Which Side Are You On?

When I went to work in my fields [following his marriage], I worked with more alacrity and sprightliness. I felt that I did not work for myself alone, and this encouraged me much. My wife would often come with her knitting in her hand, and sit under the shady tree, praising the straightness of my furrows and the docility of my horses. This swelled my heart and made every thing light and pleasant, and I regretted that I had not married before. I felt myself happy in my new situation, and where is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer…? 

-  J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer

Crevecoeur, an Anglicized Frenchman (born Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur -- and I apologize for not having the proper accent mark available to me on the program I'm using), initially began his New World life in Canada, fighting under General Montcalm until the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham. Then, resigning his commission, he traveled through New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. In New York he was naturalized as a British subject and also adopted into the Oneida tribe as an honorary member. He married Mehitabel Tippett in 1769 and spent the following seven years happily farming and raising a family at home, Pine Hill, cultivating friends among his Hudson Valley neighbors, and traveling. 

But his very name — “broken heart” — perhaps presaged what was to come in the author’s life. Count seven years ahead from 1769. Crevecoeur felt himself thoroughly “American,” but to him that meant being a loyal subject of the English king. 

Susan Manning, who edited and wrote the very scholarly introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Letters from an American Farmer, calls the work “a book about identity — specifically American identity — struggling into being.” 

The book that took shape in the years before and during the American Revolution embodies the personal crisis induced by momentous political events. It is at once the fullest literary expression of America’s coming into being … and a moving exploration of the meaning of ‘revolution’ in the personality of any previously established self. 

- Susan Manning

It is easy for us to see the march of history exclusively in broad strokes: migrations, social change, important primary source documents (e.g., in this case, the Declaration of Independence), battles, treaties, etc. What gives Letters from an American Farmer its importance is not only that it was written at all and widely published but that it is a record of one man’s emotions, passions, and responses to the larger events which engulfed his life. We occasionally ask ourselves what we would have done in such-and-such a place in such-and-such a time period. More often we judge the actions of individuals in the past, forgetting to imagine ourselves in their shoes. But there is no possibility of forgetting the man and his family as we read Crevecoeur’s Letters, an epistolary-literary account of real people caught up in world-changing events beyond their control. 

So the Letters constitute a much-neglected American classic, but reading it now, during the COVID-19 crisis, when not only the United States of America but the entire world is struggling and looking for ways to maintain a semblance of normal life and find a way forward while also doing everything possible to avoid contagion in the present and “flatten the curve” (the rising curve of numbers of people infected with the virus), a year that is also an important election year in the U.S., I find added resonance in Crevecoeur’s cries of anguish.

Throughout the early Letters, the author idealizes the American experience and work ethic, particularly that of English and Scottish colonists. (Irish, not so much.) Farmers work hard and bring forth the land’s bounty, while fisherman on Nantucket and Cape Code brave the ocean to harvest subsistence and, for some, even wealth. He is full of admiration for the modest Quaker way of life but paints a picture of religious tolerance, with families of diverse faiths living side by side without acrimony. He admires also the Native Americans, calling their manners “respectable,” in sharp contrast to some of the rude European pioneers along the frontier, who live in “sloth and inactivity.” Those “back-settlers,” he remarks reprovingly, are much more in need of conversion than the Indians. But in general, he presents life along the Eastern Seaboard, on its farms and in its towns and villages, as a veritable pastoral idyll, a dream come true for the poor who fled the nobility-crushed and heavily-taxed Old World, where they had no hope of advancement.

From pastoral idyll, however, Crevecoeur descends into nightmare when he travels in the South and learns firsthand the horrors of slavery. In Charleston and in the countryside, the stories he hears and one particularly gruesome sight he sees stand in such sharp contrast with the threadbare arguments presented to him in defense of the “peculiar institution” that his very belief in God’s beneficence is shaken to the core, and he cries out from his heart —

Is there then no superintending power who conducts the moral operations of the world as well as the physical? The same sublime hand, which guides the planets round the sun with so much exactness, which preserves the arrangement of the whole with such exalted wisdom and paternal care, and prevents the vast system from falling into confusion, doth it mankind to all the errors, the follies, and the miseries, which their most frantic rage, and their most dangerous vices and passions can produce? 

