The Light at Five O'Clock

Even in rain, autumn in Lexington has been offering up scenes worthy of framing. Earlier in the week, there was the drive home down a street of vintage houses, newly washed in afternoon showers. As I turned onto this particular street, near downtown, the always-graceful homes were especially lovely in a setting of soft, rain-washed light, autumn colors, and slowly drifting leaves. It made me want to be a painter.

Later that day, evening came on with a tumultuous sunset of storm-wracked skies and billowing clouds, steel-gray on one side and turbulent orange where they reflected the light. Even on an evening of uniformly gray drizzle a few nights ago, the neighborhood appeared cozy in the damp, with house-lamps shining out in the mist, a cat sitting calmly in a driveway, and the cheery hue of chrysanthemums on porches echoing the colors of the trees.

But in weather, as in most things, variety is the spice of life, and of course, we only stand for so much of that English dampness around here, whether it's good for the complexion or not. The sun shines bright on my Old Kentucky Home (or at least it's supposed to), and we've got the state song to prove it.

The sun came back today. As I was driving to the coffeehouse this afternoon, I was struck (not as bad as Saul on the road to Damascus--for which I thank my Elle sunglasses--but rather more pleasantly, let us say, enlightened) by the quality of the sunshine. After a few days of rain and drizzle, I had stepped out into a day that was dazzlingly bright, with a phenomenally blue sky--almost a surprise after all the grayness.

I had put my sunglasses on and pulled out into the street, enjoying not only the sunshine but the subdued Sunday afternoon traffic. I hadn't gone very far when the quality of the light, layered on buildings and trees like liquid gold, brought on one of those zen, eternity-in-a-moment feelings, when the world coalesces around you and (despite strange neighbors, the policies of the Federal Reserve Bank, seasonal allergies, and the decline of modern cinema) the universe seems to be perfectly-imperfectly in order.

I looked at my watch, and it was five o'clock. Hey, it's five o'clock somewhere! Not somewhere else, but here. It's five o'clock here.

You may scoff, but there's a name for these things. Psychologist Abraham Maslow called these kinds of feelings "peak experiences," these occasions when feelings of bliss and harmony seem to fold you into the world and make you one with it. This one was fairly mild, as peak experiences go, but it was nonetheless welcome on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, the kind of thing you never say no to. I take bliss as I find it, and I also take it as a sign: I must be doing something right.

The Game of the Surreal, or: The Not-Quite-Haunted Apartment

The human mind just naturally wants to make sense of things and see passing events in a coherent manner. Writers, given a disparate group of facts and the leisure to make of them what they will, come up with stories. I often find myself musing on events and trying out different plot lines. Who knows, I may make a novelist yet.

Take this past week, for instance. Beginning last Saturday night, the noise from the apartment above me began to take on added life (this is a continuing saga, as those who follow my blog are aware). From repeated horrendous crashes (what passes for normal around here) to mysterious tapping sounds to remarkably persistent creaking floorboards to muffled, inexplicable noises directly overhead while one is trying to sleep (as if someone is doing a full-body buffing job on the floor) to other things I won't mention, it's akin to living under the sound effects department of a Hollywood B movie studio.

Then there are my adventures with the probate court system, where I went to correct a mistake in my middle initial (which is not "J"), simply because I don't like typos and the confusion that can arise from muddles. This mistake was in the file of my mother's estate case; while the case isn't active, the errant "J" (from a misreading of a signature) has always troubled me, and even more so lately, as I've seen from my own experience just how many Mary Hackworths are out there beating the bushes of the world. It's not as distinctive a name as I used to think it was.

In adding a note to the probate record, I discovered another anomaly: the case number originally assigned by the court is not the one that ended up on my mother's case file. The original number, for reasons no one was able to explain to me, ended up on the file of another person (who may or may not even be dead, since one document listed the date of death as June 31, 2007).

Then, too, there are the current events one reads about, spinning away in the background of all our lives . . . politics, money, corruption, etc. If you pay attention to the news long enough, you begin to see patterns, and in that case, you may be tempted to either run out and become an investigative reporter yourself (though who has time for a journalism degree) or let your imagination run wild in the creation of a fictional narrative that ties motley pieces of facts into a rational story line.

How about this one: a person dies without a will. Unknown to the descendants, he was worth a fortune. However, someone else knows about the money and sees an opportunity to make off with it when a simple typo creates an opportunity for confusion about identities. A series of lugs are hired to move into the apartment building of the unfortunate heir, causing enough noise and unpleasantness that (it is hoped) the tenant will move, creating the possibility of a cold trail and misdirected mail. (If that doesn't work, the lugs are instructed to create an "accidental" fire or some other disaster that cannot easily be traced, thereby eliminating the party.)

The plot thickens when it becomes apparent that the fortune -- not just any garden-variety fortune, but a rather large one -- has actually been targeted by not just a greedy opportunist, but one with shadowy connections to the financial world, highly placed politicians, the deep state, and terror organizations. The money is wanted to grease the wheels of war, misery, and disaster in order to create even larger fortunes for those who stand to gain from all of the above.

This jolly group of plotters, making use of everything from unscrupulous acquaintances, hired guns, secret operatives, mind games, foul plots, harassment, spying, and all sorts of mayhem, tries to silence or eliminate the descendant, his friends, and any possible allies. Various people stumble onto parts of the plot and attempt to join forces to stop a heist that could be the prelude to World War III. Some act out of love, others for altruism, and others for love of country--and some for all three.

Thrillers and espionage have never really been my thing, so I'm not sure how this would hold up to scrutiny by John Le Carré or Robert Ludlum, but I'm fairly proud of it as a novice's contribution to the genre. I've been equally influenced by actual events, things I've read and heard, things I've experienced, and the same daily news to which all of us are privy. If I ever write this novel, I will, of course, include the statement that all similarities to actual persons and events are purely coincidental and not meant to be construed otherwise.

When the royalties start coming in, maybe I can move out of this noise-infested apartment and into something more to my liking. I'd start with peace and quiet, but a fireplace, a front porch, and a rain-bath showerhead would be nice. Oh, and I want a garden, too.

Kale and Zen

It's a football Saturday in Lexington, and that means coming up with a plan. Not only do you have to figure out how to outwit gridlock on the streets, you have to decide how sociable you want to be if you're on foot. Cars and people stream in from everywhere to converge on Commonwealth Stadium; if you don't meet humanity on the road, you meet them on the sidewalk . . . lots of them. Late this afternoon, I was still trying to decide how to find some fresh air without getting caught up in crowds and finally let my stomach make the call. If I went ahead and fixed dinner, I could go for a walk afterwards and get back before dark.

I spent an hour or so chopping and rinsing and putting things into the Dutch oven while sounds of cars and people increased to a mild roar outside. After eating two bowls of Italian soup with tomatoes and kale, I decided a walk in the Arboretum would likely involve fewer crowds on a football evening than it would otherwise, so I put on my shoes and started out.

I walked outside into the quintessential fall evening in Lexington, with football fans everywhere on my block, a bustle on the streets, golden sunshine, and a pleasant coolness in the air. Though I sometimes don't enjoy crowds, the feeling of festivity was very congenial after a quiet day spent mostly inside. There were cars inching along, white tents with knots of people under them, smells of barbecue, radios broadcasting sports chatter, and faces bright with anticipation of the game. The atmosphere was merry but not rowdy.

I passed fans heading toward the bleachers, security officers directing traffic, and RVs jamming the parking lots opposite the stadium. Once I got into the Arboretum itself, a mellow air of quiet reigned. Most of the people I saw were passing through the park on their way to the main event. It was lovely to be able to set my own pace and not have to contend with a crowded path. I noticed lots of squirrels rustling in the leaves for acorns, seemingly at leisure in the absence of the large numbers of fast-moving exercisers more typical of a mild evening.

The sun was going down in tangerine splendor, I could hear myself think, and the air felt newly washed after yesterday's rain. Near the footbridge, I passed a black cat under the trees, intent on some business of his own, though he paused to take a look at me. After the path bent toward the north, I had a view of the campus water tower up ahead, bathed in apricot light from the sun, and further off, the stadium, its powerful overhead lights contrasting sharply with a dark mass of clouds building up behind it. It looked suitably dramatic as a place of contest, and I could hear the noises of the crowd. When I got to the part of the path that parallels the road, I saw that traffic was still heavy around the stadium, and I was glad to be on my own feet.

I don't know what it was--a burst of energy from the crisp air, the feeling of revelry nearby, the waxing moon overhead, the placid beauty of the park (or maybe it was the kale--it has a lot of healthy properties, I hear)--but as I entered the final Arboretum loop, I experienced a rare thing: without meaning to, I stumbled into the Zen of walking. There seemed to be no resistance to my forward movement; my legs felt strong and my feet invincible. Even the feeling of my feet coming into steady contact with the path was a pleasure. My stride became so effortless that I almost felt the need to put the brakes on to keep from floating off. (I know what you're thinking: If it's the kale that does that, I'm getting some.)

The feeling held, then passed, and then I was making my way across the grass toward the sidewalk skirting the parking lot, encountering stadium-bound stragglers and the same slow line of cars trying to go who knows where and not getting there very fast. The game was underway, things had calmed down on my street, and I could see the lights of home ahead. I was moving at a more mundane pace now, having crossed the invisible line back into ordinary, purposeful walking, and was thinking of dishes and other things I needed to do.

I'll tell you what, though. After I got home and put the dishes in the sink, I sat down with some good, old-fashioned Hershey's dark (with almonds and toffee for extra zest) and tried to eat it slowly. Maybe, somewhere in my mind, I was hoping to build on the essential vitamins and minerals I'd already derived from the kale, but mainly, I just wanted dessert. It was one of the things I was thinking of as I walked down my street.

