Common Place No. 25 by John J. Parman

“SKETCH OF WHAT THE WRITER KNOWS” COMMON PLACE Number 25 | SPRING 2020

The title is Robert Musil’s, referred to by Catrin Misselhorn in “Musil’s Metaphilosophical View,” The Monist, January 2014, p. 109. It’s the title of an essay fragment from 1918. She explains that Musil divided life into two areas, the ratiod, “everything that can be summarized in laws and rules,” and the nonratiod, "the dominance of the exceptions over the rule”: the worlds of science and mathematics, and of literature and poetry, respectively. Musil, a mathematician and philosopher, felt that persons of a serious mindset, “capable of strict scientific and abstract reasoning,” would turn to literature and poetry in order to reflect on their experiences of the nonratiod. These, Musil contended, are singular, unrepeatable, and inapplicable to facts, rules, laws, or any generality at all. When I read this recently in an issue of The Monist on “The Philosophy of Robert Musil,” I wanted to write about it.

“SKETCH OF WHAT THE WRITER KNOWS” “Musil argues that our minds are loosely tethered to the rational, with the irrational as a leitmotif. This mirrors life with its sometimes baleful, sometimes gorgeous randomness, or both, like a meteor we see coming at a great distance, impossible to avoid, its embrace glancing, leaving scars; or we are that meteor, unwittingly. He is the patron saint of this.”

I wrote this recently after reading a friend’s “note to the world” expressing longing to transcend a life that at that moment felt constricted—some version of this. Musil set out his argument as a pair of complements, which he called “the ratiod” and “the nonratiod.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the relentless critic of any view of actual life that fails to note the pervasiveness of its edge conditions—that is, of conditions where the normal distribution of outcomes is inapplicable— would quarrel with my quote, I think, saying that randomness is what’s there and any appearance of stability is an illusion. As the Buddhists put it, only the Dharma is refuge: only a radical acceptance of the nonratiod quality of life will free you to live fully within it—that is, unhindered by illusions of control. The Buddhists anticipate Musil’s pairing, though, by declaring the necessity of living as if the world is not contingent—“putting breakfast on the table”—and accepting the effects that arise from different causes as the reality with which one deals, “the world.”

It’s here that Musil, Taleb, and the Buddhists seem to meet: they want us to see our situation accurately, to take randomness or contingency for granted, yet still act mindfully within it, not retreat into silence or cut ourselves off from experience out of fear or an abundance of caution, “overthinking.” Sometimes we have to plunge in, commit ourselves to a course of action that, seen in retrospect, seems suspect. We may have the scars to prove it, but we have something else, often, that we wouldn’t have gained without it. Our motives may be unclear going in, particularly if another person is involved, but often there’s a rough balance, what Horst Rittel called “a symmetry of ignorance.” Note that I’m thinking here of experiences that are not coercive, one person forcing a situation on another, although what brings them to it may be their own coercions, arising separately but conjoining coincidentally. Not coercive, yet it seems often to end in tears. I thought of this when I read my friend’s “note to the world.” My first impulse was to warn her, but warnings aren’t really what’s needed, so I wrote what I wrote. What’s odd about experiences of this type to me is that I’ve spent the rest of my life pondering them, not out of regret, nostalgia, or the desire for a counterfactual outcome, but rather to work out what they meant. Because they meant a good deal and this may have been their point, possibly for all the parties involved.

In Musil’s Diaries, he writes down scenes from life— encounters that, as he says, seem worth noting. They’re almost reportorial, but blur into stories and parts of novels, or the stories and novels assimilate them. My diaries are more condensed. I’ve exposed parts of them to someone else and excerpted from them out of a sense of irony. Delusion and insight surface amid running comments on the weather. This is like Musil’s pair, but less sacred or profane as pointed or mundane—how minor things can draw attention in a landscape of sameness. All those times I gave up, feeling condemned to it, and in the end came to prefer it, finding the beauty in an ordinary life that extraordinary life tries and fails to recreate in hopes of prolonging it or grounding it in order to make it less strenuous, volatile, or tenuous: words of this sort that shouldn’t be contrasted too strongly with ordinary life as it unfolded in parallel. None of this would have happened if it, too, hadn’t had its own upheavals, but strangely the grounding of it took—an ordinary, even a natural process. Why is this? It’s as if there are border conditions, the one shading into the other, as one of Musil’s interpreters put it. We cross over and cross back. Perhaps we can just cross over, but I never was able to do that. The writer doesn’t know this, going in, but he finds that at a certain point he crosses back, and not just once.