As he looked about him and saw “crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other,” he could not help doubting in the existence of wise deity guiding history and ensuring progress. 

Loudly though his every feeling cried out against the evils of slavery, however, Crevecoeur himself was in no immediate personal danger as he traveled through the colonies. He was a white man, after all, an educated man, with apparently sufficient income to leave his farm in other capable hands for long periods while he traveled. A visit farther south, to self-taught botanist John Bertram in Florida, soothed for a while the agitated feelings aroused by his painful encounters in South Carolina. 

But Time is marching on, inexorably, and both Crevecoeur’s scholarly social visits and his peaceful life at home will soon be violently interrupted. The Revolution is at hand! What hope is there now for a loyal subject of the king? 

Now danger has become personal and immediate — as it was already for the slaves on those Southern plantations — and the writer now fears for the lives of his wife and children, as well as himself. Though he declares himself ready to sacrifice his own life for that of his family, staying home on the farm and helplessly waiting “the end of this catastrophe” becomes more and more unbearable. And once again the feelings that agitate his soul find expression in larger questions about the human condition.

It is for the sake of the great leaders, on both sides, that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished; by the arms, the sweat, the lives, of the people.

Resenting historical convulsions that disrupt and even destroy ordinary, peaceful lives, at the same time he knows that he must decide. 

What must I do? … Shall I discard all my antient [sic] principles, shall I renounce that name, that nation, which I once held so respectable? … Must I be called a parricide, a traitor, a villain; lose the esteem of all those whom I love to preserve my own; be shunned like a rattle-snake, or be pointed at like a bear? 

As much as he loves England, he also sees “the powerful attraction” of the call to revolution, and he cannot help blaming the king for pursuing a course that will guarantee the shedding of so much innocent blood. He is a man caught in the middle. 

I cannot count the multitude of orphans this war has made, nor ascertain the immensity of blood we have lost. Some have asked whether it was a crime to resist, to repel, some parts of this evil. Others have asserted, that a resistance so general makes pardon unattainable and repentance useless…. What one party calls meritorious, the other denominates flagitious [criminal]. … What can an insignificant man do in the midst of these jarring contradictions…?

It is, after all, not only coronavirus that hovers outside our doors these days. There is also the unsettling and continuing political discord and paranoia, amazingly and alarming not set aside in the midst of a life-threatening pandemic. If anything, it is exacerbated. And what one side calls necessary, another calls criminal, while millions of ordinary Americans, who want only to work and live in peace within their families and communities, are caught in the crossfire. 

What will Crevecoeur do as the clamor of strife comes nearer? Will he be a “traitor” to the king or a “traitor” to the revolution? Of course, his future then is now long past, so what was his ultimate fate and that of his family? 

Don’t look for spoilers here. If we are going to learn anything from history, it is important that we hear not only competing interpretations but also individual voices of real human beings, as they lived through and experienced those distant times. We are not that different from those colonists — or those slaves — in eighteenth-century America. As did they, we work and love and hope, feel joy and fear, and the questions we ask of ourselves and of the universe have been asked by every generation that came before us.

Do We Romanticize the Lives of Others?

Bookstore dream come true

It’s happened more than once, and I’ve written about it before. Someone walks into my bookstore, realizes the art gallery next door is my husband’s, and exclaims, “You’re living my dream!” (Pretty funny coincidence: I hadn't looked over yet my draft of this post before uploading it when a woman from New Jersey, who yesterday bought Nuts to You, by Lynne Rae Perkins, came back today for Criss Cross and told me, "This is my dream!" I told her I'd just been writing about that for my blog.)

Gallery dream come true

I’ve also said – again, more than once – that having a dream is very different from living it, the difference one between pleasant, idle daydreaming and making something happen and working year after year to keep it alive. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t a dream come true, only that it didn’t come about with a lottery ticket or because a fairy godmother waved a magic wand. Of course I have my own unrealized dream lives, the selves I call my “inner cowgirl” and my “inner farmer” -- sigh -- but it’s hard to live more than one life at a time. I guess many of us have "roads not taken" in the progress of our lives.

Hurry! Time to make hay before it rains!

