The Last Slice of Hawaii

Did I mention? Every Friday night we all sit down together and eat pizza and watch a movie. That’s the family tradition and was the family tradition way before I moved in four months ago.

We make the pizza ourselves and then bring some furniture to the living room to complement the small sofa that the two kids garrison with blankets and pillows and a baby doll named Nora, who eats and pees and poops and vomits, authenticity overriding affability in the current fashion of playthings.

I sit on a wicker chair by the bookshelf, Clemens leans back on a rolly desk chair on the other side of the sofa, and Julia sometimes sits on the floor by the coffee table, sometimes sits straight-backed against the child-sized barstool, whose short seat and questionable construction forces its user to contort herself into an awfully healthy – which is to say uncomfortable – posture.

Everyone gets their own uniquely deficient view of the small television set. The one working speaker mumbles the dubbed German dialogue and sighs some pale, orchestral refrain that begs us to laugh, laugh, laugh! at the lighthearted shopping montage.

The first Friday night I was living with the family, the parents had to work. They made two big pizzas and set them on the table along with three glasses, a bottle of sparking water, and a big roll of paper towels.

“Last one in the room closes the door,” Liv said. She looked over at me.

I got up and closed it, and I sat back down.

“And turns off the light,” she said.

I did that, too.

“And we also need plates.”

Stand up, lights on, door open, grab some plates, come back, close the door, turn off the light, hand out the plates, sit down.

So then it was just me, Liv, Lennart, and Willi und die Wunder dieser Welt, a playful travel documentary for kids. Willi’s main goal is to take some of his friend’s ashes to her favorite dune in the Sahara Desert, but he doesn’t let that required story arc get in the way of swimming with crocodiles in the rainforest or sumo wrestling in Japan.

But I was having a really hard time hearing the television, so I whispered to Liv: “Can you turn up the volume?” Lennart then hit me in the head and told me to be quiet.

A few minutes later, Lennart asked me to cut him a slice of pizza. I wondered if lightly hitting him on the head and telling him to be quiet would teach him a valuable lesson. I figured it would just mean I had to leave my new room four days after I moved in to it, so I let the total unfairness of the apparent pediarchy go.

So, Lennart asked for the slice.

“Give me a slice of Hawaii,” he said.

“Hawaii?” I asked. After all, Hawaii is a noun, an island. And its slices were already claimed by the United States in 1959.

“Just give it,” he demanded. I gave him the slice of Hawaiian pizza and as we watched the film the kids quoted the funny lines immediately after they occurred and I said nothing at all.

The first few weeks I felt like an intruder, and the kids helped support that feeling.

Lennart, whose hunger is insatiable, was always concerned that I was eating his food.

“Did you eat an apple yesterday?” Lennart asked.

“Yes, and I told Clemens so he’d know to buy more,” I said.

“Dad, I found the thief!”

And Liv, the ten-year-old domestic wunderkind, fretted about cleaning supplies.

“Are you allowed to use our laundry soap?” she would ask.

It was not possible to declare that I was now a part of we simply because I’d handed over some cash – you can’t buy acceptance (except in cults, hotel casinos, and fraternities).

So the kids would turn on the stereo and climb up on my bed and throw pillows at me and yell, “You only rented the room, not all the furniture. This is ours!”

But I sat around on that furniture that wasn’t mine for a long time and it started to smell like me and little by little we just get used to the things that are around us – though it’s always hard to believe that things were once different and may change again (Was I ever not alive? I can’t remember.) – and last week Liv snuck up on me while I was writing (she always does that) and she was crying and she grabbed my ankle and whimpered: “Please don’t go back to California.”

I love the kids. I love the fleeting seriousness of their problems: missing hair accessories, stupid jackets, dumb lunchboxes, mealy-tasting yogurt, wiggly teeth, too many toys, pajamas, bedtime, he-poked-me-but-she-hit-me-first-but-he-tried-to-show-me-his-willy.

I love that Lennart sings all of his thoughts at dinner each night: “I don’t know what I should eat!/I’m going to spread some butter on this roll!/Maybe salami, maybe fish, maybe poo-poo!/I don’t know what to eat!” Or how he wants to become mayor and occasionally dresses up in a suit and practices speeches in front of the big mirror by the front door.

I love that Liv corrects me about everything, like when I use u (yoo) instead of ü (ew), or when I accidentally roll my r’s when I say an English word because I practice so much to improve my German accent, or when I tap my foot at the dinner table (“Our neighbor’s baby is trying to sleep!”) – and then she explodes because Lennart ate the last tomato and suddenly she’s on the floor screaming and crying and hurling her enormous hair in every direction like some horrifying prototype for an anthropomorphic Swiffer Wet Jet.

And kids really do say the darndest things.

A few weeks ago, we were cleaning the house to get ready for the holidays. Liv started to iron a tablecloth while Lennart and I were sweeping the stairs outside the front door. We come back inside and Lennart is furious.

“I wanted to iron!” he yells and rolls on the floor in the position that supposedly helps if you’re on fire.

“Don’t worry,” Julia says, “I’ll give you a very special job.”

“Make sure it’s more special than Liv’s job!” Lennart insists.

“I don’t even want a special job,” Liv says, “I just want to iron.”

A few days later, on Christmas, Lennart answers the phone and it’s a distant family member. Julia mumbles to me that she doesn’t really feel like chatting.

So Lennart says: “Sorry, mommy doesn’t feel like talking to you today.” And he hangs up.

After Christmas, Lennart wants to play the board game that I got him, Forbidden Island. I explain the rules to him and I notice he seems a little anxious.

“Is it too complicated?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, “it’s just… why are we going to the island if it’s forbidden?”

Yesterday Liv came into my room and sat down next to me on the sofa. She watched me read for a few minutes before she put her hand over the book, looked at me gravely, and asked: “Are you happy you’re a grown-up?”

“Yeah,” I say, “yeah.”

She nods.

“Do you want to grow up?” I ask her.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she says.