One would think the writer would know after one instance, but it takes time to grasp that it’s a pattern. The realm is extraordinary, after all, and each instance has aspects that make it different from others that, viewed in retrospect, appear as a set. Let’s call this set the realm of impossibility, because in each case the writer crossed back. Had the writer crossed, then “ordinary” would take on new aspects and there’d be no set. It would appear as it looked, a progression with its own signs—a realm of destiny. I think this view of it has its own standing as a set that crosses the boundary of ordinary and extraordinary. What the writer didn’t know was the hierarchy. In the realm of destiny, it’s clear, and not everyone is or was happy with it. It seems to have rules. What the writer doesn’t know is if this can possibly be true. But there are signs that the writer saw. He has a good memory for signs, and some of them were explicit. Even if the writer knows these things, of what value are they? Do others also tumble through time, charged with playing out games here they dreamt up somewhere else, but arriving only with intuitions? The most explicit confirmation is of hardly any use when the context is dead set against the players. (But an argument could be made, bet your life on it. Only something gravitates against it—and this word is apt. Gravity is the tide and riptide of life’s ocean.)

A quantum sense of life is what the writer knows by experience. Gravity is supposedly off to the side, majestically apart from quantum mechanics and its speculations. Gravity is a stand in for the limits we encounter as we try to escape convention’s pull. Life is quantum in its chronic instability. We live “as if,” and life turns these words back at us flippantly. This is especially difficult for anyone who craves proofs. Convention is the sum of such proofs as we agree on, although of course they too are provisional. They may gain from acquiring gravity, but its currency is strictly limited. Proof against what? Which is to ask, who agrees? What are the limits of their agreement? It follows that gravity isn’t really off to the side, but is the abiding context in which life operates, a source of friction but also how we ground ourselves. In the end, life alone permits us to draw some conclusions about our personal experiences of it. I doubt that it reveals the truth of things except in a very narrow sense, but we can say meaningful things about our nature, about the individuals we each are as life clarifies for us through experience. Even this is never hard and fast, but merely indicative, a place to start. Our nature may dispose us to start readily or reluctantly, to be engaged with life or surprised by it. If we accept Musil’s realms, we could imagine freeing ourselves to live hedonically in one of them, unconcerned with any turmoil our actions cause. But this misses their inseparability: how actions in one realm bleed into the other; how some have qualms and others emerge with blood on their hands.

But hedonism isn’t the only reason we set out past convention as a matter of course. This too is part of our makeup, how we learned who we are in the face of others’ expectations of who we should be. My sense from being a parent is that children arrive with a good deal of their inner being innate. We may see it more clearly than they do across their lives, but there’s very little can say of value when it comes to their navigating what counts for them. We see what counts, to some degree, but it’s not always clear why it counts and what it means to them. We both are sorting this out individually. It’s possible to compare notes, a potentially useful exercise: to say things about our process, not to impose it on others but clarify what it looks like from within, including a sense of where it got us, is getting us, might get us. A quantum sense of life is provisional, but this “provisional” is elastic, varying between conviction and a hunch, for example. Gravity in its baleful guise can seek to pin us down, demanding we live up to our conviction even to the point of self-sacrifice. But we exert a counterforce that goes to the heart of who we are. Its emergence is spontaneous, instinctual, possibly hardwired, and beyond any calculation. It’s what an army tries to train through suggestion so that soldiers will tap it and direct it on command. It’s why an army is dangerous in the same way a crowd can be—aroused and set loose. An army has more discipline, but only barely if things get out of hand. Individually, we learn to control ourselves. We do our best. We pray sometimes for divine guidance.

