December 1982

AManhattan Melody

by T.K. MAHADEVAN PHOTOGRAPHS

BY AVINASH

PASRICHA

A cynical friend suggested I title this essay "A Manhattan Malady." Well, I guess he has a point there; he has lived much longer in New York than I have. But I doubt if he ever had a chance to delve deep enough into the entrancing soul of this Circe among cities. He had a job in midtown and a home on the far-out fringes of the megalopolis. A commuter! Out, out, brief candle: you never had the time to pause and listen to the melody. One has to be a contemplative traveler-not the modern-day tourist on the run. You've got to have all the time in the world to amble along her cobbled

Facing page, far left: City dwellers relax on benches in Central Park; left, pedestrians avoid traffic while strolling in Rockefeller Plaza.

Right and far right: Show windows on Fifth A venue create a roadside theater.

byways and inhale the fragrance that lies smothered under the filth, put an ear to the ground and drown the din al)d bustle, so you heat the music!

Oh yes, you've got to be a traveler like William Dean Howells (1837-1920), the American novelist and critic. Howells wrote a delightful series of letters (essays, if you like) for The Cosmopolitan, between November 1892 and September 1894. He called them "Letters Of An Altrurian Traveler." Writing from New York, he said: "I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of American life. You

¡ . the entrancing soul of this Circe among cities ... i know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is; for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less dreadful than you would reasonably expect. ... " Or a fortnight earlier. "My dear Cyril," wrote Howells, "If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New Yorkers live, I should begin by saying that the New Yorkers did not live at all. But outside of our happy country, one learns to distinguish, and to allow that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. ... " The discerning reader will have noticed that Howells is here indulging the most difficult of the critical arts: holding up the mirror to oneself. That, of course, is what impelled me to put him up as my first brief exhibit.

Howells, in other words, provides the counterpoint to the melodic lines that follow.

What do I like about New York? Is my infatuation for her a passing fancy, or is there some reason in my madness? Around the turn of the century, an intrepid New Yorker by the name of Charles W. Wood questioned a cross-section of people on this seemingly irrational passion; and Henry Collins Brown, editor of Valentine's Manual, put it all together in a chapter of the 1917 edition of his annual New York of Today.

Some excerpts from the chapter-which was aptly titled "What Do You Like About New York?" - follow.

A hardened Broadwayite: "I like New York because it lets me alone. There's just as much fun in other places, but it all has to be explained and accounted for, forever after. Not that I'd want to do anything I'd be ashamed of; but it gets on a man's nerves to feel that everybody in town is watching him.

I'd just as soon everybody would know everything there is to know about me, but I hate to feel that it matters."

A minister who formerly preached in up-state New York: "I like the' city because people here are not interested in one's private affairs. I insist that my life shall be an open book. I smoke: for instance I used to smoke in church, and of course I did it openly as I do here. The people were broad and tolerant. They didn't object. But I felt that whateyer I said or wrote was pigeonholed in all their minds as the ideas of the minister who smokes. New York doesn't

make those distinctions."

A student at Columbia: "I like New York because it is unconventional. There is no standard 'of conduct here. Each person is allowed to go his own way as long as he doesn't break any of the ordinances; and the!".-e are enough people going [the same way] each day to make your own way, whatever it happens to be, perfectly respectable. You can't follow your own way in a small town.

You can't be spontaneous."

A vaudeville monologuist: "I like New York because it is conventional. In small towns people get into the habit of going it alone. They become individualists, each with his own hobby and his own cherished peculiarities. The result is that it takes a superman to get a laugh out of more than half a dozen in the house at once. Here in New York all you have to do is to spring some standard joke fairly well. If it has stood the test of years and attained a standing in any particular set, all the partisans of that set in the house can be depended on to applaud it. There are always enough people in each set on Broadway to No, it's not somewhere in Europe; it's make anyone of the old gags go over. I St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. wouldn't dare try a new one in New York.;' Wood asked a machinist wbo had work- cuse, I used to cover eleven courts, two or ed at pis trade in nearly every part of the three strikes, a couple of theaters, and a fire United States: "Why do you live in New or two-all in the same day. It was hotfoot York? You're a natural rover. You haven't from 7:30 to 5 o'clock, with sinkers and any wife or family. Why don't you get out?" coffee on the run for lunch. If you were out Said the machinist: "I'm going to hike 10 minutes without telephoning, they notified the police; and if you were gone half just as soon as I get acquainted; but there's no sense in leaving a town until yO!! do. It an hour, they took up a collection for took me six weeks to squeeze Los Angeles flowers. Do reporters work in New York? dry. Reckoning on the same schedule, bo, Why, some of them are actually fat!"

A college professor: "I like New York I'm due out of this burg about June 1, 1974!

It's no good, of course; but you gotta hand it because its people are all so good-natured. I to the town for being some hard to unravel." watched a crowd going down Seventh Mused a tired businessman who was Avenue the other day. That the avenue was refreshing himself in a Park Row cafe: impassable occurred to no one. One "What do I like about New York better than pedestrian fell into an open manhole, two any other place? Well, let's see. What other more tripped on loose planks and plunged places are there?" headlong into dust and slivers, thr:ee or four A connoisseur who has lived every- stumbled and went lame, but nobody swore. where: "I like New York because it is the It might work for progress if our people had only place there is. I like music: New York a little more temper; but their good humor is the only place I can hear it when I want to. makes them fine to live with."

A novelist: "I like New York because it I like art: New York is the only place I can be sure to see the greatest pictures; not only is the only place on earth where I can't get of the old masters, but the new ones, just as lonesome. I have often heard that the fast as they come along .... I like the whole average person doesn't find any social life in New York; but if that is so, it is because the universe, and New York is where it lives." average person doesn't feel the need of it.

A newspaper reporter: "I like New York because it's so slow. You fellows here don't The mere presence of people everywhere is know what fast work is. Why, up in Syra- apt to dull one's craving for personal

holds you in its clutches .... I hate it. But I love it." acquaintance. It accounts for New Yorkers' habit of going crazy over their favorite actresses and moving picture stars. They don't have to know these people personally to love them ... I like New York because of its impersonal social life."

Said a woman who used to be a social worker up-state: "I don't like New York: I love it. I never could fall in love with anyone I could like. It was always with someone who had a dreadful fascination for me. Men don't like whiskey, but it fascinates them."

Wood looked on, amusement writ large on his face, as she continued animatetlly: "New York isn't comfortable.

It isn't sane.

It isn't fit to live in. Living here is just a habit, a bad habit, but one you don't want to break. Why? Just because it is big, that's all; because it's big and terrible, too big and terrible for anyone to do anything with; something that holds you in its clutches and makes you feel your own helplessness."

I Pause. Then, the crescendo: "New York is something you can't like and can't escape from. I hate it. But I love it."

Gentle, but suspicious, reader, the sentiments are all entirely mine, but not the words in which they are couched. Long before I chanced upon Brown's miscellany, in';'a book-length essay (still, alas, unpublished)'J ruminated upon the uniqueness of New York in a more philosophical vein.

Follows a fragment: As I saunter along Madison Avenue and watch the scurrying men and women, thousands of them, emerging from the subway holes in the morning and as swiftly disappearing down them in the eveningboyhood memories of that rabbit in Alice in Wonderland!-I am perpetually astonished. Men everywhere seem to think that thus, and thus alone, shall they reach out to some undefined Utopia, where there will be peace and joy and spring sunshine for ever and ever.

In New York-and this is what makes her unique-a man has to bear an additional burden: his own private Utopia. Although equally undefined, he is sure he can discern it at the end of his back alley; and he is least bothered whether what he sees is something tangible or a mirage. Without an illusion of this kind to sustain him, a New Yorker will crack up within hours.

His Utopia is his chief strength. It is the armor that protects him from the slings and arrows that assail him on every side.

All this is probably true of any city that has burst its seams and is still growing. But in New York a further dimension comes into play when, by a process resembling metempsychosis, these

minor Utopias gravitate toward and merge in the largest and most fabulous Utopia of them allthe glass-and-steel father fantasy called Manhattan, the technological Utopia that will either end or mend the human family.

Writing home about it then, I had this to say: The barrage of words to which I have been subjected since I came to New York is so eye-, ear-, and nerve-shattering that it is a miracle I am still in one piece and voluble enough to add to her endless babble. In this city words dart at you from all directions. There's no escaping them.

Every stock and stone seems to be saying something, or wanting to say something.

The only things that are silent are the human denizens. These say nothing, except occasionally to move their lips in an inaudible twist. They are men and women in a hurry.

However, let me not tire you with my pontifications.

Let's walk down nostalgia lane instead. Ah, here's a vintage piece of writmg which is almost 150 years old.

Writing about dandies, in A Glance at New York (1837), Asa Greene entertains us: We hope none of the gentlemen belonging to the genus dandy, will take offence at our placing them in the next chapter to the genus rogue. The rogue, it is true, sometimes assumes the garb and manners of a dandy, the better to conceal his cunning. But we are not aware that the dandy, on his part, is solicitous ever to appear in the garb and character of a rogue. In fact there is a very essential difference between them. Their minds are of different caliber. The rogue, though very far from being a wise man, has a head capable of be-tter things, if he would but use it properly; while the capacity of the dandy is not supposed, in its utmost limit, to be capable of anything more weighty than mere outward show.

Like other great cities, New York has her share of this class of the biped without feathers.

They abound more or less in every part of the city, but are mostly to be seen in public placesat the corners of streets, on the doorsteps of hotels, and in the various public walks.

Dandies may be divided into three classes: chained, switched, and quizzing-glass. These are as the reader will readily so distinguished, conceive, from those harmless pieces of ornament which they severally wear about their persons or carry in their hands.

In respect to numbers, the three classes are nearly equally divided. In many cases, they are united in the same person. The tasselled switch, the gilded chain, the everlasting quizzing-glass, combine to ornament the self-same character. He is a dandy of the first water. He is the triple, or compound, dandy; and his head is found, on dissection, to possess three times the vacancy of

the single, simple or uncompounded dandy.

Dandies are supposed, by many, to be on the increase in New York. But of that we are not certain. The truth is, the race is not particularly admired, and especially by the ladies. It is believed, therefore, that in time they will run out; that the race will become extinct and, like the mammoth, leave nothing behind them but their bones: de mortuis nil nisi bone-urn!

My space fast running out, I look askance at the spillover drawer of Manhattaniana lying agape beside me. One more slice of nostalgia is all I can serve you, ladies and gentlemen.

It is from Fifteen Minutes Around New York (1854) by that most prolific of the city's chroniclers, G. G. Foster; and the chapter I have chosen is titled "A Touch at Manners and Morals": A young lady entering a crowded drawingroom, who should walk up to a gentleman and seat herself on his lap, would be very apt to create a "sensation."

But young ladies in full dress, with bare shoulders and arms, think it all right to bundle into a full omnibus and seat themselves, sans ceremonie, upon the laps of men who are entire strangers to them and may be pickpockets or blackguards.

Nay, they deem it capital fun; and we actually saw a very magnificently got-up young lady, the other evening, set herself astride the right and left knee of two gentlemen, and ride in that infamous and disgusting position from 20th Street to Castle Garden.

She took her seat with a giggle, and maintained it with as much sang-froid as if she were sitting in an armchair of her own drawing-room ....

I was about to peel this last page off the typewriter when the postman rang. It's a letter from an actor friend who lives in a dilapidated hotel in the neighborhood of Times Square (where I myself often lived).

Among other tidbits of scandal about our shared concubine-to wit, New York, N.Y.-Fred spoke of how he was roughed up and robbed within earshot of the lights of Broadway.

He enclosed a cutting from Show Business telling the sad story.

I wept over the details. Fred has lived in New York for well over 30 years and this was his first brush with the phenomenon of mugging. Ha! But has my love for New York diminished one whit? Not at all.

Am I then past redemption?

0 About the Author: T. K. Mahadevan, editor of the now-defunct Gandhi Marg, is the author of notable articles and books on Mahatma Gandhi, his latest book being The Year of the Phoenix (published in the United States and India). He is afrequent visitor to the United States.

'The only place on earth where I can't get lonesome.'

Activity in Greenwich Village's Washington Square is varied, unpredictable: A mime actor (top) and a fire juggler' (above) perform for

the roadside audience; a (right, above) displays her a pavement shop (right) customers to its electronic

woman poodle; attracts goods.

SPAN 1 A Manhattan Melody

by T.K. Mahadevan

6 Philosophies of Freedom

7 Indian Parliamentarians Observe U.S. Elections

by Rachel Roxanne Birtha

8

u.s. Elections-Turbulence

But No Tidal Wave

by Fred Barnes

9 A Preface to Emerson's Journals

by Jacob Sloan

12 'Nature Makes a Brahmin of Me'

by CD. Narasimhaiah

15 Emerson in Heaven

by Amritjit Singh

17 On the Lighter Side

18 David. Ray's Images of India

20 The Polyhedral Arthur Loeb

by George Howe Colt

2& A Passion for Patterns

by Krishan Gabrani

28 'A Relationship of Equals' An Interview by Promilla Kapur

31 The Joys of Fatherhood

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

32

Play Groups for Dads

by Ari Korpivaara

34 Seabird Sanctuary

36 A Storehouse of Public Opinion

by BenJ. Wattenberg and David Gergen

38 Letting the Market Prevail

by S. Fred Singer

41 New Knowledge To Solve Old Problems

by George A. Keyworth

42 Focus On ...

45 The Hydrogen Man

by Kenneth Jon Rose

Publisher Editor Managing Editor

Michael Pistor Mal Oettinger Chidananda

Das Gupta

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishall Gabrani

Senior Editor

Arona Dasgupta

Copy Editor Editorial Assistant

Murari Saha Rocque Fernandes

Photo Editor

Avinash Pasricha

Art Director

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Circulation Manager

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Photographs: Front cover-Christopher S. Johnson. Inside front cover4-Avinash Pasricha. 7-Carol Hightower. ll-Illustration

by Paul Degen, courtesy The New York Times Book Review Š 1979. 18-19David Ray, except 18 bottom left by Avinash Pasricha. 21-Christopher S. Johnson. 24-Jim Harrison. 25, 28-Avinash Pasricha. 29 left & right-K.K.Chawla, courtesy The Hindustan Times; center-Avinash Pasricha. 34-35-Robert Eginton. 41-R.K. Sharma. 42 top-Deb Parks, courtesy Argus Leader; bottom-NASA. 43 bottom-courtesy Institute for Shipboard Education. 45 right and bottom-Douglas Kirkland; 45 top left, 47-courtesy Billings Energy Corporation.

