A Little Beach Reading

One of the joys of having a partner is that there are certain duties you can delegate, particularly when you're very busy. The annual post-busy season recuperative vacation is a prime example. I was involved, some months back, in the initial destination selection (where "involved" means b&c's saying, "I thought maybe this year instead of going to New York City, we'd go to the Virgin Islands and just relax," was followed by my saying, "Good idea"), but after that, he took care of all the details, and when -- at various times between late February and mid-April, he'd inform me of one of those details, I'd give my input, usually in the form of "Huh?" or, if I was actually not completely exhausted that particular evening, "Oh. Whatever."

But there are certain things you can't delegate. Packing, for instance. And, more to the point: reading material. Well, I suppose that you could say, "Pick me out something good to read while we're on vacation," but that's a lot like saying to a friend "Can you bring me home a partner from the bar?" Who you're going to spend the next several years of your life with is arguably a bigger deal than what you're going to read on vacation, but it's an argument you'd lose. Besides, if your friend is a reasonable person, he'd probably do a lot better job of picking a partner for you than you'd do for yourself. I mean, judging from the available evidence.

By way of example, if b&c weren't already my partner, he could probably do a halfway decent job of selecting one for me. By contrast, when I complained earlier today that I'd done a poor job of selecting my beach reading, his response was, "I would have loaned you one of my Gordon Merrick novels." Dude. But I'm on vacation, and we're having far too good a time for me to experience anything like pique, so I just said, "Your faith in my intellectual prowess is truly touching." Then he tried to backpedal, but I had already moved on. On the other hand, less than an hour later, we were sitting at a beachfront bar, nearing the end of our first Margarita of the evening, and we had the following conversation:

B&c: So do you want to go see Siegfried with me, or should I find someone else?
TED: Siegfried?
B&c: Yeah.
TED: The opera?
B&c: Yes.
TED: By Wagner?
B&c: Right.
TED: Part of the ring cycle?
B&c: Yup.
TED: How many questions am I going to have to ask before you know the answer to your question? You should have known before you ever asked. When have I ever wanted to see anything by Wagner?
B&c: Well, that one time we saw the first act of Siegfried in concert at the NSO, you said you liked it.
TED: I said it was tolerable.
B&c: Well...
TED: And it was an hour and a half. One act. How many acts are there?
B&c: Three.
TED: Three acts plus two intermissions equals not tolerable. Do the math.
B&c: Maybe you're just not old enough to appreciate Wagner yet.
TED: Fine. You can take me to the entire ring cycle when I'm dead.

And at that moment, it probably should have occurred to me thinking I might be willing to endure Siegfried was not entirely consistent with suggesting a Gordon Merrick novel, but it didn't, not because I was in too good a mood (which is why, now that it has occurred me, I only find it amusing), but because I was fairly drunk and well on my way to very drunk. The variety in the alcoholic content of Margaritas in different Virgin Island bars is quite large, but none of them were nearly as strong as tonight's. When I remarked -- appreciatively, of course -- that the Margaritas were on the powerful side, the barwench replied, "Really? They're only half Tequila and half mixers." I have no idea whether half Tequila is usually considered strong, but these particular Margaritas were practically devoid of ice, and I believe they were served in a ten-ounce glass, so each of them had, I'd estimate, about 4.5 ounces of Tequila in them. I didn't notice until I was starting on my second one, and by then it was too late to un-order it (Not that I would have, anyway, because "Margaritas" is plural, and who goes out "to have Margarita"? Well, maybe straight guys if Margarita happens to be the local bawd, but she isn't, and I'm not.). B&c didn't notice until he stood up from the table, which turned out to be considerably more difficult than he'd anticipated. The barwench explained that she'd only been brought in as a back up and that "I usually work on the front desk." I told her that I was sure she had now found her true calling.

Andre Aciman was the editor of The Proust Project, and, boy howdy, does it show. It is impossible, if you've read even as little as a long excerpt of In Search of Lost Times, to get more than twenty or so pages into Call Me by Your Name without being reminded of Proust. I have nothing against Proust, but I wouldn't bring A la Recherche to the beach, and I would probably go so far as to say that if it's your idea of beach reading, you and I are very likely not ever going to be soul mates. As with Proust (Another good example would be Faulkner, whose writing I adore: I would not bring Absolom, Absolom!, or even Light in August to the beach.), Call Me by Your Name is the sort of work that requires attention, even immersion. You cannot read a few pages of it and then rise up and towel it off so that you can go immerse yourself instead in the Caribbean.