They’re comingled, as Musil wrote: the ordinary and the extraordinary shade into each other. Within so-called ordinary life, our attention is pulled to its edge conditions. Remembering a day on acid and the famous account of madness in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I wonder the stress of madness is most of all the way it tilts the plane of ordinary life so that the edge conditions are too present. The disciplines that Zen imposes seem meant to maintain habit’s force in the face of an onslaught of self-derailments. These disciplines, taken on voluntarily, are largely missing in contemporary society, and self-derailments occur on a considerable scale without any discipline at all that qualifies as supportive, therapeutic, or useful. I mention this because my mother went briefly, fully mad after a long foreshadowing of madness. She was brought back by medical intervention, but securing it required a hearing and the cooperation of a psychiatrist whose help hinged on the fact that her sister, who he knew and liked, spoke up for her—that is, made him see that restoring her to ordinary life was worth the effort. She was saved, in short, by her family connections, which is often how it is. I think sometimes how it could have gone the other way. At my mother’s funeral, I noted how her life had roughly coincided with the revolution that brought Lenin into power and the sclerotic collapse that led the Soviet Union to transition back to Russia. She didn’t live long enough to see much of the endgame, but she survived a pandemic, experienced a second global conflict, and watched an epochal power shift.

What counted as extraordinary to her I’m not sure. She had a psychic sense that she sometimes described. Left motherless at four, she may have had a wound from that event that she carried with her. At minimum, it’s an extraordinary thing to happen to a child. She never really spoke of it, at least not to me. My “double cousin” Patricia Cochran, who was my mother’s niece and the college roommate of her half-sister Sylvia, told me that my mother and her mother were regarded as “a bit peculiar” by some of her relatives on my grandfather’s side. (Patricia was my double cousin because her father was both the brother of my grandmother and the husband of my grandfather’s sister: that is, one pair of siblings married another.) My mother would occasionally be in the grip of her intuition, virtually demanding that we press on toward a destination that pulled on her. This led us once down a long road to lakeside cabins, a journey that took out our 1953 Dodge sedan’s oil plan. It led us to set out for Nantucket from Martha’s Vineyard in the face of small craft warnings, sailing from Edgartown to Nantucket harbor in a gale. My father deferred to her when this happened, despite what I felt to be his misgivings. Adventures followed. My father was a uniquely grounded human being with a remarkably open view of life, more accepting of the spectrum of possibilities it produced than my mother was. She brought along a passel of childhood prejudices and superstitions that were leavened by a handful of specific exceptions—tramps and Gypsies, for example, exempted by direct experience of them.

My friend Thomas Heinser has been posting slides taken by his father on his travels in Europe circa 1960. I was in Europe with my family that same year, one of a series of visits between 1948 and 1977 of up to six months. The first two bracketed our journeys to and from Singapore. I don’t remember much from 1948 except the flight back to the US. (The plane had bunkbeds for children, which I thought was great.) But the memories strengthen and become more or less continuous thereafter, reinforced by my father’s penchant for photographing much of what he saw. He left 10,000 slides, roughly, which my sister gave to the University of Oregon. Seeing Thomas’s slides, I wished immediately that I could sort through them. The iPod and then the iPhone brought out in me a similar tendency to document. Despite owning not a few film and digital cameras, the simplicity of these small devices, easy to slip into a pocket and forgiving of light conditions, won me over immediately. Yet I possess a prodigious, even holographic memory for experiences of certain kinds. In the presence of “Las Meninas” at the Prado, I gave 30 minutes to taking it in, understanding that it can’t be replicated. Oddly, iPhone photos are sometimes closer to the feeling a painting evokes photos made using better cameras. At least to my eyes, dodgy instruments attached to a fairly sophisticated mental apparatus. For a decade, I’ve had a Tumblr site where many of these iPod- or iPhone-derived photos are posted. I also post on Instagram, sometimes expansively, but