Last Friday I missed pizza night. I was on my way back from a short trip to Hamburg, where I saw things as diverse as the Reeperbahn and Miniatur Wunderland.

When I came in the whole apartment was dark, so I set my bag down in my room and went to check if anyone else was home. I found the kids in the living room, near the end of watching the final Harry Potter film for the sixth or seventh time.

Lennart ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass, which Liv then filled with water. Liv made some place for me on the sofa and I sit down, but Lennart stayed standing up and said, “Sorry, we don’t have much left, but do you want the last slice of Hawaii?”

For Beginners

Liv is sitting at the kitchen table trying to solve a puzzle. A logic game. A brain teaser.

There are nine tiles with colored edges. Each edge is either red, green, blue, or yellow. The goal is to make a 3×3 square such that each edge is touching a same-colored edge.

Liv lays down a piece and then connects two red edges. She connects blue edges, green, blue, red, red, then yellow. The last piece is in her hand, but it doesn’t fit in the last empty space. So she shuffles the deck and tries again. Lay a piece, connect connect connect connect and so on until the last piece doesn’t fit.

Shuffle again, lay the pieces out, wrong again.

She tries to solve the puzzle like this eight times. Then she’s bored.

“Let’s playing something other than this stupid game.”

So she pulls out a box and takes out a fake needle and says: “I’m the doctor. You look sick.”

The puzzle is still sitting on the table. With her all-or-nothing approach, Liv had exhausted 8 of more than 350,000 possible ways to lay 9 tiles in a 3×3 box.

Recently I came across one of David Kendal’s blog posts, which requests that someone start a blog for beginners in philosophy.

I’ve had a passing interest in areas of philosophy for a long time, but never really known what to do about making it a more serious pursuit. The realm of philosophy seems so big; where should one begin? With the Ancients? The Renaissance? The philosophers of the modern day?

So I would enjoy a blog offering regular reading recommendations for philosophy, and a guide to the perspectives of the philosophers whose work it recommends.

When I was was starting Yabot the Robot, I considered writing occasional articles that distilled the thought of philosophers I have read into simple, readable prose. I found myself with two major problems:

1. I am not knowledgeable enough for such an undertaking, and I think if the blog that David describes were to be created, it would need a team of authors – perhaps even a different author for each post.
2. It is very hard to simplify challenging ideas.

This second point I know well. I started my philosophy thesis presentation with the goal that my mother would understand it. I even looked right at her at the beginning and said: “I’m going to try to make this so that you can understand it.” And then I started talking about infinite substance and synecdochic properties and ethical edification.

But maybe philosophy ought not be simplified.

I think of struggling with a philosophical text very much like reading a difficult novel. Which is to say: it takes time, and the experience of being uncomfortable is essential. And just like reading the plot summary of Moby Dick will only give you a mere glimpse of what is actually in the novel, reading a blog post about A Critique of Pure Reason will not give you knowledge about the arguments and ideas it contains.

In fact, it is usually harmful to prepare to read a philosophical text by reading a summary because you rob yourself of the challenge of following an argument. And this is another way that reading philosophy is like reading a novel: it’s not the goal to just get to the end or figure it out; the real intellectual joy is being right in the middle of some harsh desert or tropical jungle. (1)

Kendal’s post led me to an essay by Paul Graham called “How To Do Philosophy”, which may have been more aptly titled “How To Do Something Fairly Unlike Philosophy”. In his essay, which is an attack on the way in which philosophy is a “sea of words”, Graham sets sail for distant shores with confused ideas and polemical cannons as cargo.

Graham’s main argument is that pretty much all the work done so far in philosophy is incoherent:

When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet. There’s no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can’t distinguish them from placebos.

And the reason that Graham is the first one to profess this truth is because the other people who noticed it just didn’t bother.

And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.

Those people who went to find ultimate truth elsewhere also knew everything Wittgenstein knew, they just thought it’d be a waste of effort to say it.

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

Look, there’s a lot of ways I could go about criticizing the flaws in Graham’s essay. But it wouldn’t be worthwhile, because he repeatedly demonstrates in the piece that he’s made of straw.

He’s uncertain about how arguments function.

I took several classes in logic. I don’t know if I learned anything from them.

He’s unaware of a thousand-year period in the history of philosophy.

In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold: that it was not only acceptable to produce works like the Metaphysics, but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle’s motivating argument.

And he holds kitschy philosophical stereotypes – the sort of things that one unlearns in the course of bceoming educated – as the very ideas that he somehow learned by studying philosophy.

There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don’t exist.

Alas, I can confirm that he does exist and has subsequently produced an essay filled with dubious claims.

But for me, what is more troubling than his misunderstandings is the conclusion that he makes from them: that philosophy needs to be more practical. If those silly ideas did something, maybe asking fundamental questions would be worthwhile.

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.

The reason Aristotle didn’t get anywhere in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.

The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward.

Graham thinks that Aristotle is acting out a contradiction by exploring abstract ideas and assuming abstract ideas are useless, but he’s wrong in two different, important ways:

• Aristotle is only performing a contradiction if we take it that the goal of human action is efficiency. It isn’t.

And more pertinent:

• It isn’t true that Aristotle thinks that abstract knowledge is useless, it’s just that usefulness isn’t the aim. And because Graham repeatedly assails Aristotle but never quotes him, I will:

Evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… So we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake. (Book 1, Metaphysics)

The last line is important: where Graham says useless, Aristotle says free. And why free? Because perfect knowledge is not bound by circumstance; it is not bound by anything at all.

Aristotle is after the truth. He’s not seeking it because it will help him build a better mousetrap – though it may very well be helpful in that endeavor – but because he is curious.

And I guess that how I feel about philosophy and its relationship to human beings is pretty simple: I’m curious. Aren’t you?

We need to eat and sleep, it’s useful that we have roads and gadgets, and it’s nice to have a collection of cardigans or shoes – but: What can we know? What ought we do? What can we hope for?(2) No one tells us to ask these questions. And when we consider them, it’s not because we’re thinking of some practical benefit. We’re responding to a need.

