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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: family

Barbarian Days

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

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Barbarian Days, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, Cancer, family, Joseph Conrad, Medicine, Mortality, Oncology, Surfing, The Mirror of the Sea, William Finnegan

“Things changed after that between me and Mark… I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology — in finding a cure — but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. ‘The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,’ Mark told me. ‘I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit — in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.’ Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.”

__________

From the eighth chapter (“Against Dereliction”) of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

The chapter opens with Conrad, writing in The Mirror of the Sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by too much adulation.”

Keep going:

  • Laird Hamilton reflects on the lessons of the waves
  • An elegy for Sherwin Nuland, author of my favorite book on medicine
  • One of boxing’s great coaches tells how to lose your fear in the ring

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Mitt Romney: What Matters Most to Me in Life

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

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Anne Romney, belief, family, interview, meaning, Mitt Romney, Stanford Business School, Stanford University

Mitt Romney

Interviewer: What matters most to you — and why?

Mitt Romney: It’s not one thing. So I’m gonna give you a longer answer.

One: I believe in God…

In believing in God, I believe therefore we are all his children. I believe that God loves all of us, and I believe that He loves us as you would love your children; some are doing naughty things, some are doing nice things, but you love them all. And I believe that I will be measured and you will be measured based upon what you have done for your fellow children of God…

The person I care for most in life is my wife.

We met in high school. I love her passionately. She is the most important person in my life. If I could do anything, on any day, it would be to be with her. That’s what I enjoy most in life.

Close thereafter is to be with my kids.

My boys and their wives and now 23 grandkids. The greatest joy I have in life is being with them, sitting around in the backyard or at the beach — that’s my greatest source of happiness and the most important thing to me.

Coming beyond that is a circle which includes my church and my sense of service to them… I happen to believe that the currency in life is the people that you love and care for you. The friends you have.

Most of what you’ve learned here, you’ll forget. The people you’ve met here, you’ll remember for the rest of your life – and will form a big part of your wealth. That’s your balance sheet when life is over. Who loves you and who you love and who are your friends.

So what’s the most important thing to me? My God, my wife, my kids, and my fellow human beings.

__________

From the end of Mitt Romney’s “View from the Top” interview on leadership and values, which he gave to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business last year.

Keep it simple. Notice what things this star in business and politics didn’t talk about in his answer.

Image credit: NPR

Read some others talk about their core beliefs:

  • Andrew Sullivan: What I believe
  • John Updike: What I believe
  • Wallace Stegner: What I believe

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David Frum: What Does Secularism Offer in the Face of Mortality?

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Religion

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Afterlife, belief, Cholera, David Frum, fame, family, Genghis Khan, God, Immortality, interview, Life, meaning of life, MeaningofLife.tv, memory, Mortality, Philosophy, Phlogiston, Real Time with Bill Maher, Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, Why Romney Lost

David Frum

Robert Wright: Given the fact that you’re not looking forward to an afterlife, well… maybe the best approach is to just not think about death. But if you do think about it, is there a way you console yourself in the face of it?

David Frum: When you’re younger, it seems a much more terrifying prospect than it does when you’re older. I think we do see it coming and we accept it.

My consolation in my final hours, I hope, will be that I won’t have left anything unsaid. I won’t have left any of the people that I love in any doubt that I love them. That, to the extent of my ability, I’ve made provision for them. That they’ll be secure after I’m gone…

There’s something kind of megalomaniacal about wanting more, wanting our actions to have eternal consequence. I mean, I suppose that’s literally true — if you have a baby, and the baby has a baby, and so on, then yes, your action has an eternal consequence. But we ourselves are going to be forgotten so soon, and those of us who aren’t forgotten are going to be so misunderstood that they might be happier being forgotten.

There are a lot of things that are remembered for ill or even for derision. Whoever invented the Phlogiston theory, he’s remembered — and his work is held up to mockery in science classes from now and for a long time to come.

We look at history and remember the people who left behind misery. Genghis Khan remains a celebrity to this day. But how many people know the name of the man who proved how cholera was caused? How many remember the dozens of obscure civil engineers who put in safe and reliable water piping so we wouldn’t have it anymore?

Most of that desire for remembrance, it usually ends up pretty badly.

__________

An exchange from Frum and Wright’s interview last month in Wright’s MeaningofLife.tv series. You can pick up Frum’s newest Why Romney Lost or Wright’s expansive book The Evolution of God.

