Evenings Out, Mornings Outdoors, and Books as AntifragileTechnology

Evenings Out

It is rare for me to go out in the evening, other than outdoors in my own yard, but July is the month when the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library hold their Summer Writers Series, featuring one Michigan author a week for four weeks. The third week of the series this year was author and farmer and chef Abra Berens, and not only was she FOLTL guest author on Tuesday but the following Thursday she prepared a special chef’s dinner, also at the Willowbrook Inn. Two nights out in one week!

Abra Berens at the Willowbrook Inn

Sommelier du soir

The Willowbrook is a magical event venue, elegant and at the same time simple and old-fashioned. Mimi DiFrancesca and Joel Heberlein, in transforming the 140-year-old building, have only added to its charm, such that it is always a joy to be there. The windows invite the outdoors in, giving the feeling that one is in a very grand and spacious treehouse. And this time, of course, there was Abra’s wonderful menu, served by friendly faces, many of them familiar. Quite the evening out!

Also noteworthy is that a portion of ticket sales from Thursday’s dinner went to Food Rescue, people doing much-needed and important work in northern Michigan.

My role in the program came following dessert and was – no surprise! – selling books that Abra happily signed for her satisfied diners. Sunny Juliet was ready for play when I got home, and I was ready for sleep, but we worked it out.

 

Books are my life.

Sunny amusing her dog momma at bedtime --

Mornings Outdoors

 

In my life, mornings mean outdoors, and while that’s usually in our own yard, sometimes Sunny Juliet and I go farther afield. Friday we did what I call “Go for a ride, go for a walk,” where we get in the car and have a leash walk (or two or three) somewhere other than our familiar home grounds, with stops also simply to give the dog momma a chance to photograph lovely sights. 

That pond on Alpers Road again --

Books as Antifragile Technology

 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and my, how that name keeps cropping up in my posts lately!) does not have an entry for ‘books’ in the index to his book Antifragile, but because BOOK is an important topic in my life, not only as a reader but also as a bookseller, I have added the term to his index, noting the number of each page where books enters the discussion. First, in the chapter on “Via Negativa,” he notes that “the future is mostly in the past,” by which he means that the longer a technology or a way of doing things has survived, the longer it probably will continue to survive. This means that, contrary to human beings, with technologies and ways of doing things, the older will typically survive the younger. Following that logic (and he gives several examples), we can predict with some assurance that the continued life of the printed book will greatly surpass that of the e-reader.

 

“No one reads books any more,” people told me when I opened my bookstore 31 years ago – hence my new motto: 

Surviving skeptics for over 200 dog years

 -- though I’m happy to say the skeptics seem fewer in number with each passing year, as more and more people seem to rediscover books and realize that paper and print are here to stay. In fact, I rarely hear the dismissive, skeptical claim about books so often voiced three decades ago.

Oldest on the premises -- at present

Taleb distinguishes between the perishable (objects) and the nonperishable, the latter having what he calls an “informational nature to it.”

 

A single car is perishable, but the automobile as a technology has survived about a century and a half (and we will speculate should survive another one). Humans die, but their genes—a code—do not necessarily. The physical book is perishable—say, a specific copy of the Old Testament—but its contents are not, as they can be expressed into another physical book [my emphasis added].

 

In this passage we deal with the technology of the book in a different way, not predicting the life of the technology but the “imperishability” of the information it carries. 

 

What of the perennial human craving for novelty, for whatever is “new and improved”? Anything that has an electronic on/off switch, Taleb thinks, is something that can induce neomania in us – the feeling that we have to have the very latest model – whereas what he calls “the artisanal” (and I take it this could be a book as well as a painting by an Old Master or a piece of furniture, examples he cites) continues to be satisfying even as newer items are available all around us. Thus the artisanal is antifragile, the electronic fragile to time and change. 

 

The e-reader is fragile in another way that the book is not. Accessibility to electric power, battery life, and the general fatigue that overtakes computerized parts all make the e-reader more fragile than the bound, printed volume. How many laptops have you gone through in the past 30 years? But do you have a paperback book from college days in the Sixties? I do – and it still “works” perfectly, as do these volumes from the late nineteenth century.