Which is why I’m so baffled that philosopher lecturer Lee McIntyre recently published an article declaring that we need to “make philosophy matter—or else”.

The profession of philosophy has had ages to make itself more relevant…We need to show our students that—when it is done right—philosophy can help them to be better, more critical thinkers and communicators in their jobs. It can teach them to be skeptical of political rhetoric and advertising. It can help them to consider what is worth caring about and so perhaps to begin to make the world a better place…But what seems problematic is the widespread philosopher’s prejudice that we are somehow sullying our discipline any time we try to make a real-world connection.

The individual statements McIntyre makes are not wrong: studying philosophy does foster critical thinking and those skills can be used to make the “real-world” a better place.

On the subject of relevance, however, I disagree with McIntyre. I don’t think philosophy needs to be made relevant. Just as you don’t need to list your hopes on an index card to remember them, you don’t need to be convinced that considering difficult questions about your existence is important. It just occurs to you.

Knowing that those questions are important doesn’t mean that you’ll devote your whole life to them – the real-world is shiny and fun and distracting, after all.

And this is why Graham’s test of utility – “whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward” – doesn’t make any sense. There are all sorts of reasons why someone could intensely study philosophy and still lead an awful life. Shiny ardent zeal helps us “follow the worse” though we “see the better”.(3) I don’t think that makes philosophy a worthless pursuit.

An action can be judged by its efficacy or by its worth, but Graham only considers the former.

I think of it this way: I spend fifteen hours a week teaching German kids how to speak English, and most of the stuff I teach they forget. It may turn out that my teaching is ineffective, but it’s undoubtedly worthwhile.

And when I break down on that big blue bridge and I think and I think about my thinking and I dance that meta-dance ad infinitum as my anxiety rattles sixteenth notes on the hihat to accompany my slow glance downward – it’s a long way down – and those Big Questions occur to me, then it’s easy to see: philosophy is undoubtedly necessary; it needs no justification.

After a while, Liv says I’m now healthy, no doubt thanks to her toy medicine kit filled with fake pills that look like wooden peas, which were originally made when eastern Germany was East Germany and were later sold at a flea market along banks of the Elbe at a price that only nostalgia could afford.

So I sit down with the puzzle and I set the nine pieces down and look at each one, and then look at them all.

The puzzle, I notice, is already almost finished. I turn one piece and swap two others and it’s done.

Liv comes back but doesn’t notice that the puzzle is solved. She just says, “Hey you little pimple, do you want to play Twister or are you going to read like you always do?”

Mr. MacGuffin

The relentless hunt for a MacGuffin begins something like this:

GRUFF MAN: We have to get our hands on those files. It’s imperative.

NAIVE RECRUIT: But why, sir? What’s in the files?

GRUFF MAN: Did you hear me, kid? Finding those files is imperative.

A MacGuffin is a plot device that’s easy to recognize: it’s that thing that somebody wants. It could be a briefcase full of cash or it could be a sled. It doesn’t matter, as long as it starts the action.

And one of three things happens to a MacGuffin by the end of a story:

1. The MacGuffin is completely forgotten.
2. The MacGuffin is found (and acquired or destroyed or, in the case of that horrible film with the crystal skull, launches ancient ruins into space.)
3. The MacGuffin is better explained or put into context.

The best case for a MacGuffin is the third one.

What I want to do here is put a MacGuffin into context, but not one from a work of fiction. Rather, I want to talk about that currently despised MacGuffin known as “The One Percent.”

You know: the one percent of Americans who are horrible and greedy. The rest of us average Americans live on Main Street and hate pepper spray and stand proudly with those just outside the top one percent who only earn $593,000 per year.

The One Percent was a good device to get us talking about inequality. It served the traditional MacGuffin role: starting the action.

Now, however, we are in the middle of things and we have to figure out what we are really after. We are not looking for a maltese falcon, but rather justice for human beings.

That’s what this article is about.

I have no practical knowledge of economics or business or law, and so my discussion here will largely ignore those angles. Instead, I will focus on the things that I am good at: telling stories about people and making strong demands with ethical arguments.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the bus stop chatting with a policeman. It was a Sunday and the bus only comes twice each hour. Talking is a nice way to forget that it’s freezing.

In the middle of our conversation, the policeman walked a few yards away toward a pile of patio furniture in front of a closed cafe. He unfolded a large umbrella and found a man sleeping inside. The guy was wearing ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. He had a two liter juice container filled with whiskey that he held under his left arm like a stuffed animal.

“You got a home?” the policeman asked him, setting the man up on a bench and gently taking the whiskey out from under his arm.

“I don’t know, man.”

He didn’t know if he had a home.

In one of my classes during my first year of college we were talking about hospitals.

“Who works there?” the professor asks.

Everyone sighs. Who works there? Come on, professor. We all know this crap already. A guy named Rob raises his hand, says, “Doctors. Nurses. You know.”

He’s right, he’s right. But, wait.

“And who else?”

Oh – we didn’t know we were supposed to be exhaustive. So now it’s a competition to think of the most obscure thing one can be employed to do in a hospital.

Janitor! Water Fountain Tester! Technical Support Guy! Sanitary Napkin Stocker! Vending Machine Operator! Dirty Laundry Collector!

And, Rob again:

“The guy who collects the dead bodies for research.”

Laughter, laughter. Dead bodies. Research. Zing.

Then the professor calmly asks us: “Which job is the most important?”

Rob is ready.

“We’re back to the beginning again now. The doctors, the nurses. They have the most important job.”

It seemed like he was right – the doctors and nurses have the knowledge and skills needed to promote health. And that’s what a hospital is for.

Except the question is intentionally misleading.

What we really have to acknowledge is that all of those jobs are important – in fact, all of them are essential. If the computers are not functioning, the doctors cannot access important records that they need to make decisions. Even jobs that we take to be menial – like taking out the trash, mopping the floors – are immensely valuable: how well is a hospital going to function if it’s unclean?