48-Back cover-Christopher Springmann except 48 left & 49 top courtesy of Pier 39.

Correctlon: SPAN inadvertently omitted credit for "The New Guru of American Journalism," which appeared in the November issue. It was reprinted with permission from The Vii/age Voice, and is copyrighted by The Village Voice Inc. 1982.

by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed

by H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Published

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2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kaslurba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address fnrm on page 44b.

Front cover: Arth~r Loeb, a veritable wizard of design science, introduces the world to new shapes. At Harvard he teaches artists, architects, crystallographers and choreographers a common visual language.

See also pages 20-27.

Back cover: Christmas lights up a house in San Francisco. See also page 48.

Truly successful state visits can have a resonance that caUses reverberations long after the trip itself is over. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's visit to the United States this summer set into motion events that are taking place now. Like all state visits, this one had its symbolic purposes: Americans became more aware of their sister democracy India and were impressed by the dynamism of her leader. But away from the glamorous public events, private conferences sowed seeds that are coming to flower. Top-level U.S. delegations are visiting India to consult about matters of mutual concern.

Last month the third-highest ranking member of the U.S. State Department (and one of the cotmtry's outstanding career diplomats), Lawrence Eagleburger, visited New Delhi for a series of meetings with Indian foreign policy officials. The custom of holding annual consultations on foreign-policy questions at a high level had been neglected in recent years; to reSlUI1ethem on a regular basis was one of the suggestions for closer Indo-U.S. cooperation the two national leaders had agreed upon. Press reports of the meetings indicate that the officials explored actions and discussed attitudes of great importance; that the dialogue was indeed cordial, frank and useful (as the terminology of diplomacy has it) and that the custom of regular consultation between our nations is well worth reviving.

Another key area of bilateral cooperation is science and technology. Last month a blue ribbon panel, headed by the President's science adviser, George A. Keyworth,' met with Indian colleagues, headed by Professor M.G.K. Menon, chairman of the Science Advisory Cotmcil. Their cooperation is centering on the areas that the Prime Minister enlUI1eratedin.her speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: improvement of food production to minimize dependence on mineral fertilizers; biomass production, tissue culture and genetic engineering for fodder and fuelwood; biomedical research for disease and fertility control, and research to discover materials to reduce energy constunption and costs. Dr. Keyworth's remarks at the India International Centre ill New Delhi are reported on page 41 of this month's SPAN. One of the outstanding features of his talk, it seems to tis, is the congruence of goals of India and the United States in this critical field of hlUI1anendeavor. As Dr. Keyworth notes, it might have been tempting for a cotmtry like India, which has so many pressing needs for its population, to skimp on the "cerebral aspects of science and concentrate entirely on applications. tI But India has been outstanding among developing nations in the breadth of its scientific inquiry.

Trade is another area that was high on the agenda of the two leaders. There was governmental consultation, of course, about the GATT ministerial meetings recently conducted in Geneva, Switzerland. Beyond that, the United States Information Service on November 18 conducted an experiment in commtmications on this critical subject that may have a broad and salutary effect on economic tmderstanding between our cotmtries. ,Using telephone lines and satellites, USIS arranged a press confeFence with a group of eminent Indian economic writers and editors interviewing Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Doral Cooper in Washington, D.C. This marked the first time such an international telepress conference has been held in India. Great distances did little to inhibit a lively give-and-take on world trade and economy, particularly North-South issues, transfer of high technology and prospects for private U.S. investments in India. The technology of the meeting itself was highly successful. The participants engaged in conversation with as much ease as if they were in the same room. The technique lends itself to dialogue on a variety of subjects concerning the United States that are of particular interest to Indians.

Americans have been visiting India on an official level--and, as the articles on pages 6 and 7 recotmt, distinguished groups of Indians have been visiting the United States, during the mid-term elections to observe the similarities and differences between the workings of our democratic electoral processes. Their visits are emblematic of the deepening interest between the peoples of our cotmtries, an interest an the governmental level that is certain to extend to the citizenry.

--M.P.

Philosophies of .Freedom "We are here today to celebrate a common vision-a vision of a world where the right to self-government is openly acknowledged-where the state is seen as not the master but the servant of man," President Ronald Reagan told a distinguished gathering of statesmen, scholars, government officials and observers from 35 nations, including India.

The occasion was a White House luncheon the President gave in honor of the more than 100 participants in the Conference on Free Elections held in Washington, D.C., November 4-6.

The objective of the conference, as President Reagan emphasized in his welcome remarks, was to demonstrate the inherent superiority of the "power of democratic ideals" and to produce "not only a new commitment to freedom but a positive program for international action." "Mankind," he said, "has an unquenchable aspiration to control its own destiny .... This conference is an opportunity to point out to the world how democracy gives the people of each nation a chance to chart their own course, how the free competition of ideas at the ballot box is an invitation to stability and flexibility that is so necessary for economic and social progress .... " Inaugurating the conference, Secretary of State George Shultz impressed upon the delegates that the meeting's aim was "not to criticize, but to consider what we can do to help other nations realize their democratic aspirations." To fulfill the conference's goal, the Secretary suggested three areas of action for the delegates' consideration: to provide concrete assistance to countries interested in. establishing free elections; to advocate the right to free elections more actively, and to affirm that political freedom is a human rights issue; and to do more to publicize the success of democracy and spotlight the comparative performances of democratic and totalitarian nations.

The conference's keynote speaker, Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini, said that "political democracy, which is the fruit of so' many efforts and sacrifices, is still [practiced by] a minority." He urged the delegates "to commit ourselves so as to consolidate political and civil liberties as a fundamental element of coexistence. " Other major speakers included Jeane

Is democracy only for the West? Can it take roots in different environments and under varied economic conditions? These were among the questions that more than 100 delegates from 35 countries addressed at the Conference on Free Elections in Washington last month.

Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and President Luis Alberto Monge of Costa Rica.

Some of the most animated and lively discussion at the Conference on Free Elections, which featured a series of panel discussions, speeches and papers dealing with various aspects of the electoral process, revolved around whether democracy can take roots in different environments and varied economic conditions or whether it is a system of government that is "peculiarly suited to developed countries of the West and certain areas of the Asia/Pacific region."

In a frank presentation on election systems, Vernon Bogdanor, an expert on parliamentary systems and fellow at Oxford University, pointed out that democratic processes are hard to come by and not easy to keep, especially in the pluralistic societies of the Third World. He contended that most Third World societies are divided by ethnicity, language, religion, race or region, and in such societies democracy is difficult to maintain. "The defeat of one party by anothe~," Bogdanor said, "will seem to the losing side not as a swing of the pendulum, but rather as a defeat for its whole way of life. Majority rule can only be successful when such fears have been dissipated, and a sense of the common interest vanquishes the tribal principle."

In addition, he observed, Western nations had time to take "gradual and evolutionary" approaches to these institutions, but "Third World countries will be unable to benefit from the long process of evolutionary development" because immediate political and economic pressures are too great in those countries to make experimental government a success.

A number of speakers argued against Bogdanor's thesis. Ergun Ozbudun, a professor of constitutional law at Ankara (Turkey) University who is a visiting professor of public and international

affairs at the University of California at Berkeley, said in his paper: "On the basis of our evidenot, it seems difficult to conclude that a certain threshold of socioeconomic development is necessary to sustain a democracy .... There are too many exceptions on both sides ... rich countries governed by nondemocratic regimes and poor countries with democratic political systems."

Citing instances of developing nations that have free elections, Ozbudun concluded, "They are among the poorest in the Third World ... have high illiteracy rates and are among the most ethnically heterogeneous in'the world."

At a luncheon he gave conference participants on Capitol Hill, Vice President George Bush agreed with Professor Ozbudun that democracy is not only for the rich. "We come from all parts of the world," the Vice President pointed out, "and our achievements prove that democracy is compatible with a variety of histories, traditions and cultures."

Summing up his impressions of the meeting, delegate Professor Bashiruddin Ahmed, director of New Delhi's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, observed that "this was perhaps the first conference that brought together representatives from practicing democracies from both North and South, providing a very useful forum to better appreciate each other's viewpoints on democracy."

Dr. Ahmed, one of the two participants from India-K. Ganesan, Secretary, Election Commission of India, was the other-added: "Until this conference, there's been a lack of understanding between the states of North and South even on the concept of democracy. This is 'because democracy around the world is not the same. There's so much variety, and I am glad that the conference deliberations helped remove man)' of the misunderstandings and misconceptions."

Expressing his satisfaction at the outcome of the conference, Ambassador Gerald Helman, deputy to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and a coordinator for the meeting, said, "We are very pleased with the results of the conference. It effected an important exchange of ideas and concepts." As a followup, he said, the United States will sponsor a conference on constitutional government in September 1983.

0

Indian Parliamenta'rians Observe U.S. Elections

by RACHEL ROXANNE.BIRTHA

A whirlwind tour of Washington the week before America's general elections on November 2 took a delegation of Indian legislators behind the scenes in the world's second largest democracy for a first-hand glimpse of how it works. The group included a number of speakers of Indian state assemblies.

Federal members of Parliament included the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Secretary General of the Rajya Sabha. Their five-day tour under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency was designed to explore the relationship between the states and the Federal Government, the role of the political parties, the congressional role in policymaking and the U. S. election pJocess.

During the final intensive week of political campaigning, the legislators had the chance to take to the camp~ign trail with Maryland Governor Harry Hughes, Senator Paul S. Sarbanes and Representative Michael Barnes. In the suburban countryside, the group went door to door, American style, then visited an apartment complex for elderly citizens to meet more voters.

What surprised the delegation was the relatively small number of people at the public meetings. Lok Sabha member Balkrishna Wasnik observed: "In India the audience turnout at election meetings is very large-it goes into thousands."

R.P. Das, a CPI Marxist member of the Lok Sabha, said he missed the barrage of posters and massive demonstrations characteristic of Indian campaigns. "Perhaps this is because people get so much from U.S. media that they don't much bother to come to meetings. They are very well informed otherwise, through television, radio and other channels," Rajya Sabha member P.N. Sukul speculated. Das agreed, adding he had found that American newspapers-particularly The New York Times- "reflect public opinion in a very balanced manner."

Despite differences in style, however, Indians and Americans running for election have a common agenda in at least one respect, according to Wasnik: "Their ultimate aim is to contact the electorate, to talk to them and educate them."

At the State Department, the group discussed Indo-U.S. relations with three top officials: Ambassador Nicholas Velliotes, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asia; his deputy, Howard B. Schaffer, and Acting Secretary of State Kenneth Dam (Secretary George Shultz was out of the country).

Speaking at a luncheon at the Brookings Institute, Dr. Robert L. Hardgrave, a South Asia expert from the University of Texas, expressed the view that "the warmth and openness" of the U.S. reception to Mrs. Indira Gandhi reflected a growing American conviction of India's importance with its shared tradition of bicameral democracy, its industrial advances, political stability and independent character. Hardgrave identified the U.S. Government's tendency to deal in broad global policies as the source of friction between the two nations, because when specific issues are later viewed from a regional perspective, they appear to be biased. He also called attention to the growing role that 500,000 Indians residing in the United States have begun to play in all walks of American life.

As Congress was out of session, the parliamentary delega-

Indian legislators meet with Richard Beal, Special Assistant to the President and Director, Whi(e House Office of Planning and Evaluation.

tion could not meet with Senators and Representatives.

However, on Capitol Hill they had a lively interchange on the party system and its impact on Congress' role in U.S. international policy with M. Graeme Bannerman and Peter W. Galbraith (son of former U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith), both professional staff members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

They compared the U.S. Congressional committee system under which Senators and Representatives hammer out compromises so bills can be voted into laws with the Indian method of floor debate.

A discussion of how congressional staff persons are chosen revealed that political parties in the United States have begun to playa more active role. Historically, the staff members were bipartisan and individuals served both Republican and Democrat members of Congress, Bannerman pointed out. However, during the Vietnam era, diverging views on foreign policy altered this situation and committee members began to seek partisan staffers.

"Now the issues are more partisan," Galbraith observed.

"There are big .differences between Democrats and Republicans on arms control, the economy, human rights, arms sales and the Middle East," he said. Despite these differences however, Bannerman pointed out, "there is a basic American foreign policy." It is "on the margins" where the differences between the two parties lie.

There was also time for sightseeing. The group was given an early morning VIP tour of the White House. They also visited the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.

In addition to Bal Ram Jakhar, Speaker of the Lok Sabha, and Bhishma Narain Singh, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, the group was composed of the following parliamentarians and administrators: Lok Sabha members Chandra Shekhar Singh, Balkrishna Wasnik, R.P. Das and George Joseph MundaokaI; Rajya Sabha members P.N. Sukul, Dayanand Sahay and Secretary General Sudarshan Agarwal. Kamal Nath, an M.P. and delegate to the United Nations General Assembly was also with the delegation. The speakers of state legislative assemblies comprised Sharad Shankar Dighe (Maharashtra) and his wife; Hashim Abdul Halim (West Bengal); Natvarlal Chandulal Shah (Gujarat); Sardar Tara Singh (Haryana); Nar Bahadur Khatiwara (Sikkim) and his wife. Prem Prakash Sharma, private secretary to Minister Singh, also attended.

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u.s. ELECTIONS-Turbulence But NoTidal Wave

The U.S. election results are neither a victory for the Democratic Party nor an outright rejection of Reaganomics, says a national political reporter of the Baltimore Sun. Democrats increased their majority in the House of Representatives by 26 seats (they now have 267 as against Republicans' 166; two seats are to be decided November 30), while Republicans retained their 54 to 46 .edge in the Senate. Democrats also annexed seven governorships from the Republican Party.

Races for the House of Representatives are considered to be the most reliable barometer of political conditions during U.S. elections. That is why for the November 2 election, more attention has been paid to the 26 Democratic Party pickups in the House than either the Republican feat-and it was an impressive feat-of holding the U.S. Senate or the Democratic gain of seven state governorships.

Since World War II, the party holding the White House has lost an average of 19 House seats in the first mid-term election after taking power. Republicans this year lost more than that, indicating the bolstering of the rollback by the recession.