So, I think the answer is a resounding not much. Though not exactly wrong, the approach is in many ways an exercise in managing expectations.

Though I disagree with a good bit of Frum’s outlook, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, as I do almost all of Robert Wright’s conversations, especially those on his new series MeaningofLife.tv. It’s a program devoted to the big questions, with guests who, like Frum, are leaders in their fields though not professionally or at least chiefly concerned with issues of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

This combination makes for an informal, direct exchange, where intelligent people can make dinner table points instead of polishing well-worn soundbites. As you’ll see in the Frum interview, this is a man who’s thought a lot about these things, though I’m not sure he’s ever been asked a question like “Are you religious?” on camera.

His answer, by the way, is an interesting one. “I’m religious, but I’m not spiritual,” Frum replies, echoing a common though unacknowledged thread in modern reform Judaism. It’s the reversal of that well-worn yawn “I’m spiritual, but I’m…” Well, I can’t even bring myself to type it.

If you want to hear more of Frum, I recommend watching his appearance on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which features a very worthwhile back and forth about why middle class America is falling to pieces.

You can also continue here:

  • Clive James thinks about mortality and the next generation
  • Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and others on the surprising reason we want to stay alive
  • Physicist Alan Lightman writes about the cost of immortality

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Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Childhood, Children, ethics, family, Four Hour Work Week, Francis Bacon, interview, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Kennedy School, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Parent, parenthood, Parenting, parents, Quilliam, relationships, Sam Harris, Tim Ferriss

Sam Harris

Interviewer: You’ve briefly discussed the ethics of having children and the evidence that parents are less happy and less productive than their child-free counterparts. Why did you decide to have children?

Sam Harris: I guess there are two possible answers. One is it’s just a failure to be emotionally moved by the data. There are certain things you may understand to be true, but you just can’t make their being true emotionally relevant enough to have it guide your behavior. That’s one explanation.

I don’t think it’s the most likely reason in my case. I think it’s more a matter of my feeling — based on who I am and who I’m married to and what she wanted and what I wanted — that we were very likely to be exceptions to the rule. There’s no doubt a certain amount of self-deception if not delusion on offer there, when you begin looking at scientific data and imagining it doesn’t apply to you.

But in our case, I think we stood a very good chance of being happy parents, having happy kids, and being glad that we were parents — and finding the alternative, alas retrospectively, unthinkable.

And that’s sort of where we are. I’m a very happy father. I love my daughters. The idea that I might not have had them does seem unthinkable now.

But I’m also aware that having them has created forms of suffering that we wouldn’t otherwise know. And we’ve certainly given hostages to fortune, as Francis Bacon said.

You worry about the future, you worry about all sorts of things that you’d be quite insouciant about if you were just on your own, living out your adulthood.

It’s not without its downsides, but even the downsides have a silver lining. Being concerned about the future because you have kids is good ethically. And it does lead to a kind of productivity that might not otherwise be available…

To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future — and a future that hopefully extends beyond your own.

__________

Sam Harris, speaking with Tim Ferriss in his most recent Four Hour Workweek interview (these comments can be heard at around the nineteen minute mark).

Currently on my nightstand is Sam’s newest book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a short dialogue with Maajid Nawaz. Nawaz is one of the truly compelling contemporary public figures. A former Islamic extremist, he spent five years in an Egyptian prison for trying to topple the Mubarak government and establish a caliphate. Now he cuts a suave figure in London as the head of the anti-extremist think tank Quilliam. I encourage you to follow the work they do, especially his. You can watch Harris and Nawaz’s illuminating discussion at their recent book launch at the Kennedy School below:

Read on:

  • Calvin Trillin gives some heartfelt advice about prioritizing child-raising
  • Maajid talks about why we need to comprehend how Islamic the Islamic State is
  • Harris riffs on cops — and why we may need to cut them some slack

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Charles Darwin Decides to Marry

30 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

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"Is There a Secret to a Happy Marriage?", Adam Gopnik, and the Birth of the Modern Age, Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Charles and Emma Darwin, Charles Darwin, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Darwin, Diary, Emma Darwin, evolution, family, Journal, Love, marriage, Men and Women, On the Origin of the Species, sex

Richmond - Charles Darwin J980057

In late July of 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin, mulling over his charmed courtship of cousin Emma Wedgwood, split two pages of his journal for a cost-benefit analysis in which he jotted the following:

“This is the Question [whether to marry or not].

Marry:

Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (& friend in old age) — who will feel interested in one. Object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog anyhow. Home, & someone to take care of house. Charms of music & female chit-chat — these things good for one’s health. But terrible loss of time.

