Reading Last Year and This Year

January 12, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy week for me, and not in a good way.

It was probably RSV that took down the first three days of it in a torrent of congestion and runny nose, until I felt my old self begin to return on Thursday, only to discover while heading out for necessities, that the rapid thaw had burst two pipes in our carriage house (which holds both car and office) so I ended up spending all of my relief mopping, moving, drying and hoping that my plumber would come to the rescue.

By Friday I was tired, back to recovering and not yet relieved again, but Andrew the unflappable pipe fixer had come and gone and it now appears that I’ll finally be getting rid of the old computer equipment that’s been gathering out there because I never got around to removing “the sensitive bits” before it’s composting until now.

If all of this has to happen, it might as well be in this dangling participle of a week, lodged between a culmination of sorts (on Christmas) and a new beginning (today, on New Years). While I was casting about for a headline image this morning, it seemed to me that the one above is either about capturing the last or the first light, and therefore, just that kind of inbetweeness. (Photographer Sasha Elage gets my thanks for it.)

In a similar vein, this is also a time of year for looking back on some of its high points and maybe anticipating some new ones. I covered some of the songs that held my ear in 2022 last week, and today it’s a short dash through things I’ve read that have left their mark on me this year and might do the same for you.

However, before turning to my short list of books, essays and stories, a observation about the current state of our literacy (more generally) from, of all people, Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s Secretary of State is 100 years old now and looking a bit like Stephen Hawking while he retreats into his business suit at gatherings, but God-Bless-Him the man is still raising concerns and speaking out about them given his undiminished sense of public duty. It’s remarkable, but also invaluable—especially because so few of our “public figures” work up the gumption to do so today.

_{Henry Kissinger as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.}

Above everything, Kissinger is concerned that our culture is losing the academic-and-life-long commitments to “deep literacy” that its road warriors seemed to have earlier in his career. That is: To know what our greatest minds are thinking about, to be able to talk about those things too, and most importantly, to discern the most telling insights in this cultural conversation and apply them to how we live and work, govern ourselves and interact with strangers. He believes that there used to be more public-spirited individuals with a deep understanding of history, world affairs and human interaction (from literature, among other sources) who were prepared to lead their communities or countries.

Kissinger fears we are losing the farm teams and even the starting benches of leadership that our civilization once depended on because the men and women who are drawn to public service no longer bring “the deep literacy” that our colleges and universities once fostered. There are lots of reasons for this of course, including an emphasis on “vocational” education (or only-study-now-what-you-can-get-paid-to-do-later) and on the STEM disciplines (given remarkable advances in science and technology and the high-paying jobs that accompany them).

But Kissinger cites two other culprits, both related to the growing dominance of electronic communication today. Increasingly, “we gain what we know” from pictures or tweets instead of from reading about something (anythng) in any greater depth. A constant barrage of brief impressions has caused us to have shorter attention spans and made us less likely to take any kind of dive (let alone a deep one) into complicated subject matter. Kissinger fears that our leaders and “the educated strata” in our societies that once produced their brain trusts are becoming increasingly “less literate,” with consequences that we can unfortunately see all around us.

It’s a point that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made this year in an Atlantic article called “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anticipating Kissinger’s alarm, this article was already “one of the year’s best reads” and the subject of my Divided We Fall post six months ago. Haidt argues that social media, and its appeal to emotion instead of reason, has increased our civic illiteracy, making it harder to safeguard the institutions and commitments we profess to hold in common. While, like many of you, I was briefly heartened by the U.S. mid-term elections in November, the coming year is likely to remind those of us in the US (with our new Congress) and elsewhere (given widening conflicts and fresh horrors) just how fleeting that “good news” really was.

Today’s undermining of literacy is not somebody else’s problem. I know only too well how much “easier” it is for me to scroll through photo or video-sharing sites or watch “what Netflix recommends for me next” than to commit to a lengthy essay or a new book. So I sense the cognitive degrading in and around me too, a lassitude that the pandemic and other travails has only amplified, and I actively try to vote against it—although not as much as I’d like.

So with that somewhat sobering preface, allow me to share my other favorite “reads” of the year and hopefully an occasion or two for you to cast your own votes for “deeper literacy” over easier diversions.

_{(photo by Leo Berne)}

2 MORE ESSAYS AND ONE STORY

– Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” in The New Yorker, June 8, 2022. I have one of you to thank for this one (“Happy New Year, Tedd!”) This essay is about private property versus the land as well as the other privileges and freedoms that we still hold “in common.” It turns on the author’s visit to the farming community of Lawton in rural England where the common resources that everyone depends on have somehow resisted the private interests that keep wanting to gobble them up.

Laxton has a tight center where the farmers all live within walking distance of the pub. This makes it distinct from all the rural places I have known. Standing at the center of the village, I had the feeling that I was standing inside an idea, an idea about how to live in relationships of necessity with other people. I felt at home in the idea, and I puzzled over this for a moment, feeling held close by the tight center of a village where I had never been, wondering if I was making myself at home in my own imagination.

It’s imagination that we need now in places like the unclaimed oceans and polar regions, the Amazon and Congo River basins, the rainforests and coral reefs, and where the water flows down the Colorado and towards an American desert that tries to sustain more people than it ever expected.

– Lucas Mann, “An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That is Really About My Own Shit,” at Hobartpulp.com, August 16, 2022. From its title, you might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with “making the world a better place” at the humanities end of the pool. Well I wouldn’t have found out either if I hadn’t already been thinking about Brad Pitt’s screen persona and the impact that seeing somebody like him over and over might have on an even mildly susceptible person.

Pitt has never chosen to not be Brad Pitt in the image on-screen. Even as he’s taken strange, anti-careerist roles, earned that character-actor-trapped-in-a-leading-man cliché, each performance comes attached to the promise of Brad Pitt’s body. He may have done a wacky Irish Traveler accent in Snatch, but he was still a boxer, and there was a slow-motion break in the movie’s frantic comedy to watch him pull off his shirt. It’s almost as if he’s set himself a lifelong artistic challenge — I can believably be anybody, even when I look like this. Or there’s that lingering, glorious possibility that he hasn’t considered his body enough to wonder whether it’s a gift or a hindrance. Or maybe it’s a moral decision, honoring what has always been the money-maker, refusing to take on that greatest and easiest bit of artifice, the physical kind, even in a profession all about playing pretend.

By getting an imprint like this into the right author’s head, great literature (and this comes close) can change the way that you see the world. Mann confronts the shame of his personal cravings around food, his tendency to be overweight, and his desire that his new daughter be free of these burdens in the shadow of Pitt’s treating food like another accessory to his preternatural good looks. Above even Mann’s powers of observation and serious writing chops, this autobiographical tour-de-force is about how “what we see” might never stop affecting “who we are” once “it gets under our skin.”

“Watching Brad Pitt Eat” is another cautionary note in an era that’s full to the gills with damaging, media-driven impressions, and not just the ones that are made on vulnerable, 13-year-old girls (although in my post next week, called Watching in 2022, one of my favorites was a advertisement for Dove soap that showed “the nearly parental effect” that Instagram or TikTok can have when it’s urging these same 13-year olds to strive for greater beauty.)