The New Romance (But I Liked the Old One)

By happenstance, a couple of movies have come my way recently that ended up surprising me. One of them was the 2007 version of A Room With a View (from E.M. Forster's novel), and the other was last year's Before Midnight, the third in a series of romances starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy. Both movies play with and in some ways topple expectations set either by prior versions of the same story (A Room With a View) or previous films in the series (Before Midnight).

A Room With a View is set in the Edwardian age and concerns a respectable but inwardly adventurous young woman named Lucy on holiday with her chaperone in Italy. While there, she meets and is attracted to a young man who is not only of a different social standing but whose father is a socialist. Lucy gets engaged to another man, Cecil, who is outwardly suitable but emotionally incompatible with her. The first young man, George, shows up in Lucy's village back home, and she is faced with the problem of deciding whether to honor her attraction to a young man who loves her or take the conventional route of marrying the respectable but insufferable Cecil.

The theme of the story is authenticity, or the lack thereof, as it relates to passion and love. In Lucy's world, passion is a disreputable thing, especially if paired with unconventionality. Many of the people around her feel that appearances are more important than truth, and Lucy partly believes this herself; the main reason for her engagement seems to be a wish to protect herself from a strong vein of emotion that she recognizes, fears, and is encouraged to discount. Her decision to break her engagement and trust her feelings for George is a tremendous act of rebellion.

The 2007 TV movie goes further than the lovely 1986 Merchant-Ivory film by including a coda dimly inspired, apparently, by Forster himself but not included in the version of the novel I read. Instead of ending with the newlyweds in Florence, the TV movie concludes with Lucy alone in Italy, George having died in World War I. The revelation of George's death comes as a shock, and the reason for the film's introduction, in which actress Gillian Anderson rather chillingly invites viewers to decide for themselves whether letting Italy "change your life" is a good thing or a bad thing, is finally clear if no less strange. Are we supposed to think Lucy would have been better off if she'd never met George?

I take it that the more modern version of the story is attempting to tamp down the romance with a dose of reality: this is what happens once they live "happily ever after." It's true that George, in real life, would have been likely to meet such a fate, and in a way I admired the gumption of this production. On further reflection, though, it began to seem as if tacking a second story with a different emotional vibe onto the first one had more to do with shock value than realism. The beginning and end of the story don't seem to match; however, I can see that someone coming to this film knowing nothing of its antecedents might not see a disconnect. It might become, for that person, a different story, a darker one about the uncertainty of life, not an ode to being true to yourself. In the 21st century, we're supposed to be over those old hang-ups, so perhaps this film wanted to be about something else.

Before Midnight induces a similar cognitive dissonance in its look at two lovers who met on a train in their youth, reunited nine years later, and nine years further on are the parents of twins, weighted down with worries over kids and careers but apparently still happy. The first two films in the series were wistful, cheery, and romantic. There are a few signs in the third movie of darker undercurrents in the relationship, but overall the film maintains a gentle, humorous approach to its protagonists until a final, protracted fight scene in which resentments boil over into ugly words, venom, and incompatible viewpoints.

Holy mackerel! Personally, I've never had a fight like this one, but I'm sure many long-time couples would say it's realistic. Evidently, a decision was made with this film to brings things out of soft focus and into the nitty gritty, but the difference in tone between this and the first two films is a bit shocking. I'm surprised the script didn't find a way to explore the tensions inevitable in a long-term relationship with a bit more humor in keeping with the élan of the earlier films. Even fighting can be funny, but here the two people actually become unlikeable, and one is left not really caring if they stay together or not. It's not the movie you think you're going to see.

So, is romance dead in the edgy new light of the 21st century? Are we supposed to believe now not that it's everlasting but that it never lasts? Of course, it depends on the people and the circumstances, but I would take a less harsh view than either of these two films. Is it "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"? I think most people would still say "yes." I don't know that I'd ever say "happily ever after," but I would say "it's up to you." Isn't romance simply an opening?

Seventh Heaven

The other night I watched, or rather re-watched, Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders' rumination on angels and humans. I first saw this movie, if I remember correctly, in 1992, and though I've thought about it many times since then, I hadn't seen it again until Wednesday night.

In the film, angels exist unseen (except by the very young and perhaps a few others), brooding, watching over, and sometimes helping people without their awareness. The setting is 1980s Berlin, which looks rather austere and lonely from an angel's-eye view (and from a human view as well). Parents, children, subway passengers, library patrons, circus performers, clubgoers, passersby on the street . . . all seem caught up in isolated worlds, although the angels can hear their thoughts and sometimes intervene in their lives in small, delicate ways.

How much less lonely would all those Berliners be if they knew where that encouraging thought, in the moment of deepest despair, really came from, or with how much sympathy their private sorrows were known, or the degree of anguish with which angels view human suffering. And how surprised would they be if they knew with what longing angels sometimes view their troubled, painful, complicated, but glorious mortal lives full of color, sensation, tastes, smells, and three-dimensional embodiment. Yes, as it turns out, eternal life can be tiresome; omniscience and invisibility are not all you might expect. Sometimes all you really want is a hot cup of coffee, the feel of the sidewalk under your feet, and a good hamburger.

One of the angels, Damiel, falls in love with a trapeze artist, Marion, whose costume includes an awkward pair of wings that make it difficult for her to perform. In one scene, Damiel paces below, invisibly and nervously, as Marion does her act, dazzling and graceful but all too fragile with her imaginary wings. After observing her loneliness for some time, Damiel tells another angel, Cassiel, that he's decided to give up eternal life and become human. It turns out this is an option for angels that's taken more frequently than people realize.

Damiel gets his wish and wakes up one day on the ground to the rude sensation of his breastplate thunking him on the head. He wanders about with a bleeding scalp, drunk with the rapture of having a living, breathing body. It is now apparent that, without his omniscience and ability to fly and walk through walls, he will have to search for Marion, and it takes an effort to find her. They meet at last in the bar of a club where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are performing, and the connection is instantaneous. At the movie's end, Damiel spots Marion, his true love, as she practices, anchoring the rope watchfully while she dances above him. Who's the angel now? It's obvious that in Damiel's eyes, it's Marion, a struggling trapeze performer with a traveling circus that can't pay its bills.

Imagine, angels giving up eternity to slum for a few years on this old earth--and being grateful for the privilege! Not on the Riviera either, or in Beverly Hills, Miami Beach, or The Hamptons. In Berlin, a city of broken buildings and urban desolation still suffering from the wounds of its past. You'd think there must be something truly wonderful in the world to make an angel, who's above all the earthly cares that weigh the human race down, fall to ground and throw in his lot with the rest of us. But what could it be? Are we missing something?

Colors and Memories

We're making the transition around here into fall, and it was really evident today. Yesterday when I walked to the library, a heavy rainfall had made the field behind the sports center as fresh and green as May; the major tell-tale signs of September were a few scattered brown leaves on the sidewalk. But somehow, overnight, the oak tree on my street has let loose a load of acorns, the air is cool and damp, and the sky has turned gray.

When the harvest moon rose a few days ago, it almost seemed too soon for it. We've been having summery weather, including thunderstorms, and the trees and lawns still had the look of July, if not June. The night before it was full, the moon had an evanescent spring appearance, rising pale and ghostly above the rooftops in a sky still full of daylight. Cicadas were shrilling, and the air was muggy. Now, just a few days later, the grocery store has a huge pumpkin display, leaves are falling in greater numbers, and the summer heat is nowhere to be found.

Well, fair enough. The summer days seemed to just melt away, so that it's hard to believe the entire season has come and gone, but fall is often brilliant around here, and change, as they say, is life. Sometimes a dry summer causes drab fall colors, but with all the rain we've had this summer, we may really have something to look forward to as the leaves begin to turn.

I still clearly remember our first fall in Kentucky, after we moved back here from Florida, many years ago. Days of an unbelievably gray, wet dreariness, in stark contrast to the hot, bright light of Florida, alternated with glowing days in which dazzling orange and yellow leaves stood out so sharply against the cloudless blue that it almost hurt your eyes. That's autumn in Kentucky, which can veer from crisp and energetic to funereal and back again many times over.

When I was out walking earlier, acorns crunching underfoot, I had a sudden memory of myself as a first-grader in Florida, coloring in leaves and acorns with those big, fat Crayolas they make for young children, helping to decorate the classroom for fall. I can still see those autumnal browns and oranges, which were largely conceptual for me, since colors didn't change much with the seasons where we lived, practically in the Everglades. We imagined fall (and winter). How nice it would be to be able to see this fall's colors with imaginative beginner's eyes all over again.

Sounding Brass School of Oratory

A news item on CNN caught my eye the other day: in it, President Obama said he blamed the media for stirring up fears and making things seem worse than they are in our country. Here's a link to the story:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/01/politics/president-obama-media/

After I posted the link to the article, along with my reaction to it, on my Facebook page, I noticed it was not showing up in my news feed. I had to post it a second time before it appeared, and that little difficulty got me to thinking about the importance I attach to freedom of speech.

I'll repeat what I said on Facebook: yes, one must be judicious in evaluating news sources. You definitely can't believe everything you hear, and no librarian would ever say otherwise. However, it's the media's job to report the facts, even when they're unpleasant, not to be a public relations outlet for the status quo. I appreciate the complexities we're all facing but would respect the president more for acknowledging the country's mood instead of blaming the messenger. That's a diversionary tactic that, to my mind, insults the public's intelligence. My sense is that people are responding appropriately to sobering realities while trying to figure out the best way forward.

It's true: we're facing a difficult set of circumstances. But blaming the messenger is a species of logical fallacy, which I'm sure the president knows as well as I do.