Besides harboring the idea that voters were inexorably moving their way, Republicans had another reason for thinking that the 1982 election might skirt tradition and strengthen their position in the House and Senate.

This was reapportionment, the shift of House seats every 10 years to accommodate for movements in population. This time, the shift was from the northeast and midwest to the Sun Belt states across the south and west, a shift, as Republican tacticians saw it, from regions of Democratic control to ones where the Republican Party was growing rapidly in influence.

But Republican clout had not grown quickly enough in the Sun Belt, and Democrats won most of the new House seats there.

In the aftermath of the election, Democrats were inclined to overstate the message for the voters, Republicans to understate it. The Democratic leader of the House, Representative Thomas O'Neill of Massachusetts, said that Republicans suffered "a disastrous defeat." President Reagan said, however, that "there is a smile on our faces and intentionally so."

In truth, there was little reason for O'Neill to gloat or Reagan to smile. More accurate was Governor Jer.ry Brown of California, who lost a contest for the Senate. "I consider what's happened in California a mild endorsement of Reaganomics," he said. The election results elsewhere that favored Democrats were "a mild rebuke" to the President in his pursuit of tax and budget cuts, Brown said.

Remarkably few candidates declared the need for a fullscale retreat from the President's economic program. Democrats, though critical of the 1981 tax cut as too deep and too slanted toward aiding the wealthy, did not propose any sweeping alternative. Nor did they attack all of Reagan's budget cuts.

As they campaigned, Republicans ordinarily did not give undiluted praise to Reagan's program. Instead, they said they liked the "general direction" of the program, but differed on some of the specifics. What this means is refinements are likely . to be made in the Reagan program.

It is unclear what, if any, impact the election will have on foreign policy. Though a number of nuclear freeze initiatives

byFREDBARNES

passed, foreign affairs was scarcely mentioned in the campaign.

But President Reagan received from the voters nothing that would encourage him to make his foreign policy more hawkish.

There was nothing to inspire him to accelerate his domestic program. President Reagan wants a constitutional amendment to force a balanced federal budget; with Democrats strengthened in the House, that has no chance of passage. And neither does his plan for transferring many federal programs to the states.

But if the Reagan revolution was halted by the November 2 election, it was not overturned by it. Reversals are common in American politics. President Dwight Eisenhower carried two dozen new Republican Senators and Representatives into office with him when he was elected in 1952. Nearly that many Republican members of Congress lost in 1954 in the rollbacks from the Republican sweep.

Sometimes the rollbacks are quite pronounced. In 1966, two years after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had won election by a landslide, his party lost 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate. Reagan faced nothing quite this vehement, but the number of House seats lost by the RepubliCans this year has been described as "unsatisfactory."

What caused the present rollback?

Foremost among the routine reasons for Republican losses was the nature of presidential campaigns in America. The candidates inevitably over-promise, telling voters that they answer for nearly every social and economic ill that has have plagued the country for decades. Naturally, because some of the problems are deep-rooted, all these ills are not cured within two years. And the party in power is held responsible for this shortfall. It loses seats in Congress and statehouses as a result.

Then, there is the phenomenon of the landslide, whiCh brings many marginal candidates into office. That happened in 1980, when many Republicans won seats in the House from districts with a predominance of Democratic voters. When the enthusiasm of the landslide year fades, many of these winners become losers in the next election.

All would have been fine had the Reagan economic program been an instant success. In that case, the Republican Party might well have been able to defy history and overcome the rollback tradition-by building on its gains in 1980 and moving toward majority status with new victories in 1982. The recession intervened.

President Reagan had promised that his progra~ would achieve the dual purposes of reducing inflation and trimming unemployment. Some economists think this is impossible, though the bank of supply-side economists that influenced the President said it could be attained.

At the least, it wasn't achieved by late 1982. Instead, while inflation sank from 12 percent to less than 6 percent, joblessness soared. Unemployment replaced inflation as voters' chief concern. And Republicans suffered somewhat at the polls.

Republicans will argue that the losses they suffered were not massive, that it was largely the expected attrition that plagues the party holding the White House. And Republicans are right; it wasn't a sweeping rejection. But it was enough to change the balance of power in the House.

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an

A Preface to

The Journals reflect the history of 19th-century America through the prism of their author's very special sensibility; passionate for all their reserve, they supply accurate readings of what Robert Frost called Emerson's "inner weather."

This selection of l30-odd entries from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Journals is-remarkably-only one skimming from a very rich cream indeed. The collected Journals occupy 10 fat volumes on the Emerson shelf. In 1820, the 17-year-old Harvard theology student began keeping a daily record of his thoughts, feelings, dreams, as well as anecdotes, quotations from his reading, sketches of people and places, and other memorabilia. Emerson maintained his journals until he was 72-a period of 55 years. By 1875 he had long since abandoned the Unitarian ministry and accomplished his outstanding life work as preacher, teacher and exemplar of the American Gospel he had himself formulated: American Romantic Idealism (Transcendentalism); American Pragmatism (selfreliance); and a new American literature. His intellectual powers-principally his memory-had distinctly waned.

Emerson died seven years after the last entry.

Emerson's Journals were first published some 30 years after his death, during 1909-14. They were immediately hailed by Emersonians for the light they shed on the Sage of Concord's life as well as on his work, and for the connections they trace between the two. The Journals are neither chronologies nor barometers of Emerson's time~, but they certainly reflect the history of 19th-century America through the prism of their author's very special sensibility; passionate for all their reserve, they supply accurate readings of what Robert Frost called his "inner weather." Hence, what began as the usual jottings from a would-be writer's workshop put down by a half-formed, characteristically solemn, ambivalent, self-doubting, poor young man with a spark of still-to-be-ignited genius

gradually turned into an anthology where acute, often very worldly and penetrating psychological observations jostle the grave, sententious, deeply optimistic philosophical aphorisms on which Emerson's reputation rests.

The distinguishing mark of the Journals entries-their gnomic quality-is clearly the same as that of his famous Essays. This is no accident: many passages were lifted from the Journals and embedded, usually in expanded and polished form, in the Essays. Both display his remarkable talent for the apothegm: the brilliant, lively, memorable, metaphorical statement of an often paradoxical truth with which Emerson's name is so closely associated. Emerson was the first to admit that his writing lacked a unified, coherent, logical philosophical system-although as John Dewey was to point out, Emerson's thought and writing did have an underlying structure of interdependent meaning.

Emerson thought of himself as essentially a poet with a minor gift, and all in all, the conventional critical wisdom has concurred in this modest self-evaluation. (Some contemporary critics, notably Hyam Waggoner and Harold Bloom, think otherwise-Bloom has recently linked Emerson's poetry with that of Wallace Stevens, as well as that of the inevitable Whitman.)_Nor, despite Emerson's many philosophical essays, does he figure as more than a footnote in professional philosophy. He was something quite different, quite unique; with his customary common sense, he would not have blinked to hear himself described in Santayana's words: "Emerson ... was not primarily a philosopher, but a Puritan mystic with a poetic fancy and a gift for observation and epigram."

Nevertheless, this poet manque and philosopher manque has exerted a disproportionate influence in his time and ours on the history of 19th- and 20th-century poetry and thought: on Whitman and Thoreau and Frost and Stevens and William James and John Dewey in the United States; on Nietzsche and Carlyle abroad. A man's stature can also be gauged by the vehemence and size of the opposition to him; beginning with the 1920s Emerson has been under attack from the avant-garde, led by fellow rebels from the Puritan tradition, fellow Harvard graduates like T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell, and (more reluctantly) by the English Methodist instinctualist D.H. Lawrence ("all those gorgeous inrushes of exaltation and spiritual energy which made Emerson a great man now make us sick!").

But Emerson's audience has always been and perhaps still is much larger and more heartfelt than that of these modern writers and thinkers, whom his friend Carlyle would have regarded as mere effete Feinschmeckers, resolutely cultivating special tastes to distinguish themselves from hoi polloi whom Emerson labored to edify.

He was a professional lecturer; many of the entries in the Journals, before they were polished for his Essays, served as departure points-notes for the speeches he read in his magnificent, resonant voice from lecture platforms all over the United States. (Emerson traveled as far west as California for his lectures at a time wh~n crossing the American continent was no mean feat.)

The lectures, and later the essays, show evidence of their provenance in the Journals and that is the secret of their strength. For the same quality that made Emerson's poetry questionable made his Journals (and later, ~~e lectures and essays built from them) superb. The cntIc George Woodberry put it perfectly when he pointed out the paradox that Emerson's poetry was p.rosaic in ~ovement and structure, lacking the surpnse that IS the hallmark of true poetry; while his prose was poetic in its use of vigorous metaphor, and in the leap of his unconventional, imaginative thought. Emerson's Journals make such good reading because they follow the keeflowing line of Emerson's original genius. .

Happily, too, in his Journals Emerson need not restn~t himself to one tone, one role, one persona: the public figure of neo-Platonic guru. He can write, for his own eyes, as iconoclast as well as preacher; as listener. as well as lecturer; as foe of individuals as well as fnend of humanity; as observer of self as well as of strangers; as Rocky Mountain and Vatican tourist as well as stroller along Walden Pond. He can be sober on one page, and cold' and rave and rant on the next. On one page he can admire Daniel Webster's noted dialectic skills extravagantly. On the next he can cite Webster's venal "three rules for living" with half-hearted excuse. ("It is true that he sometimes commits crimes, but without any guilt.")

A few years later he wrote of his idol's falling off with affectionate sadness: I saw Webster on the street-but he was changed since I saw him last-black as a thundercloud, and careworn; the anxiety that withers this generation among the young and thinking class had crept up also into the great lawyer's chair, and too plainly, too plainly, he was one of us. I

did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw me, and would not meet my face.

Pages-and years-later, when in 1850 Webster~ ~or reasons of political opportunism, supported the FugItIve Slave Law, Emerson felt free in his Journals to att~ck the fallen demigod mercilessly: "The word liberty m the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan .... All the drops of his blood have eyes that look downward."

But his final judgment, though bitter, had a note of compassion for the fallen angel: "Pity that he was not content with being Daniel Webster, but must be a President also."

Webster's reputation, monumental at the time, receded long ago, and Emerson's animadversions on the Great Debater are of historical and clinical interest only.

The same is true of the many references to the Platonist Bronson Alcott, whose mind Emerson admired enormously, but whose improvident character he deplored.

But Henry Thoreau has advanced to the first rank of 19th-century American literature, and the Journals are fascinating for their line-by-line drawing of Tho~eau's striking personality-and of Emerson's own compl.lc~ted relationship with one whom he regarded both as dls~l~le and mentor-as Joel Porter has pointed out (cltmg chapter and verse) as indeed a very Socrates to Emerson's Plato. .

Had Emerson reread his various entries in the course of his long friendship with his neighbor Thoreau, would he have been troubled? (After Thoreau's death, he hastened to insert as an aJterthought an entry describing his friend's independent courage: Thoreau himself rang the town hall bell for an antislavery meeting that Emerson was to address, when the selectmen refused to tell the sexton to do it.) Emerson makes no secret in his Jour~als of his dismay at Thoreau's love of intellectual combatIveness for its own sake, and at his self-centeredness (e.g., Thoreau walks into a room where people are sitting, interrupts-with an account of something he h~s. seen or thought about, and then walks out with?ut ~aItmg for a reaction). But the Journals are overflowmg WIth passages of admiration for Thoreau's discernment, endurance, powers of observation and of his potential as a leader.

Indeed Emerson's much-quoted eulogy at Thoreau's death ~xpands on a notation in the Journals, in which Emerson laments that Thoreau missed the motor that drove Emerson himself: "Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of huckleberry patch."

But Emerson need not, after all, have been troubled after Thoreau's early death at his own ambivalence toward Thoreau. In his Journals he freely practiced the celebrated self-defense that is reprinted to this day in every dictionary of quotations-to the effect that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." And Emerson's final regretful summing up of Thoreau's life and death is consistent with the facts of 19th-century mortality (after all, two of Emerson's own brothers, .like Thoreau and John Keats, had died young of consumptIon, the scourge of the age): "Young men, like Henry

inveterate opt~mism, and there are many passages in his Essays that give grounds for this censure. But his Journals reveal that Emerson-like Whitman-did not, as Yeats (and Henry James) charged, lack "the Vision of Evil."

"There is," he wrote in the Journals, "a huge and disproportionate abundance of evil on earth. Indeed, the good that is here is but a little island of light amidst the unbounded ocean." Emerson's characteristic reaction to the indisputable fact of evil was to rise above it in an act of willed faith: "It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in."

Leafing through the Journals, one comes on entry after entry of hardheaded melancholy. (He was a New England Yankee, after all.) But he did not believe in supernatural demons: the evil is always human, or seen from a human perspective. Thus:

Thoreau, owe us a new world, and they have not acquitted the debt. For the most part, such die young, and so dodge the fulfillment." To us it does not seem that Thoreau, who like Keats and John F. Kennedy has become a culture hero because he died in his young and most productive years, dodged the fulfillment of his destiny. But certainly Emerson's regretful grief is the classic expression of the century's sentiment.

Emerson shows himself in his Journals sensitive to the contradictions in his own personality: "I, who suffer from excess of sympathy, proclaim always the merits of self-reliance." An exponent-with his friend Carlyle-of the Great Man theory of history, he was yet realistic and honest enough to comment parenthetically that genius is not always directed by will: "The most interesting class of people are those who have genius by accident and are powerful obliquely." Similarly, Emerson was noted in his genemtion for his ability to stir audiences-particularly the young-to transports of self-confidence and energetic action. But his own-eyes were wide open to the cynical uses of demagoguery: "The abomination of desolations is not a burned town, nor a country wasted by war, but the discovery that the man who has moved you is an enthusiast upon calculation."

Emerson has been censured for what seems to be his

On death: "The event of death is always astounding."

"The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral."

On grief: "I saw Ellen at once in all her beauty, and she never disappointed me, but in her death."

"There are some people who are above grief, and some who are below it."

On failure: "Everything intercepts us from ourselves."

On communication: "We never touch but at points."

On self-deception: "He seemed to be one of that large class, sincere persons who are bred and do live in shame."

On mutual -aid: "The aid we give one another is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic."

On self-protection: "Mine Asia [Lydia, Emerson's wifej says, 'A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.'"

On timidity: "There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live."