– Alyssa Harad, “To Live in the Ending,” in Kenyon Review, July-August, 2022.

When you live in a time that can feel almost apocalyptic you deeply appreciate new ways to frame “the imminent threats” you’re constantly facing. In gorgeous “braids” of storytelling, Harad manages to do just this by weaving several endings in her own life with the “end times” stories that echo around her in order to make more manageable sense out of the harrowing times in which we live. For example, the voice of an environmentalist that she’s followed:

offers a way to think about the end of the world not as a singular explosive event—something true only from the long view of geological time—but as a Chinese box or a matryoshka doll. In a time of climate emergency we live in a series of nested crises. When we emerge from one, the larger one is always there waiting for us. And inside the big troubles—the global rise of fascism, a kleptocratic presidency, white supremacist police violence, concentration camps on our southern border, a pandemic—the smaller crises of ordinary human life continue—a broken heart, a sick child, the rent falling due—all of it framed, structured, intensified, and continually interrupted by the ongoing alarm of the climate crisis.

So how does nesting these crises cushion their blows? Because doing so allows us to acknowledge the occasional victories that occur within them and, when that happens, to feel their respites (if only briefly).

The rolling flow of Harad’s narrative allows us to experience what she means by this: the epiphany of blue flowers in a dying lakebed or of the heroism of a public defender who works “within but against a violent system, quietly, in an obscurity that makes the work possible, trading purity for efficacy, jimmying open the places where the edges don’t quite come together, to make room for a few more people to breathe.”

_{Shadow & light packets.}

BOOKS

– I have piles of unread books, but not a finished one that’s worth sharing since I extolled the virtues of a slim volume about effective writing and a short memoir by “one of our great innovators in modern autobiographical writing” over the summer. In a post called The Relaxing Curiosity That Is Also August, I have more to say about Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Several Short Sentences About Writing” and Margot Jefferson’s “Constructing a Nervous System: a Memoir.” (Both of them are still sending me reminders.) You’ll find quotes, links to reviews and other impressions that I had about them in that post.

– I follow the second half of the year-in-books quite closely, in particular the National Book Award finalists and longlist for American writers, the same winnowing down for the Booker Prize given to a book that’s written in English this year, and the “notable” and “best” books according to book editors at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other literary arbiters. I do it because I want to know what I should be reading next.

One compilation of note came via a daily post from the publishing industry—a kind of compilation of compilations for the year’s fiction and non-fiction books and “the 10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” when the categories are combined. This is how Publisher’s Lunch (yes, it conveniently drops at lunchtime everyday) describes the operation of this remarkable annual service:

Below as usual are our top 10s for the year — based on 61 ‘votes’ from a variety of highly selective lists from critics and reviewers, award nominees, bookseller and librarian picks, book club selections and more.

(“And more!”) You see, they’re aiming to measure quality here, not the quantity of books sold. So in the coming year, if you’re looking for a book to read that comes highly recommended by (apparently) all the right people, their “10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” are as follows:

_{1. Trust, Hernan Diaz
2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
3. Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng
4. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
An Immense World, Ed Yong
6. The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
8. Babel, R.F. Kuang
Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews.}

(I am at a loss as to why there are 11 books on their top 10 list. It must be the “ties” at #8 that are responsible.)

– And last but hardly least, here are the 3 books that I’m currently standing-in-line to take out of my local library. One I was after long before I saw the list above (Ed Yong’s “Immense World” about the infinite varieties of living experience that are flourishing around us but that we know so little about).

A second is also on the list, but I only got interested in it after the buzz from delighted readers I trust gradually became so deafening that I felt like I’d be missing out otherwise (Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” about the origin story of video games and how friendships can sometimes be “as complicated, perplexing and rewarding as a great love story.”)

Finally, a book that came to my attention outside of any list (Claire Keegan’s “Foster,” set in rural Ireland and full of the rich details of daily life, but composed with an artfulness that promises to linger and gnaw. What I know of the plot—about a temporarily-loved girl—has shown me more than enough about why this just might be true.)

If these three live up to their evangelists, I may be writing to you about them here in coming months too.

In the meantime, to you and your loved ones, I wish you all the best in the coming year. Keep in touch and may the wind be at our backs in the months ahead.

This post was adapted from my January 1, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Who We Go-to To Learn How to Get There

July 5, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For just about anything you can think of, somebody’s posted a YouTube video to show you how.

It’s like we’ve moved Dad on-line and then made him available to everyone. Literally.

I tuned in to one of them, Rob Kenny and his “Dad, How Do I?” tutorials, because one of you thought that I should. (Thanks, Brian!)  Dad, how do I tie a tie? Dad, how do I shave? Dad, how do I fix my running toilet?

That last one’s had 1.1 million views, so lots of us “kids” are watching.

Rob Kenny’s advice is sincere, never scrambled with snark but always accompanied by a mayonnaise of Dad jokes that make him break up a little when he tells them, pulling you into their vibe even though you can’t remember ever thinking that jokes like this were funny. They pull you into a heartland kind of conspiracy, like the “just-right porridge” did in the wandering fairy tale.

You see, Rob Kenny lost his dad when he was a kid and it made him realize that other kids had lost (or never had) their dads either, so he initially started posting his everyday advice as a kind of public service, never expecting for the hole to be as big as it was or for so many to feel that he was helping to fill it.

When Rob Kenny was having a bad week recently (and hadn’t posted his next vid when he’d planned and viewers were hoping), he got on the horn anyway, to “buy himself some time,” talking about how much he appreciated everyone’s comments on his last dollop of advice—“I’m new at being out in public like this” he explained, but your writing to me things like “Protect this man at all costs” helps me so much “because I need protection” so much–and then How Proud He Was of all the generous people who took the time to care about him back.

To him, it seemed to demonstrate their good character, even those like Joseph, who’d written (like he was some kind of tough guy): “This dude is making my eyes sweat.”

Rob Kenny’s “I am proud of you” post, which comes with an almost tearful dad-joke along with his struggles to get though Teddy Roosevelt’s “Daring Greatly” poem (from those halcyon days when our presidents were also poets) moves straight though the heart of maudlin with the sincerest of intentions.

For me, It brought some tonic to another long week (when is the last time somebody said “I’m proud of you” just for making it through?), and it got me thinking about how much we all need not only hands-on guidance but also an attaboy now and then, even when it comes at the arms-length distance of a YouTube video or an article in the New Yorker, or a self-help book that you can spend all the time that you need with.

Because the best of this kind of outreach conjures those extraordinary times when you were huddled knee-to-knee or hunched elbow-to-elbow over whatever it was, and somebody who cared enough was actually there with you showing you how.

The life-blood in these kinds of tutorials comes from memories like that.

When I was in “start-up business mode” several years back and thinking about ways to change the world for the better, I had the idea for a school, or maybe just an area in every school, where you could learn about practical things that no one else seemed to be teaching.