No job is the most important.

And if we’re going to condemn The One Percent – i.e. doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers, CEOs – we have to remember that our intuitive thinking is that they are the most important. Yet there’s no influential politician who doesn’t have hundreds of human beings supporting him, no successful CEO who doesn’t have specialists translating his ideas into actualities, no doctor who doesn’t have someone to clean up the shit and blood.

And traditionally the reason why The One Percent earn the most money is because we think that they should. We think that large amounts of money are the best way to motivate individuals to do jobs that require a lot of skill.

But that’s not true. The good people doing far-reaching jobs are doing what they want to do, what they’re suited to do. I’m thinking here of someone like Steve Jobs, whose yearly salary at Apple was one dollar and who worked the day before he died. No one works the day before they die because they want to increase their net worth.

And I’m not advocating the implementation of some sort of socialist experiment: Pay everyone the same and let’s see what happens!

Rather, I think we need to unwind our thinking a bit before we can properly address the problem of wealth inequality, because currently we are reprimanding the wealthiest for doing exactly what our default position mandates: do a job that is Very Important and you can take home the big bucks; do a job that Well Somebody Has To Do It and you’re pretty much a failure.

If we agree that every job makes necessary contributions, our view of earnings should reflect that by becoming more moderate.

In other words:

1. The highest earners should be making less, because their current wages are based on a false notion that they perform in isolation.
2. The lowest earners should be making more, because the work that they do is vital.

And we should all strive to do those things that we are most suited for. I could never be an architect or a X-Ray technician or a carpenter because what I do well is write – but all of us have a role and we should never look down on someone who is doing any sort of hard work.

It all needs to get done.

It was an icy eighteen degrees outside the night that man slept in an umbrella. The same night, six thousand miles away in Egypt, a two-week old baby died in his mother’s arms having never been inside a building and having never felt water on his skin.

The philosopher Peter Singer wrote an article called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, which discusses the duty the rich have to the poor.

The impetus for Singer writing the article was a 1971 famine in East Bengal, but the situation today is no less dire. Some human beings have the luxury of playing Angry Birds all day and their greatest problems (“First World Problems”) are, for example, only having $100 bills when they want to buy a pack of gum. Other human beings are homeless and starving, abused by their own government and neglected by wealthy countries.

Singer’s assumptions are hard to disagree with:

• “Death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad.”
• “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.”

And his argument is quite simple:

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

What ultimately follows is this: Those of us who have more than we need ought to give things away until we reach the point where giving up more would cause more suffering than it prevents.

When you consider that giving up trivial objects can relieve someone from great suffering, it’s hard to imagine that collecting such objects is very important.

I don’t want this post to resemble those sensationalist commercials where a man with a beard walks down a street covered with glass and hubcaps and picks up a famished baby and says, “Zandra here hasn’t eaten for two weeks. For just ten cents a day…” – and yet, isn’t it true?

Those of us lucky enough to be affluent in the year 2011 live more comfortable lives than the royalty in any other century in history.

And it is luck that I am here and now and not there and now.

I remember when we read Singer’s article in a philosophy class in college and the typical reaction was: “I earn the money that I have, so Singer is overstepping his bounds to say that I have a duty to give it away to the poor. I can decide to do that, but I can also decide to do whatever else I want with it.”

It’s true that middle class Americans earn the money they make – the same applies, of course, to The One Percent – but what they didn’t earn is what very few people have, namely, the opportunity to be born in that place at that time.

That’s just luck.

We need to remember that: there’s nothing fundamentally different about how a starving Somalian landed on this ramshackle planet – she just landed in a different place. A place that’s harder than any I’ve known.

After a few minutes a police car came to take the homeless man away, wrapped in a blanket. He never stopped looking back at the nearly empty container of whiskey that had been tipped over by the wind.

The police officer said goodbye to me, said that that guy would be back again some day.

“He fucked up his life,” he told me.

But still – he needs help.

The same week I saw the man at the bus stop, a young guy in New York City was getting prepared to leave the temporary housing where my girlfriend Lily works – his time there was almost up. And where the hell do you go when you don’t know how to find a job and everyone thinks that you messed your own life up, that you’re causing yourself to suffer?

I have no idea.

Just yesterday Lily told me about another guy who came to her and asked if there was some way he could move back into the building. There is not. All she could do was offer him some advice on other places to try.

And I’ll tell you: Lily is tremendously empathetic and must have felt that guy’s despair. She earns no money for the work she does, but I wish she did, because she’d know what to do with it.

And I wish that I was empathetic in the same way that she is, because I think it is that ability to look at someone and really believe that could be me that the world needs.

It is so difficult to get out of my own perspective – every experience I have reinforces the fact that I am at the center of it all! – but it’s something resembling objectivity that helps human beings act ethically.

We have to try to get out of ourselves, because if we don’t then the only suffering we know is our own. And we’ll forget that the man sleeping in an umbrella is us in a different battle, us in another scene, us weeping and dreaming and asking, “Why?”

Our life is not a movie or maybe in the opening sequence you are chasing after some Mr. MacGuffin, but it’s just acting after all so you go to the director to ask what your motivation is and hanging on the wall behind him is one index card for every actor in the film, that is, one index card for every human being that was/is/will be – it’s a big production, a big wall – and according to the cards some of the actors play generals and some play presidents and some lovers and some farmers and some builders, some die in burning houses and some get out in time, some ford the river and some die of cholera, some nights some sleep and some nights some don’t, some live and some die and then the some that live die too, and you, you’re supposed to kill that son of a bitch Mr. MacGuffin but you can’t find the guy anywhere, he doesn’t hang out with everyone else, he doesn’t even have an index card, so one day in the middle of shooting you pick up that damn camera and you sell it to the guy who plays a pawn shop broker and he gives you two thousand bucks for it and you give it all away and when the tape runs out some metal needle spinning in a deep dug well worn groove tells you that you got him, you did the right thing.