Tumblr’s archive feature makes it much easier to go back in time and review the visual narrative. Doing so reminds me of the slideshows that were a feature of my youth, episodically reliving trips we made as my father curated them for different audiences. He must have had confidence in his photographic skill, and indeed he was talented. I took far fewer photos than he did, but was pleased to see that I had some ability at composition and an instinct for beauty. He occasionally commented positively on this. When I go back through my photos, they vary in quality. My brothers-in-law, who shoot with proper cameras, get better results often, especially if their better lenses make a difference. Despite this, some of my photos are evocative, at least to me. When I see them, they remind me of the moment I took them—where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, even my mood. I can evoke this inventory without the prompt of a photo if the event was singular enough to etch itself into memory. In those instances, I might as well have been filming, but my mind’s equipment includes not just dodgy lenses, but the whole sensory package— attached, as noted, to this synthesizing, holographic apparatus. What the writer knows is to draw on it. Experience, that catch-all word we slap onto all of this, isn’t really where my writing begins. What my mind takes in is never precisely raw footage, but life apprehended in states of heightened awareness. Ordinary life, familiar life, habitual life—we live with it in a ritual way, performing the tasks it assigns us.

Yet within the everyday, we’re pulled into another realm—one that connects us to people and activities we bring with us that take root wherever we are. Consider the photo above, taken in my cousin Henning’s cabin next to his mother’s house. This is my second visit, so the place is more familiar. The cabin has few lamps, so I’m working in the light nature provides. I brought a manuscript along and am editing it in between seeing family and spending time with my cousin Turid, who I first met in 1948, visited in 1953 and 1960, then met again in 2011. The place is at the edge of Bergen, looking out at the North Sea and distant mountains. The manuscript is from Austin, Texas, the work of a Russian-born poet writing in English. I ended up editing 100 of more than 200 pieces in a continuing series that struck me as remarkable when I read it piecemeal on Tumblr. (By editing in this case, I mean copyediting.) The photo records my tendency to edit by hand. That in turn reflects how I tend to read—slowly, so the text unfolds as the writer set it out. When I work as an editor, I either write out suggestions for given passages or I offer comments. Copyediting—line editing—requires engaging the text. The writer in question here later insisted that I make my edits using the review feature of Word. This for me is an unnatural act. The thicket this creates obscures the text for me as a close reader. I understood, of course, and met her request. I even got the hang of it, using that feature, but it made the exercise utilitarian. It was utilitarian in the writer’s viewpoint, undeniably, but the pleasure I took in doing it diminished. That pleasure relates in some way to my sense of being an outsider within contemporary, unfolding life.

I appear to live contemporaneously, seeming to latch onto things quickly, but in truth I only do so if they perfect older things that I value. In some ways I’m an 18th-century man, despite the influence of modernism in its 19th- and 20th-century guises. So, although my pen is Japanese and disposable, and the manuscript largely reflects a digital process, this is an 18th-century scene to me in which this fluent, cosmopolitan writer figures “as if present” because present in her text. The manuscript has a heightened meaning because it came with a request to read it. When I look at the photo, all of this is there. If others look at it, absent this background, a bit of it may come through. I can’t say, but it exemplifies for me how Musil’s two realms intermingle in daily life. Is this just association? I don’t think so. The fact that I took the photo indicates that I recognized in the moment this confluence and its heightened affect, setting it down so I could come back to it later. To be deeper in the extraordinary, the setting down isn’t thought out, but the apparatus is running. For me, coming back to it is part of this other thing’s reality. As Musil notes, you can’t replicate it. I read that Walter Benjamin made a great effort to separate his friends and lovers from each other. This isn’t my tendency at all, but I can see it as a defense against the confusion and anger that arise if friends or lovers feel they’re being compared with each other. That we do so reflects attributes of speech that imply a hierarchy of preference or value when in reality we experience these others’ unique entireties. Few rely on this or accept their unassailable integrity, even as they unfold and change. But the truism remains true: “You really are you, and no one else will ever be.”

My colleagues gave me the card at top right when I retired as our firm’s editorial director. The barn is a renovated shed that holds most of my library and one of my two writing desks. The sunsets are the upstairs view west from my house. My colleagues saw the barn as the center of my gravity, and the west as both the paradise to which I make my way and a record over time of one aspect of a place I love. This anyway is how I interpreted it. But the fact that they pointed to these two specifics led me to interpret it also as an endorsement of the step I took—toward my own work, long pursued in some sense, in parallel. Elsewhere I’ve written how work falls in several categories. In the same way life mixes experiences, work mixes activities that are reflect talent, interest, and patronage. Across a career, you navigate this in an effort to make it pay off in money and enjoyment. All in all, I did this successfully, but my own work— what Aristotle called “leisure” and distinguished from paid work and holidays from it—gradually came forward to claim my interest. When I reached 70, I began to notice older colleagues waylaid by illness and even dying sooner than expected. At the same time, the accomplishments of my career meant less to me. In the last period of it, especially the last few years, I focused on giving my colleagues more and more responsibility, expressing with justification my confidence in them and my sense that they didn’t need me. It was true, they didn’t need me. They didn’t just learn from me, but I used exceptional