There were places in my high school like wood shop and the typing pool where certain crafts and skills were taught. Indeed, showing how close we were to the cusp at the time, BHS had already re-branded “home economics” as “cooking 1-2-3” so that boys wouldn’t feel too threatened to take it (and I could learn how to make pecan pie by the last class.) But there was no one there to teach me the soup-to-nuts of traveling by train or reading a roadmap, fixing a broken toaster or finding my way out of the woods if I got lost, traveling in a foreign country or changing a flat tire (although my fellow “industrial arts” students, who’d go on to become our town’s mechanics, might have helped with that last one if I’d asked).

Perhaps because “practical” was not one of the first 10 or 15 words that anyone would have used to describe me, I was drawn to this gapping void in my own experience and maybe in the educational system generally. This un-met dimension of schooling would need to have guides who could show the uninitiated how to do all of those things that had somehow fallen through the cracks of our formal educations.

I got far enough with this idea to wonder how I’d sell it to boards of education that (unfortunately) were already struggling to keep the school systems that they had already both functioning and safe. What was the “value-add” that parents and other civic-minded individuals would be willing to pay for in order to produce more fully-rounded graduates and a more capable community? That’s where the waves of my enthusiasm hit the shoals of feasibility. But I never abandoned the idea entirely.

At least intially, I returned to the need itself and where my urge to satisfy it had come from. I don’t recall wishing that my dad had taught me how to solve all of these lingering mysteries. Instead I came to realize that he’d actually given me some of the tools that I needed to solve them myself. As a businessman who was always on the road having “to figure things out,” he was a regular demonstration of how to turn conundrums into solutions. It was an internal discipline that I had in me too, however little I’d acted upon it.

So if my “problem-solving” innovation was unlikely to fly in our school systems, maybe I had my own ability to find the practical, step-by-step paths that could lead me (rewardingly) to the bottom of whatever I was most curious about. It was a revelation that tracked my other dad-like substitute, the Cub Scout manual, in which every challenge (from making a fire in the woods to creating a successful lemonade stand) began with wondering how and ended after taking one practical step after another.

In the ensuing years, I effectively brought that imagined part of schooling into my head, encouraging its problem-solving wherever curiosity took me, and thinking nothing more about it until I stumbled upon one of the most extraordinary things that I’ve ever read in New Yorker magazine.

_{This isn’t a picture of Kirk Varnedoe coaching the Giant Metrozoids, a well-named team of 8-year old boys learning the art and science of football twenty years ago. Indeed, it’s not even a picture of football players and their coach. But it might help you begin to imagine the accomplishments that a cohort like this can aim for together on a field of dreams.}

During the late 1990s, when Kirk Varnedoe was the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he volunteered to help Luke, the son of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and a clutch of other City boys eager to learn the game of football on a playing field in Central Park. Since Varnedoe and Gopnik already knew one another from their full-time pursuits, on an extracurricular voyage like this one it was like Odysseus finding his Homer.

In the first 10 minutes, Gopnik realized that great teachers can “de-mystify” a painting as well as an athletic pursuit and that Varnedoe was world-class wherever he exercised his vocation. In fact, Varnedoe’s instincts as a field guide were so strong that he’d considered becoming a football coach after graduating from college, offering this post-mortem some years later on why he’d taken a more high-falutin direction.

if you’re going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.

But of course, the underlying instincts don’t go away, they just get channeled into explaining, say, something as inscrutable as abstract expressionism to the un-convinced, which Varnedoe went on to do in the Mellon Lectures that he gave (to near unanimous acclaim) in the early 2000s at the National Gallery of Art. It was during this same span of years that also brought his de-mystifying abilities back to some 8-year old boys who wanted to explore the mysteries of football.

If your New Yorker subscription will get you over its paywall, you can read “The Last of the Metrozoids” here. You can also subscribe, “get a free tote,” and read it from “the inside” in the same place. Otherwise, you’ll have to trust in my ability to cull some of its best passages from my own torn-out copy of it and to include them here.

Gopnik sets the scene magnificently:

The boys came running from school, excited to have been wearing their Metrozoid T-shirts all day, waiting for practice. Eric and Derek and Ken, good athletes, determined and knowing and nodding brief, been-there-before nods as they chucked the ball around; Jacob and Charlie and Garrett, talking a little too quickly and uncertainly about how many downs you had and how many yards you had to go. Will and Luke and Matthew, very verbal, evangelizing for a game, please, can’t we, like, have a game with another team, right away, we’re ready; and Gabriel, just eager for a chance to get the ball and roll joyfully in the mud. I was curious to see what Kirk would do with them. ‘OK, he said, very gently…’Let’s break it down.’

After returning to basics they could easily swallow, Gopnik says: “They followed him like Israelites.”

What none of the boys knew however was how far back-to-basics they’d need to go before they actually picked up the ball and threw it around, or even learned which way to run. But Varnadoe understood that this game was less about what “you did” and more about what “you all did together.” So he continued by further bringing their enthusiasm to ground.

‘No celebrations,’ he said, arriving at the middle of the field. ‘This is a scrimmage. This is just the first step. We’re all one team. We are the Giant Metrozoids.’ He said the ridiculous name as though it were Fighting Irish…The kids stopped, subdued and puzzled. ‘Hands together,’ he said, and stretched his out, and solemnly the boys laid their hands on his, one after another. ‘One, Two, Three together!’ and all the hands sprang up. He had replaced a ritual of celebration with one of solidarity—and the boys sensed that solidarity was somehow at once more solemn and more fun than any passing victory could be.

Varnadoe also knew that what they were doing there was about more than the game. They’d all come (himself included) as one thing and by the end of their time together would leave as something else, because learning is always about transformation too, from one level of knowledge, appreciation or physicality to another. At this point, Gopnik disclosed the depth of Varnadoe’s own transformation, from a “fat and unimpressive” kid before he’d become a football player in college. About that earlier time Varnadoe said:

You were one kind of person with one kind of body and one set of possibilities, and then you worked at it and you were another. The model was so simple and so powerful that you could apply it to anything…It put your fate in your own hands.

So he endeavored to put the same kind of fate in each of the Metrozoid’s hands.

As the morning progressed, Varnadoe instilled the lesson by drilling the boys down into each step that they’d be taking on this field when they were ready.

He had them do their first play at a walk, 6 times [Gopnik reported from the sidelines], which they clowned about, slow motion when they were inclined to be ‘terrier quick,’ but he still had them do it. Then they ‘ambled through it’ [making the proceedings take on]… a courtly quality, like a seventeenth century dance.

But the boys were beginning to see how the game was a series of basic steps that they could master, and that they needed to know how to do each step slowly before they could speed it up, and certainly before they could combine it with other steps. “You break it down and then you build it back up,” is how Varnedoe put it.

Some of his teaching also involved recognizing that every boy would come to his “de-mystification” differently—some emotionally, some through reasoning, and others more viscerally, through increasing their body awareness. So when circumstances called for it, he’d take, say a kid who seemed afraid of the football, to the side for some one-on-one instruction. But instead of focusing on the kid’s occasional successes and many failures, Gopnik described Varnadoe’s ability to engage the boy’s deeper drives.