While on some levels the book is brilliantly written -- and deeply affecting: I would almost certainly have wept at the end had I not been experiencing such fine times and weather -- on other levels, it's just a bit too much. The topic is desire (more specifically desire in the context of a first true love), and while thinking at length about desire is something that many of us, myself included, have indulged in, there is a point where examination, however enlightened begins to lessen, rather than add to, the experience being examined. And I'm pretty sure that this novel would have passed that point even if I hadn't been reading it on the beach and in a hotel room. If you haven't already, you should read Call Me by Your Name and notice how many of the paragraphs begin with "or." It is, of course, the nature of intelligent young men wading for the first time into the turbid waters of love and desire to obsess over the possible meanings of each minute detail, and that obsession is well captured here. But anyone who hasn't already lived through it won't get it no matter how long you go on about it, and anyone who's been through it will surely have recaptured the feeling by the third or fourth "or perhaps." Some abridgment, or perhaps editing, would have been helpful. Or at least I sometimes found myself getting more impatient with the author than the narrator was impatient with himself.

The Homeric hymns might not seem like the ideal reading material for situations where time and attention spans are likely to be brief, but they actually have much to recommend them for beach reading. The subject matter is familiar and engaging, and the format (The edition I'm reading takes about one hundred fifty pages to get through the thirty-three hymns, and while the lengths are highly variable, none of them is very long, and each can be read independently of the others.) lends itself to short periods of reading interrupted by long stretches of bathing or debating the comparative merits and shortcomings of the trip's various Margaritas. But there are two problems. First, the translation. It is, I recognize, impossible to translate Classical poetry into English without sacrificing either the meter (the hymns were written in a sort of hexameter where the individual feet, I believe, were a flexible mixture of dactyls and spondees) or the meaning (It's possible that it's better not to try. It may make more sense to take the overall story and start afresh. Shelley wrote some good hymns that way.), but if you accept, as I do, that the meter won't survive translation, then at least you can try not to make the English leaden. There is nothing either playful, emotional, or moving about this translation. I find that I can keep reading for several stanzas before I realize that I've gotten so bored that I've begun thinking about something entirely different even while my lips have continued reading the hymn.

And that brings up the second problem. They're hymns, and they really have to be read aloud. Fortunately, the hotel beach here is large and uncrowded enough for me to put my beach chair far enough away from anyone else so that I can read aloud, as long as I do so softly. If that means I stumble over some of the pronunciations (No! Please don't make me try to say "Eileithyia" again. Oh, hell, I'll just call her "Fred." I'm sure that's what the goddesses did.) then so be it. But I'm flying back tomorrow, and I'm only about a third of the way through the hymns, and there's no way in hell that I'm going to read them aloud on the plane. They also wouldn't work on a more crowded beach. And even on a relatively uncrowded beach, people will look at you and think that you're too dumb to read without moving your lips. The shame.

Fortunately, b&c finished at least one of the books he brought along to read, so on the airplane back home tomorrow afternoon, I'll be reading Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva, which, I believe, has little in common with any part of the oeuvre of Gordon Merrick. It seems the most likely of the three books he brought to be entertaining. I am pretty sure that I would not pick up a book titled The Cellist of Sarajevo unless I were looking for a gift for b&c. And, truly, I don't know whether pity or terror is the appropriate response to a man who thinks that something called Wittgenstein's Poker has any place in a vacation.

Paradise Found

Extreme fatigue, like almost everything else, is a two-edged sword. By the last days of tax season, it didn't take much to bruise my usual unflappability. I was so worn out when I slouched out of the office at 4:30 on April 15th that I forgot to turn on my out of office autoresponse on Outlook, and I forgot to change to my alternate greeting on my voicemail. If that's not one step away from a nervous breakdown, I don't know what is. Actually, I don't know whether people even have nervous breakdowns any more. It seems like such a vague diagnosis that surely it must have ended with the 20th century. I reckon (though I don't know and of course can't be bothered to research) that nowadays people must have psychotic breaks or manic episodes or periods of severe depression. Or something. Back in the day, I occasionally felt like a nervous breakdown would be a good path for me, but I could never figure out what the first step was. It was like I'm ready for my nervous breakdown, but now what? Do I just find a corner, sit there, and drool? That seemed a bit too distasteful to me, so I always just continued to fake sanity.