American Water

The fourth graders here in Dresden gave short presentations about the United States last week.

“The total area of the United States is nine thousand… no, wait – nine million… eight two six – eh – eight two six thousand, six hundred seventy five, kilometers… what’s this little two?”

Among my four sections of fourth graders, this statement about the exact area of the United States was repeated fourteen times. I stressed to them that it is important to know that America is big, but knowing its exact size is trivial. (1)

“Germany,” I told them, “has an area of about 350,000 square kilometers. But what does your family eat for supper?”

Despite my plea for more substantial cultural facts, the kids continued the barrage of numbing numerical nuggets, like population and median income.

One kid started to list the dates of office for every American President until we stopped him at Madison. Another listed the average temperature for every month of the year in Los Angeles (Spoiler Alert: it’s pleasant except for August and July, and then, tragically, you have to go to the beach).

This stout kid, Moritz, is pretty bright, but he didn’t know what a Table of Contents was, so he started reading it aloud: “1, Geography and environment, 1.1 Political Divisons, 2, History, 2.1 Native American and European settlement…”

The kids know New York and San Francisco and that the Golden Gate Bridge is in one of them. (2) They know that movies come from Hollywood and that Barack Obama is a good President because their parents hate him less than that other guy who came before him. They know that the Statue of Liberty and the White House exist somewhere. They know what the flag looks like and that there’s either 50 or 51 states – it’s not easy to remember.

They know a bit, but they have a lot of questions.

Most importantly: “Dan, how many celebrities do you know?” But other questions, too.

Most of the questions start with “Is it true that…” – as if they can’t quite believe that things in other parts of the world are actually unlike Germany. Is it true that people drive cars everywhere? Is it true that people eat plain cereal for breakfast? Is it true that everyone carries a gun in New York?

At the end of one class, this demure girl, looking alarmed, asked, : “Is it really true that Americans drink water out of the tap?”

The room I’m renting in Dresden belongs to the family’s oldest child, Carmen, a sixteen year old girl who is spending a year abroad in a small town in Ohio.

She lives there with an Ohioan family and has had to adjust to American high school, which is markedly different from the German equivalent, Gymnasium.

Socially, high school is a blast for Carmen – and a total mystery for her parents here in Dresden.

“Carmen said she has a dance coming up,” the parents tell me. “It’s called… Homecoming?”

After speaking with Carmen, they were confused why the dance seemed charged with the sort of razzmatazz that normally accompanies more important ceremonies, like, say, a wedding. Over-the-top proposals. Tacky matching of various articles of clothing. Luxurious dinner. And who is coming home, anyway?

Why do we do those things?

I found my attempts to describe Homecoming difficult – and not just because I only attended once and spent most of the dance trying to hide from the girl I liked. (Such is the dating strategy of overwrought sixteen-year-old males.)

The reason why it is so hard to explain Homecoming is because it can’t be defined in isolation. Homecoming is not an event, it’s a nexus, embedded in assumptions and traditions and questions and images.

Football games. Alumni reunions. Last minute corsages. Boy asks girl. New dress – maybe return it after the dance. Olive Garden. Alcohol. Grinding. Sex. Or no alcohol, no grinding, no sex. That one slow song. Who pays for the tickets? Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? Do you love that song? I love that song. That song plays. Dress shoes. Bare feet. Chairs. Stage. Sweat. Chaperones. Mike just got kicked out for being drunk. That’s so Mike. Do you want to… dance? Those silly lights. Getting tired. Last song. No driver’s license – parents pick you up. How was the dance? Fine. Fine. It was fine.

It’s a cultural perspective I understand because I’ve always had it. I explained what it was like to Clemens and Julia as best I could, but Carmen did a better job when she simply said: “It’s really crazy!”

When I discuss the peculiarities of American life with Clemens and Julia, I’m reminded of a great benefit of living in a foreign country, a benefit that can easily be taken for a cliché: I get to see things from a new perspective. I get to look at America through German eyes. I get to look over there from over here.

And sometimes I’m embarrassed.

Like when Carmen talked about how no one in her town wore a coat during winter, because they’re only outside for two brief periods: between the house’s front door and the car, then between the car and some other front door.

Or when she describes how everyone heats up some food in the microwave and eats it in front of the television without talking to anyone.

Or when I explained Black Friday, and how someone will inevitably get trampled not long from now, running fast and arms stretched out in pursuit of a television or a toaster or some other green light, on some fine morning. (3)

But most of the time, I love America.

Last year, I took a class on Walt Whitman.

It took a long time, but I read all of his wonderful work, Leaves of Grass.

Whitman first published the volume in 1855 and re-published it seven times, continuing to work on it until the day he died.

He was fascinated with printing and said that he wrote with attention to how his words would look on the page. The title of Leaves of Grass is a printer’s pun: leaves are the sheets of paper, and grass is what printers called the long works that were printed and assembled slowly, a contrast to the short newsletters that had a quick turnaround and an immediate payoff.

And here’s where I get to use my favorite literary term: synecdoche: a part is made to represent the whole, or vice versa.

So you see, Leaves of Grass is stunning synecdoche: the slow construction of Whitman’s poem is a reflection of the gradual development of a human life, but – on an even grander scale, where the or vice versa comes in – Whitman says that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

A poem revealing a life.

A tapestry of lives expressing a poem.

And Walt Whitman, wearing his commonest clothes in his diminuitive frontispiece, can say what I love about America a hell of a lot better than I can.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendship—the freshness and candor of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage … their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech—their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul … their good temper and open handedness—the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them, not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

And that last sentence, that forward-looking sentiment, is why I’m hopeful.

America is built and being built, working through the contradictions and the expectations and the disappointments. (4)

I can’t say much more than that, though I try to when I teach my classes. I try to explain Native Americans, the Civil War, September 11th.

I try to get them to imagine what it actually means that America is a place where people from every other place in the world live. I don’t know what it means myself, but who could?