These have endured.

Taleb received a letter from a historian Paul Doolan in Zurich, asking how young people could be taught skills for the 21^stcentury, since we have no way of knowing what skills will be needed. Taleb’s perhaps surprising answer (perhaps not, if you’ve been reading his work) is to have those young people read the classics. This is where the sentence appears: “The future is in the past.” 

 

We cannot return to the past, and few of us would choose to do so. The wisdom of the past, however, the accumulated knowledge of our culture is the legacy to us of all who have lived before, and we can avoid many errors by learning what hasn’t worked out well for our human ancestors. 

 

What is success, for an individual, a corporation, or a culture? Taleb tells us the most important factor is the avoidance of unsurvivable error or the unforeseeable, rare but unsurvivable event. Mere survival does not insure success, but there is no success without survival, so it is crucial to avoid that fatal misstep.

 

We cannot learn from what has not (yet) happened or what might happen, only from what has happened.

History: Learn from it.

I Never Trust an East Wind

Strange sky on Sunday morning

The weather forecast for Sunday morning was for a couple hours of rain or snow, but the east wind was a monkey wrench thrown in that prediction. No way we would have rain, with air as cold as it was, the little no-name creek frozen to silence again except for the miniature waterfall section. Sunrise had no warmth to it, either. Were those grey clouds in the north moving our way? No, they seemed at a standstill, sun and wind pouring between two completely different sets of clouds. But then, an east wind always makes for strange weather.

 

Now it’s spring break. – Not for me, but for many. Northport School is closed. New Bohemian Café is closed all week, too, as are Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern, 9 Bean Rows, and heaven knows how many other purveyors of food and coffee, so those of us staying behind in Leelanau will have to be resourceful to get through the remainder of March. Don’t we always, though? One way or another….

 

Several people have asked if I found it worthwhile to have the bookstore open all winter. Since it wasn’t my first bookstore winter, I knew what to expect, and that did not involve crowds of book buyers carrying out piles of treasures! A few bibliophiles now and then were grateful, however, to find the shop open, and several large inventory intakes kept me busy pricing and shelving and rearranging whole subject areas, which means I’ll be well stocked when “the season” arrives.

Young people on left, classics on right

Older children's books, YA, and school readers

Then, too, I’ve been keeping my weeks and days short: Wed.-Sat., 11-3. It only makes sense. Projects at home, not to mention work and play with Sunny Juliet (mostly play), are more important than looking out at empty downtown streets until 5 p.m.

Now, though, Northport is moving toward establishing a “social district,” which is apparently (and I didn’t know this before) a term for official sanction to take alcoholic beverages from restaurants and bars out onto the sidewalk and into the parks. I haven’t taken a position pro or con on the plan and won’t be taking one, as younger generations are driving now. They’re putting in a lot of time and energy, and it’s their turn, while my business and I are Old School and will never be anything different, so I’ll just watch and report from the sidelines. 

And a week from now it will be time for me to post my “Books Read” for the month of March. Will I finish that very philosophical nonfiction book in time to include it, or will I continue to be pulled off-task by one novel after another, currently The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason. And will the piano tuner ever reach Burma? I’m beginning to wonder, and the only way to find out is to keep reading. (Juleen, I know you've already read the book, but don't tell me what happens!) Sunny Juliet had a bath this morning, so we will be spending the day indoors, and I should have time for quite a bit of reading, letting that strange east wind do what and as it will.

What a clean dog girl!

Closing note about one of those projects at home: A metal frame table with wood surface has been my “desk” in the office but in a few weeks will be put into service as a seedling nursery, and I’ll move desk work to the actual desk. The table, covered with Con-Tact paper in the past, seemed ready and willing to give up that covering, so with putty knife and fingers I started stripping it down. 

Looking a little shabby

Stripping it down....

Then the table’s identity suddenly came clear to me: It was the table from the houseboat! David’s homemade houseboat, moored for years on the Leland River, just upstream from the Riverside Inn. I got out photos, and yes, there it was. 