I agree with him that America is a great nation, insofar as its founding principles and its people go, imperfections notwithstanding. The difficulty I see, as I discussed in a previous post about our current guiding myth (see "Shall We Gather at the River?"), is that power has shifted away from the people and into the hands of monied interests. This has happened gradually, and many factors have contributed, but the end result is that the story most Americans believe in--the one about freedom and opportunity--is not the story we're being governed by. There are now conflicting stories, and one of them is called "It's About the Money."

It's sad to say it, but there have been times in recent memory when "patriotism" seemed synonymous with "jingoism." If you considered yourself a patriot but didn't go along with the "Might Makes Right" style of things, you felt uncomfortable. If you called yourself a patriot, would people assume you supported every clause of the Patriot Act, even the ones that infringed on your rights? If you displayed a flag, would people assume you were a hawk? If you believed that the duty of a patriot is to question things, would people call you un-American? These were real questions.

For better or for worse, it now seems fashionable for Democrats as well as Republicans to openly drape themselves in the flag. The trouble I have with it, as regards politicians, is that it often comes across as self-serving, as if they're trying their darnedest to bask in Lady Liberty's reflected glow while having circumvented--in numerous, cynical ways--all that she stands for. Gilded phrases about America have a hollow sound falling from the lips of people who wouldn't know "making ends meet" from a golf outing but know exactly where Wall Street is.

There's a verse from Corinthians that comes to mind: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal." As we know, it's always a good idea to judge more by what people do than by what they say, but since they will talk, I've made it a practice to watch their body language and to notice how I feel when they speak. This can be quite revealing sometimes.

Nemesis

This week I've been on a Miss Marple jag. I've been watching videos from a TV series starring Joan Hickson, who seems about as perfect as anyone could be as Miss Marple. The character is a cross between a fairy godmother, a cool-headed logician, a busybody, and an avenging angel. In the first episode I saw, in which the elderly crime-solver was vacationing in the Caribbean, she spent a lot of time just sitting quietly and watching the other guests. It was hard to tell from her subdued demeanor how astute she'd be once she sprang into action, but when she did, she was a true force of nature.

With her knitting, old-fashioned clothes, and keenly observant eye, Miss Marple walks a line somewhere between maternal and formidable. She's easily underestimated by strangers because she seems like a harmless old woman, but her tongue can be as sharp as her eye. While entertaining a local police detective, who resents her tendency to solve cases under his nose (and doesn't mind saying so, loudly), she is both assiduously proper and slyly satirical, telling him that the wine she's serving is a bit bold but no doubt suits his character.

In one of my favorite episodes, a young, newly married woman has settled into a new house with her handsome and loving husband only to be plagued by a sense of déjà vu and foreboding. Fearing that she is going mad, she confides in Miss Marple, who calmly points out the possibility, overlooked by everyone else, that the simplest explanation is that she has in fact lived in the house before--which turns out to be the case. 

Later in the same episode, Miss Marple dispatches a would-be attacker by blasting him in the face with hot water--hardly the reception he expected--and turns to comfort the young wife without missing a beat. She is both Demeter and Nemesis. The latter appellation, "Nemesis," is actually the title of another episode, in which a deceased acquaintance charges Miss Marple--from the grave--with solving a murder case involving his n'er-do-well son. Of course, she does it, while at the same time looking after her own newly separated nephew and figuring who's who and what's what on a motor coach tour of the English countryside.

Despite her quaint ways and kindliness, Miss Marple is a consummate philosopher, serving up some surprisingly pointed observations for such a conventional, god-fearing aunt and godmother. When a character is shocked at the full revelation of a character's wickedness, Miss Marple responds, "That's because you believed what he told you. It's very dangerous to believe people. I haven't in years." While staying in a posh hotel that hasn't changed since she was a child (and is actually a cover for a diabolically clever operation involving doppelgangers and stolen cash), Miss Marple observes that what had at first seemed comforting now seems simply wrong, because even when some changes aren't to our liking, "life is about always moving forward."

Of course, Miss Marple has her faults, like anyone else. While hardly a snob, she doesn't seem overly fond of Americans and is not above a put-down where they're concerned. When a friend tells her over tea of an American repast in which a tea cake with raisins was passed off as a muffin but wasn't one a'tall (in the British sense), Miss Marple tsk-tsks and replies, "The Americans have a lot to answer for." Ouch! Touché, Aunt Jane! But that's a bit like the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it? No doubt you're right, but after all, the murders have all been committed by seemingly proper members of English society. (If pressed, I'm sure Miss Marple would agree to the justice of that observation, while perhaps pointing out that had she been in America, she would no doubt find murderers there, too.)

Of course, I'd love to have my own Aunt Jane, despite her faults. How comforting to have her wisdom and steadiness and inability to let go until the case is solved. Despite the blood-chilling frequency with which she encounters evil deeds, things always seem to come right in the end, and people are always getting ready just before the credits roll to be married, have a baby, plant a garden, or in some other fashion live happily ever after. Except for her tendency to attract crime, she'd be jolly to have around. Who couldn't use a fairy godmother?

After the Storm

Yesterday we had a thunderstorm that, despite its brevity, managed to wreak a maximum amount of havoc in a minimum amount of time. It seemed to happen in the space of only 15 minutes. I was in the coffeehouse when it hit and would nearly have missed it if I hadn't glanced up from my book and seen how extremely Stygian the view had gotten through the front window. It wasn't even 5:30, but it looked like night was falling. It had all happened in a hurry.

Since I was planning to go to a movie, I left the coffeehouse to go home for dinner. The rain had passed over, but I heard thunder off to the east. I moseyed through quiet residential streets, not realizing the storm had done any damage until I got to a stoplight, half a mile from home, which was not working. When I turned left, I found myself stuck in a line of molasses-slow stop-and-go traffic. When I got clear of that, the next stoplight I came to was also on the blink.

When I walked into my building, there were no lights in the hallway, and an alarm was sounding insistently. In my apartment, there was no electricity at all, though I did have phone service. I called to let someone know about the alarm, discovering from our apartment manager that he had no power either. I went back out into the hall, crazily lit by a white emergency light on the exit sign but otherwise dusky, to locate the source of the alarm, which turned out to be a wall panel next to the stairs. The building seemed unfamiliar, transformed into a slantwise, alternative version of itself by the shrilling alarm and altered lighting.

I thought to myself that it was a good thing I was planning to eat leftovers anyway; my pasta salad was still chilled inside the non-functioning refrigerator. In the back of my mind while I ate was a lingering memory of the great power outage of February 2003, which lasted on my street for almost a week and for much longer in other places. I knew this outage would likely be resolved within a few hours but thought it best not to count on the lights being on when I came back home. I was doubly glad I had plans because watching a Jimmy Stewart movie in the familiar environs of the Kentucky Theatre seemed much more appealing than trying to read a book by battery-operated candles with an alarm shrieking in the background.

I took my pink piggy LED flashlight, my umbrella, and my foldable rain cape with me when I left, feeling somewhat like a Girl Scout assailing the wilderness. There were no functioning traffic lights as far as I could tell. Things were moving surprisingly well, if slowly, though I don't think I'd have wanted to be a pedestrian trying to cross the street. I encountered an officer directing traffic at the biggest intersection, but otherwise, it was inch forward, keep your eye on the cars approaching from various directions, inch forward some more, and wait for your chance to go. The slightly chaotic air gave the scene an upside-down quality that might have been more carnival-like if it hadn't also been nerve-wracking.

It wasn't until I reached High Street downtown that I finally found a working stoplight, and then it was as if I had crossed the border from a topsy-turvy country teetering toward lawlessness back into the familiar world of everyday, just by passing through an intersection. The trip had seemed longer than it was, and I was sure I was late, but by the time I found a parking spot, I realized I was right on schedule. It was as if time had slowed down in the place with the power outage, but the clock came right again as soon as I passed out of it.

The crowd was a bit smaller than usual for a summer classics movie, so the rain had no doubt kept some people home, but everything else was as usual in the theatre as we waited for the movie to start. The organ played, the crowd sang "My Old Kentucky Home," the smell of popcorn hung in the air, the movie was introduced, and the lights went down. Up on the screen, Jimmy Stewart's smiling face appeared, and we settled in for an evening of Harvey, which in itself is a comic meditation on the intersection of different worlds--one everyday, and one uncanny. It was rather appropriate, under the circumstances.

My trip home from the movie was uneventful. By the time I got back, the stoplights were working, the power was on, the alarm had been silenced, and we were back to business as usual. It was, I guess, a little reminder of how we are all, always, at the mercy of nature, no matter how secure the trappings of civilized life seem. None of us are bigger than the most fleeting of summer storms. I guess it's good to be reminded of that from time to time.

Prospero Drowns His Books

I was watching a Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest, with Christopher Plummer, the other night and was having a little trouble hearing all the dialogue. Rather than turn the sound up, I decided to let it be and follow the events instead of the words. It was rather enjoyable just to be carried along by the story instead of hanging on every syllable. I don't know if that isn't the best approach in any case; academic habits of analysis can sometimes get in the way of simple enjoyment.

It occurred to me that I was trying to watch the play with "beginner's mind," and I started wondering what it would have been like to see it as a child. There are so many fairy tale elements in the plot that I think I would have loved The Tempest, without understanding all the nuances, if I had seen it as a little girl. What else should a play with a magician, an enchanted island full of invisible voices, castaways, airy spirits, talking monsters, a violent storm, true love, comedy, and the righting of wrongs be except charming?