My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.,

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked. Choice of Society & little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— To have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling. Loss of time. — cannot read in
the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much.)

Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

It being proved necessary to Marry.

Marry when? Soon or Late?

The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children — one’s character is more flexible — one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon, one misses so much good pure happiness.

But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble & expense in getting & furnishing a house… Then how should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my wife.— Eheu!! I never should know French, or see the Continent, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales — poor slave. — you will be worse than a negro. And then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better than an angel & had money). Never mind my boy —  Cheer up — One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in one’s face, already beginning to wrinkle. Never mind, trust to chance. Keep a sharp look out — there is many a happy slave.”

__________

Selections from the diaries of Charles Darwin, which you can find neatly summarized in Adam Gopnik’s short book Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Birth of the Modern Age. And so the either-or above seemed to settle it. The Darwins were married on January 29th, 1829. 

Gopnik, a fluent, often funny writer and hyper-articulate storyteller, has produced several assessments of Darwin the man, the spouse, and the father. In his essay “Is There a Secret to a Happy Marriage?,” he hinges his theory of marriage on the relationship between Emma and Charles, opening:

Anyone who tells you their rules for a happy marriage doesn’t have one. There’s a truth universally acknowledged, or one that ought to be anyway.

Just as the people who write books about good sex are never people you would want to sleep with, and the academics who write articles about the disappearance of civility always sound ferociously angry, the people who write about the way to sustain a good marriage are usually on their third.

Gopnik goes on, quickly making his way to dissecting Darwin’s marriage:

What made it work? My theory is that happy marriages, from the Darwins on down, are made up of a steady, unchanging formula of lust, laughter and loyalty.

The Darwins had lust, certainly — 10 children in 17 years suggests as much anyway — and they had laughter. Emma loved to tease Charles about his passion, already evident in youth, for obsessive theorizing.

“After our marriage,” she wrote to him early on, “you will be forming theories about me, and if I am cross or out of temper you will only consider: ‘What does that prove?’ which will be a very philosophical way of considering it.”

And loyalty? Well, despite Emma’s Christian faith, she stood by him through all the evolutionary wars, and did for him the one thing only a loyal spouse can do — pretend he wasn’t in when German journalists came calling.

So, marriages are made of lust, laughter and loyalty — but the three have to be kept in constant passage, transitively, back and forth, so that as one subsides for a time, the others rise.

Read on:

  • The bachelor Alexander Hamilton describes his ideal date
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s advice for finding the right girl
  • John F. Kennedy’s tumultuous courtship with Jackie

Darwin Journal - Marry

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Steve Martin on the Death of His Father

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on Steve Martin on the Death of His Father

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Biography, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, comedy, family, fatherhood, Fathers, memoir, Saturday Night Live, Sons, Steve Martin

Steve Martin

“My father… died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and caring he was. I was surprised by these descriptions, because the number of funny or caring words that had passed between my father and me was few… When I was seven or eight years old, he suggested we play catch in the front yard. This offer to spend time together was so rare that I was confused about what I was supposed to do. We tossed the ball back and forth with cheerless formality…

My father…  was not impressed [with my comedy act]. After my first appearance on Saturday Night Live, he wrote a bad review of me in his newsletter for the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, of which he was president: ‘His performance did nothing to further his career.’… I believe my father didn’t like what I was doing in my work, and was embarrassed by it. Perhaps he thought his friends were embarrassed by it, too, and the review was to indicate that he was not sanctioning this new comedy. Later, he gave an interview in a newspaper in which he said, ‘I think Saturday Night Live is the most horrible thing on television.’… But as my career progressed, I noticed that my father remained uncomplimentary toward my comedy, and what I did about it still makes sense to me: I never discussed my work with him…

[Years later, just before my father’s death] I was alone with him in his bedroom; his mind was alert but his body was failing. He said, almost buoyantly, ‘I’m ready now.’ I sat on the edge of the bed, and a silence fell over us. Then he said, ‘I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.’

At first, I took this as a comment on his condition, but am forever thankful that I pushed on. ‘What do you want to cry about?’ I said.

‘For all the love I received but couldn’t return.’

I felt a chill of familiarity.

There was another lengthy silence as we looked into each other’s eyes. At last, he said, ‘You did everything I wanted to do.’

‘I did it for you,’ I said. Then we wept for the lost years. I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: ‘I did it because of you.'”