A friend whose parents moved the family to a 120-acre farm when she, the friend, was about 12 years old commented to me recently, “I don’t romanticize farming. It’s hard work! I couldn’t wait to leave the farm! I felt like the farm was my prison.” I told her that in my younger years I held a series of low-level office positions, and those offices definitely felt like prison cells to me. On a farm, there are seasonal demands and the unpredictability of nature – not to make light of them, but they are impersonal constraints. The real nightmare, to my mind, would be clashes with threatening and unreasonable authorities, encounters such as the growers in the documentary film “Farmageddon” suffered. (Surprise!) I don’t have the energy I had even five years ago, but I still enjoy working hard outdoors.

Well, instead I spend hours indoors in my bookstore (and often long to be outdoors at home), but it is my bookstore, and I am the boss! so it is not the prison those deadly old offices were. I drive myself pretty hard sometimes but am not subject to the arbitrary will of another, one of the most difficult features of clerical work. Lots of responsibility coupled with little if any authority is not a recipe for happiness! Nowadays I have both the authority and the responsibility, and the one makes the other much more pleasant.

I don’t think I romanticize farming, any more than I romanticize my own life, but sometimes I do romanticize the life David and I lead -- in a sense -- and I’m the first to admit it. (As I like to say, if I don't romanticize my life, who will? Oh, wait! I just said many people do. Hmm.) That doesn't mean, however, that I'm just daydreaming about a hazy possibility and seeing it in a rosy, soft-focus glow. I live the reality along with the dream. The bookseller’s life? More than just sitting around reading books! The artist’s life? Not all wine and roses, either! Hard work and financial sacrifice, like farming. Also, like farming, unpredictable income. Not everyone would choose to live as we do. Where the romantic part comes in, for me, is not in an avoidance of hard work, not in living the life of Riley or counting on "easy money," but in loving one’s work and being grateful not to be working against one's own nature. So I like to think if I'd taken a different road that I would feel the same way about farming. But who knows, right?

Well, when a friend had a garden business some years back -- design, installation, maintenance -- I worked with her on the installation and maintenance, and we worked hard! But we enjoyed working outdoors, enjoyed working together, and were happy to be strong and healthy enough (in late middle age) to engage in hard physical labor. Also, she was her own boss and treated me, her employee, like a respected colleague (though some of her clients saw me as the "yard girl"). So we were both happy.

And yes, David and I, the artist and the bookseller, are happy now in our hardworking life. Isn’t it romantic? Not every single minute, but often!

They are weeds, but I adore them!

“For Love OR Money” Cannot Be the Question

“I’d do this even if I didn’t get paid for it,” said best-selling author Stephen King. Anyone who loves to write can identify with that statement. But what works for work (e.g., writing) does not work for businesses (e.g., a bookstore).

No one pays me to write blog posts, and it’s anyone’s guess how many people care at all that I take time to put an idea or observation into words, let it percolate a few days, go back to rewrite and polish, and finally hit that magic ‘Publish’ button. Granted, a blog post is not a novel or a poem. And how many deserving novels and poems, memoirs and histories, books and articles on economics, politics, philosophy, and what-have-you are already out there in the world, looking for an audience? The mind not only boggles -- it reels, stumbles and falls, blinking wide-eyed. Everyone has something to say! No wonder so many writers have to work other jobs!

Writing is work, for anyone who tries to do it well, even for those who can’t live without it. It just happens to be work we love. We would also love, as Stephen King manages, to be paid for our time and effort, but we don’t expect that to happen often.

(It’s so exciting when the rare opportunity presents itself to be paid for writing. Three hundred words? Twenty dollars? Hey, great! Because I’d be doing this anyway, even without pay, even without a word of feedback. Because recreating the world in sentences is one of my ways of being in the world, to paraphrase Jim Harrison.)

Bookselling, on the other hand, as in selling books out of one’s own bricks-and-mortar, public shop, is another matter entirely. I am moved to write about the difference because, over and over, I read pieces by well-meaning people -- often writers with books to sell, which really drives me nuts! -- going on and on about how booksellers “aren’t in it for the money.” Well, guess what. We are.

Yet another in the long line of booksellers-don’t-care-about-money pieces was quoted in and linked to this week in “Shelf Awareness.” The writer admits that he buys online “when I want something” and goes to physical bookstores for discovery. I like the discovery part -- the other part, not so much. Booksellers need patronage both from customers who “know what they want” and those willing and eager to explore and be surprised. To stay in business, we actually need to sell books.