There is a way in which searching for meanings and parsing phrases can actually get in the way of understanding, and to me this play is proof of that. I think Shakespeare wanted above all to enchant, to be Prospero, to exert his powers of creation to make a new world, or possibly just remake the old one. We're meant to fall under the island's spell, to dwell for a while with incantations, sorcery, and inexplicable happenings, to feel ourselves out of our usual element. The initial storm, which deposits the seafarers from the kingdoms of Milan and Naples onto Prospero's island, is a portal to a different world, and it pulls in playgoers, too.

The plot is simple and appeals strongly to the love of a happy ending and sense of justice restored. Prospero, the wronged ruler, stranded for a dozen years on the island with his daughter, has used the time to perfect his knowledge of magic. He seizes the chance to bring his enemies within his reach by calling up a storm that brings their ship to his island. They are punished as much by the strange, uncanny air of the place (which almost brings them to madness) as by the fear of being castaways, although the violent storm and near drownings give way to a less dire, if initially befuddling, fate.

What child hasn't fantasized about the magical ability to control his surroundings and shape things to his liking? Prospero can actually do it, in an unusually potent display of what psychologists might call "agency" that more than makes up for his prior helplessness in the face of wrong. Prospero's ultimate purpose, despite the fear and confusion he creates, is benign: it's the restoration of his own rights and reconciliation with his adversaries. His daughter Miranda falls in love with the son of the King of Naples, setting the seal on the theme of restoration and healing. The King, who had feared his son drowned, finds that he is still alive when Prospero, like a stage magician pulling back a curtain, suddenly reveals the two lovers playing chess together. Everything that had seemed wrong, after a satisfying amount of confusion and trouble, comes right again.

As a child, it wouldn't have bothered me perhaps, but it does occur to me now that a few hours of torment isn't really the equivalent of twelve years of confinement. The events following the shipwreck take place in less than an afternoon, though of course, it's a magical three hours, which could very well seem longer. My better nature tells me we're meant to think that the experience was so bewildering that to have continued it much beyond that would have been cruel . . . Ariel seems to think so, at any rate.

Prospero also makes it plain that he is finished with magic once his ends have been accomplished: "This rough magic, I here abjure." Ariel is freed from Prospero's service, Prospero drowns his books, and there is a sad sense of something numinous passing. Should Prospero really have to give up the knowledge that saved him and become like other men once more? And yet again, maybe it's for the best. It would be unwise and dangerous to continually be calling up the powers of air, light, and storm to correct every little problem that might arise in the future. There are supposed to be laws for that.

It's a wonderful play, wise and affecting, and I wish I had seen it when I was young. It would have been lovely to have seen it just for itself without study or preconceived notions. Somehow Shakespeare has become high-brow and lofty, and one is often taught to believe that a lot of scholarship is required to make sense of it. This play simply overturns those notions.

Mayhem, Murder, and Magicians

Yesterday I finished Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a novel about dueling English magicians in the Napoleonic era. It took me more than two weeks to read it, which tells you something about the length of it (782 pages). It's wonderful when an engrossing story is also a lengthy one so that you can stick with it for a while . . . if your budget doesn't allow for vacations, isn't a good book a great alternative? Wasn't it Emily Dickinson who said, "There is no Frigate like a Book, to take us Lands away"? (Yes, it was--I just looked it up.)

If you saw the movie The Prestige (which was also a book), you have a little of the flavor of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though Clarke's book is comical, and The Prestige, in my memory of the film, is rather grim. Strange & Norrell is recommended by my local library for readers who enjoyed The Night Circus, which is how I came across it. Some reviewers have said it combines high fantasy with the drawing room humor of Jane Austen. Certainly the social contretemps endured by Clarke's characters seem more in keeping with the brightness of Austen's world than with the deadly earnestness of The Prestige, despite all the magic and references to Faerie.

Personally, though, I can't imagine any of Austen's people holding much truck with the spell-strewn, whimsical characters of Clarke's book, though I see what reviewers mean about the society humor. The book is funny as well as fantastical, and the humor is a nice balance to the dark twists the story takes. I don't think the book would be as effective without the sniping social climbers, jealous rivals, mystified government ministers, and long-suffering servants who inhabit its pages and counteract some of the eeriness. There are many good fantasy writers, but the ability to seamlessly combine wildly imaginative plotting, alternate worlds, wit, history, and satire is rare, I think.

I would compare the tone of the book to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, with its sense of menace and otherworldly mayhem, crossed with the quirkiness and dark humor of Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests, with some Neil Gaiman-style chaos, a la American Gods, thrown in. This description is not to detract at all from the author's originality and sheer imaginative brilliance, but it does give you an idea of the territory the novel occupies.

The genius of the story lies in the characterization of the magicians as just another species of "gentlemen scientists," men of standing who happen to have chosen the art of magic for their profession instead of law, the military, or the Church. They approach the most arcane and fantastical of tasks--walking through mirrors, bringing someone back from the dead, moving a city across the ocean to affect the course of a war--with the matter-of-factness of scholars; they study, hoard books, publish, curry favor, seek publicity, become arrogant, and jockey for position. Historical figures, including George III, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Byron, mingle easily with the book's characters, exhibiting none of the artificiality of "cameo" appearances. They are just a few more well-drawn personages in a large, sprawling, and lively cast.

In one of my favorite scenes, Strange, the bolder and more adventurous of the contending magicians, has feuded with Lord Byron, whom he encounters while traveling in Switzerland. The two men share the same publisher, who receives letters from both of them, each complaining about the other, on the same day. The publisher, Mr. Murray, decides that although it's too bad his clients don't jibe, it really isn't surprising, "since both men were famous for quarrelling: Strange with Norrell, and Byron with practically everybody." In a footnote, Clarke has Byron use Strange as the inspiration for the magician in his poem Manfred.

I don't know if Ms. Clarke intends ever to revisit these characters; the story's conclusion seems to leave the possibility open, since the end, though satisfying, doesn't tie all the loose threads up neatly. While this may have been simply a nod to complexity and a refusal to go with a predictable ending, it makes for an easy segue into a sequel if it ever comes to that. I wouldn't count on it, but I wouldn't rule it out either. The trickster spirit of the novel, of taking characters and readers places they didn't expect to go, is evident even in the closing sentences. I turned pages anxiously to see how it would turn out but was obstinately sad when it was all over.

Over the Threshold in Newport, KY

Last week I went to see a concert at Southgate House Revival, an old/new music venue in Newport, Kentucky. Southgate House used to be located in an old mansion of the same name close to the Ohio River but has moved to an old church a few blocks away and changed its name accordingly. The original Southgate House is historic, having hosted a number of prominent people, including Abraham Lincoln; it's also known as the birthplace of the inventor of the Tommy gun. Southgate House Revival's new home is an 1866 Methodist Episcopal church that had been abandoned for some years before being adapted as a music venue.

I had been to the old location a few times and was curious to see the new place. The old mansion was quite an institution, with its prominent hilltop situation, elegant facade--including a tower and a widow's walk--and many steps leading up to a wide porch. My first impression of Southgate House Revival, from the outside, was that it exudes a much humbler ambience. The exterior is somewhat dilapidated and lacks signage to tell you where to go; you enter by an inconspicuous side door off a small, claustrophobic parking lot between the church and an adjacent brick building. The surrounding block is plain and unassuming, almost austere.

When I was growing up, Newport had a reputation for vice, but it has traded its notoriety for more family-oriented entertainments these days. It retains some of the feeling of a ramshackle riverside district, even with all the new restaurants, spiffy bars, and entertainment options in the immediate area. The mix of old and new, wholesome and edgy, combined with spectacular views of the Cincinnati skyline across the river, makes for an interesting, unsettled, and slightly fraught energy. So it's probably fitting that Southgate House Revival seems to represent in itself the coniunctio of the entire neighborhood. It is very much a marriage of opposites.

The show I saw was in the Sanctuary, which has been refitted with a concert stage and a bar. The Sanctuary is beautiful: it has splendid pointed arches, Gothic corbels, vivid stained glass windows, hanging ecclesiastical light fixtures, a ceiling that soars--and numerous shadows. There's a phenomenal pipe organ (Cincinnati-made) behind the bar, which is opposite the stage. I was so struck by the sight of that ethereal organ serving as backdrop to all those bottles of spirits that I had to stare at it for several minutes. Talk about the sacred and the profane (or secular) mingling and mixing and creating a complicated third thing! Talk about an axis mundi. There it is, in concrete, architectural terms.

I was stirred by the extraordinary energy in the room, as I think most anyone would be, consciously or not. The union of worldly and spiritual planes rarely occurs so dramatically. I read an article about the owners of the business that made it clear they're alive to the sacred dimensions of the space and feel it's entirely suited to the business of connecting audiences with music (I agree with them). It would be difficult for any performance not to be shaped by the tenor--part mystical and part streetwise--of this liminal, dreamlike interior. You definitely feel you're on the threshold of something. It's a little like C. S. Lewis's Wood Between the Worlds in Narnia: jump in, and there's no telling where you'll end up.

In Jungian terms, the coniunctio expresses the meeting of the conscious and the unconscious, a process that brings the individual closer not only to his or her innermost self but also to the larger concerns of the world soul. According to Jung, it's a messy process and one that's often resisted. Just a guess: I'm tempted to think that any artistic performance, regardless of style or intention, would affect the listener more profoundly in Southgate House Revival because the room itself amplifies the content and carries it past the conscious mind's defenses. It's rare to be any place where the architecture is so revealing of what goes on within.

Nothing to See Here, Except . . .

Things have been quiet around here for the last week or so. Traffic is light, Starbucks has been mostly empty, and there's a feeling that everybody must be out of town on vacation. It's very pleasant. Even the fireflies seem to be off napping somewhere.

