Utopians, ideologues, and system-builders of all sorts run aground when they forget that life is biological. Systems needs to breathe. They need to slow down or speed up, contract or expand, in response to changing conditions, like a heartbeat. Too much freedom? Increase order. Too much order? Increase freedom. Too little regulation? Too much regulation? Adjust as needed.

Far easier said than done, but inelastic systems guarantee failure, like medieval Christian attempts to fix “permissible” interest rates, aiming to avoid usury while still allowing for normal economic activity, and failing at both—because actual interest rates fluctuate with the money supply, like a heartbeat fluctuating to meet the needs of the body.

The more that man-made systems imitate this biological elasticity, the more they will succeed.

I revisited Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land after half a century by listening to the audiobook, which, mercifully, is based on the shorter version first published in 1962, rather than the “uncut” version published in the 1990s by Heinlein’s widow.

At its worst, the novel is a hodgepodge of nonsense interspersed with offensive and mildly offensive artifacts of the time when it was written and the gender of its author. At its best it does indeed (as Heinlein claimed) raise fundamental questions worth considering about who we are as a species, and how we ought to live. It’s something like the People Magazine version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Are the questions worth the nonsense? No. But the nonsense is just treacly enough to keep the book in print and selling for another fifty years, I fear.

Think of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, with Nick Carraway observing his dubious friends and acquaintances—part of their story but always on the margin of the action.

Think of Marcel Proust’s endless reconsiderations of everything.

Turn the narrator into a woman, who adds to endless reconsiderations endless and peculiarly feminine doubts, self-doubts, waxing and waning of self-confidence.

Begin the story with two girls in a working-class neighbourhood of post-World War II Naples and its collection of petty criminals, gangsters, shopkeepers, and fascists whose wartime activities are never mentioned but permeate the air.

Is Lila/Lina Elena’s best friend? enemy? doppelganger? evil twin? Will Elena, like Nick Carraway and Melville’s Ishmael, escape the fate of the others, or will she be dragged down with them? The novels present an exhausting yet hypnotic four-volume, slow-motion train wreck covering half a century of these fascinating, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, occasionally hilarious lives.

In the background we get the Sixties, political upheaval, Cold War, the sexual revolution, etc.

P.S.: The men, with rare exceptions, do not come off well. Not at all.

P.P.S.: The narrator’s name is Elena, as is the author’s, and in the novels Elena becomes a novelist who writes about her best friend . . . but the novelist’s name is a nom de plume. And . . . the rumour mill has it that the author may actually be a man, writing under a woman’s name! Mon dieu!

She asked him why he did not write out his thoughts. For what? he asked her with careful scorn. . . . To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?

In The Republic and elsewhere, Plato famously divides human nature into three parts: appetite, will, and reason. If you picture an isosceles triangle divided by two horizontal lines, the biggest of the three sections that result is appetite, at the base of the triangle. The middle portion is will. The smallest part, at the tip of the triangle, is reason. Appetite and reason are self-explanatory. Will (sometimes translated as “spirit”) is that part of us that determines to do something, just because. Think of the dog who insists on jumping up onto dad’s favourite chair, which has been forbidden to him, even though there are plenty of other comfortable spots available.

Plato thought that we share the lower two parts of our nature, appetite and will, with the other animals. Reason, exclusive to humans, was the part that made us different from other animals, and better. Christian theologians adopted Plato’s scheme. In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is imagined as a giant cone with its point at the centre of the earth. Look at it in cross-section, and it is Plato’s triangle, upside-down. In the upper sections are the sins of the appetite—lust, gluttony, greed, etc. Lower down, in the middle section, are sins of the will—violence, most notably. At the very bottom are the worst sins, those resulting from perversion and misuse of our reason—fraud, deceit, and treason. Those sins are the worst because they take the highest, best, and most god-like part of our nature—reason—and use it for evil purposes.

As Dante makes his way through Hell, he continually exclaims at how many damned souls he sees—multitudes, crowds, hordes, and so on. I have been thinking about Plato’s triangle and Dante’s Inferno more and more often. How many people do you know who live mostly to gratify their appetites and their will? How many cultivate their intellects? And of those who cultivate their intellect, how many of them use that faculty of reason for good purposes? In Dante, the damned are described as those who have “lost the good of intellect” (Canto III), and the souls of the damned are countless.

Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are, of course, mirror images of the living world. Those who are not consumed by appetite and will, who use their reason, and use it to do good . . . are a tiny, tiny minority.