The same table

Houseboat and rowing skiff on the Leland River

So now even those discolored rings revealed on the surface are dear to me. Recover it? Paint it? don't think so. Like Harlan and Anna Hubbard, continuing their "shantyboat life" on the banks of the Ohio in their new house, I will keep my past close going into the future, whatever the future brings.

Please forgive me for going on and on about this.

Call this a spoonful of sugar.
 

Someone who read my previous blog post said that current political conflicts are nothing new and that they are “nothing that a simple healing patch of behavior can end.” Whoever suggested the divisions in our country could be ended with a Bandaid? Not I. There is no magic pill or, God forbid, silver bullet, either.

 

The hate-filled divisions are real and heartbreaking. The cruelty is heartbreaking. And yes, the seeds of division and hate have always been there, from the beginning of our history, and – let’s admit it – there is no way for all Americans to come together completely and permanently. 

Storm clouds!

Where does that leave us, though? Having faced that reality, what are our choices? What do we do now? 

 

- Continue to scream at each other and escalate the domestic arms race – until what happens? 

 

- Or give up and retreat into bitterness, each of us, for the rest of our lives? 

 

Please forgive me if I reject those as viable options. 

 

Let’s me make the question personal for myself. Who am I going to be for the remainder of my life on earth? Do I want, while alive, to add to the world’s storehouse of love or to its arsenal of hate? Will I be grateful for my life or choose to be miserable and blame my misery on evolution and world history? Take the most selfish view possible, if you like: As far as I see, it points in the same direction as altruism. 

Both sides now --

This morning (still dark, these long mornings of autumn’s waning daylight, and I am in the autumn of my life, too, my time growing ever shorter), it occurred to me that America’s present crisis is deepened, if not entirely driven, by grief. We have all experienced loss, and it hurts, and we don’t know what to do with that pain. Readers of this blog, as well as my close friends, know that personal grief has been with me for a while now. Grief. Shock. Paralysis. Disbelief. Mourning. Life torn apart, never again to be a shining whole, the companion of my days and nights forever gone. 

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,” wrote the poet Auden in his own grief. He ends his poem with, “For nothing now can ever come to any good.” Is that what you feel about your country? The world? Your life? 

 

(Had Auden been wrong, as he writes in this poem, to think that love would last forever? What do you think?)

 

For myself, I can’t afford to let myself feel that “nothing now can ever come to any good.” Two seven-year-old boys, great-grandsons of the man I loved, are at the beginning of their lives, as are so many little children whose lives are only now beginning. It’s too big a job, yes – I can’t control the course of the future, true – but I can’t give up and crawl into a hole and die, either.

I live in a beautiful place.

I realize that I am a lucky woman, spared the anger that many people suffer in the throes of grief. My husband was 85 years old and had followed his passion and found success as an artist. The beauty of his work lives on. The two of us had a second chance to make a rich life together, to make our dreams come true, even (priceless gift!) to grow old together. And at the end, we had time to say goodbye. So Fate spared me anger and resentment and gave me gratitude, and I am grateful to have had that through the grief his death brought. 

 

But despair? Heavens, yes! Grief goes on and on, and despair, while it doesn’t fill every hour, lurks around every corner, ready always (especially in those first, early, dark hours of morning) to jeer sarcastically, “What’s the point? Why bother? He is never coming back!” And that, my friends, is hard.

 

Like a wounded animal, I needed to be alone before I could face the world again, and I still need time alone even now, but already in those first weeks a demanding puppy did not allow me to stay in bed with my head under the covers, and once back in Michigan there was my bookstore to open, David’s gallery to arrange, grass to mow, the puppy to exercise and train. Looking back at May 2022 from October 2023, I see now that it was good for me not to have available the escape of total isolation.

 

Anger. Despair. Pain. What about exhaustion? Grief is exhausting. So much of life can be exhausting! The ongoing crisis mode of American politics is exhausting. So yes, we all need to take time out when we need to, when we can. 

 

And then? What?

Even under cloudy skies, with winter coming --

Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes not to give up, to keep living. Whatever it takes not to be cruel, not to be mean, not to seek revenge. A cat to feed, a dog to walk. Grass to mow, books to sell. Books and poems to read and write. Flowers and trees to plant and tend. Other people with their own griefs, who need an understanding listener as they struggle. Whatever it takes. One day, sometimes one hour at a time – which is the only way we ever truly live, anyway.