Coinciding with that, we've had sort of a summer version of a polar vortex, with a storm front moving in and cooling things down, trailing ragged thunderclouds and pinkish-gold sunsets in its wake. It's amazing how charming a cold spell can be when it happens in the middle of July, dropping temperatures to the 70s, lowering humidity, and still allowing the sun to shine.

A little over a week ago, it was so humid that even at 8:30 at night, walking was like wading slowly through curtains of moisture. I much prefer that to walking through sleet and snow, but it does sap your energy if it goes on long enough. After a week of storm clouds wildly chasing sunshine, and vice versa, we're back to heat and humidity, though I understand we're in for another cooling spell in a day or so.

Among the charms of a summer evening's walk this week, I have spotted: toadstools, like something from a nursery rhyme, right on my street; a cardinal on a treetop silhouetted against the sky; two rabbits sitting together in a field; scampering chipmunks; porches edged with riotous flowers; and a complex sunset of mauve, pink, and orange. Tonight, big, fat cumulus clouds, tinged with apricot from the setting sun, seemed too lazy even to move, as if an artist had painted them on the backdrop of the sky and then went off on tea break, leaving them hanging.

If you looked at the image of July in one of those medieval books of hours, like the Très Riches Heures du Duc Berry, you would see what July looks like around here, minus the sheep and the castle. In fact, there is a street named Kastle near here, and there's a house not far away where (I'm not kidding) a sheep used to graze in the yard, so with a little imagination you can see some overlap. It's a pity the sheep is gone. I never saw it in the summer, but it would have made a lovely Très Rich Hours scene, Kentucky style, to go with all the cardinals, rabbits, hostas, and begonias of our suburban summer.

Shall We Gather at the River?

In my first year of graduate school, I tried to figure out the myths we currently live by in America, in the absence of a single religious tradition and the presence of multiculturalism. It was hard to identify one thing that most people hold as sacred until someone mentioned money. I guess I was reaching for something loftier, thinking that surely there was something grander we all subscribe to. I was slow to come to the realization, but you know, money explains a lot of things.

This unpleasant truth has slowly become clearer to me as I've watched the news over the last few years. It's not that there's anything wrong with making money, but when it becomes the highest value, with no other principles to check it, things get out of whack pretty quickly. Jung talked about the importance of balance in psychic health, of not having too much of one attitude or value to the detriment of others, and this is true at the collective level as well as the individual.

Some depth psychologists, like Thomas Singer, talk about the idea of "cultural complexes," recurring themes in the nation's psyche that play out in social life, politics, cultural trends, entertainment, and the media. Over time, it's possible to work through some of these complexes, as we grow conscious of them, through debate, compromise, lawmaking, and social change. It's a long process, and one that only works when all of the viewpoints on an issue, whether it's gun control, abortion, or affirmative action, are heard, considered, debated, and tested. Singer has said that it's usually a mistake to locate soul and "rightness" on only one side of an issue. Only deep engagement, passionate disagreement, consideration, argument, reconsideration, and compromise, over and over, for as long as it takes, can ever resolve things.

Interestingly, the cultural complex surrounding materialism in our society is the area in which Singer sees little engagement, meaning that we remain stuck in any issues touched by money--which, after all, covers a lot of territory. From tax reform to corporate regulation, from consumer protection to the role of money in political campaigns, from economic growth to health care, we run into stalemates time and again because the high value placed on the making of money clashes with so many of our other values.

Everybody knows the story of King Midas, who was gracious when one of Dionysus's satyrs fell asleep in his vineyard and was in turn granted anything he desired by Dionysus. When Midas asked for the power to turn anything he touched into gold, even Dionysus (not exactly a model of moderation) asked if he was sure that's what he wanted. Midas got his wish, which seemed like a great thing for the first half hour or so, until he killed his own child by the touch of his hand and found that even his food and drink turned into metal. It turned out there was a cure, which involved bathing in the river Pactolus, though Midas couldn't undo the damage he'd already done. It's assumed he emerged from the river considerably chastened.

Talk abut a tale for our time!

I read an article yesterday discussing the recent Pew Research Center finding that the number of Americans who think the United States is "exceptional" is dropping. This is true regardless of political party, and the trend is especially evident among those aged 18-29; only 15 percent of them think the United States stands above other nations. There is more than one way to look at these statistics, of course (exceptional in what way, exactly?), but Aaron Blake and Jaime Fuller of the Washington Post suggest that this finding is related to another trend, revealed by a recent Gallup poll. In 2013, Gallup found that Americans' satisfaction with the level of freedom in their lives has fallen 12 percentage points since 2006 (we're now in 36th place). Gallup explains the drop in terms of unhappiness with the economy, the government, and corruption. In other words, the New Normal.

Most of the people I know do live by other values besides money, and I believe we've always taken it for granted that our country stands for much more than power and greed. The question is, are we still justified in feeling that way? And if money is the root of so many of our current problems, what can we do about it?

I think a reasonable first step might be to get clear on the things that matter to us most. If we want to curb the influence of money and support other values in our culture, we can do it, but we have to have the will. Do we have that will? It's a big question. What else do we hold dear, and what else do we think makes life worth living? What do we want our country to stand for? Maybe the right place to start the conversation is with questions like these.

Wine for the Palate, Yarrow for the Heart

There's something in Vanessa Diffenbaugh's novel The Language of Flowers that makes me think of the movie Sideways. It may not seem that a teen-age orphan making her way in the world after years of foster care and a frustrated middle-aged oenophile should have much in common, but they do. There's the central role of grapes and vineyards in both stories, of course, but there's also a similarity of mythic themes.

At first glance, Sideways seems to be about one thing primarily, and that is romance. The film is replete with sensual images: wining and dining, epicurean picnics at sunset, flirting, and long drives through gorgeous fields of ripening grapes. Aphrodite's presence is so strong and beautifully rendered that it initially diverts attention from another, more patient figure in the story.

In keeping with Miles' tendency to devote himself to sybaritic pursuits while shying away from love, the movie seduces with soft-focus images of romantic dinners and voluptuous wines. Meanwhile, another goddess bides her time, making herself known only through subtle gestures. That's Demeter, notable mostly for her absence at first but coming into clear focus in the scene in which Maya asks Miles about his obsession with Pinot and in turn shares her feelings about the life cycle of the grape. No mere aficionado, Maya is the real deal. She not only loves to see things grow but is perceptive enough to understand that the key to Miles is bound up in his appreciation for a temperamental grape that needs a lot of nurturing to thrive. The subtle language of wine, shared by Miles and Maya, leads from sensual appreciation to something more deeply sustaining.

In The Language of Flowers, Victoria seems to have little going for her on her emancipation at age 18 from the group home in which she's been living. She shares Miles' penchant for acting out and has her own troubled and unhappy past. She, too, has a secret, sophisticated, and sensitive knowledge of a little-known subject, in her case the symbolism of flowers. Desperate to avoid living on the streets, she asks a florist for a job, revealing her innate gift for combining flowers not merely in beautiful arrangements but in a manner that speaks true. Unknown even to herself, Victoria is a healer, skilled at hearing what a giver wants to say to a recipient and knowing how to say it.

Like Miles, Victoria has betrayed and been betrayed and is afraid of intimacy. As her growing success as a flower arranger begins to open a new life for her, she, too, confronts the possibility of love. The not-easily-deflected interest of Grant, a farmer and purveyor she encounters in the flower market, simultaneously leads to a halting romance and a re-engagement with the traumatic past. Grant also speaks the rare language of flowers, which both intrigues and frightens Victoria but ultimately proves too difficult to ignore.

Nurturing takes many forms in this story. As in Sideways, Demeter is first absent, ineffectual, or deflected and then unmistakably central. Victoria begins to encounter one maternal figure after another, from her employer, to her roommate, to her employer's mother, a midwife and wise woman. Even Grant is a nurturing figure. Finally, and surprisingly, Victoria discovers that the imperfect mothering she received in the past, which had seemed so insufficient, was in fact perhaps enough. Grant leads her to a rapprochement with the woman who nearly adopted her years ago and whose teachings about the language of flowers proved to be a true mother's gift.

Flowers generally fall into the realm of Aphrodite, with their beauty and sensual appeal, but in this story they represent nurturing, care, true insight, and love. As in Sideways, a symbol with one meaning proves to have unsuspected dimensions, leading the way delicately from mistrust to trust and from insufficiency to abundance. Miles and Victoria play multiple roles, though the most prominent one for each is perhaps Persephone, at first sojourning in the Underworld and finally returning to life. Miles, Victoria, and the characters who surround them are examples of the way mythic themes surface in remarkably different contexts, all but unrecognizable sometimes but ever persistent.

Unlike some love stories, which seem too lightweight and inconsequential to be believed, both Sideways and The Language of Flowers have a gritty layer of reality. My guess is that this is because neither story stops with physical attraction but also acknowledges the importance of nurturing and understanding. Both stories are ultimately grounded in the earth.

Agree to Disagree

Is it good to "be consistent"? As far as ideology goes, maybe not. Being able to see things from another point of view may come in handy sometimes.

I'm thinking about this not only because of some research I came across but, more importantly, because of what I read in the news every day. A recent Pew Research Center study confirmed something that doesn't come as a shock to most of us: political polarization is a reality in the United States.

Many sociologists and political scientists have examined divisions among Americans in recent years--whether under the name of polarization, fragmentation, or culture war--and they have come to varying conclusions. Some of these researchers have found evidence for fragmentation along political, economic, or religious lines; others have concluded that the perception of a deeply divided country is greater than the reality. The findings often seem to depend on the way polarization is defined and measured.