writers. I also “worked out loud,” so they could see clearly how to resolve the problems that invariably arise, how not to panic but be confident you’ll get through it. In a large organization, rife with politics, I was lucky that our team was mostly left alone, seen as a valuable and productive partner. Of course, this gave way to a chaotic period, static at the level of the gods that turned into thunder and lightning at our level. But something survived it. That’s clear to me. This is the main obligation of a long career, to leave when your colleagues can think, “We did it by ourselves.” This makes some people bitter—they feel forgotten—but what I feel is the affection people have for anyone who helped them in a meaningful way. That work, when I look back on it, had moments when we collectively transcended our past efforts. It was those moments that we savored, even if the gods barely noticed that we won international awards. The work was entirely ephemeral, carried out to serve the firm’s business purposes. We began in print, but the team has shifted online with no loss of impact. The standards we set were agnostic about the medium. This is a long aside, but it has a bearing on my own work, the leisure I can now use more fully. It took me some time to make sense of it. I benefited from a chance remark by an artist friend that he just paints and then looks to see what he produced. My Tumblr site, which gets a lot of my output in a raw state, speaks to my willingness to expose what I do, whether it has promise, is botched, whatever.

The nature of reality and being is impermanency, Dögen Eihei asserted, and this is the freedom life affords us: to recognize that the universe unfolds with us and we unfold with it; to be our unfolding selves, seeing each here and now as it really is; to throw off mind-body as somehow separate, distinct, above or below, left or right. “Just sit,” Dögen said, quoting his teacher. Hakuin, a later reformer and admirer of Dögen, emphasized the action that living with impermanence made possible, once we got the hang of its oxymoronic, even quantum nature and the illusions we perpetuate within it, the false view. Musil’s protagonist Ulrich favors what Hakuin called active mediation, pondering the dilemmas of life while walking through it. It seems to have been a question if people in the world could appreciate the nature of reality and being sufficiently to throw off mind-body as Dögen suggests. He and Hakuin both reached out to ordinary people, not ruling out their potential to do so, but they also valued monastic life. The plot of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities revolves around Ulrich’s decision to take a year off and unfold with life in all of its uncertainty. The year is 2013 and the place is Vienna on the cusp of World War—an empire soon to collapse, but unaware of it. The novel’s characters are “human types” whose theories of life are constantly tested by the situations Musil creates—interactions with others that they reflect on later. These take the form of inner dialogues that look back in order to process.

Musil is illustrating the intermingling of his two realms within unfolding reality. Although he draws a distinction between them, the novel shows that in everyday life each haunts the other. “We become accidental Buddhists,” I texted my daughter. That is, we acclimatize ourselves to uncertainty and its daily effects on us. I don’t meditate in the Buddhist sense, and I’m guilty of various forms of magical thinking. I didn’t inherit my mother’s psychic abilities, but I’ve seen things that were uncanny and point to a parallel universe or whatever you want to call it—something that runs alongside us and sometimes bleed through. The Buddha nodded toward these phenomena, and then said that they weren’t the issue for him. He distinguished Nirvana from reincarnation, the wheel of birth and death to which our desires condemn us. The time-traveling game that I sometimes think I’m playing with certain members of my cohort speaks to my intellectual understanding of reincarnation and suggests that Nirvana is to say finally, “Game over.” But my experience of that same game comes back to Musil’s broader point about the two realms of life he identifies. While they can’t be separated, we see the singularity of parts of it. More important, we feel that singularity as we unfold through them. Unfolding can be crushing as we experience it. Yet the aftermath gives us poetry, dreams, melancholy, and other very human things. We make art with it. We relive it in some sense. We act in spite of it. We heal and yet the wounds are always somewhat fresh.