It is hard to resist the temptation of quoting at length from 10 volumes that are themselves quotations from a lifetime of close examination of both self and the world.

Emerson, for his part, was fond of quoting.("By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.") In this he was following the classic authors who were his bold exemplars in the art of the essay: Bacon and Montaigne ("I quote others in order better to express my own self"). So it was inevitable that Emerson (despite his youthful "I hate quotations") should end up memorialized for all time in dictionaries of quotations (279-no less-in Bartlett).

But some of the best passages in the Journals are never to be anthologized under Emerson's name, because they are his own dry notations of the mocking wit of his Concord neighbors: "Henry Clapp said that the Rev. Dr. O. was always looking about to see if there was not a vacancy in the Trinity. He said that Greenley knew he was a self-made man, and was always glorifying his Maker. He said that T. always aimed at nothing and always hit it exactly." And then there is the wonderful wisecrack about Whitman, whom Emerson had been the first to hail as the

long-awaited voice crying in the desert of American poetry, but whose windy self-gratulation he later came to dislike: "Whipple said of the author of Leaves of Grass that he had every leaf but the fig leaf."

How are we to judge Ralph Waldo Emerson now, a century after his death, from the evidence of his Journals?

Gay Wilson Allen tells us at the end of his recent biography, Waldo Emerson, that when Emerson died in 1882, The New York Times, treating him as a celebrity, devoted space to him on the front page. The Times capped the obituary with an epigram that might well have come out of Emerson's own Journals: "Emerson seems to have acted out his own definition of a philosophy-he reported to his own mind the constitution of the universe."

But success was very much on Emerson's mind. He thought of himself as "the Scholar"; and, as Martha Banta pointed out, "'scholar' for Emerson was a term he freely applied to all who devote themselves-succeeding or failing-to the life of profoundly winning through." Did he really win through, profoundly realize "the constitution of the universe" by reporting his own life of supreme consciousness? The Journals, as may be expected, are ambiguous on this question.

In one more than slightly malicious passage Emerson spoke about the remarkable bluestocking and feminist Margaret Fuller (he carried out a strange literary flirtation with her for years until she despaired of ever receiving more than hints of love from this self-contained eminence). Emerson described her unique talents and how she disoriented him with her teasing: ... variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent, [she] seems to have learned all languages, Heaven knows when or how-1 should think she was born to them-magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles like this, "Yours is an example of a destiny springing from character," and, again, "I see your destiny hovering . before you, but it always escapes from you.'"

The Journals would indicate that Margaret Fuller was right on both scores. The destiny Emerson achieved-as the leader of a 19th-century movement that advocated the identification of an independent, self-reliant American character-did spring from the independence of Emerson's own character. But there was also a destiny that he did not achieve, that hovered before him, that always escaped him: by Transcendentalism to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western religious-philosophical thought, between what he called the (Utopian) party of Hope and the (traditionalist) party of Memory. In his own time he turned away disappointed from the shallow cosmopolitanism of Longfellow on the one hand, and the self-pitying parochial melancholy of Hawthorne on the other.

If Emerson were alive today, one suspects he would do the same, preferring above all, as he did then, the party of Reality; though it be a party of one.

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About the Author: Jacob Sloan is a poet and essayist, who writes in Washington, D. C. He is also a former editor of SPAN.

It was the month of May in 1950 when we drove from Princeton, New Jersey, to Concord, Massachusetts, rejoicing at the glow of the New England landscape in spring. What cared I if it was a ramshackle car, when the euphoria was on, for I felt like our countryfolk journeying to a temple on the hilltop. My gods were Emerson and Thoreau. And before I let myself loose in the Thoreau territory I knew I had to do obeisance to his mentor; hence to Emerson's first. The house still retained the radiance of his angelic presence; the very streets echoed his name and his winged words found their way to the bosom: he was still "the friend and aider" of those who want to live in the spirit. Even the skies of Concord seemed to come close to the earth in a gesture of benediction.

As I wrote later: "If I had been a young man in the 1830s and living in New England and had not been fired by the new idealism that swept the east coast of America, I should think there was something very wrong with me. Even at this distance of time the very word Transcendentalism seems to have some magic about it and I catch myself intoning Wordsworth's line, 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive .... ,,, But unlike the French Revolution which inspired the young at first with what have today become empty political tags and subsequently left them disillusioned (as Napoleon overran Europe and sought to set up a dynasty of his own), the youthful idealism of New England in the 1830s rose in revolt against the rank materialism of the age.

A contemporary Transcendentalist described his reaction to his first encounter ,with Emerson: Commercial Boston where honor is weighed in the public scales and justice reckoned by the dollars it brings, conservative Boston, the grave of the Revolution, wallowing in its wealth, yet grovelling for more ... ¡preferring the accidents of man to Man himself-and amidst of all comes Emerson, graceful as Phoebus-Apollo, fearless and tranquil as the Sun.

Small wonder, then, that most educated homes in Calcutta soon had copies of Emerson's prose and verse alongside Shakespeare's plays. And not without a logical connection, such is the unpredictable movement of ideas. A farsighted Bengali, Raja Ramm(lhun Roy, caused a

stir not only at home but in far-off Boston by his affirmations and denials: He defended the "Precepts of Jesus" and attacked the Christian missionaries as irrelevant to Asia. His "Brahmo Samaj" was a catalyst to angry young men like Emerson who were sick of the churches, sick of the preachers, and sick of institutionalized Christianity-for religion to them was an individual matter and called for utmost freedom of worship. Roy himself had resigned from the pulpit because of "conscientious scruples."

The Christian Register, an outstanding Unitarian journal of New England, in December 1821 printed eight columns (including the entire front page) of the writings of Raja Rammohun Roy. Roy had written that "traditional dogma and ecclesiasticism is unintelligible to the nations of Asia," but not so the teachings of Christ. This started a controversy in New England. It was then that his aunt Mary Moody Emerson recommended to young Ralph Waldo, still in school, the sacred writings of the Hindus. Emerson's notions of Hinduism were far from complimentary at that time. In 1818 he had read in the inept Edinburgh Review an article on "The Religion and Character of the Hindus" which said that "the two distinguishing characteristics of the Hindu religion are the number and absurdity of its gods." Its "cruelty and sentimentality" came in for particular attack. And Emerson, who looked at India through British eyes, was gullible enough to endorse the prejudice: "The Indian Pantheon is of a prodigious size; 330 million gods have in it their heaven or rather each their parlour in this immense 'goddery. ' " In 1822, a year after he took his degree, Emerson wrote to his aunt: "I am curious to read your Hindoo mythologies. One is apt to lament over indolence and ignorance when he reads some of these sanguine students of the Eastern antiquities." And a year later he is convinced that an abundance of fables "seems not to indicate any special quality of the mind, for though Greece had many, stupid Indostan has more." Interestingly, Coleridge, whom Emerson admired highly, had used the same epithet for "Indostan" in his Aids to Reflection and yet Coleridge had the reputation of being a seminal thinker of his age. But unlike Coleridge, the prob-

ing mind of Emerson was well aware of the paradox that "Romance is the mother of knowledge," and his shift from one extreme to another exemplifying the truth of the age-old Hindu concept of Virodhamarga-affirming truth by way of negation-is one of the interesting ironies of 19th-century intellectual history. After the change he wrote in his journal, "Europe is thy Father, bear him on your Atlantean shoulders, Asia is thy grandsire, regenerate him!"

Finally, he was so impressed by the truth of the Vedas that he could say: "It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble and poetic mind. If I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, nature makes a Brahmin of me, presently." And Emerson was one of a galaxy of great writers such as Goethe in Germany, Romain Rolland in France and Matthew Arnold in England, who reacted favorably to India.

My object here is not to assess Emerson's debt to India, which may well look like a cultural balance sheet, but to show how a creative mind can absorb disparate experience and produce something new out of it: "A fig tree," he said, looking on a fig tree, "becomes beautiful." Actually what he was looking for was "not instruction, but provocation" in the form of an idea, image, metaphor, myth, symbol, and in all cases, stimulus.' Such is the nature of genius-to resist overinfluence.

In his own words: "Greatness is the fulfillment of a natural tendency in each man."

It is by way of ambivalent references like "fable" and "romance" in respect to India that he seems to stumble upon the concept of "illusion" or maya (which he spells "maia"). It must be conceded too that Plato and the Neoplatonists had prepared his mind for the reception of Hindu thought. Not for nothing is it said that ancient Greece and India had more in common than Greece and modern Europe. Emerson spoke in a "Letter to Plato," when he was only 21, of "Old Asia, nurse of man and bower of Gods."

He is reported to have written a poem called "Asia" which even his son, the editor of his works, was not able to lay his hands on. We know, however, that he called his wife Lydia "Mine Asia." But consider how the skeptic and the hardheaded Yankee are ever-present in his

explorations. His essay "Illusions" opens with the narration of an actual incidenthis visit to the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky-and then begins to rationalize the seemingly irrational concept of illusion: "Life is a succession of riddles which must be lived to be understood. All is a riddle and the key to a riddle is another riddie ... we wake from one dream to another ... the pageant marches at all hours, with music, banner and badge."

After enumerating many instances of life's illusions he surveys the thinking of the ancient world (illusion was yoganidra in Indian myths and Proteus or Momus in Greek) and vindicates his faith in the supremacy of Indian thought: "The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of identity behind illusion.

Diogenes of Apollonia said that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one another. But the Hindoos in their sacred writings express their liveliest feelings, both of the essential identity and illusion, which they conceive variety to be." And now a quotation from Vishnu Puriina, renowned to be Puriinaratna (the most precious of all legends): "The notions 'I am' and 'This is mine' which influence mankind are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, 0 Lord of all creatures, the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance. Hence the main endeavor of man to be freed from fascination [maya]." The thought has come full circle (Emerson works in "circles," interestingly the title of one of his essays) and that which makes the circle has, for him, its beginning in illusion and the end in apprehension of reality. The elaboration of an idea is in the form of concentric circles, widening our horizon, intensifying awareness and returning reinforced in the rightness of the center from which it has emanated.

There is no essay, no poem of Emerson's from "Over-Soul," "Fate," "Compensation," "Self-Reliance," "Divinity School Address," "Immortality, " "Brahma," "Hamatreya," "Days," "Give All to Love" that cannot be related to this central concept of appearance and reality.

His twin poems of Indian origin, at least in their titles, "Hamatreya" and "Brahma," seem to sum up his essential thinking, the first by means of enactment

in popular terms and the second by means of conceptual thinking. The name Hamatreya is either deliberate distortion or misreading of Maitreya, to whom Sage Parasara expatiates upon the name and nature of Vishnu at a place (Melkote near Mysore) which the sage chooses for its utmost holiness. And Maitreya came to have historical importance by its association with Ramanuja who expounded the philosophy of Visishtiidvaita in the 12th century and opened the doors of the Vishnu temple to Harijans. The kings of Vishnupuriina are transposed by Emerson into American democratic terms (hence the parabolic form)-which, incidentally, shows that a great poet neither imitates nor steals but takes the booty away like a conqueror. The names in the poem are those of his neighbors and acquaintances: Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Merian and Flint who Possessed the land ... ... walked amidst his farm Saying 'tis mine, my children's and my name's How sweet the West wind sounds in my own trees!

How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!

In the next stanza the poet asks with disarming simplicity

Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet.

Emerson retains the traditional, functional nature of art and literature in the last stanza. Parasara's "These were the verses, Maitreya, which Earth recited and by listening to which ambition fades away like snow before the sun," becomes in Emerson's poem My avarice cooled Like lust in the chill of the grave

How right Emerson was when he declared that he read the Orientals and remained Occidental! That is selfreliance, swadharma and in Gandhi's words "Let all the winds of all the lands blow about my house, but I refuse to be blown off my feet."

The same concept of illusion must help to place in perspective his other and better known poem "Brahma," which opens:

If the red slayer think he slays Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass and turn again.

Some thought the source of the poem was John Fletcher's "Hymn to Venus."

But Emerson is emphatic: "The country of Unity ... the seat of a philosophy of delighting in abstractions is Asia." And R6er's translation of Katha Upanishad should leave no one in doubt as to the source of "Brahma": "If the slayer thinks I slay, if the slain thinks I am slain, then both of them do not know well. It [the Soul] does not slay nor is slain."

The poem is testimony to the quintessential wisdom of Vedanta, namely the absolute unity of man and nature about which Ananda Coomaraswamy has written so perceptively in his essay "What Has India Contributed to Human Welfare?" But the poem brought forth from the ill-informed and the casual reader smartiy phrased parodies like: If the gray tomcat think he sings Or if the song think it be sung He little knows who boot jacks flings How many tricks I've flung.

In 1876 when his publishers decided to bring out a volume of Emerson's Selected Poems, they pleaded with him to omit "Brahma," because of the ridicule it brought forth. But like T.S. Eliot with "Shanthi Shanthi Shanthi" in The Waste Land, Emerson insisted it be retained, whatever else they might excise.

While some scholars wish to trace essays like "Over-Soul" directly to Indian sources because of its precise equivalent Paramiitan in Indian thought, 'it might well bespeak, an affinity with the Greek concept of Prime Mover. And it therefore calls for restraint of enthusiasm in the Indian reader who is disposed to see India in every possible Western text. But what astonishes one is that even in an unsuspected essay like "Montaigne or the Skeptic," Emerson's Indian preoccupation comes through. And in speaking of the skeptic's politics too: "His politics are those of The Soul's Errands of Sir Walter Raleigh or of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita." An Indian reader is amused to see Krishna's name bracketed with Raleigh's.

But it doesn't detract from Krishna's greatness because the essay shows a true appreciation of Krishna's role in the Gita which is never to persuade Arjuna but to present alternatives, in the dialectical form, for consideration in his inquiry (in which sense Emerson uses the word skep-

tic), so that contraries may make for Blakean profession of thought or awareness.