Anyway, sometime around 8:53 on the morning of April 16th, I experienced the other edge of the sword when I was sitting at one of the United gates in Dulles airport, eating my breakfast burrito from one of the fast food establishments there, when b&c approached and told me that his request to use 30,000 of his frequent flyer miles to acquire an upgrade to first class for the two of us on our flight to St. Thomas.

It was as if the Buddha were smiling just for me.

I imagine that upgrades to first class are relatively common for people who travel more often than I do, but it was a first for me, and I really can't explain just how pleased my tired self was. Suddenly I was one of the elect, and neither the fact that I'd be back in coach five days hence nor my entire belief system kept me from feeling smugly superior to the poor slobs who didn't have the sense to end up with a partner who flies a lot.

First class simultaneously wasn't and was all that. My sense of giddiness quickly gave way to an acute recognition of the absence of annoyance. Yes, the flight attendant was very attentive, and yes, we got a pretty good breakfast and as much to drink as we wanted (B&c had two gin and tonics, before 11 am. What a lush.), but what really made it special was that I wasn't subjected to the tiny seats, the negligible leg room, the noise, and the general atmosphere of misery not loving company that is the inevitable experience of coach, especially now that the flights are always so full. I was even able to sleep (I almost never can in coach, even on long or overnight flights), and I arrived in the Virgin Islands feeling unstressed.

Sadly, I was also wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt, and the sun was very forceful, so by the time we'd walked the half-mile to our hotel, I was feeling tired and ragged again. But a quick shower and a trip to the beach set all that right, very quickly. The beach here is beautiful, and the water is both gorgeous and welcoming. After twenty minutes or so of various strokes alternating with floating on my back with my ears submerged and my eyes closed so that I heard nothing but my own breathing and the occasional murmur of the ocean and I saw nothing but the orange and yellow of sunlight through closed lids, I lay on my chaise longue, in the warm shade, reading and dozing, dozing and reading.

I had brought along Call Me by Your Name, which I had seen recommended somewhere by another blogger, and while I would have, in general, to pronounce it the antithesis of beach reading, it is very well written, and it does contain scenes where one of the characters lays idly in the sun, by the water, with his eyes closed, occasionally saying, "This is heaven."

I am not especially comfortable with the notion of heaven, associating it as I do with a very particularly Christian idea of the final resting place of the virtuous dead. I am much more enamored of paradise, which is infinitely customizable, and nirvana, which is also somewhat particular, but comes from a religious tradition that I don't associate with guilt and punishment. In any event, lying there next to the impossibly blue water, shaded from the sun, cooled by a lazy breeze, and almost falling asleep with my book open on my chest, I experienced something like nirvana or paradise, or the extinction, at least, of concern.

People will tell you that it is good to be alive without, necessarily, implying that existence is intrinsically good. What they usually mean by "it's good to be alive" is "it certainly beats the alternative." There are certainly ways to grasp the inherent goodness of existence without flying hundreds of mile and removing oneself to a place of great natural beauty, but it really doesn't hurt. Lying there, intermittently dozing, feeling the kind embrace of the tropics, it was easy to go beyond "it's good to be alive." It's good to be.

Spring, in Pictures

I had in mind something ponderous about spring and Easter, but boy howdy, I'm tired. So enjoy, instead, these pictures of this evening's culinary project. I regret that I didn't get pictures of some of the steps, just because I'd like to have them for myself.

Anyway, Easter. Well, last night (unless it's still tonight: it's just gone midnight here), YFU came to me and said, "What's for dinner?" And I said, "Hmmm. Dinner: interesting notion." And then I took her to one of my favorite local restaurants. She had chicken enchiladas, and I had the Pato alla Saviliana, which was not quite as tender as usual but still delicious. And we were eating, she was telling me stories from her recent trip to Boston with her Religious Education class from church, and she told me about her friend Jack, who has a fear of crosses. Her narrative went something like this:

So we're all, like, how can you be afraid of crosses, and he tells us how when he was a little kid, he saw Hellboy, and he was confused, and he thought that Hellboy was the devil, and Hellboy's the good guy, so he was talking to some friends and said "The devil's a hero!" and a priest heard him and the priest got really mad at him and started waving a cross in his face and talking about Satan and he got scared. But we still didn't understand and we were all, well, still, you should be afraid of priests instead of crosses, and then he said, "But when he waved the cross in my face, it went in my nose."