__________

A selection from Martin’s 2008 memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

Related paths:

  • Peter Hitchens reflects on how the wish to please one’s parents can distort our relationship to the past
  • Calvin Trillin on the singular priority of good parents
  • Louis Simpson’s poem — A light is on in my father’s study…

Steve Martin 2

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Why Radicals Always Target the Family

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Why Radicals Always Target the Family

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Alexis de Tocqueville, BBC, culture, family, Jonathan Sacks, politics, Reith Lectures, religion, science, society, speech, The Great Partnership, The Great Partnership: Science

Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

“As our families fragment, so do the deepest structures of our consciousness. When a certain kind of family breaks down, so do the values which once linked parents and children, and gave continuity and character to our inherited world.

Which is precisely why ideological radicals have focused on the family. Change it, and you change humanity. But let’s turn the argument around: if changing the family would change the world, protecting the family might be the best way of protecting our world.

Which is, I believe, what our religious tradition has been doing until now — because the Bible is above all a book about the family. It begins with one: Adam and Eve, and the command to bring the next generation into being. And from then on the book of Genesis never relaxed its grip on the subject. It endlessly turns to some new variation in the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel and Leah: these aren’t miracle workers or agents of salvation. The heroes and heroines of Genesis are simply people living out their lives in the presence of God and the context of their families.

And we can perhaps now see that this forms the foundation of the Bible’s larger moral and social themes. The family is the matrix of individuality. It’s that enclosed space in which we work out, in relation to stable sources of affection, a highly differentiated sense of who we are. It’s hard to imagine a culture which didn’t possess a close family structure arriving at the breathtaking idea that the human individual is cast in the image of God.

De Tocqueville once wrote that ‘as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.’ By which he meant that the family is the great protection of the individual against the state. It’s no coincidence that totalitarian regimes have often attacked the family. Against this, it was the Bible that gave rise to the great prophets who dared to criticize kings. The family is the birthplace of liberty.

Not only that, it’s where we care for dependents — the very young and the very old, those to whom we gave birth and who gave birth to us. And it’s a short step from this to the biblical vision of society as an extended family, in which the poor and powerless make a claim on us, by virtue not of abstract principle but of feelings of kinship. It’s this that lies behind the prophetic identification with the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. They’re not merely people with theoretical rights. They’re part of the family.”

__________

Pulled from part three of Jonathan Sacks’s 1990 Reith Lecture for the BBC.

You can find this and the rest of Sack’s excellent, six-part lecture in his book The Persistence of Faith: Morality and Society in a Secular Age. As with anything from Sacks, however, try to enjoy it in audio form. His voice makes Morgan Freeman sound like Gilbert Gottfriend.

More:

  • Peter Hitchens: why we all wish to be children again
  • MLK riffs on the moral of the good Samaritan story
  • Theodore Roosevelt on the need to set a strong example as a man

Jonathan Sacks

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Calvin Trillin on Parenting: Your Children Are Either the Center of Your Life or They’re Not — the Rest Is Commentary

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on Calvin Trillin on Parenting: Your Children Are Either the Center of Your Life or They’re Not — the Rest Is Commentary

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About Alice, Biography, Calvin Trillin, Children, family, fatherhood, motherhood, Parenting, parents

Alice Trillin

“There was no doubt about [my wife’s] priorities. While our girls were growing up, she hated being separated from them; after a two-week trip to Asia, when they were about ten and thirteen, she decided that one week was her limit. Concerning children’s constitutional right to sit down to dinner with their parents every night, Alice tended toward strict constructionism. When it came to trying to decide which theories of child-rearing were highly beneficial and which were absolutely ruinous to the future of your child — a subject of considerable discussion among some parents we knew — we agreed on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.

After both girls were out of college, there was a period when Abigail was living in San Francisco while Sarah was in Los Angeles. Alice said that if they remained where they were we would simply have to live in California for part of the year. ‘If we want to be convenient to both of them,’ I’d say, ‘we could find a nice little place in between — Bakersfield, or maybe Fresno.’ Alice would shoot me the look I associated with a catch phrase from a radio sitcom I used to listen to as a boy ‘’Tain’t funny, McGee.’ By then, though, her desire to be near them was no longer based partly on her need to influence what kind of people they would become. In her New Yorker article about the recurrence scare in 1990, at a time when Sarah was a sophomore at Yale and Abigail was in Teach for America in Los Angeles, Alice wrote:

In the days after that bone scan, I couldn’t find a hopeful way out… I did manage to imagine uplifting conversations I might have with my daughters about how it was O.K. for me to die this time, as it absolutely had not been when they were four and seven, and I had foreseen their adoring but occasionally absent-minded father getting them the wrong kind of sneakers or losing track of their dental appointments after I was gone. Now I was sure that I had told them everything of importance I knew; they had understood it all and figured out a lot on their own, and were as close to perfect as they could possibly be. Then it occurred to me that neither of them was married yet, and I would hate to miss the weddings and the grandchildren. I speculated about which of my friends I would assign to help them pick out their wedding dresses. Then I cried and decided that I really wanted to stay around.