In his essay on "Fate" Emerson suggests that "the Turk, the Arab, the Persian accepts fore-ordained Fate. But the Hindu under the Wheel [the Law of Karma] is as firm as the Greeks, because Nature is no sentimentalist, does not cosset or pamper us." He realizes that the way of Nature is a "little rude" but the Law of Karma, he thinks, is "a poetic attempt to lift the mountain of Fate, to reconcile distortion of race with liberty which led the Hindoos to say 'Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.'" Despite his son's death, Emerson could say after reading the Upanishadic story of Nachiketas, that the man who is "grounded in divine life will transcend suffering in a flight to a region whereunto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot rise." In support of his stand, he recalls that to Plato the good was Absolute Reality and Evil unreal; and to St. Augustine the loss of God has received the name of Evil. Emerson would have been thrilled to know that to the Indian, Evil is in feverish haste to join God, for the way of the friend, mitra, takes seven lives while the other, three lives.

Hence perhaps his exhortation in the essay on "Progress of Culture": "But if the works [of Greece and Rome] shall still survive and multiply, what shall we say of names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their coevals?" And he mentions among others "the Vedas, Institutes of Manu, the Puranas, the poems of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana."

If so, how sad that this timeless India of the Boston Brahmins should have been allowed by its very guardians to decline.

The study of writers like Emerson and T.S. Eliot can be a great opportunity for Western-educated Indians to forge contacts with their own heritage: If; to Eliot, the Gita is the "second greatest philo. sophical poem," and to Emerson ."it was the first of books," it is as if an empire spoke to us. Nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered thus, disposed of the same questions that exercised us.

0 About the Author: Closepet Dasappa Narasimhaiah is founder and editor of The Literary Criterion published in Mysore. He is also the author of The Swan and the Eagle, Raja Rao, Novelist, and Moving Frontiers of English Studies in India.

On Saturday afternoon, May 29, 1982, I took a cosmocab from astroport to Heaven to keep my appointment with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Within a matter of minutes and several light-years, I was led through the Heavenly Mist by two angelic guards to Mr. Emerson's residence.

Once the mist cleared, I found Mr. Emerson in his study-calm, sedate and kindly-sipping a lemonade, tuned in to the music of the spheres. He beckoned me to a chair and his saintly smile put me at ease. The interview had been arranged through the good offices of American poet Donald Hall who had, in turn, approached Robert Frost through Cosmic Communications. It took Hall an expensive astrocall to convince Mr. Frost about the need to demonstrate how Mr. Emerson was still mouthing platitudes a hundred years after his death. Mr. Frost understood the need to minimize the effect of the publicity Waldo might receive in the year of the latter's hundredth death anniversary. Hall reported the chuckle with which Frost had approved the choice of an Indian interviewer over the wire"He is sure to turn them into cliches even if Emerson makes the most memorable statements," Frost had said. Anyway, here I was and handicapped too, my tape recorder having been impounded by a surly customs official at the astroport.

"None of this Watergate stuff here," he had snapped. I had to make do with scrap paper.

The study was neatly arranged. Books and papers were lying on a shelf behind Mr. Emerson. On the wall to my left was a pair of wings hung there like a helmet in a scooterist's flat. To my right, I noticed a harp and a couple of other instruments on the wall. The fat notebook at the desk must be the Journal, I thought. Emerson confirmed that it was.

Singh: You must have written millions of words since your arrival here.

Emerson: No, no more than half a million. The heavenly schedule allows little time for writing of any kind, Mr. Singh. I miss the earth, it provided a more stimulating environment for thinking and writing. Now I know firsthand what Swedenborg meant when he said nothing is arrived at by dispute in the Highest Heaven. Everybody votes in Heaven but werybody votes the same way. It isonly in the Second Highest Heaven that things get parliamentary-a two-party or a multiparty system.

Singh: Oh yes, we have a multiparty parliamentary system in India. Never a dull moment for us, Mr. Emerson, and so much to fill all our newspapers.

Emerson: I don't have that kind of option, Mr. Singh, you understand. But I have applied for emigration tothe Second Highest Heaven and am waiting for my Green Card. But it does get tiresome waiting so long in the queue. You see, the quota fills up each year with innocent victims of political turmoil on the earth and we here have to wait. ...

Singh: Mr. Emerson, if you had to do it all over again, would you do it any differently or would your objectives remain the same?

Emerson: I remain a teacher, Mr. Singh.

The whole secret of a teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.

I want people to see more than they see, hear more than they hear, feel and think more than they do now, to respond to their own Divinity.

Singh: The world today can be divided into three groups-Emersonians, antiEmersonians and those who ignore you completely.

Emerson: Mind you, Mr. Singh, I don't understand what an Emersonian is. I have

never wanted any followers. So there is no great need to a,ttack me either. I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and agreeable influence stealing like the scent of a flower, or the sight of a new landscape on a traveler. I neither wish to be hated and defied by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by -the young whose thoughts I stimulate.

Singh: It is sometimes said that you had no love or affection for people. How could you hope to teach people for whom you had no feeling?

Emerson: What I have for others is not love or affection but respect when they deserve my respect. Men in society do not interest me because they are tame.

From every man, even from great men as the world goes, a large deduction is to be made on account of this taming, or conventions. His going to church does not interest me because all men go to church. But, then, he falls desperately in love. Ah, ha! does he? Now I am wideawake, that is not conventional, but the great epoch of the revelations of beauty to his soul. Now let me see each line he writes, every step he makes, every kiss which makes him immortal-to me, each act of his in these golden hours is holy and beautiful.

Singh: So society has a baleful influence except when the individual awakens to his soul? You have recommended Nature as an antidote, but doesn't one find in Nature what one finds inside himself?

Emerson: No, Mr. Singh, for most men Nature has an uplifting effect. Nature is the beautiful asylum to which we look in all the years of striving and conflict when we shall be driven out of society by ennui or chagrin or persecution or defect of character. The man comes out of the

wrangle of shop and office, and sees the sky and the woods and is a man again.

But how few men see the sky and the woods. And how little of the sky and the woods remains today to see. Isn't that happening more and more in India too?

Singh: Yes, that is true. But there is some awareness of this impending ecological disaster in India but even more so in the United States.

Emerson: I am with my friend [Henry David] Thoreau in his struggle to draw the attention of the authorities here to the fast-deteriorating situation on the earth.

Some time back, David had gone on fast unto death on this issue until God pulled some strings in Washington, D.C., to get some controls imposed on American industries. David is not satisfied but right now he and his Heavenly Hippies are busy organizing their March on the Beatific Hill to protest the monotony and sameness of Heavenly life-they want reduced hours at the harp and more freedom. But the Cosmic Cops have been alerted and necessary steps are being taken to cope with the March.

Singh: To return to the subject of Man and Nature, Mr. Emerson, isn't there an inconsistency in your views somewhere?

On one hand, each individual soul must perceive Nature in terms of his own capacity to respond to Nature or Over Soul and on the other hand, you believe like Wordsworth that Nature is a beneficent influence.

(Emerson goes red with anger and I begin to feel the inner turmoil behind the calm exterior.)

Emerson: Damn consistency, Mr. Singh, damn it all. Must I conclude that small minds exist in India too?

(My shock at this turn of events is too great for me to mask and he hears me muttering something about his use of swear words. He watches my great discomfort and his lips form themselves into a faint smile.)

Emerson: Sorry, Mr. Singh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but you see you mentioned consistency and Wordsworth both at the same time. I have frankly no patience for either. As for swear words, I must tell you that it is one of my regrets as a literary artist and as a speaker that I didn't use curse and swear words. Cannot the stinging dialect of the sailors be domesticated? It is the best rhetoric, and for a hundred occasions those forbidden words are the only good ones.

You see, Mr. Singh, there won't be any inconsistency in what I have said if we all respond to that great Nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the

soft arms of the atmosphere, if we are all-individual selves-in active communication with Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other.

Singh: But don't you think the new developments in science have changed it all? The spectacle, the focus has shifted-hasn't it?-from Nature to science.

Emerson: Once again, I see no contradiction here. There is much to marvel at in science, no doubt. .. (whispers). I must tell you, however, that God is really worried about this man-on-the-moon business .... But turn to Nature and there is still. much to observe and learn from. If I study an anthill, and neglect all business, all history, all conversation, yet shall that anthill, humbly and lovingly and unceasingly explored, furnish me with experience and the same conclusions to which business, history and conversation would have brought me. I say again there are uncommon compensations in common sights, if only we have eyes for them.

Singh: Mr. Emerson, would you care to say something about the accusation that your vision of life lacks a sense of evil?

Emerson: So, they are still debating this on earth. Don't they have anything better to do? Why don't they make up their own minds about the existence of evil on the earth? Why is it so important to know what I believed or didn't believe? But let me try to state my views again. It is very hard for anyone to be simple enough to be good, but what we call evil is part of the urtimate good. Evil flows from the "dead alive," it comes from souls that are not active. When on earth, I once dreamed that I floated at will in the great ether and I saw the earth floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, "This you must eat." And I ate the world. Does that answer your question?

(Afraid to offend him, I kept quiet but he could see that I was not satisfied with his explanation.)

Emerson: You see, Mr. Singh, with all my sunshine optimism, I like the sayers of "No" better than the sayers of "Yes." I cannot really explain it further.

Singh: Mr. Emerson, I hope you don't mind my saying that you talk sometimes like a young radical of the 1960s. You know perhaps that you have recently been blamed by Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti for the ugliest tendency of the American character, "a worship of power." He claims that you freed American politics and politicians

from "any sense of restraint by extolling self-generated, unaffiliated power as the best foot to place in the small of the back of the man in front of you."

Emerson: (Smiles genially, obviously pleased.) I thought genius always came a century too early-now I can see that it sometimes comes two centuries or more too early. When I was 13 years old, my uncle Samuel Ripley one day asked me, "How is it, Ralph, that all the boys dislike you and quarrel with you, whilst the grown people are fond of you?" When I was 36, the fact was reversed-¡the old people suspected and disliked me, and the young loved me. I must say Giamatti and others are giving me too much credit for history. There is nothing wrong with the young people today-we often want to blame our mistakes on them. As for politicians, pride, often bordering on emptiness, is their problem.

I am even more indifferent to all these charges against me than I was when on earth. There are, no doubt, many dogs barking at the moon, and many owls hooting in the Saturday night of the world, but the fair moon knows nothing of either.

Singh: What about Americans and America in the world today?

Emerson: I cannot say I am happy about the situation. Americans today seem to have three wants which cannot be satisfied: that of the traveler who says" Anywhere but here"; that of the rich who wants something more; and that of the sick who wants something different. I think ¡the Americans have to achieve a drastic reorientation of values. As for their relationship to the rest of the world, it is only now that Americans are beginning to re3.lize that they are not unique among the league of nations. Until my countrymen discover their common humanity, unless they learn that the complex fate of being an American coincides with the complex fate of being human, they will remain an isolated, misunderstood group.

But I have faith in America as much as I have faith in Man. (As he said this, Ralph Waldo Emerson picked up his harp, put on his wings and stepped out with me. The two guards delivered me to the cosmocab which brought me to the astrap art. I picked up my Panasonic tape recorder from the customs counter and checked in for the flight back to earth.)

0 About the Author: Amritjit Singh is a professor of English at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. He has also taught at colleges and universities in other cities of India, and in the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore.

He credits Ralph Waldo Emerson with originating some of the ideas and quotations above.

ON

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David Rays Images

A IV-month research fellowship as a visiting professor at the ,University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, brought David Ray to India last year-and it introduced India into his poetry and photography. Ray, who returned to the United States in August, teaches English at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and is editor of the university's national literary

magazine, New Letters. In India he studied Indian poetry and, along with his wife Judy, who is also a poet and photographer, gave poetry readings in several cities.

David Ray is the author of six books of poetry (including one "inspired by the ghazals of ChaM" and published by ,the Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and one collection of short stories. Two books of poetry written during his Jaipur stay are currently being published.

One of them is a translation of love poems from Prakrit, a peasant vernacular of Sanskrit.'

Ray's poems have been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. His book The Tramp's Card was awarded the 1979 William Carlos Williams Prize by the Poetry Society of America.

These are the splendid chickens of the poor, who pick through ashes in their earthen yard where a basin's propped next f to .a tin door that leans against slant shadows like a card.

With blue jewelled necks and justly famous tails they strut past the kettle where five huddle to scrape their breakfast out of beat-bronze pails, this family reflected in a puddle.

A charpoy sits in sun. It's where they sleep, the parents, for they leave the crowded room to make their love or let the woman weep while milky moonlight bathes a broken broom.

This morning a peacock left one feather crossed with a black shoe tongue of thin leather.

of India

A Statue of Gandhiji

Morning Flower: Hyderabad

By a Lake Near Jaipur

From our window on the second floor we can look out level at the statue of Gandhi, a silhouette in dusk, raised high on a marble plinth.

He steps out with a staff as into the bustle of the modern mob, high above rickshaws, camels, strolling cows.

As it grows dark he looks like a peacock, his shawl the folded feathers he never unfurled in pride, nor would he, I think, have raised himself so high.

To honor men we make them truly shadows of themselves, their small and fragile selves.

Lying on a rock, its tendril like a hair, this trumpet vine's yellow blossom is woman at her best, or rather woman at her best is like that, trembling on a rock, wet with a few raindrops, open, offering, inviting touch or an untouching worship. I hold back, hesitate.

All is so tentative, restrained.

Necessarily so.

And behind her, others, yellow, ecstatic. Of course we can no longer compare a woman to a yellow blossom if it makes her look helpless, tentative. All I¡ meant to say is this: the yellow flower is beautiful.

A woman is beautiful.

Sometimes.

Let it be.

We sit on cremation ghats over water, their roofs like stone umbrellas. Thin grass has grown on the platforms, ripples in breeze, souls 'of the long departed. On this spot the Rajput king became flames, ash of his body blown out Qver that lake where the white lotus floats now as then, by the myriad.

A slab propped against a palm trunk shows him in life, on his horse with his two wives standing, crossed arms just as after they crawled willingly up to this stone for suttee, both of them lying like sisters togetber, standing together still on the propped stone in wind that can' do no harm, simply blow them over the lake, onto the routes of cranes, storks and the wl).ite-winged egrets.

The

Polxhedral Arthur Loeb An astoundingly versatile scholar, Arthur Loeb teaches his students, who include architects, physicists, chemists and an occasional brave poet, how to "think three-dimensionally" through the fascinating world of shapes and forms.