When he caught [a ball], Kirk wasn’t too encouraging; when he dropped one he wasn’t too hard. He did not make him think it was easy. He did not make him think that he had done it when he hadn’t. He made him think that he could do it if he chose.

Between the master and his chronicler, “The Last of the Metrozoids” blew me away when I first read it and still blows me away today because there is something almost supernatural about those who know how to build up the capabilities of others, are lucky enough to be captured in the act of doing so, and somewhere down the line, share those bits of magic with the rest of us.

This post was adapted from my March 20, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Deeper Sense of Place is Like an Anchor in Turbulent Times

June 13, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In a much quoted phrase, Rebecca Solnit said that: “Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.”

I tried to track down where Solnit said this, but (apparently) once something that you’ve said becomes “a famous quote” it tends to live in the ether alone, untethered to its origin. But it doesn’t really matter, because so much of Solnit’s writing over the past 30 years has been about what it means to fully inhabit a particular place—like the boat above, locating itself within the present, as well as by longitude and latitude, memory and destination, under the stars and above the depths of the sea.

Solnit is a kind of wandering minstrel and storyteller who rouses her readers into awareness (and even to action—like in Hope in the Dark), by drawing on her own deep engagement with the world. As an observer of turn-of-the-century life, she has written field guides that almost anyone who has read them seems to want to follow.

These field guides embody what Solnit means by Sense of Place: a lived experience that includes the present time, memories and dreams about particular pasts and futures, along with the stories of others who share the experience of those places with you.

Why does this almost cosmic sense of geo-location matter? Maybe it’s because we’re so unmoored today, with facts themselves in flux, mobs at war with one another, and 24/7 cycles of news and social media commentary that usually gravitate towards the “unsettling” while failing to put “what’s being blared about” into any kind of meaningful context.

As it becomes harder to find perspective or comfort–a useful frame for lived experience–it’s always possible for us to sink down deeper and more nurturing roots and to gaze into more promising horizons by the conscious act of locating our living and working within the rich variables of the particular places where they unfold.

Rebecca Solnit helped me to do this in a very specific way a couple of years ago. Among her many writings are a series of travel books about U.S. cities she’s been drawn to (like San Francisco and New York) and they include her insights about them along with telling points of view from others like local musicians, autobiographers, oral historians and weather experts. Each of these storylines is accompanied by detailed maps that follow each angle or interest from actual place to actual place in these cities. So before I returned to New Orleans two years ago, I took her Unfathomable City: a New Orleans Atlas (with all its maps and previews of coming attractions) with me.

Here she is, writing (with her co-author) about their intentions for this book in its opening essay:

We have mapped New Orleans and its surroundings twenty-two times, sometimes with two or more subjects [or areas of interest] per map, but we have not drained the well with these few bucketloads.

Instead we hope we have indicated how rich and various, how inexhaustible is this place, and any place, if you look at it directly and through books, conversations, maps, photographs, dreams and desires.

One of these extraordinary maps eventually brought me to New Orleans’ “cities of the dead” and, more particularly, to Holt Cemetery, which is the City’s potter’s field (or place where those who can’t afford a traditional burial, put their loved ones into the ground). I included a picture essay about my visit there in a 2019 post called A Living Rest. From her field guide, I discovered that local families have picnics at the gravesites, refreshing them with flowers, momentos and messages as they honor and continue to correspond with their family members for months and even years.

Solnit has not written a travel book about Philadelphia, but her curiosity led me to a potter’s field closer to home at a time when a disproportionate number of my neighbors were dying unvaccinated and a charitable corner of Chelten Hills Cemetery seemed to be exploding with activity every time I passed by.

In Same World Different Stories from a couple of months ago, I posted pictures from Chelten Hills potter’s field and talked about how that visit and what I took away from it deepened my appreciation of the place where I live, while at the same time it got me thinking about my own mortality and how it will be marked in the ground and on other peoples’ memories.

_{This picture shows how a Gingko’s fan-shaped leaves turn yellow just before, in a mad rush, they drop down all at once- like a loose pair of pants.}

Another sense-of-place marker for me is the Gingko tree that nestles in the armpit of a majestic Tulip next to my house.

Before we get to his sense of the extraordinary place where he currently resides (below), novelist Richard Powers wrote memorably about trees in general, and about Gingko trees in particular, in The Overstory, a book that won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction two years ago:

Adam looks and sees just this: a tree he has walked past three times a week for seven years. It’s the lone species of the only genus in the sole family in the single order of the solitary class remaining in a now–abandoned division that once covered the earth—a living fossil three hundred million years old that disappeared from the continent back in the Neogene….
The fruit flesh has a smell that curdles thought; the pulp kills even drug-resistant bacteria. The fan-shaped leaves with their radiating veins are said to cure the sickness of forgetting. Adam doesn’t need the cure. He remembers. He remembers. Gingko. The maidenhair tree….
Its leaves leap out sideways in the wind…. It falls from one moment to the next, the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered. A gust of air, some last fluttered objection, and all the veined fans let go at once, releasing a flock of golden telegrams down West Fourth Street.

In this single tree, Powers conjures familiarity (“he has walked past [it] three times a week for seven years”); its deep roots in time (“back to the Neogene”); its awful and magical properties (“a smell that curdles thought” while it’s “said to cure the sickness of forgetting”); its mythical moniker (“the maidenhair tree”) and perhaps its greatest trick (“the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered”).

I now recall all of those things when I walk under the dual archway of Tulip and Gingko on the northwest edge of my house as it marks the season’s time every year in my own particular place.

It depends on when it’s cold enough, or cold enough for long enough, or when it gets subsurface signals from the Tulip that presides over everything that lives under its massive canopy that the time has come for your leaves to fall.

How will Philadelphia’s warming, its longer “Indian Summers,” effect the great drop when it finally happens in a month or so? I want to be ready, because in most previous years, I’ve tried to stand below its rain of yellow softness, as soft as this because none of its leaves have lost their cooling moisture yet and their skin still feels supple, a light kind of velvet. They’ll blanket me (and sometimes Wally) with everything below them in a shag rug of Asian fans. Nothing else feels quite like it.

The Gingko that lives here is a time piece, but not of the 24-hour variety. It has some deeper, environmental clock in the complicated network where it lives. This time of year, I keep some of my time by it too.

_{We’re hard-wired to navigate through space and time too.}

M.R. O’Connor’s Wayfinding: the Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (2019) looks to neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how our ability to navigate through space and time gives us an essential part of our humanity. But before climbing the evolutionary ladder to our human ancestors, she begins by discussing the extraordinary geo-location and time-keeping abilities of migrating birds and animals.

For example, humpback whales can travel thousands of miles before returning to the inlet or estuary where they were born. Bird species like flycatchers, blackcaps and buntings appear to adjust their flight patterns to the pole star when flying at night. Honeybees may visit hundreds of far-flung flowers during their miles of daily travel but still manage to find their way back to their hives by nightfall. Some dung beetles, desert spiders and cricket frogs have been found to use stars in the Milky Way like a compass. As O’Connor recounts, nearly every insect, bird and animal that’s been tested has demonstrated the ability to orient itself to the earth’s geomagnetic fields.