 

Not simple. Not easy. Often – let me say a challenge. (Let me say challenge rather than a struggle. Though either word is descriptive, I seek strength in choosing my words.) 

 

In every era, certain words get overused and lose their power in daily speech, but consider – amazing, awesome. The gift of life is one none of us had to earn. Human beings did not invent or build this glorious planet. Who, reflecting on the gift of life, can see it as anything less than amazing? Who, looking at the beauty and force and age of the universe, can see it as otherwise than awesome?

Unquenchable life!

Let me end today with an idea from my most-beloved philosopher, Henri Bergson. (Here is an interesting take on Bergson that I hadn’t read before but found congenial.) One of Bergson’s most basic and important insights was this: 

 

The “road ahead” (the future) is not there. 

We build our road as we travel through life.

 

My images today are from the world around me. Thanks for reading.

Always renewing.

The Pages of Time's Book Keep Turning

[Orig. written 10/4, revised & published 10/6.]

Apple harvest is underway, field corn looks good in the land, and leaves are turning – popples to gold, maples to orange and red, ash to every color from banana-butternut to deep purple. October is here, a month of transition and variability, when any day of any week might steal a march from any other month of the year. What now? What next? In 2020, we ask those questions with more than the usual urgency, not only of the weather and the autumn season but also with respect to COVID-19 and toxic American politics, two parallel pandemics that have converged this week in the nation’s capitol. With more life behind us than ahead of us, the Artist and I wonder what we will see in what time remains to us.

Sunday morning could not have been gloomier: cold, wet, dreary, grey. I forced myself to get up and dressed ... to peel apples ... to cook up a pot of applesauce and get it processed in jars. My other self-assignment for the day was to clean the refrigerator, and I almost cancelled that plan, because -- Who would know? Who would care? But I reminded myself that it takes less time to clean the refrigerator than it does to postpone the job, and after it was done I opened the door a few times to admire my very minor household accomplishment. Sometimes we need to give ourselves positive reinforcement wherever we can find it. I made applesauce! I cleaned the refrigerator! I did not hide my head under the covers all day!

It was a mostly gloomy day, however, certainly not one I'd want to repeat Bill Murray-fashion as Groundhog Day, although that is one of my all-time favorite movies. Could I learn something important by living last Sunday over and over? Maybe "let go" of a friend's comment that disappointed and saddened me? But then, on the other hand, there was a long conversation with another friend, a dear, dear person, and we both felt better after that. [Note to self: call and write to friends more often!]

An inspiring little paperback I read cover to cover over the weekend was Jimmy Carter's Why Not the Best? which takes its title from an encounter young Carter had with Admiral Rickover. Instead of praising the young man for his class standing, the admiral asked if Carter had always done his best, and Carter had to admit that he had not always. "Why not?" the admiral demanded. 

In this 1976 autobiography, Carter writes in detail about his childhood and family, his Navy career, his run for the governorship of Georgia, and finally, as he resolves to make a bid for the presidency, his belief that the American people deserve and will respond to honesty in their political leaders. There is an entire chapter on what was a very crooked election process in part of Georgia and Carter's role in cleaning that up, a volunteer mission he continues around the world to this day, and that was very enlightening, but the thing that impressed me most was how, when he decided to run for elected office -- eventually for the presidency -- he set himself to learn what he would need to know in that office. He read and studied. The energy plan he put forward as president was no half-baked opinion off the top of his head but a comprehensive program carefully formulated after much study and consultation. That is, he took the job of president seriously before he ever ran for the office. He resolved -- I'm saying this; he did not -- to do his best. I think the title of his book was meant to ask why Americans should not demand the best of everyone in government -- and of ourselves.

Carter is often called, by those who find his presidency unimpressive, our best former president. I think history will look upon him more favorably. I make no secret of my admiration for him. 