People are often astonished to discover that Arthur Loeb, baritone at Old North Church, is Arthur Loeb, crystallographer. Or that Arthur Loeb, Renaissance court dancer, is Arthur Loeb, solid-state physicist. Or that the fellow whose Scottish kilt draws stares on the Radcliffe College shuttle bus is the gray-flannel gentleman who plays viola da gamba at morning prayers in Harvard University's Appleton Chapel. Equally at home carving a roast peacock at a mock-Burgundian banquet or dissecting a difficult diophantine equation, Arthur Loeb is the one-man gang whose Design Science Studio makes a playground out of what is normally seen as the no man's land between science and art. "He's so multifaceted, I don't think there's anyone side of him," says his teaching assistant Holly Alderman. "There's nothing like him at Harvard-or anywhere." But if his versatility amazes others, it's second nature to Loeb-he understands the kinship among the various facets of his world, and moves in their midst with grace, humor and an elegant equilibrium.

"Last week I wanted you to draw a nice rectangle.

Now I want you to draw a nice isosceles triangle," says Arthur Loeb to the 35 students in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) 175, "Introduction to Design Science," who line long workshop tables. Thirty-five compasses pirouette on paper. "Now draw another triangle inside the original," he continues, instructing them to place the compass needle on one of the base vertices, pencil point on the other. "Aren't there two ways to do this?" ventures a sweat-shirted woman. "If there are, then do them," advises Loeb, who's learned never to say no-or yes-until a student has said it first ("Nothing is impossible till it's proven impossible"). "Do you think that the gnomon [the remainder of the original triangle outside the smaller new one] is an isosceles triangle?" he asks. The class argues to a draw. "Do you think it could be?" Some unconvincing yeses. "Well, now I want you to draw a specific triangle whose gnomon is isosceles."

Several students look confused, but soon heads huddle

over sketch pads. Loeb looks over them, his words a soft accompaniment to their calculations. "What happened when we looked at the gnomon of the perfect rectangle?

We were led to the golden section and the Fibonacci sequence. And we found a spiral." The students, heads down, cannot see him smiling. "Wouldn't it be terrific if we wound up with the golden section here?" Arms folded behind his back, Loeb rocks on his toes, delighted. "Then we might really feel as if we'd found some universal truth." .

Gradually the students come up with theories, and Loeb uses generous slices of all their research to illustrate his own path to the solution: The inscribed triangle must have angles of 36 degrees, 72 degrees and 72 degrees.

"And that," murmurs Loeb affectionately, "is a really gorgeous triangle." Its gnomon is an isosceles triangle with angles of 36, 36 and 108 degrees. "Notice I don't use astrological means, but good old Euclidean geometry."

He pauses'. "Now I want you to play with these trianglesto extrapolate and generalize," he urges. "Let your eye guide you and your mind follow."

Heads bow. Soon there are exclamatory oohs of discovery. Most, in the webs and nets they construct, are beginning to fashion five-pointed stars. From there, still using the original two triangles, it's an easy step to pentagrams, pentagons-and the golden section. The diagonals of a pentagon divide each other into portions that relate to each other in the ratio of the golden section.

"And maybe," suggests Loeb, "if we go further, we m(ght get a spiral." Meanwhile he demonstrates the five-fold symmetry of the pentagon. "If you were to close your eyes, and I were to revolve the pentagon 72 degrees, 144 degrees, 216 degrees, or 288 degrees, when you opened your eyes, you could not tell that I had touched it. It would look exactly the same." One student is too obsessed with his doodling to listen. He nudges his neighbor. "Hey, check this out." By connecting the points of successively larger pentagons, he's gotten a spiral.

Right: The Loebs entertain at home, wearing Renaissance costumes. Arthur plays psaltry, and his wife, Lotje, the Flemish harp.

One last project: "Using these two triangles, construct a new plaza for the city hall in Boston," says Loeb. The class warms to the work, and for several minutes the only noise is the snicker of scissors. Then a hand is raised. "Can we assume that the people building this thing have taken this course?" The class laughs, and Loeb looks amusedand pleased.

"I don't believe this animal knew about what we've learned in class," says Arthur Loeb, presenting a large magenta sea urchin with the ardent hands of a jeweler showing a favored gem. "I don't believe he knew there's such a thing as the golden section or five-fold symmetry."

And yet the sea urchin, like the pentagon, has both. "You could use this sea urchin as a model to build a dome," Loeb suggests. "In design science, we come back to organic forms and organic shapes." Like the chambered nautilus, which every year builds a new chamber, the size of which is proportional to the sum total of the existing chambers-"just as, in a bank, interest is proportional to the sum total of the capital." The chambers correspond to the ratios of the golden section, and generate a logarithmic spiral. "These animals create mathematical structures-whether from. Darwinian selection or what, I won't speculate." It is enough for Loeb that "they are shapes that work and that are beautiful."

Shapes that work are shapes that don't fight the properties of space. "Space is not a passive vacuum," declares Loeb. "It has properties which allow the coexistence of certain structural features and disallow others." If, for instance, you wished :0 stitch together a homemade soccer ball, you'd find you could use any number of hexagonal (six-sided) patches, but in combination with those, must use exactly twelve pentagonal ones in order to form a perfect sphere. Another example: If you wish to surround yourself in three-dimensional space with a maximum number of neighbors equidistant from each other and from yourself, you would have twelve neighbors.

Twelve is also the leading term in a sequence generated by placing the digit 2 behind the squares of each positive integer: 12, 42, 92, 162, 252, 362-which represent the number in each successive layer of spheres (of equal size) required to surround a single such sphere.

The aim of Loeb's Design Science Studio is to train the eye to recognize these significant patterns and properties.

Its flagship course, YES 175, offers "the basic skills for anybody whc deals with three-dimensional structures."

That might include crystallographers, choreographers, architects, artists, or civil engineers. These specialists have developed their own peculiar languages for dealing with their particular corner of space. Loeb is interested in organizing a common visual language.

First semester, the class works in two dimensions, discovering "shapes that work," like the golden rectangle or golden triangle, and the relationships between those shapes-that, for instance, the pentagon could not have been made without that 36-degree. angle, and that the golden-section triangle generates the five-pointed star.

Particular attention is paid to symmetry, which Loeb describes as "the most democratic way of dividing space."

In one session, a newly discovered planet is divided so that each student is assigned an equal portion. Loeb hefts a

slate globe to demonstrate. One person living on the planet would represent asymmetry; two would share the wealth by living at equidistant poles in blissful symmetry; three would ring around the equator, 120 degrees apart (forming, incidentally, an equilateral triangle within tp.e circumference of the sphere). Four? We could continue homesteading the equator, but the more settlers, the less territory each will have. To avoid this impractical zoning, Loeb chalks four points on the surface of the sphere (two are 19 degrees north of the equator at longitudes of zero and 180, the other two 19 degrees south of the equator at longitudes of 90 and 270)-and we're in three dimensions. Lines connecting these points WOuld inscribe a tetrahedron (triangular pyramid) into the planet. The class continues divvying up their brave new world until there are 120 citizens, or points, each with equal acreage.

(Connecting the points yields a 30-edge, 20-face solid, the icosahedron.) Sounds like suburbia!

And might well be. City planners wishing to subdivide their town into zones so that everyone in a given district lives closer to the school (or subway, or church) in his district than to that in any other, might construct a Dirichlet domain (next on the Design Science agenda), which is another "democratic way of dividing space."

Second semester tackles three dimensions. Polyhedra are three-dimensional shapes, from cubes and spheres to the great rhombicosidodecahedron, which has 20 hexagonal, 30 quadrilateral and 12 decagonal faces. The class explores the symmetry and connectivity relations within each polyhedron, and then the system of relations among the polyhedra'. Like blood relatives who possess certain

"Now I want you to play with these triangles -to extrapolate and generalize. Let your eye guide you and your mind follow." similar genes, certain polyhedra are contained in other polyhedra: a tetrahedron holds an octahedron; a cube can subdivide into six square pyramids. Using specially constructed models, Loeb demonstrates how two cubes "unwrap," combine and form a rhombohedral dodecahedron (12 rhombic faces). Other "transformations" include "jitterbug" transformations, in which, by twisting a special model, a tetrahedron swells to an octahedron, to a cuboctahedron, and finally to a lesser rhombicuboctahedron.

Once these relationships are understOOd, polyhedra can be used as building blocks, stacking together to fill space and considerably expanding an architect's repertoire. Loeb feels that few architects venture beyond traditional shapes, that their vocabulary is often limited to squares and rectangles and their structures to mere stacks of rectangular boxes. Thus our cities have become "forests of skyscrapers, huge, vertical dead-end streets, pockets of crime and delinquency, rather than true, -threedimensional dwelling and traffic systems."

"I don't deny that the rectangle and square are important," says Loeb, "but we need to go beyond them." Some architects, most notably Harvard's Moshe Safdie, Yona Friedman, and the Israeli Zvi Hecker, have put polyhedra into practice. But most architects bring things down to earth. "Architects will always say, 'Well, there is such a thing as gravity, which dictates the vertical and the

horizontal,''' Loeb smiles. "Now gravity is something we have to contend with. But that's only partially true. If you made a suspension bridge on that basis, you wouldn't get anywhere. Some of the most crucially stable structures are not rectangular at all." (Loeb often has students pose one leg behind the other, arms clasped overhead, to demonstrate the stability of the tetrahedron.) "Under the present way of thinking and training, I don't think anybody could have invented the flying buttress," he adds.

"The basic problem with translating polyhedra to architecture is that gravity doesn't work at an angle of 60 degrees to the. ground plane," says Bill Hall, Loeb's assistant in the course and an architect with The Architects Collaborative. "There are problems with headroom, with getting doors to work." Says Loeb: "Walls are vertical, but they don't have to' be. People say, 'Well if I don't have vertical walls, then how am I going to hang my pictures?'" He smiles. "And my answer is, 'You're going to have three-dimensional sculptural forms, which are more natural.' It's deplorable we had to resort to paintings because the walls are vertical!"

But design science is not limited to pre-architects: "That's why it's a great class," says one student, "because you get such a range of people-architects, artists, physicists, chemists and an occasional brave poet." (Over the years, roughly half the students in YES 175 have been in art, half in science.) Just as the English department aims for verbal fluency, Loeb's course angles for visual literacy .

"I don't know why the United States is so visually inarticulate," he wonders, "but it is. Affluence has brought ugliness. Plastic comes with affluence-beauty often goes , with poverty. We must learn to think three-dimensionally."

Several graduates of the Design Science workshop are applying Loeb's lessons to their work. Spalding, who decided to major in visual and environmental studies after taking the course, works with architect Peter Pearce, designing large structures without any internal supports.

Susan Gill, a sculptor and architect who took the course the first year it was offered, recently established ABRI; Inc. (Architecture, Building, Research, Innovation), to develop projects that uSe geometry in practical, progressive ways, exploring "the fine line between total abstraction and invention directed toward specific application."

But Loeb is equally pleased with less sophisticated returns on his teaching investment-like the postcards he receives from former students, whose visual literacy has led them to a greater appreciation and understanding of the world around them. "I'm delighted when students send me postcards of mosaics, because they're using their eyes as they've been trained to use them."

Loeb's first symmetry lesson was learned in Amsterdam at age three; his teachers were the decorative tiles his grandfather collected. "I was intrigued by the figuresthe tulips, trees and animals," he recalls. But he began to pay more attention to the ornaments in the corner of each tile. :'1 realized that when there were four tiles together, those orm.ments made a new ornament. That recognition was startling."

And led to others. His grade-school building was joined to another school by a common gymnasium. "They were mirror images," says Loeb. "I was always trying to

get out the other door, to see the whole Alice Through the Looking. Glass'kind of situation." Loeb was a passionate sports fan. "I loved to figure out how you scheduled games so that every team played every other, using a minimum of Sundays." He raced model cars, "because you could organize competitions and make charts and systems of the results. " The Loeb household was not bereft of higher forms of culture. His parents both played music, and Loeb remembers often going to sleep with a live Mozart sonata lilting downstairs. Loeb took piano lessons, but was not encouraged to make a career of it. "There is a very Dutch, middle-class tendency to not think of yourself as anything out of the ordinary. If you wanted to be an artist or a musician, unless you were exceptionally talented, the attitude was 'Don't try-it's too risky.' The feeling in my family was 'Don't make yourself conspicuous.' So that didn't motivate me to do something special. I think that only happened when I came to the United States."

He was 17 when Germany invaded the Netherlands.

"We packed in the middle of the night and managed to get out during the first days of the Occupation." The Loebs settled in Philadelphia, where father (a dentist) and son attended the University of Pennsylvania. Despite not having finished high school, Loeb was admitted as a freshman with advanced standing in the chemistry department. The transition was difficult: in the Netherlands, Loeb had attended a classical high school that trained him in reasoning and encouraged the unity of science and art.

Loeb found Penn offered "essentially preindustrial chemical training. We were swamped with facts and more facts. It was'like going over Niagara Falls in a rowboatall I could do was try and keep my equilibrium."

After earning his Ph.D. in chemical physics at Harvard in 1949, Loeb, responding to a notice on the Chem Lab bulletin board, got his first job-as consultant in the ceramics division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "They were doing the first absolute measurements of thermal conductivity at very high temperatures, for the Atomic Energy Commission." In the experiment, the unknown material was wrapped around a heating core, and around both was a layer of insulating material, all in a long cylindrical shape. But the model was not yielding accurate measurements: heat was escaping from the ends of the cylinder. Loeb was asked to design hemispherical guards. Instead, he started from scratch.

"I said, 'Let's not be stereotyped, let's not just think in terms of cylinders and spheres.'" He knew they needed an elongated shape, because they had to be able to look into the material with a pyrometer to measure the temperature. "I wanted to find a smooth geometrical shape with continuously changing curvature. And the ellipsoid was the answer." It worked. "The shape was a very elegant one," says Loeb appreciatively. "Instead of using gadgetry to force heat in a different direction, I accepted the properties of space and let the heat flow in a natural way.

So although I didn't know it at the time, I had the entire philosophy of design science in 1949-maybe not in a nutshell, but in an ellipsoidal shell."

Loeb worked next on thin metal films for infrared detection, and from there went to microminiaturization

and microcomponentry. More interesting to him was a detour along the way. In working on the metal films, he realized he was falling behind-that for each hour of measurement, he had to do a hundred hours of calculation, by hand. At that rate he'd spend the rest of his life adding and subtracting. The solution: Through the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Loeb became the first outside user of Whirlwind I, a pioneer computer. But even the Whirlwind was insufficient. (Although its capability seemed enormous at the time, it had less capability than a pocket model you'd buy at a store today.) So Loeb used the computer screen as a "shooting gallery," feeding information into the computer, getting information back on the scope, digesting it, then feeding it back in-a primitive version of interactive, or computer, graphics.