Humans have retained some of these capabilities to navigate through space and time while (sadly) allowing others to atrophy, because like all capabilities they require regular use and exercise. The “wayfaring” of O’Connor’s book title comes from American psychologist James Gibson, who used the word as a kind of informal shorthand for spatial navigation. “There [is] no separation between mind and environment, between perceiving and knowing,” Gibson wrote. “Wayfinding [is] a way that we directly perceive and involves the real-time coupling of perception and movement.”

To read O’Connor’s book is to find out about the remarkable navigational abilities of tribal peoples like the Inuit of Arctic Canada, the Australian Aborigines, and the native peoples of the Marshall Islands and Hawaii who learn to navigate thousands of miles of featureless ocean without maps or modern technologies. Their skills could be our skills if we made the effort to develop them.

We find our extraordinary sense of place through the integrative functions of our brain’s hippocampus, which enables us to “locate ourselves” through various points of view, prior experiences, memories of traumatic and nurturing events as well as by recognizing our goals and desires. Particularly while we’re asleep, the hippocampus helps to organize where we’ve been and hope to navigate tomorrow into a meaningful and sustaining narrative. Key to these inner workings may be the time-and-space orientations that we first developed as children, with early home life exerting a disproportionate influence on how comfortably we navigate the rest of our lives. O’Connor writes:

Often the places we grow up in have an outsized influence on us. They influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us — they are our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we can relate to and identify with others.

These formative influences give us the perspectives that we use to test all new points-of-view. They show us (or never quite manage to teach us) how to navigate romance or office politics, how to encounter a stranger or weather a global pandemic. Towards the end of her book, O’Connor gets almost poetic while discussing the navigational aptitudes that we either nurtured at an early age or can learn to nurture today from deep within the temporal lobe of our evolutionary brains and out into the big, wide world around us.

Navigating becomes a way of knowing, familiarity, and fondness. It is how you can fall in love with a mountain or a forest. Wayfinding is how we accumulate treasure maps of exquisite memories.

Building our wayfinding capabilities can enable us to deepen our sense of place and to take more satisfaction from life as well as work by becoming more alive to the places where they’re located.

_{Mist, moss and branches that are busy returning to earth in an old growth forest.}

While Richard Power’s The Overstory is about our external interactions with the natural world and our attempts to re-establish a restorative kinship with it, his new book, called Bewilderment,, is about the internal changes that need to occur in us if we’re ever to “come to our senses” and avoid an environmental catastrophe.

In this flipside of his earlier story, Powers uses his skills as a storyteller and student of science to show the impacts that the natural and social environments around us—that is, how the deep sense that each of us nurtures in the places we inhabit—can transform not only our personal well-being but also our collective ability to champion the health of the natural world for its own sake and for the sake of our interdependence with it.

To illustrate his ambition, Powers refers to a structural metaphor in a sweeping conversation he had with Ezra Klein 12 days ago in The New York Times. In the same way that “[we] shape our buildings and ever afterwards they shape us,” building our sense of place could change much that ails us today while preserving the restorative balances of our natural environments.

For example, Powers recounts how he moved, fairly recently, to one of the last places in North America unchanged by human “development,” a patch of old growth forest in the Smoky Mountains of Kentucky. He says of that journey:

[W]hen you stumble across an 1,100 or 1,200-year-old tree that’s as wide as a house and as tall as a football field, it puts a different context on your dinner table conversations with humans who are trying to [fend off aging and] escape death.

Untrammeled nature provides a time scale that’s beyond any individual’s concerns about living longer, having new conveniences or consuming one more Amazon delivery.

[W]hen I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different. And I could see how elevated the species count was…. it’s really the first time in my life that I have lived where I live…

In his life before, Powers was always striving to be as productive as possible, “waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of.” But since moving East and publishing The Overstory,

my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
You know, how much has it rained? How high are the rivers going to be? What’s in bloom? What’s fruiting? What animals are going to be at what elevation? And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer….
I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.

For the first time in his life, Powers is sharing his sense of place with the natural world that’s around him. It’s not just a tonic for writers, it’s also a sensation that’s available wherever a sliver of nature is available to enter into a kind of kinship with everyday.

Of course for Powers, it’s not just the birds, animals, insects, trees and plants in this magical place, it’s also the people he can influence and collaborate with in his noble (or quixotic) quest for both inward and outward-facing transformation. In other words, what he’s selling is not only for those who will read and be changed by his books, it’s also to mobilize his fellow conservationists so that one day every one of us might be able to amplify the kinds of personal benefits that find Powers thriving in an old growth forest.

The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert [an environmental] disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
And that’s an almost impossible persuasion [or rose-colored mindset] to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. [But] I think the one hopeful thing about the present [moment] is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing…. [I believe] there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades, where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.

In The Overstory and Bewilderment, we are invited to enter the “contraption” of two books that transform us while we read them. In different ways, each of them show us how enabling an external sense of place reinforces the same qualities that we use internally to organize time, space, memory and hope for the future. Powers’ genius is to argue that when the bond is strengthened like this, we’ll finally be able to start caring for the natural world as much as we’re caring for ourselves.

I’ve written about “sense of place” in other posts recently. Here are some links if you want to check them out for the first time or revisit them again: Technology Is Changing Us (how reliance on navigational technologies like GPS—that give us directions and destinations but no relational context—are causing us to lose, through disuse, capabilities that were once hardwired into being human); A Movie’s Gorgeous Take on Time, Place, Loss & Gain (The Dig is a story about using the history and experience of a particular place to bring what its inhabitants need most into the future that they most want); and Embodied Knowledge That’s Grounded in the Places Where We Live and Work (learning from people who are living and working on the edge of degraded environments so we also can start to embody some of the physical knowledge they have been gaining in order to survive in the years to come).

This post was adapted from my October 10, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Bringing a Child Into a World Like This

April 26, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

_{(photo by Issac Quesade/Unsplash)}

Is having a child today—or a grandchild—an expression of fervent hope or an involuntary invitation that you’re handing down to someone who’s unable to refuse it?

It’s a fair question, relating to what are (perhaps) our first jobs: as parents, as caregivers, as either believers or non-believers in the world to come.

Because every newborn is an embodiment of hope, our answers make us grapple with the future as we see it today.

These days, Tomorrowland is no longer the Jetsons flying cars from their open-to-the-sky houses with friendly robots inside, impossibly dressed as maids. Today, it seems closer to Cormac McCarthy’s survivalist The Road or last year’s best picture contender, the farcical Don’t Look Up–harsh and cruel on the one hand, shallow and in-denial on the other.

I’d briefly thrown this question out to you before. That post was in the summer of 2017, years before a pandemic disrupted daily life, environmental collapse was something other than science fiction, or we had a 24/7 view of annihilation in a peace-loving country that often looked surprisingly like our own.