That story reminded me of this passage from Brave New World.

I guess Jack will be safe from bookspriests and botanycrosses all his life.


Easter has always struck me as the least satisfying of Christian holidays. I just never really understood why if God created everyone and then decided that they were sinful, he needed a sacrifice, of his own son yet, in order to forgive those people. It's really very difficult to reconcile the Easter story with the omniscient and omnipotent God that modern Christians would have us accept.


Anyway, I tried, truly, to think about rebirth and Easter and all that, but none of it was even half as satisfying as making a big batch of marzipan and then making edible robin eggs and a dark chocolate nest. Especially with YFU helping out.


I hope that tomorrow the weather will be a bit better, and I'll have gotten a good night's sleep (I was up until 4am Friday night/Saturday morning and then up again at 8 to go to the office.) and be able to go for a walk and enjoy the flowering trees, as well as the end of tax season: my April 15th work is essentially finished. I'm looking forward to my own annual renaissance.


Happy Easter, everyone.

The Agony and the Ecstacy -- and the Agony

It's a dark, dark day, readers. And I don't mean because I'm tired of explaining to very rich people that if you make lots and lots of money, sooner or later you're going to have to pay taxes on it, even if there's a recession. No, something more important, and a lot worse, has transpired. I speak, of course, of SWINTON's narrow but heart-breaking loss in Fug Madness 2009. I mean, okay: I don't know anything about fashion or about pop culture, so I don't even know who this Aubry O'Day person is, but I know a goddess when I see one, and did you people (Not you people, readers. I'm sure all of you are far too refined to worry about Internet fashion contests. I mean, you all have uniformly refined tastes and wouldn't dream of, say, spending Sunday morning singing a Handel aria, then going home and spending the afternoon drinking cheap wine and watching multiple episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City and eating all your partner's Cheez-Its while he's out at the opera. You all have aesthetic consistency, right? I have no aesthetic consistency. Aesthetic consistency is the hobgoblin of narrow waistlines. Or something.) really just vote against Her Imperial Majesty Jadis, Queen of Narnia, Chatelaine of Cair Paravel, Empress of the Lone Islands?


In favor of this, um, individual?


Yeah, I bet there's a picture you never thought you'd see here. Nobody puts TED in the corner. Oh, God, my eyes! I'm sure when she went to get those implants her mother told her not to because "you'll put someone's eye out," but I doubt she knew just how right she was.

Seriously, who is this Aubrey person? All I can get from Google is that she broke up with someone named Danity Kane. So now I know that she dresses abysmally and was possibly at one time a lesbian. Not that there's anything wrong with that; after all, we all have our suspicions about Jadis, don't we?

Fortunately, that other, less important and less newsworthy, sporting event had a happier ending. The North Carolina Tar Heels beat up on, um, some team from the Midwest; as a result, I crushed the competition and walked away with a Benjamin and ten Andrews in the office pool.


Granted, $300 isn't going to buy Mom that operation or allow me to retire early, but it's unbudgeted income, and that means I get to spend it on anything I want! I'll probably send some of it to EFU so she can buy large quantities of chocolate for Easter, use some of it to buy YFU a couple of pairs of jeans, and spend the balance on something frivolous for myself.

Anyway, I was consoling myself for SWINTON's loss by fondling my winnings when I went downstairs for my daily (during tax season only, mind you) quad venti latte. I had just mentioned to the barista how nice the giant and brand spanking new espresso machines were when I heard this awful, awful noise. I listened more closely, and it was some horrid, slow, country cover of "Me and Bobby McGee," and I thought, why, oh why, would anyone listen to Janis' version and then turn around and record that?



I listened for as long as I could bear it, which wasn't all that long, and then I came back to my office and did some quick research and I discovered that what I had heard was almost certainly the original version by Roger Miller.