Art accompanies my life. The collage at top right was given me by the artist Patricia Sonnino, whose work I’ve collected for three decades. The work is by people I know or with whom I have a connection. An example of the latter is a pastel, also a gift, made by Janie Michels, a French artist who was Matisse’s last student and one of his models. Most of my personal collection is in two upstairs rooms, but some of it mingles with prints, maps, and posters downstairs. There are also some weavings I did over roughly five years. What I haven’t displayed are the photo-collages I make. I printed a few out. At the house of friends, I saw a photo-printing process that might lend itself better to displaying them as art, but I haven’t taken this step. Like my poems, this is work I do for its own sake—true products of leisure. An artist friend, Henrik Drescher, told me he resists digital artwork because he likes the hands-on quality of making art. I understand. It’s certainly true of weaving that the tactile nature of the experience is part of its pleasure. I went twice to a show of Kurt Schwitters’ remarkable collages, which I loved beyond measure. I find my sources by sifting the everyday as it rolls by online, while he collected his raw materials as he walked around. Is this the same? Such art as I produce by hand is uniformly tiny. I once made a larger drawing using the end of thistle; other thistles were the object drawn. It worked—the instrument lent itself to directness—but it was the exception. As a child, I made watercolors that, thanks to my mother, I still have. They too have this direct quality, unafraid of the medium. When I started weaving, the studio I joined followed Saori, a Japanese method rooted in “There are no mistakes!”

This is a slight misnomer. There are mistakes, of course, but Saori urges weavers to improvise when faced with results that differ from their intentions. It treats mistakes as part of the creative process, which they are. Writing is exactly this: “One continuous mistake,” as Gail Sher memorably put it. Art too has this character, in reality. Janie Michels’ daughter Laure de la Chapelle told me that when her mother began working with Matisse, he said she would have to unlearn her previous training. You never unlearn anything, in reality, but you learn how to tack against it to bring yourself to some other place. I reacted to Saori’s unstructured looseness by converting my loom to four shafts and weaving patterns, but by the time my studio closed, I was improvising in ways that I learned on a two-shaft loom, playing with the weft. Artwork is a record of play because art is play. Of course, it’s everything else: polemics, design, technique, beauty, ugliness, emotion. Art is the only tangible form play takes. The rest of play is memory in terms of its afterlife—its gallery is in our heads. I come back to Matisse telling Janie Michels to loosen up, and to children, too—to the way they engage spontaneously in visual and tactile play to create work of stunning directness. We spend our lives getting back to that spirit, unlearning in order to begin again, to place ourselves at the beginning. Play frees us to act without a destination or set out for one the way Odysseus or Cavafy set out for Ithaka, an inherently discursive journey that is best described only when one arrives or one declares his arrival, subject always to the possibility that this was premature, that he’s found yet another boat to take him out on that glittering sea once again.

Black boxes proliferate today on social media to honor the man a policeman murdered in plain sight of his colleagues. It’s been followed by protests, opportunistic looting, and official violence by the police and county sheriffs that appears to be loosely coordinated and fanned by Donald Trump’s tweets and remarks. In Berkeley, as I write this, we’re in the second evening of a curfew declared by the county, emboldened by its ability to enforce a coronavirus lockdown. We’ve all grown used to governments telling us what do so. A curfew is barely noticeable. It’s clear that we need a unified opposition to prevent Trump from preemptively dismissing the results of the November election on the specious grounds of voter fraud, calling up his paramilitary troops and setting off an alt-right, police-fueled insurrection. Whatever Trump labels, you can be sure he has it in his head to try himself, and the word is on his lips, his rationale for calling up the Army, despite very clear laws against his doing so. Who will stop him? It has to be an organized opposition ready to push back and pry off the political apparatus that Trump and the McConnell faction of the GOP has attached to nonpolitical but weaponized government functions like the Armed Forces, the CIA, and NSC, I write this—today is 2 June 2020—to record my thinking. The election is months away, and January, when the administration changes or continues, even farther. The coronavirus and election season both occasion instant punditry, typically wide of the mark.