Even if you keep shutting off the news for the sake of your sanity, the brain still completes its gloomy pictures. But then we’re reminded, there have been victories too: those nurses in the terrible breach, that rebound in the numbers of whales plying our oceans, those Ukrainians serenading their fleeing breathern with folk songs and accordions in train stations. Bleak with shafts of sunlight I’d call it, but as the tribulation (a biblical word) piles on, still bleaker than it seemed only five years ago when people were already asking: “What if you decide to bring a child into this world? What do you owe her?”

Before reaching for the bottle, perspective helps. This is neither the first nor will it be the last time that the future looks bleak. In 1891, almost 25 years before the catastrophe of World War I, Oscar Wilde did what great artists always do. He looked out and realized that something was tragically missing in a world that was already marching off to war amidst destructive new technologies and social upheavals, with callow leaders and millions of oblivious bystanders along for the ride. As far as Wilde could tell, no one seemed to be envisioning a better world any more, even though that’s the only world any sane person should want to be heading towards. As he said at the time:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always heading.

Isn’t utopia the future that we want for our children? Not some nostalgic past that never really existed but a sustainable place with wiser leaders, where humanity is enhanced by its technologies instead of subjugated by them, where we flourish by celebrating our common humanity instead of preying on one another. But none of us will ever reach such of place unless we can imagine it first.

One of my favorite writers is Michael Chabon (check out his marvelous Moonglow if you’ve somehow missed it) and I happened upon an essay of his this week where he (like Wilde before him) looked around, shortly after the turn of a different century, and noticed that something was terribly missing. His queries around “what that was exactly” were prompted by his discovery of an audaciously hopeful scheme that had been launched some time before. It was called the Clock of the Long Now. A tee-up to Chabon’s essay on Longreads described the powerful response that a few visionaries had made to “a disappearing future”:

One of the grandest gestures toward imagining the future is the Clock of the Long Now. Originally conceived by inventor, computer scientist, and Disney Imagineering fellow Danny Hillis, and expected to cost in the tens of millions of dollars, the clock is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Besides being a tremendous feat of engineering, it’s also a tremendous statement of faith — building it is a bet that there will be humans around over the next 10 millennia to hear its bells ring.

To Chabon, the Clock of the Long Now seemed a utopian commitment, not to a destination on a map but to something that feels just as bold today: that we, our children and our children’s children actually have “a Long Now” stretching before us.

As Chabon quickly understood, the point of this invention was not to measure our passage of time into an unknown future or to celebrate the strange race of creatures that built it. No, it had little to do with our time-keeping or technical wizzardry. “The point of the Clock,” he writes, “is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future.”

‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without….
Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?

No, we probably can’t—or think we can’t. But the Clock of the Long Now wants to recover that loss, quite literally, as an emblem of belief in horizons that extend beyond the screens that we’re holding in our hands and their always-in-the-present diversions.

Chabon laments that Americans (as a culture and a country) are no longer caught between the poles of “the bright promise and the bleak menace.” Now (and he wrote this 15 years ago) we seem to have mostly the latter and little of the former. I think it’s one reason why we’ve been so gobsmacked by the nobility of Ukraine’s resistance in the face of barbarism—all of these people (where did they come from?) so full of “the promise” in spite of “the menace.”

Asking similar questions, he ends up thinking about his young son, with a tremendous sadness, given how different Chabon’s own speculations about The Future had been when he was that age:

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

So in response, Chabon tells his son about the Clock of the Long Now, and while he did so his son “listened very carefully” before asking, “Will there really be people then, Dad,” ten thousand years from now? “’Yes,’ I told him without hesitation, ‘there will,” [although, to himself] I don’t know if that’s true.” Chabon confirmed this Truth to his boy because he felt that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. “[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now.”

Just think about that for a minute. What you believe, what you hope, and how you’d answer that child, who embodies “a far longer now” than you do, when she begins to wonder about what lies ahead.

Doomsday scenarios around climate catastrophe have lent a powerful sense of urgency to questions around giving birth or refusing to do so. If what’s ahead are more devastating floods, wildfires, famines, mass migrations, ferocious competitions over scarce resources, and increasing strife among nations, it sometimes appears that all we have to look forward to is an even more Hobbsian world of tooth and claw–and no place for children.

In my own travels through this quandary, I couldn’t help but notice that there are hundreds of articles out there trying to find the “fairness” to future children in our having them today, with most concluding that we should forego childbearing altogether. In particular, these debates have been catnip for philosophers, with one in The New Republic (“Is It Cruel To Have Kids In the Era of Climate Change”) beginning his take on it this way:

In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what ‘the best thing of all for men’ is. ‘The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,’ Silenus replies: ‘not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.’

If that were in fact true it would simplify matters enormously, not only for those of us who are here now but for all the rest who might be coming. But is it really this black and white?

In a different essay, another philosopher (who specializes in the “ethics and metaphysical issues regarding birth, death and meaning”) invites us to weigh the plausible (as opposed to existential) risks that are facing both us and that future child.

Against “the near-certain” threat of a “global warming apocalypse” today, she recalls the failed predictions of Thomas Malthus in 1798 that a human population boom would outstrip the world’s food supply (“Imagine if everyone decided to stop having children back then to avoid the ‘inevitable’ famine?), and somewhat more humorously, The London Times’ prediction in 1890 that by 1940 there would be so much manure piling up after the horse drawn carriages that “every street in London would be buried in nine feet of manure.” (“Imagine if people had decided it was wrong to create a child to wade through the muck?”).  As a result, her analysis concludes more equivocally than Silenus’s. Her “tipping point” for the question ‘Is life a worthwhile risk?” is whether or not you happen to believe the climate-related forecasts.

And I suppose to some extent that’s true.  But it leaves us (unhelpfully) in the middle of the climate believer/denier debates, when I think what we need is a sign post that will get us to a more enabling place, to help us decide the matter “in our hearts” (if you will), that brings us to a stand that’s more embedded in human nature than in risk analysis as we consider whether “bringing a child into a world like this” is justifiable.

Which brings us back to Nietzche.  Because, as the New Republic essayist eventually tell us, the great German philosopher didn’t agree with the answer that the satyr Silenus gave to King Midas. In Nietzche’s worldview, you should never wish that you hadn’t been born, nor should you refuse to bring children into the world because of the miserable state in which you currently find it.

To some extent, this is because living has always involved both tragedy and triumph. Only today, amidst the cosseting and complacency of a society as rich as ours do we seem to have forgotten this basic tension in our existence. (Before Nietzche and long before Amazon and the Metaverse believing people called these deeply human realities “sin” and “grace.”)

So the Nietzche readers among you will also recall his “Will to Life,” his “triumphant Yes” to the question of human existence, his “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest of problems.” To be human is always to struggle to find ways to affirm the force of our lives in the full knowledge that death is also roaming among us.

That’s maturity. That’s what every parent who should be a parent understands.

As they make it “their own work” to fight against what’s unfair and unacceptable, these parents teach their children by their examples, standing right there alongside of them as their kids learn how to do the same thing.