It was a difficult moment, the sort of moment that makes you question everything that you hold most dear. Imagine, if you will, that you're a young, intelligent, and faithful-but-open-minded seminarian working diligently towards your ordination sometime early in 1860 when a fellow student hands you a copy of On the Origin of the Species. It's kind of like that. It's not entirely impossible to reconcile Darwin with Biblical beliefs, and it's not entirely impossible to justify the concept of an ordered natural universe with a world where the original recording of "Me and Bobby McGee" is, well, lugubrious, but it certainly changes the way you look at things and makes you wonder whether there's anything you can really trust.

But after all the anger (and the denial, bargaining, and depression), one eventually finds acceptance. I can't be any happier about Roger Miller's recording being the first than a fundamentalist Christian can be about the true age of the universe, but I know that Janis recorded the unparalleled version very shortly before she died, and the Roger Miller version is a reminder that if she hadn't died, the passage of time (and all those drugs) would likely have brought her to a place where she'd have been recording an album of Abba covers. We have, at least, been spared that, so maybe the universe knows what it's doing, after all.

But if Aubrey O'Day ever covers "Ball and Chain," I won't be held responsible for my actions.

Walking After Midday

B&c returned from Atlanta sometime Saturday evening. It may have been late, but I'm not sure because I didn't get home from the office until after 11. Usually he calls me when he gets home from a trip, but he didn't this time. Some people (i.e., men) ignore small details like this while others (i.e., women and gay men) ascribe great meaning to them. So if you like, you can assume that his not calling me to say he was home is indicative of the imminent collapse of our relationship. That's a much more interesting explanation than the actual explanation, and I always say that you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. (The real reason, in case you're keeping score, was either a) he didn't want to risk my grumpiness by calling me at the office on a Saturday evening, or b) he was annoyed at me for eating all of the Cheez-Its. I meant to replace the Cheez-Its on my way home Saturday night, but the supermarkets had already closed. Yeah, I know, but that's about the closest we get to drama at the Chez TED. I told you the fictional explanation was more interesting. I blame Hemingway.)



When I got home, after we established my guilt in the disappearance of the Cheez-Its (The Disappearance of the Cheez-Its was the horribly unsuccessful sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. I blame Jodie Foster.), we had a very brief conversation:

TED: How was the trip?
B&c: Oh, fine.
TED: How's your grandson?
B&c: Very cute. But he wants to sleep all day and then stay up all night.
TED: LIKE ANY SENSIBLE PERSON!

I'm almost certain that I spoke in all caps. I have trouble moderating my emotions and my behavior when I'm exhausted. It's a shame: the humor was obliterated by the delivery.


Sunday morning, I slept until almost 8:30 (woohoo!) and then headed into the office. When I was getting dressed, b&c actually asked me what plans I had for the day. I gave him my witheringest stare, and he said, "Oh, you're going to work?" I just sighed and went downstairs. I have not learned all that much about relationships, but I have learned that it is almost never a good idea to say "Duh!" to your partner, even when he deserves it. And it's not that hard to forbear: I have clients calling me all the time at this time of year, and they always ask whether I'm busy. Then they laugh at me. Hey, did I mention that you owe $75,000 with your extension? NOT SO FUNNY NOW IS IT? Don't worry, I don't actually say that last bit: I never use all caps with clients.



I knew I was in for a long day at the office, so I brought my camera with me so I could take a short walk and some pictures in the afternoon. You can see why I rarely bother taking my own pictures. With digital cameras and photo editing programs, I can usually get a serviceable record of what I saw, but I have no eye. Plus, I find taking pictures while I'm out for a walk to be very disruptive to my interior monologue which feeds on the rhythm of steps. Stopping to take pictures forces me to look at things, though, and that's probably good for me. It's not that I'm not aware of my surroundings when I'm walking, it's more that I have only an atmospheric perception. Stopping to take a picture makes me notice details that would otherwise fade into the background. Both modes of perception are valuable. But the walking is very seductive, I rarely remember my camera, and it's just easier to find better pictures on Flickr. I blame Al Gore.