After spending a year in the Netherlands, setting up a computer center at the University of Utrecht, Loeb returned to join the electrical-engineering department at MIT. One day, trying to describe the structure of a certain crystal to a computer, Loeb realized he had difficulty describing it to himself. Or to others. "I would talk to my coHeagues on Tuesday afternoon, when we'd finally have a good insight, but by Wednesday morning we'd have forgotten it, because we had no language to record spatial insight." Eighty percent of all close-packed crystal structures are composed of octahedral or tetrahedral groupings of atoms, but when Loeb lay down and tried to envision an octahedron resting on one of its eight triangular faces, he found the image difficult to conjure, impossible to retain. So he devised a set of small,

Loeb reviews progress of students' semester projects, which range from anamorphic mappings to a proposal for a children's center.

transparent octahedral and tetrahedral building blocks.

Although never manufactured commercially, the models, dubbed "moduledra," have been used by architects, educators and psychologists as tools for thinking three-dimensionally. Curiously, many who saw the modulednl asked Loeb if he knew BuckminiSter Fuller.

Loeb did not, though he was familiar with the work of the man whose intuitive quests had led to discoveries in architecture, mathematics, philosophy, religion, urban design, physics, art, literature, and naturalism. (An indication of the scope of Fuller's forays is that for many years he has been "World Fellow in Residence" at Penn.

"Fuller is a man who invents flying buttresses," says Loeb admiringly.) In 1963, WGBH-TV, working on a series of programs about Fuller, telephoned Loeb. They were interested in his moduledra and wished to interview him.

After the interview, they invited him to the studio to meet Fuller. Loeb figured he'd get a handshake at best. On the contrary, he and Fuller went to lunch together.

It was a true meeting of minds. Loeb recalls, "I remember asking him if he knew what fraction of a parallelepiped is occupied by the inscribed tetrahedron, and he said, 'Yes-one third, and you are the only person I've ever met who knew that.' " They were like tourists in a foreign country discovering someone who speaks their language. They agreed that the cube was not a stable (Text continued on page 27)

A Passion for Patterns

When Haresh Lalvani opened his exhibition entitled "Geometric Patterns in Islamic Architecture: Focus on Their ystematic Generation" at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi last August, critic Krishna Chaitanya described it as "one of the most important expositions held in New Delhi in recent times." That was one more accolade for the 36-year-old profes" sor in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute, New York; weeks before, Lalvani had received similar raves in Bombay and Ahmedabad. And that's not all.

In the United States, he has been honored by such prestigious institutions as the National Institute of Architectural Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Pratt Research Council.

Lalvani's fame stems from his work in tlie morphology of man-made objects.

Running his hand through his thick beard, Lalvani, who was recently in India on sabbatical leave from Pratt Institute,

explains his work with almost childlike innocence: "Since my teens I have been fascinated and intrigued by the beauty, the symmetry, the unity of nature in its myriad forms. Then as a student of architecture I was studying the forms created by great designers, and soon I was comparing the two-man-made artifacts and natural forms. This sort of curiosity eventually led me to explore the morphology of forms, that is the princi-

pIes of forms. I asked myself: Do manmade objects have a code like, say, the universal genetic code of the DNA molecule? If there is one, can I decipher it, can I generate new patterns from it?"

To seek answers, Lalvani turned to the geometric patterns in Islamic architecture: "The profusion of these patterns with their incredibly rich diversity on the architectural surfaces-floors, walls, ceilings, domes-of buildings, whether in India, Iran, Spain, Turkey or the southern Soviet Union, offered a morphologic challenge."

Step by step, Lalvani painstakingly decomposed these patterns into their elemental parts based on form, identified these forms by their partial or complete symmetry, and strung all the symmetrical and quasi-symmetrical forms into a meaningful sequence. What emerged was a "squigglelike" module, totally different from the pattern itself and yet capable of generating ad infinitum not only the known patterns but new patterns not

found anywhere-verifying his comparison with the DNA module, which with only four alphabets is capable of creating an incredible variety of biological visages.

"That was a revelation to me; the squiggle was the code. With the methodology that I have evolved, we can generate codes for any man-made object," notes Lalvani. "For example, I am now working on the geometry of mudras.

I have started a small project with a dancer here in India to study the morphology of mudras, and when I go back to New York, I hope to study other movements as well at the world-famous Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies."

Born in Hyderabad Sind in Pakistan, brought up in Delhi, Lalvani graduated with a degree in architecture in 1967 from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, West Bengal. He spent the next few years in the Middle East, and in 1970 landed in New York where he joined Pratt to teach morphology.

Lalvani has written two books on morphology- Transpolyhedra and Struc-

tures on Hyper-Structures (now being published). The latter is an extension of his recently completed doctoral work under the guidance of the redoubtable R. Buckminster Fuller at the University of Pennsylvania. "Oh, he is ab~olutely great! Buck is absolutely great. It was a rare privilege to have him as my thesis adviser."

From his work in geometric patterns of flat surfaces, Lalvani has extended his sweep to include their analogues in threedimensions; he has created an assortment of colored, patterned polyhedra-the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron.

And he plans to adapt them into children's toys and games, like the Rubik cube. "These three-dimensional models," says Lalvani, "can be of immense help in teaching children the concepts of morphology, the concepts of patterns, the concepts of space, the relationships between the various polyhedra .... " A project that Lalvani has set his heart on is to set up a museum of morphology, so that, as he says, "the fascinating world of forms can be pulled ou t of the academic

To decipher the code for geometric patterns in Islamic architecture, Haresh Lalvani took intricate designs like the one shown at left and reduced them to their basic symmetrical and assymetrical parts (right).

These were featured in his Delhi exhibition.

~ ,

world and brought into the open, where a larger number of people can view and appreciate the beauty, the unity inherent in forms-not only architectural patterns, but all kinds of shapes and forms-how atoms are joined together, how crystals derive their shapes, how leaves and flowers derive their shapes.

There's no museum of this kind anywhere in the world. I have approached the Nehru Centre in Bombay, some friends in Ahmedabad and friends and corporations in the United States to raise funds for the museum, and I hope I succeed either here in India or in the United States." Then, perhaps realizing the stupendousness of the project, Lalvani adds somewhat wistfully: "Even if I don't succeed, I'm sure it will be done someday by somebody somewhere."

0

form, and Fuller congratulated Loeb for being the first person he'd met in solid-state physics who thought in terms of octahedra and tetrahedra. "When it was time to go," Loeb recalls, "they couldn't get us back to the studio."

Next day Loeb received two books from Fuller, lavishly dedicated. He wasn't sure how to return the favor. At that point he had written two books, Introduction to Wave Mechanics and The Electrical Double Layer Around a Spherical Colloid Particle. He sent Fuller The Graphic Works of M. C. Escher, a close friend since 1960.

"The early Sixties were a very formative era for me," says Loeb, "because I'd gotten together with Fuller, with Escher, and with Gyorgy Kepes, the artist at MIT. It was a very creative time." And busy. At one point, Loeb worked out of four different offices: at MIT, at Harvard (where he was an occasional guest), at Kennecott Copper Corporation and at home, "It was so bad that I started to use the U.S. mail. If I had something in one place and I needed it some place else, instead of trying to remember where I had to take what, I just mailed it to myself. Of course, at the time, postage was only three cents!"

Loeb's commuting problems were relieved by the summer of 1963, when Kennecott created a research think-tank in Lexington, Massachusetts. As a staff scientist at Ledgemont Laboratory, Loeb had a spacious officefive windows, a. fireplace, and an executive secretary.

Here he produced the bulk of Color and Symmetry and Space Structures, the two main texts for VES 175.

The Design Science Studio, now 10 years old, is only one of Loeb's facets. Although when he first arrived in the United States he was too busy to continue piano lessons, on coming to Harvard in 1943 he resumed them, and added his baritone to the Glee Club. One evening in April 1945, at Symphony Hall, the Glee Club was ready to begin singing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky, when the concertmaster ran onstage to announce that the Germans had just surrendered. "That was some performance," remembers Loeb, "we just sang our hearts and souls and lungs out." Such moments convinced him he could get great pleasure from making music without practicing eight hours a day. Soon afterward, a Dutch friend gave him a recorder he'd retrieved "out of all the things we'd left behind when we came to America. It was like a sign." Thus began an interest in Renaissance music that has lasted many years. He gave his first concert at the Boston Public Library-"December 7, 1947," he recalls proudly-and has been performing ever since, adding viola da gamba and harpsichord to his repertoire. He continues to sing in several groups, and is co-founder and leader of the Collegium Josquinum, a chamber group whose rehearsal space is the living room of Loeb's home.

His wife, Lotje, with whom he recently celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary, plays, Flemish harp.

His interest in Renaissance music led him to Renaissance dance. Fascinated by the symmetry in dance, he performed with the Cambridge Court Dancers at the "World's First Symmetry Festival," at Smith College in 1973. One step led to another, and "before I knew it, 1 was sort of the dance person around here-by default,

but by interest." He's taught several seminars in dance history, and has supervised dance-performance theses for the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Recently he has taken up Scottish country dancing.

For many years, Loeb has been using the principles of design science to create art. A sculpture, Polyhedral Fancy, is in the permanent collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Four years ago he began to study watercolors with Jeanne Leger at Radcliffe's Currier House; in April he had an exhibition of his work (which is decidedly nonrepresentational) at Ticknor Library, in Harvard Yard. "As a musician, I'm very much an American musician. While I'm performing mostly pre-1800 music, 1 developed in an American setting. As a painter 1 feel completely Dutch, because most of the things I'm expressing are things that 1 found visually interesting in childhood. I find that when 1 go back and am confronted with the images 1 grew up with, 1 realize they are the prototypes that set the rough visual frame of reference for everything else I've seen."

"I feel you have to train people to combine what we might now call the left- and the right-hand side of the brain," says Loeb, "the intuitive and the analytical.

There's a synergetic reaction there. If a person can be free enough to depend on his intuition and at the same time have the analytical rigor to keep things from becoming flaky, then you have something very powerful."

Perhaps because he moves so gracefully between science and art, Loeb minimizes their differences, pointing out that they a"reboth expressions of man's desire to order his environment. "Somebody once asked me the difference between teaching electrical engineering and teaching visual and environmental studies," he says. "I find very little difference, except that in the arts, 1 do feel justified in saying, 'I feel such and such,' or 'I believe such and such.' In the arts I can make statements that are not scientifically provable. Scientists are very afraid to do that, because it's not in their charter to make that kind of statement. " For Loeb, it is not an either-or question. He invokes a tetrahedron and assigns the words art, science, technology and craft to its points. "This way, you can take any two or three of them, and see how they are interconnected. For , instance, sculpture lies at the intersection of art, technology and craft; the inventor draws on science, technology and craft." In this context, Loeb feels, art versus science becomes "a partnership rather than an adversary relationship. " That the adversary relationship persists is partly the result of a communication gap. "Many scientists feel that they'll appear more valuable if they remain obscure, and that there's a certain amount of treason in simplifying.

There is still some of the black magic in that." Art suffers similarly. "For' instance, there are many music historians who feel that Dvorak was inferior to Bruckner just because he was more accessible. That's part of our culture -if it's too accessible, it's not worth knowing."

0 About the Author: George Howe Colt is a contributing editor of Harvard Magazine.

'ARelationship of Equals' Sheila and David Rothman, sociologists and senior research associates at the Center for Policy Research, New York City, were recently in India as Fulbright scholars. Sheila Rothman, author of Woman's Proper Place, several studies and articles, and a board member of the New York Council for the Humanities, was especially interested in the emerging women's movement in India. David Rothman, a professor of government at Columbia University and author of Politics and Power: The United States Senate 1869-1901 and On Their Own: The Poor in Modern America, met with several Indian lawyers and judges to study the use of courts to bring about social changes. A subject of common interest to the Rothmans is the institution of the family. They were interviewed for SPAN by Promilla Kapur, wellknown Indian sociologist whose books include Marriage and the Working Woman in India and Love, Marriage and Sex.

PROMILLA KAPUR: Mrs. Rothman, .what have been the recent significant changes in the American family?

SHEILA ROTHMAN: One of the really significant changes obviously has been the women's movement. For the first time in America we began to think about social policy for women and children, not together with a symbiotic tie between the two groups, but separately for women and children. And so, for the first time, the woman began to stand apart from the family as a person. People began to think of her rights as a separate human being.

PK: Do you think that with more and more social services being available, the importance of the family has gone down?

People don't depend on the family so much for essential services.

SR: Well, it's a changing notion of what kinds of services the family' should offer. Earlier, it was clear that the woman would give whatever services were needed. If a sick or elderly person needed care, it wasn't the family that was going to give it, it was the mother figure in the family. She symbolized the caretaking that was to be done.

For much of the time the woman was not only the caretaker but also an educated mother who went out into the slums and took care of crisis problems with. immigrants and the uneducated. That's very similar to what many women in India are doing. As the cities are becoming crowded, as they see social problems

in desperate need of action, they're trying to figure out their own roles in society.

PK: Do you think that the phenomenon of women taking up jobs and careers has affected the family?

SR: For a long time women only worked in jobs that were very compatible with family life-for example as teachers, so that they would work nine months a year when their children were at school. Women taking up other careers haven't disrupted the family; they've changed the family.

DAVID ROTHMAN: When people bemoan the demise of the family in the United States, they're thinking of a very specific sort of family: of a mother, father, two children, with the father going off to work and the mother remaining home.

If by the "death of the family," you mean the end of that stage in the family's history, you're right. The American family today certainly is different from that.

The woman is working, the number of children have decreased, women are . marrying later, having fewer kids.

The family will continue, there's no doubt about that. The question is what form it will take. Those who have been quickest to predict the de.ath of the family are those who would have preferred to keep women in their traditional role. The family is alive and well but it's a different kind of family, a family in which household tasks have got to be shared, a family in which women are not going to be the ones who are going to make all the sacrifices for the well-being of others, and also it's clearly a smaller family. The American birth rate is now below twoit was 1.8 at last count.

PK: Have the laws in favor of women, the social policy for women, children and the aged, and the social security schemes, affected family relationships?