These parents believe in The Future, which is why they answer “Yes” (without hesitating) when they’re asked, “Will there be a future ten thousand years from now?” even though we can never be sure. That hope is always tentative, contingent, and we’re big enough to handle its uncertainties.

All that good parents can be sure of is that they’ll be standing next to that child while he or she begins to claim his or her part of it, that no child in this family will ever have to face The Future alone. Likewise, it’s a standing-on-shoulders legacy that can continue as long as the young and their nurturers are giving a “triumphant Yes” to whatever tomorrow holds in the overlapping work of their lives.

Yes!, even when our streets are clogged with nine feet of sh*t and the warm sun of springtime has just come out.

This post was adapted from my April 24, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any of them by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Instant History of the Past Week in Ukraine

March 7, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, we’ve all seen the pictures of mothers with their children and old people fumbling in distress in Ukraine—to leave the bombing, to find refuge.

Maybe because they cut so close to the bone and because we’ve seen so many similar images from Syria, Greek islands, Afghanistan and Myanmar, our early warning systems kick in and we become numb before they can sink their teeth into us too deeply.

But we’re less likely to shut ourselves down when events fall outside familiar grooves, not “more victims/different country” but something it’s harder to recall seeing: like those clips of Ukrainian men (and more than a few boys) who’d been living safely in Europe but left their families, friends and jobs behind to board buses and trains for their homeland this week, drawn by some quixotic but irresistible impulse, even though they never held rifles before, had been warned away by their country’s on-going destruction, and knew they might never survive their rescue attempts.

We couldn’t take our eyes off uncommon valor like that, or stop wondering what we might do in their shoes.

When poet Stephen Spender recalled similar impulses almost a hundred years ago, it wasn’t a fool’s errand in a jaded eye but the fragrant whispers of a flowering nobility that he captured.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
(“The Truly Great,” 1928)

It shows how far we’ve come (or fallen) that the perfume of greatness seems so unfamiliar today, but also through the magic of our technology that it somehow got embodied by these heroes on our news screens this week.

Who fights for one’s country these days? Who leaves so much behind to step into the jaws of the beast in a vain or noble attempt to stop it from closing? Observers like us in the West saw and felt what Spender was describing this week.

And we couldn’t take our eyes off of it. It surprised, maybe embarrassed us, as we confronted our own convictions or their shallowness. But while those closest in, the French, Germans or Poles, wondered whether they’d do the same, they also looked to their fears as a world of ordered boundaries was upended. The unthinkable Bear at the door was all too thinkable now.

Exactly one week ago, as a result of the West’s changed perceptions about Ukraine and the heroism of its president and people, several “historic” things happened. I’d call it a kind of awakening. And while it usually takes the perspective of 20 or 50 or even 100 years to decide “what just happened,” I was persuaded—by sharing the perspective of an economic historian from Columbia and his interlocutor—that several developments in recent weeks really did change the historical arc that we’ve been traveling on. We realized certain things, made some momentous decisions as a result, and implemented them with lightening speed and lethal effect. As a result, I’m persuaded that nothing that follows will ever be the same as it was only a few short days ago.

In addition to the obvious pitfalls of writing an “instant history of the past week,” there are some advantages.

Informed historical judgments can place the rush of on-going events in a broader context. They can put characters like Putin, Zelensky and Biden, themes like sanctions, supply chains and energy interdependence, into a story that tries to make sense of its sub-plots.

And you don’t have to buy-in completely to this kind of storytelling. Instead, you can use such explanations as hypotheses to be proven or disproven by whatever happens next on the world’s stage. But this time you bring with you a few suspicions that you’ve almost nailed down.

_{Ukrainian civilians confront a convoy of Russian troops this week in a vain but valiant attempt to turn them back.}

I became interested in the explanations of history in college. Not as a professional interest but as a continuing sidelight that’s has made me follow “the world news” everyday and always wonder what it meant.

I took a course that became three courses about the sweep of historical events and I was hooked: trying to answer questions like “what explains” a Napoleon or a Hitler, or how “the Black Death” in Europe undermined feudalism? (The beginning of an answer to this last one: by helping increasingly scarce laborers to appreciate their economic value.)

I took this interest into what seemed to me the historic events of my lifetime. Globally, it was the end of the Cold War, the recent pandemic. (Why did they happen? What would follow?) And from a more localized, American perspective: the cultural shifts of the Sixties (involving the civil rights of African Americans and women, Earth Day and the environmental movement) and finally, 9/11. It was sometimes possible to see the Before-and-the-After side-by-side because the changes around each one of them were so profound.

A two-part conversation between Ezra Klein, at the New York Times, and Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia, identified similarly transformative moments around the recent invasion of Ukraine. (This paywall-free link is to both a transcript of their exchange and a recording of their conversation.) It was compelling that Part-One of their get-together occurred almost immediately Before and Part-Two immediately After the unprecedented response to the invasion by a startlingly unified West last Sunday. Klein called Tooze back this past Monday to reflect on events that neither of them had predicted just nine days before.

I’ve separated my summary of their observations in Part One from the comments they made in Part Two of their conversation. Taken together, I’d argue that five historic changes either happened or can be confirmed around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past several days.

PART ONE OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (FRIDAY FEBRUARY 25)

1. A Western-Liberal illusion was shattered.

Once Russian military forces crossed the Ukrainian border and invaded its sovereign neighbor, it was no longer possible to believe that the benefits of international peace, finance, law, trade and cultural exchange would outweigh national grievances and territorial imperatives that lingered from a previous age. No invading army had crossed a national border for 50 years. It could no longer be assumed that the mutual advantages of a global “community,” following an ideological Cold War with the West, would constrain either Russia’s desire to expand its sphere of influence against the constraints of NATO along its eastern flank or China’s claims on Taiwan or over the South China Sea to the beaches of Japan, the Phillipines and Vietnam.

Russia’s seizing of Russian-speaking Crimea and support of “breakaway “republics” in the Donbas region of Ukraine had not been enough to dispel the West’s illusion that all nations shared its dream of global prosperity and harmony. Neither had China’s subversion of Hong Kong, in violation of its 50-year treaty with the UK, or trade sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. But those rose-colored glasses finally shattered when Russia marched into Ukraine.

Tooze and Klein saw foreshadowing from Russia and China around 2008, after Russia had recovered from the economic devastation following the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s and China pivoted from the Beijing Summer Olympics to the rise of a Xi Jinping. Back then, both China and Russia started chaffing publically about the dominance of the global framework that had been established by the U.S. and Europe a half century before. After the Russian invasion 10 days ago, the West could no longer operate on the assumption that free trade, open communications, and the greater prosperity of home populations would make Russia and China “just like us,” freer, more open and democratic. The world is divided again, less because of communist ideology and more because of national aspirations that cannot be denied.

2. Russia and China effectively used the West’s open, global framework of trade and finance to build “war chests” that could enable them to resist the West’s dominance within their geographical “spheres of influence.”