I’m trying meanwhile to write an essay on how U.C. Berkeley, a major public research university, might change in light of the pandemic. The same problem arises—what we have seen is not necessarily what will persist. Universities have centuries, even millennia, of tradition. The paradigm is to gather and exchange, face to face. For several months, this has moved online. Some of it has worked well enough. It has created new possibilities for exposing the work, as in final readings I heard by a friend’s writing class, dispersed hither and yon, but there on my screen. It has an intimacy, although it lacks the dynamics of a seminar. We were invited to pose questions, but a lecture typically makes that easier. I came away glad I’d listened in—I would never have flown to Berlin to hear the students read in my friend’s class. Is this a reason to continue the practice? What is it good for? Working on a commissioned essay earlier, I read the late Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck’s take on a house that it’s a tiny city, and that cities are made up of these microcosms of itself. The gist is that it’s always real people who make up these places—cities and campuses alike. A classroom is a tiny city, too, and a department or a college teems with people. At this writing, 2 June 2020, the digital part of it really is part of it, yet still a separable part. People toggle rudely between real life and their phones in lecture halls, but when I was an undergraduate, they used to read the newspapers, sometimes ostentatiously, to express their disdain. No helping nor solving that.

Twenty-one years have passed since the incident at Beijing’s Tienanmen Square—the end of any hope that China’s embrace of capitalism would lead it to become more democratic. Its capitalism has proven to be mercantile and state-directed. Its baleful party holds a monopoly on power that is mixed with broad inequality. Only the wealthy have become wealthier, although there is something like a middle class. In many ways, as I tried to show in the photo-collage I made, China under the CCP is a version of America under Trump and his alt-right faction of the GOP. After a hiatus, I’m reading the Diary of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish writer-philosopher. It may be that Ai Weiwei is his Chinese equivalent. I have a copy of Ai’s blog posts, which would confirm this. Ai became famous at a younger age than Gombrowicz, an exile whose work was only slowly translated. But his thoughts feel contemporary, especially the tone. Between Trump and Xi, I would pick Trump, as there is hope we can uproot him, whereas China is stuck with Xi unless some disgruntled apparatchik dispatches him. At a dinner with friends, I wondered aloud if this would happen and they denied it. I have the same question about North Korea’s Kim. What explains the grip these guys have on their countries? I mean, yes, terror, but there’s usually someone with a strong enough countervailing ethos to take a shot. I read that Saddam Hussain never slept in the same bed twice in a row. Is this also true for Xi and Kim?

I suppose the working model in these countries is just like ours: we live our lives and hope the wrath of the larger and smaller potentates stays clear of us. It mostly feels accidental or maybe accidents waiting to happen. An incident like Tienanmen Square isn’t an accident—it was a deliberate test of a democracy: is it or isn’t it? Like most authoritarian states, China allowed various things on paper that it never allowed in practice. Point out the discrepancies, this act said. Now “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble” is a serious crime. Seriously? It sounds like a joke, like “Loitering with intent.” We live our lives, and God help us if we point something out. Between Xi and Putin, I would pick Putin, as the maneuvering room of dissent is somewhat bigger and the worst fates seem to befall people who were in on the game and then fell out of it: oligarchs, KGB (now FIS and FSS). For the latter, radioactive poison if they can’t burn them alive back at home. This isn’t wasted on the hoi polloi. They can’t get rid of Putin, either, but he’s more attentive to situations than the tone-deaf Chairman Xi, more careful to maintain a veneer of savoir-faire, even if he breaks it with manly displays for the alt-right base among his supporters. Xi’s veneer is like Bill Gates in his heyday. Running a foundation is a likely scenario for his retirement. It’s not clear that Putin has any viable exit strategy, so Czar for Life is his only sensible course. Too bad about the unfortunate Russians.