Every person is a universe and every universe a poem, and we’re all winging across this Arcadia in matchbox cars with pale, tarnished paint.

The bed’s unmade and the trash can is full and we’re building a bridge to nowhere yet known and my head is under the bathroom faucet guzzling chilly water.

To Live To Die

This kid wasn’t playing with the others, so I asked him if he was alright. He showed me a nasty scab.

“Man, how’d you do that?” I asked.

“I don’t want to say,” he told me.

And I noticed then that the wound was on his wrist.

I heard about the writer Dudley Clendinen a few days ago.

He has been diagnosed with ALS, a fatal, tormenting disease. It progressively kills the muscles, and at the end of life the sufferer is very conscious when he begins to suffocate. Clendinen has decided to kill himself before the disease leaves him immobile.

“When the music stops,” Clendinen writes in his New York Times article, “I’ll know that Life is over. It’s time to be gone.”

And I can’t stop thinking about his decision, because, although he asks for respect for his choice, I think it’s wrong. He’s compelled to write about his decision because he thinks “we don’t talk about how to die.”

He’s right about that: we do need to learn how to approach death, but I’m compelled to write because I think Clendinen has found the wrong answer.

I had to fill out a survey before I could get psychotherapy at my University during my sophomore year.

The receptionist sat me at a clunky computer, sanitized the keyboard, and smiled at me with a smile that said: your appointment says you have clinical depression, but your hipster-chic wit and American Apparel apparel say you’re a pretty well-adjusted kid.

“Make sure you answer all of the questions honestly,” she said, “It’s the most helpful that way.”

I lied on question seventeen. Had I ever considered ending my own life? I checked No.

I remember lying on the same question when I went to therapy in high school and middle school and elementary school.

But invariably, once I’m on the couch, the psychologist will ask: “You’ve…” – he scribbles something – “… never thought about suicide?” And I always answer the same: “Not in a pragmatic way.” It’s kind of a joke.

Clendinen watched his mother die over a period of nine years.

“For the last several years,” he says, “she looked at her only son as she might have at a passing cloud.”

He doesn’t want his daughter to have the same experience. He doesn’t want to be “bathed and diapered and dressed and fed.” He doesn’t want to be a burden, a “colossal waste of love and money.”

He “hates being a drag.”

And it’s here that I’m not sure what to think: is Clendinen killing himself because he thinks it will protect his daughter and friends, or because he thinks it will spare him pain and embarassment?

When I don’t understand my own thoughts about something, I e-mail Martin.

It’s nice that I can call him Martin now, but I tend to use Dr. Nemoianu still. He teaches philosophy, specializing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and obscure varieties of metal music.

The problem I took to him was this: Clendinen asserts that his decision to end his life is rational. It’s not, but I didn’t have a clear way of explaining that.

“The argument that suicide can be rational has no merit,” Dr. Nemoianu’s argument began, and continues with no loss of zeal or clarity.

In suicide one prefers certain objects of rational choice – pleasure, freedom from fear, pain, and sadness – more than the faculties which make such preferences possible and which allow us to acquire such objects. But the objects of choice cannot be more valuable than that by which they are chosen.

In other words, it is my rationality that allows me to direct my life towards certain ends, and so any decision to end my own life on the basis of an inclination – say, a desire to avoid agonizing pain – is destroying the very means by which I ever had that desire. It’s incoherent. A paradox.

But what if Clendinen’s desire is not avoiding his own pain, but preventing his daughter’s suffering?

To ascribe goodness or badness to the future or to the preferences of one’s child is also and more strongly to affirm the goodness of the faculties by means of which we make the ascriptions.

That is, it is only a stronger proof of our humanity that we can expand our considerations so broadly: to others, to an unknowable future.

And thus, it’s even more irrational to decide to destroy it.

I feel strongly for Clendinen, and I know that I’ve only felt a small bit of his despair. Some days I feel like I’ve lived forever and only rarely does mortality occur to me. He’s facing death, and moreover a shade so dolorous. I’m not.

But I don’t think he’s going to save his daughter from pain with his decision.

And I don’t think there’s any rationality motivating him.

Yet Clendinen is a thoughtful person.

The first thing he said that struck me was in an interview with the Nieman Storyboard: “I’ve gotten in the habit of experiencing my life as both the person living it and the writer observing it.”

I’m familiar with the feeling myself. I write a blog that narrates the events of my life. I notice the moments that make good stories, I know what the dialogue will look like on the page, I create my own version of experiences.

But the distinction that Clendinen makes between the person observing and the person living is too elegant. In fact, it’s more nuanced. More meta-cognitive. Because, after all, I know that I’m observing the way I act, and that makes me act differently.

It makes me act like I’m in a story.

And is it possible that Clendinen’s decision is about the story he’s written for himself?

Another writer, Sir Terry Pratchett, has also decided to take his own life. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago.

“I can jump before I am pushed,” he writes, “The enemy might win, but it won’t triumph.”

What makes Pratchett’s position interesting is his ardent refusal to call his act suicide. He contrasts suicide – “fear, shame, despair and grief… madness” – with the “furious sanity” of those who have “seen their future, and they don’t want to be a part of it.”

But it’s not sane, and there’s no difference between the two groups he describes.

What grounds the decision of those who have seen the future and don’t want to be a part of it is ultimately fear, shame, and despair.

He may think that those of us who are young and physically healthy and have considered killing ourselves are somehow more insane, but the truth is that we’re all equally, passionately demented.

In the moments when I have been tortured by the thought of suicide, it is precisely because I looked upon the future and didn’t want to be a part of it. And of course that’s where the fear comes from, for the young and the old, the healthy and the sick. What else could it be?

But none of us know what’s coming.

I remember the first time I felt fascinated with dying, and the first time I wanted to die.

The fascination came when I was nine years old, and I was in talk therapy for the first time.

I remember that I used to make one hand a ladder and the other hand a person and the person would run up and down the ladder and I liked to concentrate on that activity.

That meant that I was nervous, they said.