We’re not in this business to get rich, it’s true. (We’re not that deluded.) We’ve chosen relatively low-paying but, for us, spiritually rewarding work over a variety of possible high-paying but, to us, soul-destroying careers with great benefits. Think of paid vacations, paid sick leave, paid health insurance, and pensions. Nope, not for us. But we’ve chosen not to postpone life until retirement, either.

(Does “retirement,” except as a familiar cultural concept, have any place at all in a bookseller’s life? If so, someone needs to explain it to me.)

Show me an independent bookseller, not already independently wealthy, who opens a bookstore to lose money or “break even.”

Show me an independent bookseller with so little imagination that she or he needs an indoor public hobby with a regular schedule just to “keep busy.”

We don’t go into the book business looking for great wealth, but we definitely hope to make a living, however modest. We value our work highly and hope others will value it at least enough to keep us in business, because --

Like everyone else, booksellers (and writers and artists) have to put food on the table and gas in the tank, and occasionally  see a doctor or a dentist. They generally have rent to pay, in addition to perhaps a mortgage and property taxes. Up North we need heat in the winter and a plow to get out the driveway. Even the family dog needs food and shots and license.

That’s reality.

Years ago, I noticed something that still strikes me as odd: Often the same Americans who admire highly successful individuals for working hard, loving their work, and making lots of money seem to think that people who do not make a lot of money, as long as they love their work, should be willing to work for nothing. For this group of workers, loving what they do is supposed to be sufficient reward.

How is that supposed to work?

A terrible and dangerous cultural myth has grown up around independent bookstores. The myth tells people that booksellers don’t want or need to sell books because all they want is to spend time around other people who love books and talk to people about books they love.

THIS MYTH NEEDS BUSTING!

Employees clock in and out and get paychecks. Business owners do not. My business, very seasonal, at the “end of the road,” cannot afford employees. Librarians are on salary; I am not. When I’m in my bookshop, I’m at work, and my work is selling books. Yes, of course I love conversation about books with customers in my shop. It just can’t be an either/or proposition -- either talk or sell books -- because if I’m forced to that choice, another follows directly on its heels: selling books or closing the door.

I know I’m not alone and that I speak for bookstore owners across the country and around the world. If the time comes that my book sales flatline and I end up working for nothing, the curtain will come ringing down fast and for good.

We booksellers may be dreamers, but we live in the real world, too. Please feel free to join us there.

Postscript and Update, 4/13/2016:

My P.S. has to do with small businesses other than bookstores. I want to acknowledge that independent booksellers are not the only ones expected to be happy with loving their work, regardless of monetary return. Friends who operate restaurants in seasonal tourist destinations share the experience. Well-heeled visitors may admire jars of local jam or jugs of local maple syrup but ask for a “better” price, which is to say the business owner should take the cut and be glad of a few pennies in the till. Do not be a cheapskate tourist! A business is not a garage sale, and if you had any idea how hard these people work and how long their work days are, you would offer double their asking price on everything in the place!

My update concerns new bills rushed into law by legislatures in various states, the one I’ll highlight being North Carolina, where the so-called “Bathroom Bill” not only prohibits municipalities from having higher standards of nondiscrimination than the state itself but also prohibits municipalities from having higher minimum wage laws than the state has fixed. The peculiar hypocrisyof these new laws is striking: legislatures in the very states that are outraged when the federal government imposes standards on them have no qualms about imposing state standards on their own constituent municipalities.

Boycotting of North Carolina won’t reduce the salaries of those in the state congress but already has resulted in an instant outflow of jobs and a turnoff of tourist and convention dollars. Small businesses and working people are paying the price. Naturally, news of the book world easily captures my attention, so I read with great interest a letter from the owner of Malaprop’s Books in response to an open letter from a group of authors canceling bookstore appearances in North Carolina. The wrong people are being punished, as a St. Louis, Missouri, bookseller points out in a blog post following the letter exchange. Booksellers who have put their livelihoods on the line for nondiscrimination and free speech are the last people who should be pilloried for the reprehensible actions of their state legislature.

This is "shop talk," granted, but it has much wider ramifications. Any time allies are treated as enemies, enemies are strengthened in their opposition and have nothing to gain by becoming allies.