The Tolkien books are “restful,” as A. S. Byatt is said to have remarked,* because they are free of sex, and of money. In this respect they are childlike. The people in the stories are seen in the ways that children—privileged children, at any rate—see people. Money exists, but without much regard for where it comes from or how it is earned. Travellers are welcomed into comfortable homes where abundant food appears on the table and soft beds await them when the evening meal has finished. Everyone seems to be independently wealthy, or on summer holiday, without any hint of a servant underclass. The hobbits seem to be farmers, mostly, but we never see them working. Butterbur runs his inn, but who prepares the food, and who washes the dishes or cleans the rooms or launders the linens? Like young children, we readers rarely or never consider such matters: we unthinkingly accept the delicious food and comfortable lodgings. We are grateful and happy, but we do not inquire into the sources of all these comforts.

The people in Tolkien’s stories fall into the categories used by children to classify grown-ups. Old people are either gruff and grumpy, or kindly and wise; some of them start out appearing to be gruff but are revealed in time to be kindly. Men are sorted by their jobs: farmer, gardener, innkeeper, soldier, etc. Unmarried women are young and beautiful; married women are nurturing and motherly; old women are wise and caring, with an occasional witchy character like Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Many modern readers and critics have pointed out that these roles and stereotypes belong to an era and a culture and a social class that can be traced to Tolkien’s own life as a middle-class Catholic and an Oxford don nearly a century ago..

Children today, no doubt, see adults rather differently. But there remains that period of life before adolescence when one sees the world without thinking about sex or money. That innocence, much regretted once one crosses the threshold into the adult world, naturally appeals to us when we have had some experience of the stress, anxiety, and heartache that follow inevitably from becoming a sexual creature who must earn a living and pay for everything. Tolkien’s world offers a respite from such concerns. We imagine the delight of being welcomed as guests and never needing to think about who pays for it all or who cleans the toilets (another item completely absent from Tolkien’s world). We take a holiday from lust, jealousy, and sexual envy. It is, as Byatt says, restful.

And then, the kings and queens. Fathers and mothers. Aged, in the child’s eyes, and yet ageless. All-wise, all-powerful, always protecting their children, their people. Sometimes we have stories recounting the child’s nightmarish fears, stories of evil kings, evil queens, reassuring stories that always end with the overthrow of the wicked and the establishment of a new order under new, benign monarchs. The true king is restored. All is well. The child in us does not long for democracy, but for the benign rule of a father-king and mother-queen. This longing explains much of what we read in the news. We long to be ruled by the true king.

*Byatt is quoted in this Wikipedia article, but the source is not clearly indicated.

Ask any professional musician, “Who gets hired?” and they will all give the same answer. It isn’t the most talented player; it’s not the one who can play more notes, or play faster than anyone else. It’s the one who shows up on time; the one who plays what is needed for the music; the one who is reliable; the one who is pleasant and friendly and gets along with others.

You don’t need to be a super-talented musician. You don’t need to be a star athlete, or a top student.

To be respected and well-liked, to feel good about yourself, you need only do what every one of us can do:

• Be a good friend; a good classmate; a good teammate.
• Be reliable. Show up on time, and whatever the work is, give it your best effort.
• Think of others, not just yourself, and help out when you can.

Doing these simple things will earn the respect of all who know you, and the self-respect that will make you feel good about who you are. That’s a pretty good description of genuine success.

From The Overstory, by Richard Powers, p. 257:

He’s admitted to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountainside overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and lying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad cloud of stars.

This parody, like all parodies, is founded on truth, in part. In my day (1969-72) we called Santa Cruz (the town, not just the university) Hippie Heaven. Plenty of flakiness—so much that when I moved to Oregon a few years later I had an immediate aversion to that state’s Santa Cruz simulacrum, Eugene, and happily continued north to the state capital, Salem, which was as much like a boring midwestern town as anything west of the Rockies. What a relief! When I was at UCSC two highly-touted professors recruited to the school left after just one year for East Coast schools where students were serious about their studies. Plenty of UCSC students and teachers were serious about their studies—I was one of them—but the tone of the place was definitely set by the “middle-class white-boy”* faux hippies and their silliness. I had a few great teachers; I learned a lot; but I was happy to drop out in the middle of my third year when they demanded that I declare a major, and I have never had the least desire to go back.