My problem in 1976 would have been much more serious than sneakers and dental appointments, I realized, when I finally allowed myself to dwell on what would have happened if Alice hadn’t survived. The real problem would have been that I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone else to be involved in raising our girls. I not only thought they needed to know everything of importance that Alice knew; I also thought, I suppose, that she was the only person who knew it. When I’m asked how both of our daughters came to be involved in the sort of work they do — Abigail is a legal-services attorney for children, Sarah is a clinical social worker — I, naturally, deny having anything to do with it. ‘I want to assure you that I tried to instill in them the value of selfishness and even rapaciousness,’ I say. ‘When Abigail came down to breakfast during her years in high school, I would tell her the temperature and the starting salary for an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.’ But they had Alice there as a model. Because she survived, they were exposed every day to someone who (as a friend wrote after Alice died) managed to ‘navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.’ Sneakers and dental appointments are the kind of things you can figure out, or find someone to figure out. Exemplars are hard to come by.”

__________

Excerpted from chapter seven of Calvin Trillin’s 2006 book About Alice.

In a recent interview with Olivia Gentile, Trillin offered a few simple words that illuminate the above point, only this time from the perspective of grandfatherhood:

Do you feel [your daughters are] raising their kids with pretty much your values and techniques?

Yeah. Alice used to say that we were easy about the small things and strict about the large things. By large things, she basically meant values…

I’ve always believed that parenting essentially boils down to one thing: Your kids are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.

So, the question of which childrearing book you read or something like that is really not relevant. It doesn’t make any difference because, in the first place, you’re not going to act against your own nature anyway, and the kids see you in so many different situations that you can’t put in some kind of artificial system.

Trillin dedicated About Alice to those grandchildren. Picture above: Trillin and Alice.

Read on:

  • As she sends her son off to college…
  • Inside the marriage of Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca
  • “To My Mother” by Wendell Berry

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The Last Gentleman on the Titanic

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Article, Chicago Record-Herald, Courage, Crash, Daniel Guggenheim, family, fatherhood, history, Honor, Husband, integrity, James Etches, Jay Henry Mowbray, Life Boats, newspaper, Sink, St. Regis Hotel, The Sinking of the Titanic, Titanic

Benjamin Guggenheim

“‘If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty.’

This was the last message of Benjamin Guggenheim, of the famous banking family, dictated to a steward only a short while before the banker sank to his death with the Titanic. It was was not until several days later that the message was received by Mrs. Guggenheim.

It was delivered by James Etches, assistant steward in the first cabin of the Titanic, to whom Mr. Guggenheim communicated it. Etches appeared at the St. Regis Hotel and inquired for Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim. He said that he had a message from Benjamin Guggenheim, and that it had to be delivered in person.

Mrs. Guggenheim was in the care of Daniel Guggenheim, whose apartments are at the St. Regis. The steward was admitted, but was not permitted to see Mrs. Guggenheim, who is prostrated with grief. He insisted that he must see her personally, but finally consented to transmit the message through her brother-in-law.

‘We were together almost to the end,’ said the steward. ‘I was saved. He went down with the ship. But that isn’t what I want to tell Mrs. Guggenheim.’

The Titanic Launch

Then the steward produced a piece of paper. He had written the message on it, he said, to be certain that it would be correct. The message was as given.

‘That’s all he said’ added the steward, ‘there wasn’t time for more.’

Little by little Mr. Guggenheim got the account of his brother’s death from the steward. It was the first definite news that he had received of his brother.

‘Mr. Guggenheim was one of my charges,’ said the steward anew. ‘He had his secretary with him. His name was Giglio, I believe, an Armenian, about twenty-four years old. Both died like soldiers.

‘When the crash came I awakened them and told them to get dressed. A few minutes later I went into their rooms and helped them to get ready. I put a life preserver on Mr. Guggenheim. He said it hurt him in the back. There was plenty of time and I took it off, adjusted it, and then put it on him again. It was all right this time.

