”

“I really don’t know what you are talking about. And I am not interested what Weimar officials do on their theater visits to Zweibrucken. Spare me the story, will you? Actually, on second thoughts… no: do tell me one thing. I am curious about one thing.”

“Yes?”

“What did the woman – the prostitute – you say she made you promise something. What did she make you promise?”

“You know.”

“I don’t. Tell me.”

“Er… she demanded – you demanded – that I never ever speak about the assignation to anyone.”

“To anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Would that mean Lotte von Stein? Yes? You are speechless… why? I suggest we stop now, before you say another word. Keep your promises, even if they had been given to another woman, even to a mere prostitute. And another thing: if you think, as you just suggested, that that act which you committed in Zweibrucken, whatever it was, and whoever was the counterparty, was not pure, then I am certainly glad you did not commit it with me.””

“You have me…. I have – promised.”

“Then keep your promise.”

“But there isn’t anyone here to hear us talk.”

“But I am here.”

“Yes. And so you are.”

“Oh, don’t sulk. I know, I know: you did not return for this. In fact, I am sure this is what you ran away from.”

“I have forgotten how to be under an iron fist. How to take orders regarding what to talk about and how.”

“Oh, I realize that. Some girl, Faustina, I think was her name. In Rome. I have heard. There were probably others.”

“Are you interested?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, of course not, why should I be interested?”

“Jealousy? Are you not the least jealous?”
”I am not jealous of you.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s over. To be jealous would be to concede somehow to you, and to myself, that it is not over. But it is. You broke it and I have accepted the rupture. I have taken you at your word; or rather, at your action. I accept that our love is over. I refuse to pretend otherwise. I refuse to feel sentimental, or sorry. I refuse to even remember the old days.”

“But why?”

“That, my Goethe, would be conceding something and I am not willing to concede anything.”

“Can you really be so hard?”
”I am and I have to be. You know it.”

“It’s so cold.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Here, let me cheer you up. There is another reason why I am not jealous.”

“What is it?”

“It is the secure knowledge that whatever you have with this Faustina, and others, it is not like what you and I once had. I know that you will never have another love like ours. You can’t, it’s impossible and you know it.”

“There are other brilliant women out there, you know.”

“Yes, and other brilliant men, also. The problem is that they are not available. Even you, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Hofrat, even your chance of running into another woman like me, under the same liberal circumstances, with both of you able and willing to commit the time and energy and intellect and emotions to something like this, to a ten year project like this, are practically zero. You know it and I know it. What you have with Faustina, or whatever her name, may be very beautiful, but I know as well as you, that it is not the same. It can’t be. If nothing else, you are too old now to commit ten years of your time to such a project again. As time gets shorter for you, you will increasingly invest in simpler, more effective projects… So, you see, there simply is nothing to be jealous of – you will never have again what you had with me. Nor, let me add to cheer you up, will I have it again with anyone else.”

“Can you live with that?”

“With what?”

“With the knowledge that you – will never have such love again?”

“Oh, my dear… I have known this for many years… I had known this for many years before you left for Italy. I had known this practically the moment we met. You see, you could say that I have had the time to get used to the thought.”

“And?”

“Well, it is not a happy thought, but then, what is one to do? We are mortal. We are born the sex we are born, in the families in which we are born, with the bodies and minds with which we are born. We have limits. We have to live with them. This is just one of many.”

“But love! That most sacred of feelings!...”

“No, my dear. It isn’t the most sacred of feelings; or even the most valuable. It is important; and it is beautiful, I agree. But it isn’t rare. It happens to everybody – I mean everybody seems to fall in love, strange as it seems; and most of us seem capable of falling in love more than once in our lifetime. So, you see, one could in fact say that it is the most ordinary of feelings. It is surprising how much respect such a common feeling gets.”

“But a requited love…”

“Haven’t you written a book in praise of an unrequited love?”

“Yes.”

“And isn’t everyone in Europe convinced that it is a good thing, however tragic?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, what matters is that we love, not that our love is requited, right? At least it should. And I try to live up to these high standards I set for myself: I do what I should. I love and do not ask for my love to be requited. Otherwise love would be like some kind of a business transaction, no?”

“Do you mean?...”

“No, I don’t mean that I love you. I don’t love you, my dear Goethe. I don’t love you anymore. But I like you. You should be happy: this is an emotion which will place a lot less pressure on you. I am glad that you are back, so that I can have from time to time the pleasure of your company if and when we meet in some salon or another; and so that I can have news of you without having to wait six months for a letter from Italy to arrive. To the extent that you may need my friendship, you may have it, though try not to abuse it. And that really is it. Really, this is very convenient, if you think about it.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You mean, we are to be – friends and nothing more?”

“Yes. Oh, come on, I know too well that you had come here with the intention of saying these very words to me; but you have been too… timid to say them; so I have brought you, like a chasseur brings his horse to water, to a place in which it becomes natural to speak these words. And I have even taken things a step further: I have spoken them myself. And now you can say them. Say them.”

“Friends. Just friends.”

“Yes. Bravo! So that is settled then. And now I think we’ve had enough of this nonsense. You should tell me about Rome. I am dying to know about Rome. Tell me, have you been inside the Terme di Tito? Are the paintings as vivid as they say?”

*

(Throughout this interview there was something else Goethe had wished to say, but which saying his timidity – as Lotte had called it – prevented. He had come to hate their love: it had been useless and infertile. Platonic loves – or nearly Platonic loves – always are. She compelled him to it without giving him any – or very little – of that warmth, that physical intimacy that he had wanted so. Such a fruitless, unfulfilled love: why did it interest her so? Why did she want it so? It was a kind of vain, recreational love, he thought: it satisfied her that someone pined for her; it lifted the boredom of her days; it made the misery of her unhappy marriage and her unhappy family life – it was not in her character to be a wife and a mother – a little easier to bear. She used him as a salve for her wasted life. And he did not want to be that. He was single and free, he did not need any of these constraints, he did not need any of this unnecessary longing and suffering, he wanted to use his love on pursuits which paid back the investment made. Because he could.)