It was Palm Sunday, so when I walked by the Catholic church across the street from my office, I saw a few parishioners walking away with greenery, but mostly I was looking at the tulip trees and the flowering cherries and the daffodils. My favorite daffodils, though, are the ones in my office window. We each get a bunch sometime around March 15th, and I usually keep mine, in one form or another, all summer. Even after the stems are dried up and discarded, the dessicated flowers retain some of their color. Daffodils that are blooming are heartbreaking, really: they're beautiful, but you know they're only going to be beautiful for a very short period of time. The tulip trees are glorious, but there are already petals all over the ground, and the forsythia are halfway through turning from yellow to green. But my more experienced daffodils will stay in their semi-decayed but still pleasing condition for a long time. It's easier still to appreciate them if you think of them as somewhat wistful for what was theirs for only a moment. There's a fairly obvious analogy here, but I won't bother to draw it for you. And I don't expect most people to agree with my perspective. After all, a lot of my co-workers come into my office and ask why I haven't thrown away my dried-up daffodils, and they all think I'm odd when I say that I prefer them this way.



And it may be nothing more than a coping mechanism, anyway. When you can't get outside to enjoy the most fertile moments of spring, it's probably easier to try not to want to. Which is not to say that all is misery. March is really the hardest month. The first days of April are very intense, but they bring the realization that the end is near. (And certain: tax deadlines are not like software or movie releases. When you get to April 15, everything's either been filed or extended.) And even when I'm very focused on the task at hand, my subconscious -- trained over many years -- knows that relief is not far away, and little shoots of giddiness begin to push out of the soil of despair. It's unwise to smile at moments like these, but I can funnel the glee into my walk: a spring in my step is not easily distinguishable from panic-driven running from one task to the next.


Anyway, I had a pleasant walk, and then I worked for another seven hours. I really only meant to post a few pictures and say that I had a pleasant walk, but I get typing, and I just can't stop myself. I blame my mother for letting me use her IBM Selectric when I was just a wee lad. I taught myself to type, and there's been no stopping me ever since.



When I finally got home Sunday night, I had another conversation with b&c, who had been in Baltimore at the BSO, listening to yet another performance of a Mahler symphony (Yo! Enough with the Mahler, already. In the last few years, I've heard the First thrice, the Ninth twice, the Eighth, and the Sixth, and probably at least one more. All in the DC-Baltimore area. Play some Mozart or Beethoven or something.)

TED: How was the symphony?
B&c: Oh, it was fine, but it was long.
TED: How long?
B&c: Well, they went right from the Bernstein to the Mahler, with no intermissions, so it was about an hour and a half.
TED: Excuse me?
B&c: What?
TED: Ninety minutes?
B&c: Yeah, but without intermission.
TED: OH MY GOD. AND YOU WANT ME TO GO HEAR WAGNER. THAT'S FIVE HOURS AND YOU'RE COMPLAINING ABOUT NINETY MINUTES?
B&c: Stop using all caps.
TED: Try again. Nobody's going to believe you actually said that. You're not that clever.
B&c: You're bitchy when you're tired.
TED: I blame Ronald Reagan.
B&c: What?
TED: Can we get back to what you actually said?
B&c: Sure, what was the last thing you actually said?
TED: "You're complaining about ninety minutes?"
B&c: With Wagner, one act is ninety minutes, and then you get an intermission; it's different.
TED: Right, after you've been through ninety minutes, you still have to go through the same thing two more times.
B&c: Well, I suppose that's one way to look at it.
TED: What's the other way?

He seemed to lose interest in the conversation after that. I blame Marin Alsop.

Zzzzzz

I feel that I should disclaim this post, and all my posts, by saying that I don't take myself very seriously. Also, I'm really tired. But then I also feel that disclaimers are the moral equivalent of scare quotes, so I shouldn't disclaim at all. And then sometimes, albeit rarely, I envy people who take themselves very seriously. It is oh so easy to ridicule, to excoriate, to belittle. It is much harder to stand for something, and it's harder still when you believe that the only things worth standing for are platitudes such as "Be good to your children" and "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." I don't suppose there's any hope of persuading anyone, most especially myself, that my understanding of what lies beneath the platitudes is exceptionally profound.