The Pew study examined political affiliations and opinions on an array of questions. Essentially, the study found that significant numbers of Americans are now consistently liberal or consistently conservative in their views, that these consistent viewpoints align closely with Democratic or Republican party affiliation, and that members of both parties are increasingly likely to view the opposite party with deep disapproval. In fact, according to the study, 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans view the other party's policies as "so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being." Ideological division has grown significantly over the last twenty years. (See "Political Polarization in the American Public," Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.)

In addition, Congress is more divided than it has been "since the end of Reconstruction," according to data compiled by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Analyzing roll call votes of senators and representatives, the researchers found that the ideological overlap formerly commonplace between Republicans and Democrats (as recently as the early 1970s) has evaporated. (See Drew DeSilver's article, "The Polarized Congress of Today Has Its Roots in the 1970s" on the Pew Research Center's website.)

While it's true that the public is more divided than it used to be, the majority of Americans, according to the Pew study, have mixed ideological views, still believe in compromise, and would like to see their politicians meet each other halfway to get things done. This is sometimes not apparent because the majority group tends to be less mobilized and vocal than those who are more polarized.

Jung's comment on ideologies, which he viewed as a "blight," comes to mind here. Could it be that the belief that we're in the right because of the reasonableness of our views and that others are all wrong because they refuse to agree is the biggest mistake we're making?

I used to wish myself away to a more liberal geographic location, where I might find more people who thought the way I did, but I think of it differently these days. I now believe that being surrounded by a variety of political views, including some that are very different from mine, has been a blessing in disguise. It's just harder to vilify people with opposing viewpoints when they're valued coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. When you like someone and understand their aspirations, joys, sorrows, and beliefs because their lives intersect with yours, it's easier to see where they're coming from. It seems likely in such a case that you'll discover the things you do agree on more easily.

Some people believe that harmony results from bringing people with a lot in common together, and that may be true. It's also possible that lack of friction is not always the highest goal. After doing some research on the Myers-Briggs test, I once concluded that having people with various personality types in a workplace is preferable to having a lot of people of a single type because including various perspectives makes the group smarter and more creative. It can be uncomfortable to live with differences, but in the long run, it may result in unexpected insights and new approaches to problems. That's if there's no unspoken belief that one way is inherently better.

Passionate partisanship is nothing new and certainly has precedent in the early years of our country. The Federalists and Anti-Federalists come to mind; the debate over the importance of a strong central government, states' rights, and civil liberties had strong, intelligent advocates on both sides. In the end, both sides got some of what they wanted, and most of us would agree that the addition of the Bill of Rights championed by the Anti-Federalists was a vitally important amendment to the Constitution. Our system of government was greatly improved by a disagreement that was eventually resolved by compromise.

Why aren't we doing the same thing now?

A Herm on the Road

Yesterday morning I drove to my hometown to accompany a family member to an appointment. The distance is not great in miles, but it has always seemed to me that mere miles don't reflect the real distance between here and there. While it's just down the road, my hometown has always felt a lifetime away. When matters called me there more frequently 15 or 20 years ago, I usually gave a big sigh of relief on the return journey once I hit the outskirts of Lexington, scene of my adult life. Now I wonder if even the psychological distance between here and there is as great as it always seemed.

I don't have the same kind of nostalgia for my hometown that a lot of people probably have for theirs. Some of the good memories I have are for places--like my grandmother's house--that are long gone. I used to have dreams in which I would somehow end up moving back into one of our childhood houses, and I usually felt trapped. I shouldn't be here, I'd be thinking. I'm an adult. I have my own life. More recently, when I dream of being there, I'm often on Main Street, passing the familiar shopfronts as if searching for something, feeling not exactly trapped but perhaps a bit frustrated.

One way I can tell I still have some of my old town with me is through my inner concept of "home." A lot of my ideas for what a neighborhood should feel like are based on my hometown experience of being able to walk just about everywhere, of spending time on tranquil front porches and in pleasant back yards, of being able to get an ice cream cone down the street and a library book a few blocks over. When I think of buying a house, I imagine a scenario that includes these possibilities. So, paradoxically, as much as I wanted to get away, some of my hometown experiences have had a positive, lasting impact.

Yesterday, on the way back here, I started thinking of the many memories I have just of the road I was on. I passed the little church where we once had an end of the year school picnic and water balloon fight, circa seventh grade. A little farther out is the electric co-op building where I attended a high school seminar that resulted in trips and a college scholarship. There's the drive-in where I saw movies with my family and napped in the back seat. Closer to the county line is the house that used to have a Chinese gong and a little Oriental museum, a bit of exotica on that country road that we always liked to look out for.

Then there's the little lane on the right that goes to Avon, where I went swimming with the other sixth-grade girls one summer, "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" blaring on the sound system, and jumped off the high dive for the first time. A few miles more, and there's the quick-mart where I once stopped with my Dad on the way back from Lexington. I don't remember what we stopped for, but I remember the occasion--a gray Saturday afternoon in November--because it so closely matched my mood. I was full of dread over having to find material to make a skirt in home-ec class, a prospect that overwhelmed me. (I wish that was the biggest problem currently facing me, but at the time it seemed a terrible ordeal.)

I've driven that road many times in a more businesslike frame of mind, but yesterday, perhaps because of some pictures of venerable local landmarks I saw while visiting, I was in a mood receptive to memories. As I passed the stately church with the classical facade about halfway between there and here, I thought for the first time in years of a short story I once attempted. It was all about that road, and that church (though I've never been inside it), and the journey from one place to another, short in distance but great in meaning. Something about the prospect of that church, with its Greek columns and its hilltop view, has always seemed to mark an invisible boundary between past and present. It's a herm, if you will: a milestone.

Maybe I'm now approaching a similar prospect, a place with a wider view. Maybe that's one of the benefits of staying with the journey long enough.

Boundaries

In between dusting, making iced tea, and chopping vegetables for dinner, I've been thinking about old Robert Frost. To be precise, I've been thinking about his poem "Mending Wall." Did you ever study it in school? We came across it in the 5th grade, though what I gleaned from it then other than thinking the neighbor in it rather grouchy, I couldn't say.

Well, that was then. I'm now inclined to wonder what it was that set that rock-hauling neighbor's teeth on edge and made him insist on keeping the wall in good repair. You just know there's a story behind it; having had a few bad neighbors yourself, you may be more inclined than you were as a youngster to wonder about his side of the story. I know I am. The something-there-is-that-doesn't-love-a-wall narrator has apparently not lived in my building. If Frost had quoted me in that poem, I'd be saying not only "Good fences make good neighbors," but also "So does soundproofing."

As of today, I have new upstairs neighbors, it seems. I haven't seen them, but I'm going by all the noise, trudging back and forth, and voices I've heard in the hall. Last month, I heard maintenance cleaning the apartment after it was vacated by He-Who-Bangs-Around-Like-Thor (the previous tenant), and I was hoping for a quiet summer, but someone seems to have swooped in already. Over the last couple of summers, there was a two-month break between tenants when things were blissfully quiet. This year, the break has been cut short, but it was nice while it lasted.

June is not a common time for people to move in around here. Nor would I guess it to be common anywhere to start moving in at midnight on a Sunday night, but of course there's no accounting for taste. I don't know how much actual heaving of boxes and furniture took place, but I did hear a lot of footsteps up there right around then, just after I settled down peacefully with a book. Unfortunately, the previous tenant had a penchant for coming in and making a lot of noise as soon as I turned on my reading lamp at night, so last evening's unorthodox arrival already felt like deja vu.

I have several theories as to why that particular apartment has been so troublesome for the last several years, and most of them are tongue-in-cheek. Any one of them would make a great thriller or science fiction novella (and maybe I'll write it some time):

1.) A previous tenant had ill-gotten gains and hid it in the walls or floor. Word got out, but no one knows where it is; hence the use of saws, drills, and other equipment I've sometimes heard up there. Gold diggers.

2.) In that very apartment, an alien lost the wingnut needed to drive his spaceship and can't get back to Alpha Centauri without it (this is the reverse of Lost in Space; call it Trapped on Earth--Without a Paddle). The story of how this happened in the first place involves a wild party, a limbo session, and a spaceman who couldn't hold his bourbon. A succession of neighbors with humanoid features masks a desperate attempt to find the widget, which is smaller and thinner than a contact lens and can move of its own volition. Pod people.

3.) All the upstairs tenants are part of a psychology experiment to see how annoying they can be before the other neighbors within earshot move out. I agree, it would be hard to get this one past an ethics committee, so it would have to be run by a renegade psychologist untroubled by tenure considerations. At the end of the experiment, the psychologist ends up in prison, and the volunteers are forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Mad scientists.

4.) The tenants are part of a theft ring, which decided to establish its Bluegrass headquarters in the bucolic environs of a suburban apartment dwelling. No one would ever guess, right? All of the heavy noises and sounds of furniture moving are attempts to hide stolen -- what? Artwork? Gold bricks? Bicycles? Circus elephants? Criminals.

If this were a Douglas Adams or Neil Gaiman novel, the upstairs neighbors might actually be gods, passing mostly undetected as regular humans due to their shapeshifting abilities. The whole thing would end in a major gods-on-gods rumble or some sort of time travel cliffhanger. The trouble with that one is that none of my actual neighbors have had even a hint of mythic grandeur. I'm leaving this one off the list. So, not gods.

I think Mr. Frost's narrator dismisses his neighbor's insistence on mending the wall too naively. After all, healthy boundaries are important in life, as is consideration. The narrator seems to feel that even nature rises up against walls, toppling them in silent protest--whereas I am all in favor of them, within reason. They offer some protection against stray dogs, invasions of privacy, and accidents. A picturesque stone wall like the one in the poem seems eminently reasonable to me--it keeps modest order without being an eyesore. There's an art to stone fences, as well as personal boundaries, and I somehow doubt it's a spirit trying to break the wall in the poem. It could be moles, though.