*”Middle Class White Boy” is one of Mose Allison’s inimitable classics.

Phil Freshman, who I met in 1970, died yesterday.

There are so many good memories, and so many stories I could tell.

I first saw his name in a by-line on an article in the UC Santa Cruz student newspaper in the fall of 1969. The article was about freshman orientation; I thought the by-line was a pseudonym. A few months later this guy stuck his hand out and said, “I’m Phil Freshman.” I started laughing.

In 1981 I was living in Oregon when my little brother got married in our home town in San Diego. Wanting to surprise him, I told him I wouldn’t be able to make it, then got into my car and started driving south. In L.A. I stopped to pick up Phil, who was at home with his parents in Reseda. We arrived in time for the wedding, and Phil spent the entire afternoon talking with everyone at the reception. He had a way of meeting people I had known for years and finding out more about them in ten minutes than I ever knew. As the sun was setting and we started back north, I said, “So . . . what do you think?” There was a pause, then a sigh; then he shook his head. “I thought people in L.A. were superficial,” he said.

His original idea of a career in journalism turned instead into a career as a copy-editor who specialized in catalogues and other publications by art museums. Meticulous and stubborn (and almost always right), he was invariably embroiled in disagreements. In 1982, while working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), two of his colleagues wanted to dispense with the hyphen in the name of their department. His memo to the boss on this topic is reproduced here for posterity. (“I was just trying to make people laugh, convince them via humor,” he said later. The hyphen in “Twentieth-Century Art” was retained, but no one seems to have laughed.)

To: Earl A. Powell III
From: Phil Freshman
Subject: Twentieth-Century Hyphens

As you know, a storm has lately been rattling teacups in the upstairs offices over what would seem to be an innocuous grammatical point. Maurice Tuchman and Stephanie Barron evidently abhor the presence of a hyphen when it is used to hook up the words Twentieth and Century when they appear adjectivally prior to the word Art. More specifically, the curators, formerly of the Department of Modern Art (formerly the Modern and Contemporary Art Department) are adamantly opposed to having their newly renamed department publicly known as the Department of Twentieth hyphen Century Art. I’m told they see the hyphen, in this location at least, as a blemish, an excrescence.

I confess that when I first heard of their assault on our language’s unsung little intelligibility-maker, my professional instinct was to rush unquestioningly to its defense. After all, wouldn’t our bearings be more difficult to find if we didn’t have the adjectivally employed hyphen to tell us we were about to see “sixty-odd works of art” rather than “sixty odd ones”? And how embarrassed we might feel if we were left, hyphenless, to divine the best way to approach an “ill favored woman”.

More angrily, and pointedly, I could have arisen, stuck an index finger down onto any properly punctuated book, newspaper, or magazine page where the subject of 15th-century poetry, 19th-century sculpture, or 20th-century anarchy was treated and then, folding my arms, let my case rest.

However, being a student who knows the language has a way of changing, sometimes radically, before our very eyes, and being an employee of an American museum in a time when more and more of those institutions’ modern art departments are adopting this century’s name for their very own, I decided to do a bit of digging. I called four major museums, each of which had, according to the 1981 Official Museum Directory, “20th Century Art” departments. Instead of phoning these museums’ editorial departments and collecting a pile of confirmations for my view, I spoke with members of the departments in question; if they felt as Maurice and Stephanie do, and had gotten their museums to condone the breaking of grammatical code, I wanted to hear from them how they had justified it.

The four museums I called were the Metropolitan in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the Metropolitan, a Mrs. Rubin, the assistant to one of the associate curators of Twentieth no hyphen Century Art, told me the department had had the name since the ’60s and that no one, certainly no editors, had to her knowledge ever questioned the usage. She said the department refers to itself in all public places hyphenlessly. “But now that you mention it,” she added, “yes, I guess you’re right. I wonder why no one has ever said anything?”

Next I called Boston. “Don’t mention that hyphen!” cried Debbie Emerson, the departmental secretary. “We all think it’s ugly, unsightly.” But does the Museum of Fine Arts use it? “Yes,” she admitted. “Our editors make us. On business cards, in the annual reports, everywhere. But around the office we avoid it like the plague.”

Then it was Philadelphia, where I talked with the curator herself, Ann d’Harnoncourt. “You tell Maurice and Stephanie I’m on their side,” she said. “I just can’t stand that hyphen, and I never use it in any of my letters.” But what about the museum’s official usage? “Well of course it’s correct and the museum includes it in the calendar of events, the annual report, you name it. But God, it’s so unaesthetic!”