A black woman being interviewed on the radio (and I'm sorry I did not make a note of her name) referred to "the two pandemics" we are dealing with in the United States right now, and I borrowed her idea for my opening paragraph today. As difficult as it is living with sensible COVID-19 social restrictions, to me the obvious fact that we are not "united" on that or any other question right now feels far worse. Hateful bellows or smirking, snide remarks: neither helps anyone feel better. The friend whose comment knocked me sideways on Sunday thinks I'm too generous in my thoughts and should instead wish bad things on those whose politics and social practices I abhor. Oh, friend, do you think it comes easily to me, not wishing evil on evil-doers, trying not to hate? You little realize how hard I struggle, on a daily basis -- an hourly basis! My sense of outrage is no less keen than yours! And I do hate -- do truly hate -- all appeals to our baser natures and all encouragement to hate! Does that sound like a contradiction?

When it comes right down to it, though, most of us are conservative on some questions and liberal on others. On certain complex issues we may not have reached a settled position but are still trying to sort out everything involved. And that I don’t see as a contradiction. Computer algorithms can afford to be purely rule-driven, because the world of a computer program is limited from the outset, each program modeling a piece or an aspect of the larger world for some specific purpose. Real life is more complicated, because nothing in our many-colored world is left out! 

Moreover, human beings live in a world of contingency. We find ourselves in some situations as a result result of our own prior choices, it’s true, but many situations result from choices other people have made or even from natural processes we could not have foreseen. Partisan, knee-jerk responses, therefore, whether always ‘liberal’ or always ‘conservative,’ too often miss the mark. What good are our own brains, the meaty ones inside our bony skulls, if we are going to run a preset program to yield a programmatic answer to any and every situation? Sometimes – shock! -- it even may even make sense to change our minds! (What a concept, eh?) On some issues both “sides” have important things to say, serious considerations we need to take into account, and there are many issues with more than two “sides,” although our two-party political system has a hard time accommodating and acknowledging that truth.

 

Here, though, is the bottom line: How should we treat this precious earth we could never ourselves have created? How should we treat one another while we are here? And what kind of country do we want to bequeath to future generations? We Americans are in a pivotal moment right now, one that will all too soon be history and one that the future will judge us by. 

Long after we have returned to dust, the consequences of our decisions will be playing out. We won't see the harvest, but it will come.

 

Glow, Little Glow Worm – Don’t Give Up!

 What on earth put that song into a crowded dream filling my imagination just before I woke a couple mornings ago at 5:30 a.m.? How many years must it have been since I heard the Mills Brothers singing the little glow worm song on the radio, and how much other music, how many other songs, would have come between that long-ago day and this dark morning? “Glimmer, glimmer!” What pulled that song out of some dim, long-buried storage bank and put it into my head with its surprising lyrics and close harmonies? What is it that brings a memory like that unexpectedly to the surface?

 

The leaves were the color of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets. They had begun to fall from the branches….

-      Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

 

Halfway through The Warmth of Other Suns, I was fully engrossed, nearly mesmerized, by the three particular stories the author tells, the half-century tapestry in which those particular appear as threads, and by Wilkerson’s writing itself. She incorporates historical records and statistics smoothly into the epic, always and in every line remaining, above all, a writer. Her phrase about leaves “the color of sweet potatoes” is one small example of an almost novelistic style that makes every scene vividly alive. I read the book before falling asleep and when waking up. 

Then at my bookstore one afternoon (during the midafternoon lull), I was surprised by how quickly I fell into another book I hadn’t meant to read, just peek into, Page Smith’s Trial By Fire, Volume 5 in his 8-volume People’s History of the United States. It is probably no coincidence that Howard Zinn used the same title for his own one-volume history of our country, as Page Smith, while a professor of history, considered himself – and was considered by others – very much a “populist” historian, writing not for a small academic audience but for Americans at large.

It was the final paragraph of his short introduction to Volume 5 that stopped me in my tracks and then quickly made me want to go on to the first chapter: 

 

What cannot be sufficiently emphasized is that since people do not exist for the convenience or the scrutiny of historians, a certain violence, or at least, disservice, is inevitably done to the full and breathtaking complexity of the truth whenever someone, assuming the role of a historian, attempts to deal with life in the mode called “history.” This is most notably true in writing about black people in America [my emphasis added]. …I am continually and painfully aware of my deficiencies as an uncertain practitioner of the art [or history] and nowhere so acutely as in trying, as a white man, to comprehend the nature of what we call today, somewhat glibly, “the black experience.” 