Gone Fishing

Not really, but Wordplay is on a short break while I wrestle with revisions, labyrinths, cultural complexes, the myth of the rugged individualist, the potency of the myth of the rugged individualist, majority-minority demographic trends, the exact location of the Minotaur, Benjamin Franklin, the Knights of the Round Table, and the peer review process.

Capturing a Book

Last week, I read two books recommended by readers of a magazine I subscribe to. This reminded me a little of my experiment two years ago, when I read lots of books from NPR's summer reading lists. I did something like that last summer, too, but blended recommendations from several sources. On the whole, I've decided that, despite coming across a few gems in these reading lists, I usually do better on my own when it comes to picking out books. I just know what I like.

I often find good titles when I'm looking for something else. I might be looking at books by an author I already know and notice something on the same shelf that calls out to me. Part of the fun of going to the library is the serendipity and the not really knowing what I'm going to walk out with. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for something in particular and walk out with a book within five minutes; other times, I know what I want but can't seem to find it.

When I went to the library the other day, I had a title in mind, but the library didn't have it, so I started browsing. I noticed several flyers on a display that someone in reader's advisory must have put together. They had titles like "If You Like Dan Brown . . ." or "If You Like Agatha Christie . . ." In my case, you almost have to be more specific: "If You Like Jane Smiley's Historical Novels But Not A Thousand Acres"; "If You Like Literary Adventures With Exotic Settings and Mythology"; or "If You Like Romances--With Humor--That Aren't Predictable," but to get something that close to the target, I'd have to write the list myself.

However, I flipped through several of the flyers and found some book descriptions that appealed. I started hunting and located a few of the books, including The Age of Desire, a novel about Edith Wharton, and Rules of Civility, a novel about upper-class New Yorkers in the 1930s. I almost picked the Wharton book, but something in the description made me think of Henry James's The Bostonians, and though this book may be nothing like that, I decided against it just in case it was. (This would be from my flyer, "If You Like Henry James and You Like Boston, but not The Bostonians.") Likewise, I might actually enjoy Rules of Civility, which is supposed to invoke a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but my reverse snobbery kicked in just then and a novel about wealthy New Yorkers didn't appeal.

I perused three of the pamphlets and looked for at least 10 of the suggested titles before deciding that maybe the lists wouldn't work for me. I then tried the library's "New Books" shelf, but nothing grabbed me there either. This was turning into one of those contrary occasions when I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, and I wasn't finding what I wanted, but I didn't want to leave the library without a book.

I took one last look at the list called "If You Like The Night Circus" and saw a book called The Stockholm Octavo that I had somehow overlooked before. The description summarized a tale of love, intrigue, and a Tarot-like deck of divination cards set in 18th-century Sweden. What? How did I not see that before? I found it on the fiction shelf and was drawn to it right away because of the beautiful cover, which depicts the deck of cards, and the satisfying size--over 400 pages. I also noticed a blurb from an author I like on the back of the book, and that seemed promising.

The real test of a book, though, is to read the first few sentences. Then and there, you get the flavor of what the author is up to; a book that sounds fascinating in synopsis and is highly recommended is sometimes simply not your thing once you start reading, but this one began well: "Stockholm is called the Venice of the North, and with good reason. Travelers claim that it is just as complex, just as grand, and just as mysterious as its sister to the south."

OK, that's more like it! Right away, I'm intrigued because I've never thought of Stockholm as being like Venice at all. Throw in words like "complex" and "mysterious," and you've got my attention. A novel set in a northern city with the allure of an Italian one is probably going to be worth your while for the setting alone. And there's a seer! And a deck of mystical cards!

Why I ended up with the last book I considered, I don't know, but I walked out of the library happy. I'm about a fourth of the way through it, and somehow it's just what I had in mind, even though I didn't know what I had in mind when I walked into the library. Sometimes, you just know what you want when you see it.

Palace of the Looking Glass

This week, we had a special treat in the re-opening celebration for a local treasure, the Kentucky Theatre. The evening featured a free showing of South Pacific, free popcorn, free leis, and an appearance by Nick and Nina Clooney, who had their first date at the Kentucky years ago for a showing of (guess what!) South Pacific. The Kentucky has been around since 1922; you can tell it's of a distinguished age by its neoclassical facade and elegant architectural details, but it embodies the phrase "aging gracefully" to the fullest. Rarely will you see a more beautiful theater, or one that is more beloved, as evidenced by its most recent renovation.

Based on my extensive moviegoing history at the Kentucky, I developed an idea some years ago about the real meaning of the experience. This was even before I entered graduate school to study myths; I'd been thinking about mythology in our culture for a long before I went to school for it. It seemed to me that going to a movie had a ritual quality that was something like the feeling you get by going into a cathedral or some other great spiritual house. The sequence of events is perhaps in a different order, but the elements of enactment are similar.

I think the same dynamics come into play in most movie theaters, but perhaps the lofty elegance of a place like the Kentucky makes it more apparent that you're entering a special place, one set apart from the everyday world. You stop at the ticket booth and make your offering, which entitles you to enter. There's a series of liminal spaces, from the entrance under the marquee (where you're still outside but in shadow, already experiencing the imaginal lure of the movies calling out from the playbills and movie posters surrounding you), to the first lobby (in the case of the Kentucky, a spacious hall of mirrors, the better to remind you that what you're about to see is yourself reflected, or possibly a different reality altogether than you've imagined before, as in Cocteau's Orphée), to the inner lobby, behind a second set of doors, where the concessions stand reigns supreme.

Popcorn, Goobers, Raisinettes, Candy Bars . . . these humble but nostalgic foods that look so enticing inside the big glass case, where they sparkle like jewels, are the ritual accompaniment to the main attraction, topped off not with communion wine but possibly a Cherry Coke. Healthy eating is not really the idea; self-indulgence is somehow innocent in a movie theater, if not actually necessary, possibly to lower your guard. You thought you were coming for an evening's diversion, when in reality . . . who knows what might happen up there on that screen and inside your head? Instead of incense, the seductive, earthy aroma of roasted popcorn envelops you, and not just today's freshly popped offering, but all those other batches of months and years past, permeating the fixtures at a molecular level, smelling of carnival and mystery, magic and darkness, as a theater lobby should.

With refreshments in hand, you pass yet another threshold, the door to the inner sanctum, the auditorium itself. In the Kentucky, the large open space above your head, the stained glass, and the ornate architectural flourishes draw your eye up, as if toward heaven. You feel a little bit like Dante before he starts ascending. For many people, there is a distinct difference between a spiritual and a secular setting, but I think in this case, considering the imaginal and transformational potential of moviegoing, the distinction is somewhat blurred. You sit in the dark, suspend your disbelief as a series of images plays out on the screen like a dream, and are sometimes profoundly changed by what you see, shaken, inspired, exhilarated, saddened, enlarged. You have probably been entertained, but sometimes you've gotten a glimpse of something you weren't expecting, and it makes a difference.

When the movie's over and the lights come up and you retrace your steps to the outside world, it often takes a few seconds to adjust to being in the ordinary everyday once again. I remember attending a showing of A Touch of Evil one rainy summer night at the Kentucky and walking to my car afterwards through a town that seemed different from the one I had left a few hours earlier. I had somehow carried the noir mood out with me, and the familiar streets now looked like a scene from Orson Welles, as if God had somehow assumed the persona of the great director.

I lost the feeling by the time I got home, but it's worth remembering. Was it possibly an opening to realizing that the shadow world and the surface world are not as far apart as they seem? Don't good films often reveal that in one way or another? Isn't a movie theater a portal to the unknown, what the Celts called a thin place, but with good seats and popcorn? I think the answer to all of these questions is yes.

The Sense of Place

Do different places express different archetypes? The question has interested me for several years, and I actually considered working on it for my dissertation. I think the answer is yes, but it's easy to fall into oversimplification when you try to identify what those archetypes are.

I'm especially intrigued by comparisons of urban environments. Is it possible to identify predominant archetypes in a city as expressed in its image, economy, physical environment, and the people it attracts? Can you characterize Seattle as being more like Hermes and San Francisco as being more like Aphrodite? Is Washington D.C. a city of Athena? Does Boston, with all its colleges, have more of a heady Apollo energy? Any city obviously has multiple faces, subcultures, nuances, and shadows, but predominant themes often seem present.

I've read books by people who have addressed these issues either as depth psychologists or from other perspectives, and they seem to agree that different places represent noticeably different aspirations and "personalities." I spent a lot of time a few years ago trying to identify the main archetypes of the place I live in, wanting to understand what it excelled in and what it lacked, especially in comparison to other places. When I first started thinking about it, I found this hard to do, probably because I'd been here so long and couldn't see things from the outside. Having been around a bit more since then (I traveled a lot in 2011), I have more of a basis for comparison now and can articulate what I know.

There's a calmness about Lexington, an orderliness that's in noticeable contrast to, say, Los Angeles, which is much more venturesome -- even chaotic. Part of it's a size difference, of course, but I think there's also a difference in underlying dynamics. Lexington is in many ways a settled place, centered on families, it seems to me, so that it has a feeling of Hestia, hearth, and home. L.A. and San Francisco (and many other places) are also much more hedonistic than Lexington. Hedonism, unless it's of a sedate variety, just doesn't seem to play well here.