If Robert Musil is the saint of the unfinished, then Witold Gombrowicz is the saint of all projects taken up for their own sake and humanity’s, a boddhisatva for the modern era. I was in a Lisbon bookstore when I came across a Portuguese translation of a French translation of lectures he gave on philosophy “in six hours and a quarter,” as the cover says. I got this edition later at considerable added expense to have this photo of Gombrowicz with his wife Rita, a French-Canadian. He was bisexual, I read, a denizen of Buenos Aires’ demimonde during World War II, but you can see that Rita won him over. Men are men (forgive me for saying this), but women like Rita only appear fortuitously, if at all, a gift of the gods. But I digress, as usual, from my stated theme of projects that commend themselves only to their instigators. In this sense, Gombrowicz is the saint of blind faith. But one’s work is innate in my own experience. What I took up of my own volition has its roots in my childhood. I can draw a line from there to here. It has gained a bit from those decades of practice, but most of what it’s gained is a paring away of what it wasn’t: another’s commission or assignment. God knows I’ve done enough of them. It was my living.

Gombrowicz’s Diary was carried along by time, which provides a continual flow of prompts. Most of what I write cyclically reconsiders a landscape that’s marked by accretion and retrospect. In a way, this is true of Gombrowicz, too—he scans the horizon from the rising plateau the unfolding present grants him, as well as looking sideways at his contemporaries. Gombrowicz writes like the holder of a selfendowed chair. He grants his authority to himself, holds an office only he can fulfill. While it’s likely that the reception of his literary output mattered more to him, the Diary as a non-literary sideline is an event, like correspondence. It isn’t literature, but it’s the genre best suited to him as a writer, just as Musil found it easier to write novels than philosophy. Musil is really the saint of perfecting. He felt always that his great novel could be taken further. Bulgakov had a similar view, reworking his great novel in the same way and not worrying about its reception. As I’ve noted before, Stendhal intuited an audience when his contemporaries had abandoned him. He wrote a last novel that drew their renewed attention. You write what you have in you, and get as much of it down “on paper” as is humanly possible.

When we met nearly 50 years ago, I felt that we’d met before. Much later, a psychic friend told me in our first meeting that we’d been married “hundreds of times,” and when not married, we’d been siblings. I told my oldest son, present in the photo top right, that this was the only explanation for our marriage that made sense. On some level, I knew we’d marry, and this may have been true for her, as well, given that I proposed by letter—she was living in Taipei at the time, studying with the last emperor’s brother— and while I put effort into it, something else moved us along. Destiny exemplifies the intermingling of Musil’s two areas of life. On the one hand, you see what you see. On the other hand, here you are. Of the several times this has happened to me, only our marriage provided a context capacious enough to accommodate us both—two human beings with our respective destinies and desires unfolding in time, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. Capacious seems apropos at a time when there’s a constant tendency to narrow things down for the purpose of throwing things out. Whether the object is purity or minimalism, it’s said to spark joy, a word that makes me wary, redolent as it is of a Nazi slogan. Capacious admires nature in its profusion. It takes us as we arrive and applauds our efforts to become more fully human than when we started. If it sets up barriers, they’re meant to keep the wolves from the sheep and the shepherds from the precipice. It draws lines, but they’re drawn where humanity tapers off.

Musil and Gombrowicz were capacious minds, valuing the human condition. Musil went so far as to include a beyond-the-pale character, a murderer of prostitutes, in his great novel, and other characters who skirt the edge and sometimes cross it. He slots them in with the bureaucrats, industrialists, military men, and socialites that he portrays and parodies. In many cases, the parody centers on the constrictions they impose on themselves and how life intervenes, exposing their habits and prejudices as insufficient. In a diary entry, Gombrowicz writes that he is his main problem, his only worthwhile protagonist. If this is egotism, as a critic charges, then fine. Can it possibly be any other way? We are, he adds, the body in question. I liked that. It’s clear that our bodies are in the picture, at the root of whatever we’re feeling. To sketch what this writer knows is necessarily my own history. If these others confirm or elucidate aspects of my own experience, this is undeniably a help in making sense of it. I blunder through life, in the sense of living it with less than full awareness. The harm I do appalls me, the result of negligence, stupidity, or foolishness. The harm done to me never seems to stick. I remember what was good in others, what I enjoyed about them. I regret their anger and sadness, if it arose. If I could alter it, I would. Life rarely affords us the chance, yet we still look for it. We are our problem, just as Gombrowicz said. Writers know that only they can write what they know, have known, what they love, have loved.

“On some level, anyone who writes is performing a kind of alchemy, always approaching that moment when writing becomes art.”—Peiting C. Li, calligrapher.