‘They wanted to get out on deck with only a few clothes on, but I pulled a heavy sweater over Mr. Guggenheim’s life belt, and then they both went out. They stayed together and I could see what they were doing. They were going from one lifeboat to another helping the women and children. Mr. Guggenheim would shout out, ‘Women first,’ and he was of great assistance to the officers.

Titanic Propellers

‘Things weren’t so bad at first, but when I saw Mr. Guggenheim about three quarters of an hour after the crash there was great excitement. What surprised me was that both Mr. Guggenheim and his secretary were dressed in their evening clothes. They had deliberately taken off their sweaters,’ and as nearly as I can remember they wore no life belts at all.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

‘We’ve dressed up in our best,’ replied Mr. Guggenheim, ‘and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.’ It was then he told me about the message to his wife and that is what I have come here for.

‘Well, shortly after the last few boats were lowered and I was ordered by the deck officer to man an oar, I waved good-bye to Mr. Guggenheim, and that was the last I saw of him and his Armenian secretary.'”

__________

The full text of an article published on Sunday, April 21st, 1912 in the Chicago Record-Herald, later reprinted in Jay Henry Mowbray’s The Sinking of the Titanic.

Titanic

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“To My Mother” by Wendell Berry

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

family, forgiveness, Paul Newman, Poem, Poet, poetry, Road to Perdition, Sam Mendes, To My Mother, Tom Hanks, Wendell Berry, Writing

Peter's Farm

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

__________

“To My Mother” by Wendell Berry.

One of my favorite movies is Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition. There’s an unforgettable early scene in that unfairly forgotten film, where Michael Sullivan (played by Tom Hanks) has just been lamenting to his adopted father John Rooney (played by Paul Newman) the recent rebelliousness of his eldest son. After listening, an amused Newman stares out the window and responds. “Natural law: sons were put on this earth to trouble their fathers.” It’s a brilliant line, one which — for better or for worse — the fathers and mothers of my friends, from early on to late college-y age, would hear now with a slight smile of recognition, as I would hope they’d read this poem.

I took the picture at my friend Peter’s farm near Keswick, Virginia.

More from Berry:

  • “How to Be a Poet (to Remind Myself)”
  • “IX”

Wendell Berry

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Redeem the Time Being from Insignificance

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Artist, Christianity, Christmas, family, For the Time Being, holidays, Mary McCleary, meaning, Poem, poetry, religion, Thanksgiving, Time, W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden by Richard Avedon, bromide print, 1960

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this…

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

IV
Chorus

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

__________

From W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being.

My aunt, the artist Mary McCleary, inscribed the above chorus on the letter she gave me the day I graduated from college. That card is now the centerpiece of the bulletin board above my desk. (Given how little time there is now for poetry, I can’t be too surprised that guests are yet to identify much less ask about the card. But then again, I wasn’t aware of the reference ’til I received the card from MM.)

The entirety of “For the Time Being” stretches over 1,400 lines. (For perspective: a few of Shakespeare’s plays are less than 2,000 lines.) I can’t find the full text online, but if anyone knows where I can, please send a link to my email or drop it in the comments area.*

From a technical standpoint, the above section is a sterling example of what postmodernism can do so long as it has a substantive core and also wears itself lightly. That may sound simple in principle; in practice, it’s not. Like much of Auden’s work, the subversion of classical form here does not signal a disregard for traditional ideas. The free verse is flecked with obvious nods to scripture (“lead us into temptation”) — nods which, like a photographer’s macrographic study, expose otherwise unseen parts of a whole we had gotten used to identifying by rote. Moreover, with the chorus — especially that fantastic phrase “Kingdom of Anxiety” — there is a redressing of old ideas which cloaks them in modern clothes. After all, who had anxiety in the first century?

As the verses clearly indicate, “For the Time Being” is a poem about the holidays. These words, and in particular the line I misremembered as “the time being redeemed of insignificance,” were rattling around my head throughout quieter moments at my family’s Thanksgiving. And although they work especially well as a panacea for post-holiday melancholy, they may get more mental mileage if you are reminded of them before the official Christmas week kicks off.

The pictures are of Auden, a man who once said that his face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

*Again the brilliant Ted Rey has come through and found an archived full text of “For the Time Being”. As always, thank you, Ted.

NPG x25900; W.H. Auden by Bill Potter

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