I remember that they taught me how to turn myself into a cocoon, and inside of there nothing could bother me and I didn’t need to worry when we were on the freeway, because I was shrouded and safe. And if I practiced enough inside my cocoon, they said, I’d become a butterfly.

And I always sat in the middle seat in the back and I did the cocoon thing. But that one day I sat on the right side and I looked down out the window and if you really look down at the pavement when you’re in a car it’s absurd.

I couldn’t believe how we were hurtling along and I thought about what would happen if I opened the door and just rolled out and I could see my body hit the ground and the car still zooming away and I’m bleeding everywhere and it was a juvenile invention but as each body part hits the ground it sort of falls off and I’m dead in pieces.

And the first time I wanted to die was in middle school, but I could never explain the reasons because they were gone after that frenzied moment when the argument with myself ended and I chose life.

And then there’s Hal Finney.

He also has ALS, and there’s something wonderful about his response. Most people say that the most gruesome thing about ALS is that the mental functions stay acute as the body deteriorates, so the person suffers fully, consciously.

Hal disagrees.

One of the bright spots in this picture: ALS normally does not affect higher brain functions. I will retain my abilities to think and reason as usual… I will remain alive inside.

He’s decided that he’s determined to live “a life very much worth living,” by taking the opportunity to engage more fully with mental tasks. He even seems thankful for the opportunity of that challenge.

And the challenge, after all, is what Clendinen said we should be more aware of in our reflections on death.

We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is.

But Clendinen is finishing his story without a denouement. He has preached Stoicism – “what’s up to us is how we accept it, how we embrace it, and whether we let it make us weak or strong” – but declares that he won’t accept what’s happening to him.

The writer’s control stripped away by circumstance, and he demands it back, this isn’t the ending he wanted.

Pratchett wants to go before he can’t take care of himself anymore – “Can they accept that there are some people who have a burning passion not to need to be cared for?” – but the truth is that none of us have ever been independent in this way. If independence were a prerequisite for a worthwhile life, none of us would have a chance.

We’re all needy and we’re all dying and we all forget that more or less until we’re Clendinen or we’re Pratchett or we’re Hal.

But Hal, who is certainly as horrified as the rest of us, accepts his dependence and accepts his fate.

And he fights off death with the rest of us. Ineffectual. Hopeless. In vain. Death, inevitable, but not yet, you bastard.

I don’t know what that ten-year-old kid was thinking when he slit his wrist.

I don’t know what future he saw, and what he thought he’d gain by giving everything up.

I don’t know why I sometimes feel the same way he does.

I know, though, that I want to live.

I’ll die, and I accept that. But I won’t do it.

And I hope the same for Mr. Clendinen and Sir Pratchett. Because human dignity isn’t lost when someone has to clean up our shit, or when we forget our spouse’s name, or when we can’t move anymore, or when our body is giving up.

Nothing like that can ever take away our humanity, our striving, our essence. To labor and toil and consider and choose. To live. To choose life, absurd as it is, with an unknowable future and a present moment so harrowing and demanding. What the fuck? we can say, but not Fuck it.

Here is where we are, and this is what we are doing. The best of luck to all of us.

So Much Unfairness of Things

Sarah and I used to be Liv and Lennart.

Like once-upon-a-time Sarah, Liv has slid comfortably into the role of older sister, alternating between merciless resent of her privileged younger brother and feigned indifference to that privilege.

It’s obvious to an adult observer that her insouciant shrugs are learned stratagems–she isn’t really apathetic about Lennart’s trip to the awesome outdoor store where you can try on the waterproof gear in an indoor rain room, but she will pretend that it’s totally boring.

Lennart doesn’t realize she’s scheming (I didn’t either at his age), and it’s crushing for a nine-year-old boy to see that his sister doesn’t care at all about all the neat stories he has.

So on Halloween, the boys come back ten minutes later than they’re supposed to. What could’ve kept them? Well, just look at that pile of candy on the ground. Bonbons, Haribo, and even the mother lode: full-sized candy bars.

“You boys left earlier than us and came back later,” Liv says, hoping that this logical explanation will somehow diminish the importance of the boys’ much larger stash of sweets.

Lennart offers her a few packets of gummi bears–the kind with the wonderful white sugary coating on the bottom that he knows is her favorite–in an act that’s some combination of sympathy and swagger. She throws the gummi bears back at him and her cool detachment is lost in favor of volatile indignation.

She calls Lennart is “an idiot shit,” the other boys with him “totally kaput dummies,” and she concludes with the most devastating claim from a ten-year-old perspective, an age trapped somewhere between unconstrained childhood fancy and rigid adult systematizing, the claim that things are just unfair.

I’ve heard this claim of unfairness at the house almost every day that I’ve been here, and I know the particular form of unfairness that’s being discussed here because of my (too) lengthy tour of duty as a YMCA summer camp counselor: it’s the kind of unfairness that occurs during a made-up game with a dubious set of rules.

“You’re out, Todd”

“Why am I out?”

“You have to throw the stick over that line, not this line. You threw it too far.”

It’s the kind of unfairness that doesn’t refer to a law or moral, just self-preservation. All that it’s really saying is: “Everybody, listen up! This situation isn’t benefitting me!” When Lennart practices his trumpet, Liv yells, “Unfair!” When it’s Liv’s turn to pick out a movie, Lennart yells “Unfair!”

And there’s something great about the German emphasis that English can’t replicate. The word – unfair – is actually the same, but an exasperated English speaker would yell un-fair while an enraged German emphasizes the dissenting prefix, pronounced like the ‘oo’ in ‘moon’: “That is un-fair.”

My sister told me a great story. One of her elementary school students came in Monday morning and Sarah asked, “What’d you do this weekend?” “Don’t you remember?” the student said, “I went to Disneyland.” The student hadn’t told Sarah that she was going to Disneyland and Sarah hadn’t seen her there–it’s just easy for a kid to forget that their life isn’t at the center of things.