Since its near financial collapse in the 1990s, and particularly after the sanctions that followed its seizure of Crimea in 2014, Russia used its access to the international banking system to build its financial reserves through its energy and natural resource sales, reduce its dependence on foreign currencies like the dollar or Euro, and make itself more impervious to external interference, including economic sanctions. (Adam Tooze discusses the financial games that Russia played at length if you want to read more about them.) For its part, China also used free trade and access to a global financial system to enrich and strengthen itself at the West’s expense. Once again, wrapped in the illusion described above, the West was slow to appreciate the negative consequences that came with what it believed was “its benevolent dominance.”

3. Supply-chain security involving critical materials becomes a central feature of every country’s defense policy.

As a consequence of #1 and #2, the interdependence of energy and semi-conductor markets (to take just two examples), impose limits on Western sanction regimes and make the future take-over of a country like Taiwan (which leads the world in the production of semi-conductors) even more fraught. Only a couple of years ago, few observers in the West were concerned about these supply constraints and the necessity of home-grown accessibility to critical products and resources.

These three changes in Western perception all hardened with the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, as recently as last weekend most observers believed that the invasion would quickly overwhelm its resistance, that Europe would continue to tolerate unpredictability around Russian energy supplies, and that Russia’s economic interdependence with Europe (i.e. the benefits of prosperity all-around) would continue to keep Europe safe and secure.

As a consequence, the West’s initial responses to the invasion—which had been telegraphed for weeks—“meant to sanction Russia, to cause pain to the country and particularly to its ruling class, but not to crack its economy, not to cause undue harm to their own economies, which are interwoven with Russia’s,” as Klein described it.

Then last Sunday, perhaps after viewing a week of Ukraine’s brave civilian resistance, watching its nationals return to fight, its grandmothers face tanks, and listening to the eloquent pleas of its president to NATO, the EU and the US, the West was ready to make even more fundamental departures with its past.

_{Throughout the invasion, Zelensky has maintained regular video contact with the people of Ukraine and the world outside, bolstering not only Ukrainian morale but also summoning Western solidarity and resolve that had never existed before.}

PART TWO OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (ON MONDAY MARCH 1)

4. The West declares economic war against another nation for the first time since World War II.

Last Sunday, the EU and US announced economic sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank and virtually all of its other financial institutions in a bid to bring the country to its economic knees as the punishing cost for its invasion of Ukraine. It’s an economic war that’s not only been brought to Russia’s leader and the oligarchs behind him. It’s an economic war that is likely to have devastating and long-lasting consequences for the Russia’s 145 million people. Adam Tooze:

[W]e are now applying Iran-style treatment to not just a nuclear power, [but to] the number two nuclear power in the world, the old Cold War antagonist, in the middle of an active shooting war in which we are taking sides [and] in which they are not making the progress they expect. And we are threatening by this means to deliver a devastating blow to their home front. I mean, panic in the streets, total disruption of the ordinary lives of tens of millions of Russians.

Today, every American going to the grocery store or looking for a used car is worried about price inflation. But in one fell swoop, the Western sanctions implemented by a united West on Sunday launched “a full out economic war” with far more profound “inflationary” consequences for every person who relies on the ruble to live day-to-day. Coupled with the EU’s unprecedented decision to send military arms to Ukraine (and Germany’s reversal of its earlier refusal to do so), Tooze accurately analogized these counterstrikes to the aggressive American posture immediately before it entered World War II (with its Lend Lease program in support of its European allies). Indeed, it was enough of a body-blow that Putin put his country on nuclear alert immediately thereafter. One result is that a nuclear war, unthinkable just a week ago, is today more of a possibility than it has been for over 35 (and maybe 60) years, depending on how you calculated the Soviet threat level in 1985 and 1960.

It doesn’t take boots on the ground to go to war today. While the West is struggling mightily to avoid a larger conflagration, the economic war it has launched is real and its consequences deep and possibly irreversible. And instead of taking weeks or months to mount, this kind of war began almost instantaneously, impacting a global network of trade, insurance and currency exchange fine-tuned to global disruptions that are far more modest than this invasion.

But another way to assess the damage is from the perspective of the average Russian. According to one report this week, “the fall of the ruble since Russia invaded Ukraine could add 4 to 5 percentage points to Russian inflation, which [already] stood at 8.7% in January.” That’s another order of magnitude reduction in what Russians could buy with their rubles a little more than a week ago. Tooze again:

[T]here is serious reason to worry about lower middle class Russian households [in particular]. They’ve been squeezed hard over the last five, six, seven years. Their incomes have not been going up. They’ve been piling up debt. One of the first things that happened today is the interest rates went to 20 percent. So that’s going to immediately bite into your income. So there is a serious risk here of major economic and social fallout.

We’re talking the destabilization of an entire economy from the ground up.

While it will take the Russian economy some time to “devalue” itself, the impacts on its citizens will escalate in the coming weeks and months with particularly grave consequences for these same lower-income folks who, until now, have been the bulwark of Putin’s “democratic” support. Couple that blow to its citizenry with the escalating costs to the country of an invasion (that was supposed to be over by now) and of fighting a Ukrainian insurgency (if it ever succeeds), and Russia could soon be flirting with the same economic bankruptcy that it faced after the Cold War. And from what Tooze, Klein and others seem to be saying, China either can’t or won’t come to Russia’s rescue.

So however much it is obscured by the daily blizzard of “news” and our other diversions, for the first time in most of our lifetimes, we in the West are on “war-footing,” and have no way of knowing where this confrontation will go next.

A final Before-and-After event also happened last Sunday.

5. The defeated countries in World War II—Germany and Japan—are either bolstering (or considering bolstering) their military capabilities for the first time since they were pacified 75 years ago.

In this regard, Germany announced (in some shame over its lack of preparedness) that it is authorizing an unpredented increase of $110 billion in its defense budget. Moreover, for the first time since its creation, the EU (as a unanimous block of 28 nations) has authorized the delivery of $500 million in weapons to a country that’s not an EU member. This is on top of armaments and military supplies provided by the US and NATO. (The icon of St. Javelin, up top, is Ukraine acknowledging one of America’s most appreciated military contributions, namely the Javelin anti-tank missile.)

Moreover, as China engages in saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Japan is also actively contemplating its rearmament. With these developments, the so-called Pax Americana that was promised after the Cold War but already wobbly before Sunday, was surely dead thereafter.

Five developments that have likely changed the course of modern history.

After the terrible loss of blood and treasure in Afghanistan by many of these same Western countries—economic losses that have yet to be quantified for those of us in these democracies who have covered them—it (sadly) appears that we are off to the same bloody and costly races again, with hardly a pause to take a decent breath.

Of course, the consequences are not only to where the West spends its money but also to where it doesn’t (either because of massive new defense expenditures or the lack of available band-width to consider anything other than national security concerns). For example, how do we also fight a war against global warming and biodiversity loss and on behalf of a habitable planet? Is this battle now, somehow secondary to our survival?

What really happened over the past seven days is that half (or more) of the world suddenly changed its priorities—and it’s not at all clear that in that flash, enough of the citizens of the West have even noticed.

This post was adapted from my March 6, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.