The Gift We Didn't Ask For...

What I would tell the graduates this year: Fellow mortals and sensitive bipeds out there, grappling with the pains of existence and the current lousy job market, I come with more words of advice for you which may at first glance seem overly sober and lugubrious... please don't blame me, though, I'm just the messenger here. This isn't much - I know - but it's all I have on the spur of the moment (I'm not getting paid for this) and besides, it's a topic that I predict you'll keep coming back to in the days ahead: Whatever else you take away from this special moment, please remember as you go forth, today, mindful of various blessings and advantages you have received along the way, that attached to every one of us is some unwanted and unasked-for circumstance, some dreaded fateful condition, an obstacle, a hindrance, an albatross, a curse, a blight, a wretched hassle, a wound, a hurt - something that we're stuck with for the long haul, something that gets in our way, makes us upset, keeps us vulnerable, adds to our insecurity, gives us reason to feel cheated, to feel handicapped, goes against our most cherished agendas of survival, success and prosperity in life. It might just be an obvious physical blemish, a mental quirk, a flaw in temperament, a cognitive deficit in some obscure area,  a personality glitch (shyness, anyone?), a traumatic memory, a shift in fortune, a bad year, a lost decade, a troubled sibling or problematic parent, an extended dysfunctional family or inauspicious cultural climate (feeling like we were born in the wrong decade or century). We carry it around with us and it marks us for life; it grates upon our nerves because it's like some alien presence, an unexpected guest, an unwanted care-package, this random prosthetic to our otherwise normal physique, this fly in our daily soup that continuously spoils the feast - bringing us back to the lingering question of how things might have been - if only we had not been strapped with IT. And the problem in a nutshell is very simple - what to do about "the gift that we didn't ask for" - to view it as a weird, unexpected blessing-in-disguise from the great beyond or to use it as our ongoing Exhibit A of "more sinned against than sinning." How many of us carry around this familiar rock, for years and years, never knowing quite what to do with it, where to put it, how to hide it, what to make of it, until IT drags us down several notches from where we expected to be; or else we run from it, pursuing alternative scenarios where such afflictions cannot exist (!), generating as we go oodles of new commotion and chaos around ourselves designed to overshadow IT, to deny that it's really there. So much of life is taken up with responding (somewhat negatively, I must add) to what we didn't choose and never in a million years would have requested voluntarily. But there you have it. Even at this very late date in human history, when it seems that we should finally have gotten all our wishes met, given that the weight of nature, tradition and large institutions has been lifted from our backs, even now, how absurdly difficult it remains to do away with these sources of discontent...troubles that we can't run away from... which has the effect of forcing us to question, to turn back upon ourselves, to inquire as to what kind of creatures we really are (aside from all the hype and self-promotion), what strange entities capable of intense frustration, regret and self-conscious misery. And so graduates, I end my little jeremiad by telling you in advance that, although there is no solution to this awful package, and that even pharmaceuticals, sensuality and rock-and-roll can't reverse the trend, nevertheless, the good news is, if there is any, that what seems like the biggest downer - the source of isolation, frustration, alienation, angst, sadness, resignation, despair and whatever else we go to the doctor to complain about, is for some lucky mortals out there, also a source of the most sublime healing power. Who knows how and who knows why, but  there are actually some who know how transform their hurt into advantage, their weakness into strength - these cherished few among us who keep us afloat,  keep us inspired by their example - not of ease but of hardship. We admire the people most whose lives we would ourselves never wish for.  So when you bump into one of these enlightened ones during your journey, be sure to ask them what their secret is - how they turned lead into gold - knowing that they share the same wounds as you - different in form and content surely - but the similar as to genus - that of the unasked-for gift.

Another Rainy Day

Another rainy day in the forecast. Squirming like a catawba worm. Looking up words in the dictionary. Impatience. Agitation. Disquietude. Boredom. Tedium. Monotony. Doldrums. Lassitude. Lethargy. Ennui. Fatigue. Yawning. Weltschmerz. Frustration. Petulance. Peevishness. Turbulence. Unrest. Irritability. Annoyance. Discontent. Vexation. Resentment. Insomnia. Jitters. Cabin Fever.

Why did Jonathan Franzen Criticize Edith Wharton?

I'm somewhat baffled that Mr. Franzen chose to "go after" Edith Wharton in a recent New Yorker article. Any thoughts on that? Anyone?

Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

"What Franzen is getting at is the concept of being "islanded," the notion that — no matter what — we are on our own, all the time. This is among his fascinations; there's a reason his first essay collection was called "How to Be Alone." In that sense, all of it — from the kid in that car to the teenager wandering New York to the birder on Robinson Crusoe's island — is of a piece with David Foster Wallace and even Neil Armstrong: isolated dots of consciousness in a capricious universe, trying to find a point of real connection before time runs out. "The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking," Franzen acknowledges, but in the end, it is the counter-argument that lingers, even (or especially) when it leaves us exposed." - David L. Ulin (from a recent LA Times book review)

Vancouver B.C.

Behold the great northwest! The photograph says it all.

Helicopter Parents and Today's Youth

"My own view remains predictably twisty, fraught, and disloyal. Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an "adult" life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning. The process will be different for every person. I have my own inspirational cast of characters in this regard, a set of willful, heroic self-orphaners, past and present, whom I continue to revere: Mozart, the musical child prodigy who successfully rebelled against his insanely grasping and narcissistic father (Leopold Moz art), who for years shopped him around the courts of Europe as a sort of family cash cow; Sigmund Freud, who, by way of unflinching self-analysis, discovered that it was possible to love and hate something or someone at one and the same time (mothers and fathers included) and that such painfully "mixed emotion" was also inescapably human; Virginia Woolf, who in spite of childhood loss, mental illness, and an acute sense of the sex-prejudice she saw everywhere around her, not only forged a life as a great modernist writer, but made her life an incorrigibly honest and vulnerable one.

In a journal entry from 1928 collected in A Writer's Diary, Woolf wrote the following (long after his death) about her brilliant, troubled, well-meaning, tyrannical, depressive, enormously distinguished father—Sir Leslie Stephen, model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and one of the great English "men of letters" of the 19th century:

Father's birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one had known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books—inconceivable...

The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family—not to mention the mind-warping digitalization of everyday life—usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches—has taught me at least—is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance, the "making strange" of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom."
- Terry Castle, from Don't Pick Up: Why Kids Need to Separate from their Parents (in the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education)

Seattle

Seattle is one of those cities that really tugs at one's imagination - there in the Pacific Northwest at the edge of the continent, beckoning for strangers and new arrivals like my Irish grandfather, who settled there as a dispatcher for the fire department. Memories of lush greenery, dense foliage, intense trees, leaves, ferns, hilly streets, urban fish markets, marvelous skyscrapers, harbor views,  ferry boats, and yes, rain. Don't get me started on Vancouver, B.C. I love that place too...