Here’s another story from the elementary school front line: the cafeteria is serving Goldfish as a snack and a concerned student approaches Sarah and says, “But… I don’t like Goldfish.” We are all inclined toward egocentrism now and then (and it’s understandable, since our “I” is the center of every single experience we have) but kids have a very hard time adjusting to the reality of cosmic insignificance after a long period of growing up in an environment that confirms the myth that everything has been custom built for their satisfaction: food is prepared, house is cleaned, entertainment is provided… so why the hell are you telling me that I’m not allowed to play my Nintendo DS?

And it was interesting to see Julia, a few nights ago, attempt to expand Lennart’s definition of fairness when he called her “nasty” and “unfair” for not letting him eat a lollipop after dinner.

“You know what else is unfair, Lennart?” she said. “What?” “Liv is a whole year older than you, and she always will be.” This is a beautiful example, because although it’s simple, it’s exactly the sort of benign actuality that one has to accept to avoid being forlorn in the face of immutable facts: David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, and I never will.

But it turns out that this sort of thinking is too meta-cognitive for a nine-year-old who just wants a lollipop: he doesn’t want reality to be fundamentally different, he just wants mom to stop being so dumb about one little piece of candy. “Of course she’s older!” Lennart yells, infuriated at the obvious statement and oblivious to its implications.

And I don’t think that it’s something we have to change, because a good understanding of fairness requires a sophisticated selflessness that needs a lot of time to incubate.

The night of Halloween, Lennart didn’t want to invite this other boy, Alvin, because Lennart thinks he’s annoying. The thing is, Alvin’s mom was in the hospital and he was all alone at home. “Imagine that you were alone like that, Lennart,” Clemens said, “and you had to trick-or-treat alone or not go out at all.” But Lennart was ready to retort: “I’d never be alone like that! Liv would be here, or Dan would be if nobody else was!”

He just couldn’t quite grasp what it meant that somebody else is actually somebody. It’s the difference between the naive fairness that wants to put all the collected candy in a pile and divide it up evenly to make sure that I get as much as everyone else and the cultivated fairness that thinks, “Mom has made dinner for me 3,467 times in my life, I’m going to clean up the dishes tonight.”

But it takes time, it takes time. Until then, the unfair world conspires against us, and Infinite Jest bears the name of a man who isn’t me.

Steve

I can’t remember if I said was or is earlier this morning when I was interviewed as I walked away from the Apple Store in Dresden.

“Wait a minute,” he said, chasing after me, and I thought it was a sales pitch, so I said, “No thank you.” “Steve Jobs is dead,” he said, jamming a microphone over my shoulder. I said nothing. “Any thoughts?” “I miss him.” “Why?” “He is my hero.” “Thanks a lot,” he said, and walked away.  He had a quote.  I was laconic, perfect for radio.

But my brevity was not due only to my somber mood, but also because I was being addressed in German, and though I had spent much of the morning trying to formulate my feelings in German, the words weren’t there with the microphone over my shoulder.

The words I was looking for I first tried to find during a shower of a particularly un-German duration, because I thought I’d break the news to the family I live with here, though I wasn’t sure whether they’d care.  I sought, in the shower, to find verbs and adjectives that got beyond the facts and gave at least some glimpse of the personal reasons why I actually felt something awful when I found out that Steve was no longer alive.

But at breakfast, I didn’t break the news. “The founder of Apple is dead,” the young girl said. “Where did you hear that?” I asked. “On the radio.” “Not Steve Jobs?” the father asked. “Yes, Steve Jobs,” I said, “he is dead.” I said a few other things, about how I liked him, I thought he was important — but in that moment my German simply wasn’t robust enough.  And I was so depressed that I couldn’t even find the gesture or the feeling to support my simple vocabulary.  I think it probably appeared that I was apathetic about Steve, offering a comment just because people do that.  “Oh, a tornado in that small town.  Twelve dead?  Awful.  And a baby boy, too.”

So I rushed down to the Apple Store, because it was sleepytime in the United States and everyone was trying to sleep off the news but I had just woken up to it and I had a day to confront.

I felt like the Apple Store was the closest place I could be to something, but I had no clue what exactly it was that I needed to be close to.  At the store in Dresden, a single bouquet of white roses was left on the floor just inside the door, and that was wonderful.  I was also comforted to know that in Hong Kong the glowing Apple was dimmed, in Santa Monica “Thank You Steve” was scrawled with lipstick on a store window, and in Pasadena a fresh apple with “bye” written in winsome cursive was left on a window sill.  A simple black and white portrait of Steve adorned Apple’s homepage, which was particularly significant for me because it showed how much more important than man is than the products.

The technology is great, but that’s just what Jobs left behind, not what he was made of.  He was made of magic.

Anyone who doubted Steve when he said “I think this new product is magical” wasn’t looking in the right place — it’s not the tablet in his hand, it’s the man holding it.  Watching his keynotes made me excited, and it’s because the man was an absolute force: his belief and courage and obsession on display with all of the enigma and clarity that comes along with genius.  Seeing him gave me the same sort of feeling that reading a great book always does: “I want to do that!”  I want to dream, I want to love, I want to create.

At Stanford in 2005, the words he spoke were platitidinous — “When I wake up, I ask myself if what I am doing that day is what I would be doing if it were my last day to live.” — but damn if Steve saying it doesn’t make you look around at what you’re doing with yourself, why the hell that notebook where you scrawled out your goals and your dreams is no where to be found, why in the world you’re afraid and unwilling to take a chance.

Of the many things Jobs has encouraged in me, the thing I continue to work on most is his equanimity.

In the last months, and presumably in his last days, Jobs approached his fate so courageously, so unfailingly, so dutifully.  He made time for what counts, continued to work on what he loved, managed to get his shoes a little stained by playing in the grass, and left the world in a calm and quiet and humble firestorm.  I can say with no hesitation that I love Steve, and it has nothing to do with his legacy or his products, and everything to do with his verve.

And I hope I said that he “is” my hero for the radio, because Steve was once alive, but he is still influencing me.