I've found Lexington to be both comfortable and confining. I've always thought it was a probably a better place to raise a family than to live in as a single woman, and it all has to do with that homely quality. I've often felt out of my element here, as if standing out too much in any way was always going to be a problem. I felt that I might thrive in a more adventurous environment, a place with more variety not only in cultural and occupational opportunities but also in the people I would meet. I finally addressed this frustration when I commuted to graduate school out of state, an arrangement that let me stay in place but experience the stimulus of an entirely different environment.

My home and even my job were rife with Hestian qualities of order and caretaking; I needed an infusion of a different kind of energy, more Aphrodite, more Apollo, and more Hermes (for a feeling of movement and lightness).

I told a friend before I started at Pacifica that I hoped it would help me figure out either how to leave here or how to stay. During the three years I was commuting to Southern California, I was pretty much in the "leave" mode; the question was where, when, and how. But a funny thing happened somewhere along the way, because once released from three years of what was definitely a labor of love but gave me no free time, I was at leisure to rediscover my own town. Somehow, despite its drawbacks, Lexington suddenly seemed to offer more than I remembered.

I re-discovered the Gallery Hop; there seemed to be more places to have brunch on Saturdays; I had time to attend Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour at the Kentucky Theatre (on the night I attended, I was having dinner in a nearby restaurant when it was announced that a European opera singer was in the house and would give a brief performance); a couple of weeks later, I saw a play by Samuel Beckett in the theatre of the same small restaurant. Lexington had perhaps changed and expanded a little, but what seemed really different was me. My graduate program, and what it took to see it through, had enlarged me, so that I felt more confident in my own skin, wherever I happened to be. Perhaps my vision had also become more acute so that I was now able to seek out those touches of Aphrodite and Apollo and Hermes wherever they happened to be.

Kentucky is, of course, very land-locked, so that the spirit of Uranus, the ocean, is not much felt here. I like the feeling of having land all around me; it's nice to able to move in any direction. But when I was in California, spending so much time between the mountains and the sea, I think I developed an expansiveness partly in response to the intellectual and social climate and partly in response to the physical environment. Looking up at the mountains and out over the ocean must have trained my eye, without my knowing it, to seek further and to see more. I think it's difficult to stay settled in your ways when you spend a lot of time next to the ocean, which presents such a challenge to ideas of solidity. I must have needed a little of that moisture, that fluidity, and that sense of things loosening up. And maybe the mountains raised my sights a little higher.

I miss the beauty of those California interludes, but I think in the end they did their job and became a part of me. Some sort of rebalancing took place that was partly to do with my studies and partly to do with the different energy I experienced on the West Coast. Never underestimate the power of place.

Reading Trollope for Fun and Profit

I haven't figured out whether Anthony Trollope is a Low High Victorian or a High Low Victorian (and anyway, does it signify?), but whatever he is, he's entertaining. Last year I read the first of his Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her?, a seriocomic tale of love, marriage, and politics in 19th-century Britain. The independently wealthy protagonist in that novel is urged by her cousin to marry the cousin's brother, an unscrupulous sort with designs on a seat in Parliament, while the man who really loves her tries to save her. Complications ensue, and despite the novel's length, it's lively from beginning to end.

I picked up the second Palliser novel, Phineas Finn, the other day and initially found it slow going. It concerns a young Irishman convinced by his friends to stand for a seat in Parliament, to the chagrin of his father, his law mentor, and even his landlady's shrewd husband, who all believe he should settle down to a legal career instead of throwing himself away as an MP (Trollope apparently thought very little of politicians). In the initial chapters we see Phineas thinking things over, deciding to stand for his district, and winning the seat. I wasn't bowled over by any of this, probably because several of the characters think so poorly of the enterprise that it's hard to get excited about Phineas's success. He seems to be in for a dull time of it.

Things only get lively when romantic feelings start to affect Phineas's decisions, and he begins to pursue the lovely but apparently unattainable Lady Laura Standish. Her n'er-do-well brother, Oswald, is in love with the charming and intelligent Violet Effingham, Lady Laura's great friend, who is smart enough to have turned him down three times by the end of Chapter 19. Trollope does not bring Lady Laura onstage until Chapter 4, and Violet appears a bit later. I'm trying to figure out his delay in bringing them out, as the story drags until the factors of love and attraction come into play. I'm still reading the novel, so I should probably hold off on an opinion, but it almost seems that, despite trying to write about politics, Trollope finds his interest in intimate relations between people more compelling.

As in Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn's female characters are full of complicated and conflicting emotions; unable to satisfy their own political ambitions, they strive to find a scope for their abilities through the men in their lives. Despite the constricted roles society allots them, the women are fascinating, fully formed characters, making the best (or worst) of their chances within their own sphere. Phineas is shown to be quite in awe of Lady Laura, deferring to her suggestions over and against the advice of seasoned men like his own father. Yet Lady Laura, in choosing an advantageous match over romance, soon finds herself in a stifling marriage (the type of mistake narrowly avoided by Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?). While Trollope's heroines are likable and sympathetic, they are not all-wise and all-seeing; both his men and women make serious blunders that sometimes hurt others.

Lady Laura and Kate Vavasor (Alice's cousin) are maddeningly blind to the faults of beloved but unworthy brothers whose ambitions they promote at the expense of their own happiness and the happiness of their friends. Violet and Alice are both pressured to marry the brother of their closest friend even though doing so offers a good chance of misery for the prospective wife. Even Oswald seems more aware of his unworthiness to have Violet than his sister is, despite her affection for her friend. The political becomes personal as independent-minded women attempt to achieve ends they see as desirable through matrimonial alliances. Zeus and Hera, power and prestige, keep surging to the forefront, while Aphrodite continually tries to upstage them. It's entertaining but also a bit sad.

Phineas is an appealing character, inexperienced and a little brash but quick to learn. His good intentions often rub up against self interest, and their collision with his romantic inclinations drives the story. Can You Forgive Her? ended rather better than you might expect for several of the characters. In Phineas Finn, Lady Laura has already committed to a loveless marriage, Phineas has unwisely accrued a debt from a luckless friend, and others seem poised for either salvation or perdition. Trollope has painted his characters in such realistic colors that it's hard to predict how it all will end. I've already laughed out loud over some of his more wry observations. Like this one --

Violet: 'I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth, and all that kind of thing.'
Lady Laura: 'You want to be flattered without plain flattery.'
Violet: 'Of course I do. A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can't show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.'

I've also observed that 19th century or 21st, Britain or America, politics, love, and ambition don't really seem to have changed much. If Trollope is to be believed.

The Thing That Keats Said

Last week, I came across Donna Tartt's novel The Goldfinch at the public library. A brief description of the plot on The New York Times bestseller list, along with the writer's reputation, reeled me in. The novel tells a fictional story about a real painting, Carel Fabritius's "The Goldfinch," a 17th-century Dutch masterpiece, whose actual home is in the Netherlands. In the novel, a bomb rocks New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art while the protagonist, 13-year-old Theo Decker, is visiting with his mother. Theo's mother dies in the attack, and in the confusion, he smuggles "The Goldfinch," which his mother adored, out of the museum.

Theo's impulsive act, undertaken while he's deeply in shock, becomes, along with his mother's death, the defining fact in his life. Unable to think of a way to return the painting without causing trouble, he keeps it, taking it out of hiding now and again to marvel at it secretly, though he's increasingly wracked by guilt and fear over his possession of it.

The interplay of opposites -- a cataclysmic act of violence, an object of rare and haunting beauty in its midst, a boy who is both innocent and guilty -- runs throughout the novel. Theo is a Hermes-like character, growing up to combine the qualities of a thief and dissembler with a rare sensitivity and passionate nature. In the midst of his self-destructiveness and suffering, he is aware of the moral dilemmas imposed by his situation and is somehow a better person than many of his actions suggest.

Since "The Goldfinch" is the central image of the novel, described repeatedly and in loving detail through Theo's eyes, it necessarily becomes an object of meditation for the reader. What is it about this little goldfinch, in addition to its purely monetary value, that sets such a complicated series of events in motion and affects Theo (and even his harum scarum friend and co-conspirator Boris) so deeply? It seems to be the recognition of a common destiny. The bird is chained to its perch, trapped and circumscribed by events, but it gazes directly and unflinchingly at the viewer in a manner that Theo comes to recognize as -- despite everything -- life-affirming. In the midst of somber circumstance, its spirit remains strong, its gaze sending a challenge to the viewer: I've embraced the eternal yes. Will you?

I'm reminded here, a bit incongruously, of the film Waking Ned Devine, a rollicking story rather removed in atmosphere from the rich solemnity of The Goldfinch (whose tone has much in common with the shadowy, gold-flecked interiors of the Dutch masters it celebrates). In Waking Ned Devine, there is a communal attempt to trick a lottery board into distributing winnings to the surviving friends of the actual winner, who has died. One senses in the scheme not meanness but rather a generosity in the spirit of the deceased Ned Devine himself. The trickery is good-natured and serves the greater good.

In the case of The Goldfinch, the painting is taken by a 13-year-old with the instincts of a thief but a certain purity of heart and is stolen in turn by his amoral but happy-go-lucky best friend, eventually falling into the hands of an international gang of criminals. The final resolution is a twist of fate beyond anything Theo could have imagined, with good and evil very much entangled. But did the purity of Theo's feelings for the painting somehow protect it just enough to tip the balance toward good? It seems this could be true, since the restoration of the painting then inspires Theo to rebuild his own life along more hopeful lines.

This story illustrates the way fate, personified here by the spirit of trickery, may move through the lives of people, sometimes with their knowledge and sometimes not, to achieve an end larger than all of them (though it may enlarge some of them in the process). The way this works, however, remains a mystery. Was it all accidental? Was some of it shaped by the desires of the characters at a level deeper than they could understand? Is truth beauty and beauty truth, as Keats said? You have to decide for yourself.