-      Page Smith, introduction to his Trial By Fire

 

Trial By Fire was published in 1982, that is, 38 years ago, while The Warmth of Other Suns bears a 2010 publication date. The older book’s author was a white man, the newer one written by a black woman, Smith a historian, Wilkerson a journalist who had to become a historian in researching her book, both of them prize-winning American authors. Something told me that reading these two books in tandem would be an even richer experience than reading only one could possibly be, although either is clearly worth any American’s concentrated time.

Because that is the question, isn’t it? How did we get to where we are now? 

I have already learned from Smith that our country’s founders had doubts and fears from the very beginning about the new union’s ability to hold together and not break up over the issue of slavery. And it should surprise no one that Wilkerson’s migrants – Ida Mae Gladney, who moved to Chicago during Depression era; George Starling, who fled Florida citrus groves for a new life in New York’s Harlem following World War II; and Dr. Robert Foster, whose successful career in California could never have been achieved by a black man in his native Louisiana – encountered prejudice and barriers in the North in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, despite the absence of the odious Jim Crow laws that had held them down in the South.

As Page Smith noted,

 

Slavery was not, of course, the only sin Americans had to answer for to the Almighty. Racial prejudice was everywhere apparent in the North….

-      Smith, ibid.

 

That racial prejudice that Wilkerson’s migrants encountered in the 1950s was all the more nerve-wracking because of its unpredictability.

 

There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be.

-      Wilkerson, op. cit.

 

Understanding our nation’s past cannot change the past. That should go without saying. Historical understanding is vital, however, if we hope for a better future, because in addition to generals and battles, state laws and federal policies –always, then as now, consequences fell on individuals and families, ordinary people just trying to live their lives, and so, now as then, people’s lives are at stake, children’s futures are at stake. 

But neither are we obligated to accomplish a half-century’s worth of progress in any 24-four period [since ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ as the philosophers say]. We can, however, brighten the corners where we are (as the old Sunday school song advised), and I see people doing that everywhere I look. Road builders are laying down fresh new pavement, farmers are harvesting corn, painters are painting, quilters are quilting, and on it goes. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time. A smile, a word of encouragement, a sympathetic ear, opening our hearts and stretching our minds a little every day as we go about our ordinary lives. 

We simply cannot afford to be distracted by angry shouters throwing red herrings across the path and trying to prevent understanding. The true enemies are not our fellow Americans on “the other side” but those who would divide us into “sides” to enhance their own power gains.

Sept. 20 - Sunday morning

I began writing this post a couple of days ago. Last night I woke in the wee dark hours and finished reading Wilkerson’s book before the sun was up. She thoroughly and beautifully accomplishes the tasks she set herself, collecting oral histories and presenting intimate portraits of three selected migrants, while also searching out and distilling and incorporating newspaper, literary, and scholarly accounts of the Great Migration, from the beginning of the movement to the present, to pull that 50-year sweep of history together and examine and critique what has been said of the southern black people who moved north from 1915 to 1970 and separate truth from myth. Informative, compelling, important, and brilliant!

And now, two days after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and having come to the last page of The Warmth of Other Suns, I can’t help thinking once again that the temptation (while I certainly understand it!) to give in to weariness over the news or hopelessness over current politics – that temptation to give up – can  very well be seen as what has been called “white fragility.” Or is it “liberal fragility”? "Bourgeois fragility"? Whatever it is, we cannot afford it. 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg did not give up. Immigrants and migrants moving to strange new places for what they hoped would be better lives did not give up. Survivors of all kinds, in hellish situations, with their very lives at risk, did not give up (obviously), or they would not have survived. How delicate and fragile are we 21^st-century Americans in these admittedly difficult times but – let’s face it – in material circumstances many immigrants and migrants and survivors would find enviable, even idyllic? Cowboy up! Cowgirl up! 

I am giving myself this pep talk, too, you understand, not preaching from some high-and-mighty place above the fray. Glow, little glow worms! Brighten the corners where you are.