Exceptional profundity may be a worthy goal, but there is always the problem of numbers. When I was in high school, I was a Merit Scholar, and the first step towards becoming a Merit Scholar was (and perhaps still is: who knows? who cares?) scoring in the top one-half of one percent on a standardized test. This was considered a significant achievement, and I was the only one in my class (of about 250) to qualify, but if there were, say, four million high school juniors taking the test that year (maybe a reasonable estimate, maybe not: who has time for research?), that would make me one of the twenty thousand brightest people of my year. Whoopee shit. And that's just raw IQ-type intelligence. Having suffered my way to a bachelor's degree at MIT, I can assure you that there is no correlation between intelligence and profundity. It may be that highly intelligent people can more easily achieve profundity (it may not be), but most of them don't think they have to bother. Most of them are more the all-I-really-needed-to-know-I-learned-in-AP-calculus type. Such people are insufferable as a class, though many of them are quite pleasant as individuals. Much like conservative Christians.


Anyway, I'm pretty sure profundity is an illusion, and if it's not, it's beyond me. Sometimes I fake it pretty well, though. I do that mostly through silence and a vacant stare. This gives my face a very thoughtful aspect, even when my internal monologue consists of nothing more complicated than "Even old New York was once New Amsterdam/Why'd they change it?/I can't say/People just liked it better that way" at various tempos. But if people want to think that I'm having a profound moment, I'm certainly not going to tell them otherwise. It's nobody's business but the Turks.

I used to be troubled by the limits of my intelligence and by the impossibility of profundity, but I'm not any more. It's a valid question whether a) I'm not troubled because I don't believe in profundity, or b) I don't believe in profundity because that's how I avoid being troubled about my lack of it, but I'm probably not smart enough to discern the answer, even with a 50% chance of guessing correctly. Learning to accept one's lack of profundity, i.e., one's ordinariness, is a fairly common artistic theme, and I enjoy the books, movies, etc. about it. Two of the three examples that currently leap to mind are The Sorrows of Young Werther (more about the failure to come to terms with one's ordinariness, alas) and The History Boys. Or at least, I'm pretty sure that the film version of The History Boys was about the so-called tragedy of being ordinary. I'm not sure what the play was about, but it was very entertaining, which raises (but does not beg!) the question of whether I'm fond of books and movies about accepting one's ordinariness because they so often feature attractive young men.


I suppose I was an attractive young man when I first read Ulysses. Ulysses is about a lot of things, or perhaps about nothing at all, but it's not about the difficulty of accepting one's ordinariness. I mention it mostly because I spent half of the semester in my last undergraduate literature seminar reading and discussing Ulysses, and I really didn't care for it. We spent the rest of the seminar discussing other works that had been influenced by Ulysses, and the first author we read after we had (barely) survived Joyce was Virginia Woolf. Some people find Woolf impenetrable, but after seven weeks of, oh, I can't even bring myself to look up any quotes from that piece of crap, (No, seriously, I told my professor that I thought of Ulysses as manure: it's very unpleasant in and of itself, but it fertilized a lot of good work. He laughed. He laughed at me a lot, but he gave me an A, and I think he enjoyed hearing a contrary perspective.) To the Lighthouse seemed about as difficult as Goodnight, Moon. I will always be grateful to Ms. Woolf for that. Also for Mrs. Dalloway.

Anyway, To the Lighthouse has my favorite passage about the difficulty of accepting ordinariness, and about how people much smarter than I have to accept it, too:

It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next?

After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.

Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what is R?

A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R--

Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R--

The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash--the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.

This would be an apt place to note that I make fun of people who include long quotes in their blog entries in order to avoid having to do the analysis themselves. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.


Anyway, if there's anyone who has a legitimate claim to profundity, it's Virginia Woolf, and look where it got her. This opens (but DOES NOT BEG) the question of whether brilliant people are more likely to be seriously depressed than others. I don't know the answer to that question. There seems to be some evidence to support a connection between brilliance and despair, but I can't help thinking that the people most likely to believe in the connection are people who want to feel better about their own depression. I can remember a time when I was severely depressed, and it certainly didn't make me brilliant, but perhaps that's because my depression was situational rather than something more constitutional and/or Woolfian. In any case, brilliance seems like small recompense for depression, but maybe there's a link. Or maybe the people who get all the way to Z look back and say, "Is that all there is?" And then maybe they're overcome with regret because they spent so much time and effort figuring things out only to learn that there was nothing to figure out, so they could have spent all that time drinking wine and watching reality television. Things might have turned out very differently if someone had traveled back in time to Bloomsbury with the season one DVDs of Project Runway.