Book Review: BEING MORTAL

Being Mortal:

Medicine and What Matters in the End

by Atul Gawande

NY: Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2014

Hardcover, $24

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. ... Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

So begins Gawande’s latest book, important and well worth reading, as his writing always is, and particularly relevant to individuals in what the French call the “third age” of life (think of the riddle of the sphinx) and those who are or soon will be caring more and more for that generation as time brings about the inevitable.

Every doctor, every nurse, sooner or later must confront death, but Gawande notes that until recently few in modern medicine were given tools to deal with the situation. Instead, American medical training has focuses on testing, recording, gathering facts, prescribing drugs, and offering patients an increasing number of choices among an array of procedures with hoped-for but unclear outcomes. Death was the elephant in the living room, the one everyone knew was there but no one wanted to mention.

Medical costs in the final year of life are astronomical, as everyone knows but equally unfortunate (perhaps worse), Gawande believes, is the harm inflicted when people are “denied ... the basic comforts they most need.” And “basic comforts,” it turns out, are more than food and shelter and safety.

The most frequent complaint Gawande hears from nursing home patients is, “It just isn’t home.” However homelike in appearance (appearances often geared to appeal to residents’ adult children rather than residents themselves), in most facilities designed for care of the frail elderly, residents lack the privacy and autonomy most of us take for granted all our lives.

Gawande traces the history of the “assisted living” movement from its origin in the vision of a West Virginia coal miner’s daughter. When Keren Brown Wilson’s mother, Jessie, needed help with the basic tasks of living, there was nowhere for her to go but a nursing home. The daughter, a college student at the time, never got over her mother’s frequent plea, “Take me home,” and because of those pleas, Keren Wilson developed an interest in issues related to aging and eventually earned a doctorate in gerontology. What her mother had in mind for “home” was not a place designed for her health and safety (placement considerations important to most children of the elderly) but a place where she could be herself again, not a patient, but Jessie the person. Dr. Wilson wrote a paper to outline what such a place might look like.

The key word in her mind was home. Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don’t.

For a variety of reasons, Wilson’s original idea became diluted beyond recognition as “assisted living” facilities popped up all over the country, but Gawande visits and describes a few places where privacy and autonomy, key to Wilson’s original vision (rather than regimentation) are the rule.

Paramount at every stage of aging, whether or not it involves terminal illness, is “how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves....” What makes life worth living will vary from one individual to another, and the point of the “hard conversations” with family members and medical staff is to determine, in each case, what makes life worth living to this particular individual. For one man, being able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch sports on television was enough. “My dad,” Gawande tells us, in one of the passages focusing on his own experience with his frail, aging surgeon father, “didn’t think that would be good enough for him at all.”

Not surprisingly, there is a lot in Being Mortal about hospice and palliative care. The idea of offering “concurrent care” actually came from an insurance company. Instead of having to choose between hospice and other treatments, policyholders with less than a one-year life expectancy could continue their regular treatment and receive hospice care. Since they did not have to give up anything, enrollment in hospice jumped from 26 to 70 percent. More surprising were some of the other results:

They visited the emergency room half as often as the control patients did. Their use of hospitals and ICUs dropped by more than two-thirds. Overall costs fell by almost a quarter.

Gawande cites a 2010 study from Massachusetts General in which patients with stage IV lung cancer were randomly assigned to two different groups.

Half received usual oncology care. The other half received usual oncology care plus parallel visits with a palliative care specialist ... The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer.

In other words, not only was it cheaper to add hospice care to other treatments, but terminally ill patients lived longer, had fewer emergency incidents, and their quality of life was higher. Gawande attributes much of the difference to the open conversations that hospice encourages and the focus of its staff on the person and his or her individual values and goals rather than on hope for recovery.

Conversations about end-of-life choices, he admits, are not easy. They take time and may “unleash difficult emotions” for all involved. In the end, however, they can make all the difference. The battle analogy he uses to make his point comes from the 19th century and pulls no punches:

Death is the enemy. But death has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest of all if all you do is battle to the bitter end.

The author of Being Mortal shares with readers not only his medical experience and the fruits of his research into how society deals with aging and dying, but also his own personal story, that of a loving son distressed to see his father losing ground.

My only wish – I will not call it a complaint – is that an index would have been helpful. I highly recommend this book.