Finally, Chicago. Susan Frio, the department’s secretary, was just as hot on the subject as her co-religionists in Boston and Philadelphia. “We despise that hyphen, but what are we going to do? We co-publish the University of Chicago Manual of Style [LACMA’s style bible], and so it would look pretty dumb if we deviated from that. So we make it Department of Twentieth hyphen Century Art consistently.”

What are we to conclude from all this? Seemingly, the law-abiding adjectival hyphen, just trying to do his job in the strife-torn world of modern language, is undergoing a death-dealing hail of abuse by other twentieth-century art departments than our own. However, he has, in most places, managed to survive. I want him to survive here. And so I recommend, consistent with both grammatical practice and the policies of reputable (though embattled) museums, that this museum recognize the legitimacy and necessity of linking Twentieth and Century with a hyphen whenever those two words publicly precede Art.

Naturally, I wouldn’t presume to suggest extending this rule to the private correspondence and paperwork of the Twentieth-Century Art curators, or anybody else. That would indeed be a less-than-reasonable, over-regimented, far-fetched, and even un-American policy.

In 2015 he came to visit me in Suzhou, China, where I had been living and working for a decade. Although we hadn’t seen each other for years, we picked up right where we left off, and Phil was the same curious, gregarious omnivore of new experiences that he had always been. I am so blessed to have known him, and I will miss him, as the saying goes, like salt.

At the beginning of The Republic, Socrates walks from Athens to the port city, Piraeus, to see an old man named Cephalus and ask him what it’s like to be old.

“There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the ‘threshold of old age’–Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?”

“I will tell you, Socrates,” he said, “what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is—I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, ‘How does love suit with age, Sophocles,–are you still the man you were?’ ‘Peace,’ he replied; ‘most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.’ His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.”

—Plato’s Republic, B. Jowett (Translator). Book I.

The world of mathematics . . . is really a beautiful world; it has nothing to do with life and death and human sordidness, but is eternal, cold, and passionless.

—Bertrand Russell

August 26, 1910 – July 9, 1978

Why do old people so often lament the state of the world today and speak nostalgically of the world as it used to be? Is the world really so different today than it was in the historical nano-second-ago that was our childhood and youth?

I think not.

We idealize the past and demonize the present, first, because we know how the past turned out, and we survived—an outcome we struggle to believe in with regards to the future. Second, we know so much more than we did. Had I known, growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, of all the atrocities and crimes and injustice that had preceded my birth and were continuing through my early years, my optimism would have suffered. Third, we live today in a media environment that depends, economically, on a constant stirring of the pot. Chicken Little provokes clicks, views, ratings, and success. To the extent that we construct our view of the world through the media, we almost never hear good news.

In the essays attached to Christa Wolf’s remarkable 1983 novel, Cassandra, she includes diary entries from 1981 in which she and her friends debate how to live in a world that they expect to self-destruct in a nuclear war within three or four years. What’s the point, under such circumstances, of doing anything? Why go to work? Why read a book, or write one? Their discussions remind me of similar discussions in those years. I was bemused by the panicked excavation of backyard bomb shelters, fully equipped with bottled water and canned food. What folly! If there were a nuclear holocaust, the last outcome one could possibly wish for would be to survive the initial blast and have to live in the irradiated hell-scape that would result. Others around me were terrified at the mere thought of nuclear extinction. To me, there seemed little difference: whether one dies in his twenties, or in his eighties, one dies. The cause of death is incidental. As for the destruction of humanity as a whole, there would be much to lament in our extinction; but there would be much, too, of which one could only say, “Good riddance!” However we will die, the important question remains: How shall we live, in the meantime?

All such youthful ponderings of death, individual or collective, cease to be speculative in old age. “If it be now,” says Hamlet,

’tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.

In old age we know that, whenever it comes, it won’t be long. It could be any moment, or it could be thirty years from now. The old question in the face of destruction—”Why do anything? What’s the point?”—seems now almost quaint. Why not?? What else should one do with life but to live it? In old age I see more clearly than ever before that life itself is the point. The morning cup of coffee, with its delicious odour and comforting warmth, is the point. It doesn’t need to mean anything; it simply is. And so am I. As long as I am here, I intend to savour every sip. And that’s not consolation—it’s pretty damn good!