Or, to put it another way, let's consider one of my favorite passages from the Bible:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

People generally interpret this passage (and Plato's allegory of the cave, which says more or less the same thing) to mean that to see things as they really are is something unachievable in this life but promised in the next. But, you know, the Bible doesn't say that when you can see things as they really are they're going to look any better. Who hasn't experienced a stab of regret upon seeing someone in the clear (aka harsh) light of morning and realizing that they looked a lot better in the dark and perhaps through smoke and after a not insignificant amount of alcohol?

St. Paul (and what a douchenozzle he was: why couldn't he have filled his pockets with rocks and walked into whatever body of water was at hand?) doesn't even delve into the question. He just moves right along to one of his even bigger platitudeshits: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Which is pretty much the same thing as saying "be good to your children." Not, obviously, that there's anything wrong with that, but why torture yourself to reach that conclusion when you could be out picking tomatoes?

"Scared"

People who know me, whether in person or online, know that I have long been among the most steadfast opponents of so-called scare quotes. I felt that if you were going to use a word, you should own your usage of the word and not try to distance yourself from that usage via erroneous punctuation. While more intelligent heads may still find that line of reasoning compelling or even dispositive, it has become clear to me that a significant majority of writers, and even speakers, of English have come to accept the use of scare quotes as valid and even correct. And, of course, if the majority does something, it must be right, so I have decided to drop my long-held opposition and "embrace" the scare quote. See, that wasn't so hard. I only had to linger over that last sentence for a fortnight before typing the opening quotation marks. The close quotes took a month, but Rome wasn't built in a day. So much for Roman efficiency. Um, I mean "efficiency."

But I digress. Since we're "opening" the "floodgates" to the use of "scare" quotes, I think we should come to some sort of agreement on when they're "appropriate." And I say the more "inclusive" we are, the "better," so let's go ahead and "enumerate" the "instances" where "scare" quotes can be used.

1. Irony. Well, this is pretty obvious, isn't it? If you want to say what you don't mean instead of what you do mean, you use the quotes. Example: That last post was "brilliant."
2. Humor. Let's say you want to be funny, but you're really not very good at it. Just put some quotes around one or more words, and people will know to laugh. Example: Why did the pervert cross the road? He was "stuck" in the chicken.
3. Ambiguity. This covers a lot of ground. Some words have multiple meanings. "Cleave," for example, can mean either to hold close or to separate. Why take a chance? Just use the "scare" quotes. Also, some words are frequently misused. "Nonplussed," for example, means upset or disconcerted, but people often use it to mean the exact opposite of what it means. So just go ahead and throw the scare quotes around any word that you're not sure people will know the meaning of. I know that covers a lot of words, but this is one of those cases where an excess of caution is the way to go.


4. Uncertainty. Let's say you just don't know "le mot juste." Why bother with dictionaries or, heaven forfend, a thesaurus. Just get as close as you can to the meaning you want, throw in some scare quotes, and people can figure out the rest by context. Example: I like your "thing" there.
5. Cleverness. This usage is very similar to humor, but the effects are different. If you're really just not as smart or, especially, as witty as you'd like to be, throw in a few scare quotes -- especially in unexpected places -- and your friends' and/or readers' eyebrows will rise at your obvious brilliance. Example: Why did the pervert "cross" the road? He was stuck "in" the chicken.
6. Vastness. Some concepts are too big to be adequately expressed in "words." The word we use to express such a concept is even more of an abstraction than other words are, so let's acknowledge the abstraction with some scare quotes. The most common examples are "God," "god," and "love," but I think we can all agree that other words -- most notably "sex" and "chocolate" -- qualify.

You get extra "credit" for expanding the usage of scare quotes back to where they originally came from, i.e., the "art" of "conversation." Just hold up the forefinger and middle finger (hint: don't forget the forefinger!) of both hands, and waggle them while speaking the word or words that you wish to make ironic, humorous, ambiguous, uncertain, clever, "and/or" vast. The next time, for example, you're sharing a tender moment with the object of your affections, free your hands and say, "I [begin fingers in air] love [end fingers in air] you."

I guarantee that your next moments of "intimacy" will be "interesting."