SR: Social security has been very positive for elderly people. Everyone

worries about these people being outside the family but it's given them a real sense of independence. They don't have to live with their children; they can now afford to live comfortably by themselves in the style that they want to. While some people find a joint family very pleasant, a lot of people-the elderly as well as the young-would prefer to live apart. They can come together when they want to, they don't have to stay together for economic reasons. Social security has become sacred in America. It gives the elderly a kind of dignity and independence that they wanted, it gives the children a relationship with them. that doesn't make one dependent on the other, which creates all kinds of friction.

DR: The joint family, especially as it is in India, is a two-sided coin. On the one side, it's terribly supportive and full of psychological and economic benefits.

On the other side, from an American perspective, it's also terribly coercive.

You pay a price in all sorts of ways for that interdependence of the family. In the United States, the government now intervenes and, as a neutral body, provides support. You could say it is, so to speak, undermining the traditional role of the family. But it provides an enormous amount of choice and autonomy for those members of the family. From an American perspective,-one always comes down instinctively on the side of autonomy and choice.

PK: Do you think that because of this the children after a certain age do not feel any responsibility, emotionally, toward their parents, say to look after them when they're old?

SR: Everyone looks at the proliferation of homes for the elderly in the United States and sees it as a sign of the fact that children aren't taking care of their parents. But if you look at who's in these homes for the elderly, you'll find they're very old people-generally age 80 or over-who probably could not be

maintained in a family situation without a lot of money for a nurse or a physician.

So the presence of nursing homes for the aged in itself doesn't mean that children aren't taking care of their parents or aren't involved with their parents. It means that the parents are in a situation where they can't function any more at home, either by themselves or even with help from their children. And everyone has agreed that because of these nursing homes people are living much longer.

DR: Eighteenth century families were essentially bound together by economic reasons-the family as a unit of production, the agrarian family which put the women and children to work in the field.

The family was essentially an economic unit. The second stage saw the family as a unit of consumption-the father earned; the essential task of the woman was to make the appropriate purchases in the broader sense of the term, from the nature of the household furnishings to the nature of the education for the child. So the family was still openly involved in a kind of marketplace relationship.

I think we may well be witnessing a third and much more interesting stage in . which the bond in the family is psychological. The husband has no power over the woman, the woman indeed is her own breadwinner and earner. They come together as relatively autonomous beings who are psychologically supportive of each other and of their child-more often than not, now it's one child.

Now, from an Indian perspective I would imagine that's a very strange breed of family, a family that is there altogether by choice. The number of children is kept down, the husband/wife relationship is there so long as people want it to be there. If the p.usband and wife find it no longer to their psychological well-being to remain together they can exercise the choice of leaving.

PK: The emphasis is more on one) own privileges and rights rather than on one's duties and obligations. Has this change of emphasis created any change in family relationships?

SR: It's changed the understanding of what everyone's role is. For example, even the child has understood what his rights are within the family.

Once the bond is psychological then you can also have a more expansive definition of a family. You're less concerned about whether the children are yours by blood, whether they are adopted or whether they're stepchildren, because you can deal with people in terms of affection rather than actual kinship ties.

In the United States there is a great deal of adoption. People are very willing to take children into their families regardless of the color of the child's skin, the religion and so on. In India there is very little adoption because there is so much more emphasis on blood and kin ties.

PK: But don't you agree as a sociologist and as an expert in social law, that there is a certain age, between, say, 12 and 19, in which children need the love, attention and care of parents? And don't you agree that today in American families the pace of life of both parents and children is so hectic that they have hardly any time for each other? Isn't this the cause for children not feeling responsible about their parents and for youngsters taking to drugs or becoming hippies?

SR: I would take the opposite view: In this period while it's obviously important to have love, affection and ties, it is also a time when you need a lot of independence. You need a chance to really test yourself and to see how you stand up as a person and how you begin to relate to adulthood. One can argue that a very protective family is also not very good for a young person and that the more separate interests parents have, the more it allows the child to become autonomous and to become the kind of individual that's called for in the American society.

DR: The American definition of the function of the family is to raise a highly independent, self-motivated, self-generating kind of youngster. The difficulty is that when you are raising children to autonomy you have to rake the good with the bad. Yes, it is undoubtedly true that children raised to autonomy are often going to do things that you have absolutely no patience for and indeed find perfectly dreadful. By the way, the hippie example has really gone by the wayside now, and the drug examples, thankfully, have also gone to a large degree. But, yes, that is ultimately the price one pays for spinning off what counts as individuals. We are not specially concerned with keeping this family bond as the ultimate bond.

SR: One of the things that's been so striking to me in India is the definition of a strong woman. It's very different from the American perspective. Strength here is renunciation, woman's ability to give up what she would think important if it conflicted with her obligations and duties.

PK: But don't you agree that American society is highly individualistic? Premium is placed on individual achievements and individual betterment.

DR: Absolutely. It's the base line of all understanding. .

PK: But does it not clash with the solidarity of the family-each one wanting only one's own satisfaction?

DR: Owing to developments in the post-1960 period, you now have the definition of family members as those whose interests may not necessarily coincide with one another's. Historically the reason why there never appeared to be a conflict of interest was that women were supposed to do all the compromising. So although there was always a potential conflict of interest it was not apparent because the women had to define their roles in such a way that any sacrifice of interest that had to be made was made by them. No 19th-century man ever would have said that the family posed him a conflict of interest, he simply assumed that he did what he had to do and the family would come along.

Within the American context even today the relationship between two equals-husband, wife-is not problematic ultimately. Women as mature, consenting adults can take care of themselves and the women's movement helps to make certain that they get every opportunity .to do that.

The American woman is more free to divorce than an Indian woman because she has the option of remarriage in much greater numbers than her Indian counterpart, and she also has the option of not marrying and being a full-fledged earner in the economy. There are many more economic opportunities, many more marital opportunities.

To those who would see the divorce rate as symptomatic of decline, I'm often tempted to ask how many women in India would get out of a marriage if they really had a chance.

PK: I agree that if one is not happy living with a person, he or she should have a choice to get out of that relationship. But don't you think that if two people enter into a relationship with a preconceived notion that if it cannot be worked out they can just leave each other, then they won't make the real efforts at adjusting? Don't you think that the change in the family relationship could be that both make equal adjustments instead of the wife becoming less tolerant?

SR: Yes, but that can happen only when the relationship is that of equals, when both of them are very free to leave the marriage when they want, and the woman has the economic opportunity to leave. Then you can work on adjustment.

But if there is a marriage in which the husband is beating the wife, I think there would be very few people who would see much hope for that relationship. There couldn't be much scope for adjustment really. So the emphasis has been lately to try to help the women who are involved in this situation get out of it, rather than help them adjust to it.

And I think that that's at the core of what's going on here in the agitation about the dowry deaths. Indian women are very concerned that these young brides be given an option to get out of a situation before it becomes damaging to them. The thrust of both these movements, in the West and here, has been to make the ill-treated wife realize that she doesn't have to tolerate all this, that she should get out before something goes wrong and that people wouldn't want her to stay in a marriage that could be harmful to her either.

PK: But in smaller things, for example, adjustments can be made.

SR: There's a lot of counseling services in the United States. People do generally try to consult somebody in a church or go to a psychiatrist, psychologist or to the reconciliation bureaus.

DR: The problems that the American family faces, I think, are not the problems of husband-wife but the problems of the child. One of the strategies has been to have less children. Another has been the phenomenon of living together without having children.

The other strategy has been-again in the American context only-to attempt to bring in the state to substitute for the family. And so from the very beginning one of the critical demands of the women's movement has been the establishment of day-care centers and the use of the state to supply the resources that would enable both men and women to keep children.

Besides, people have become quite willing to raise somebody else's child and given the very high divorce and remarriage rate, it is often the case that one or the other sp.ouse is not the father or the mother of the children in the household.

In India I suspect that situation would be absolutely chaotic ....

PK: No, in joint families they're always raising other people's children. ... But do you mean to say that the divorce between husband and wife does not have an adverse effect on the children born out of that wedlock?

SR: No, it doesn't necessarily have adverse effects. It can have adverse effects .... In America iCs much more

common now to have joint custody of the child where you go with one parent for four days and another parent for three.

DR: Throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries there was a mythic witch figure in American and European literature-the stepmother. Now there are so many stepmothers, it's become destigmatized. I haven't heard' a stepmother joke or a stepmother remark in years.

PK: Mrs. Rothman, to sum up, what do you consider a woman's place and status in the changing American family?

SR: Well, I wrote a book called Woman's Proper Place. My whole notion was that a woman's proper place should be everywhere; it didn't necessarily have to be confined to the home or to the family. It gives me a great deal of pleasure that that is happening.

My favorite automobile bumper sticker is "Woman's Proper Place is in the House-and in the Senate too" (you know, in the United States we have the House of Representatives and the Senate). I think by this time most parents understand that to raise a daughter in the assumption that her role in life would be as wife/mother is not only outmoded but positively injurious.

I

PK: And Mr. Rothman, how do you visualize the family in 2000 AD? DR: It's a good idea to close the interview with a look at the crystal ball.

The divorce rate will certainly maintain itself at least to current, if not higher, levels.The age of marriage will be later and later. The declining birth rate willprobably drop even below 1.8. And there will be a continuing commitment on the part of both men and women to intensive child rearing of one child.

PK: Do you think that by the beginning of the next century the American family will be more stable?

SR: I think it's pretty stable now.

DR: But again the question is: What form of stability?

We are beginning to come to the probability of serial marriages, in which the assumption is no longer that your first wife will be your last wife. You will have a wife of your youth, a wife of your middle age, a wife of your old age.

SR: One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons was of this beau on bended' knees saying to a belle: "Will you please be my first wife?"

PK: But can't it be the other ,way round too, that the woman can also say: "Will you be my first husband?"

SR: Well, that would probably be one of the things in the year 2000.

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The Joys of Fatherhood I have been thinking a lot about fatherhood. I'd swear everyone is. Since the publication of Growing Up Free, my book on nonsexist child-rearing, I have made the rounds of some 30 American cities doing lectures, interviews and talk shows where listeners call in to register their views. The subject that comes up most often and arouses the most passion is not, as one might expect, sex roles or tips for an egalitarian marriage, but how men can be better fathers.

• "My father never knew me," said an intense male voice over a phone-in radio show. "I don't want to make the same mistakes. I'm trying to learn how to father my_ownkids while there's still time."

• "I'll never forget what happened when I was 10 years old. My mother had just died and my sister and I were standing beside the casket bawling," recalled a San Francisco man of 70. "When my father saw my tears, he grabbed me by the shoulders and said, 'We're men; we're not going to cry. We're going to be strong.' I've swallowed my tears for 60 years and all I've got to sh6w for it is a lifelong lump in my throat and mean memories of my father."

• A New York City cabdriver told me forthrightly: "Being a father is more important to me than being black, being a Baptist or being a man."

• "When our son said he was coming home from college on the day of my husband's office Christmas party, my husband asked him to come straight to the office," said a woman in Washington, D.C. "The boy bounded in, saw his father across the roomful of people, ran and threw his arms around my husband'~ neck and hugged and kissed him. At first I was embarrassed for I)1Y husband, but then I heard one man after another come up to him and say, 'I'd give the world if my son would do that with me.'"

Things seem to be changing. Fathering is becoming a new kind of verb-an active verb-that describes a new kind of role and a new set of behaviors. Men are affirmatively taking time off to be with their children. They are talking to one another about fathering, learning the parenting trade, and exchanging ideas and impressions the way mothers have for centuries. They are looking to women, not as emotional surrogates and stand-ins for the too-busy dad, but as

expert counselors in the art of parentchild intimacy.

All over the United States, people are thinking about the fathers we have or the fathers we are, and fatherhood is being redefined, reinvented and redeemed.

The one line in my book that many men have singled out as the most resonant is this bit of advice: Don't be the man you think you should be, be the father you wish you'd had.

American men grow up under powerful sex-role pressures to achieve that heralded state called "manhood." Many spend their lives trying to prove their manhood. Or to earn it by establishing the number of ways in which they are different from women. Primary in this proof-of -manhood- by-contrast -with-womanhood is the relationship each sex is "supposed" to have with children.

It begins with the topsy-turvy notion that doll play makes boys into "sissies." If this equation did not cloud men's minds, they would recognize that when a boy plays with a doll, he is simply modeling the parent-child relationship he has known himself: he is pretending to be his own father. Presumably, in most cases, his own father is heterosexual. Thus, odd as it may sound, doll play for boys is homage to the husband-father role envisioned in the future of every heterosexual male.

More importantly, by making doll play off-limits to boys and by squelching their interest in "playing house," or caring for small children, our culture creates an aversion to the very activities that make a man a good father.

The way to resolve this absurd no-win situation is to reconcile the two contradictory paradigms-the "real man" and the "good father" -so that both em.body the same admirable human values. Although a "real man" need not be a father, one who is a father must be able to feel his manhood enlarged and not depleted by active, caring fatherhood.

The language gives away the bias: "to father" a child refers to the momentary act of impregnation: "to mother" a child means to give succor and self-sacrifice.

We cannot watch a man kiss, rock, feed, bathe, or comfort a child, and exclaim: "Look at how he fathers that child!" - without feeling somehow as though we have misrepresented the

Play Groups for Dads As a father who is trying to share in the raising of our daughter Liisa, I sometimes feel not just on the cutting edge of the sex-role revolution but alone, in a playground full of mothers.

That feeling is not quite the reality.

For 10 Sunday mornings last spring, Liisa, then two years old, and I participated in a play group for 10 fathers and their infants at Manhattan's YM-YWHA (Young Men and Young Women's Hebrew Association). The play group reminded me that I am not alone but part of a growing community of fathers whose desire and commitment is to nurture their children.

The fathers' group was created two years ago, after .mothers active in the parenting center's weekday programs suggested that their husbands be given a similar opportunity to spend "special time" with their children in the company of their peers, and to get new confidence in their abilities as "primary caregivers."

The experiment was an immediate success. After an item about it appeared in The New York Times, the Y had to double the number of play groups to accommodate the fathers who signed up.

I went to the first meeting at the Y, thinking I would be the best father in the group. With supreme confidence I expected Liisa to make herself at 'home with the new toys and playmates while I showed off by befriending everyone else's kid.

Liisa quickly set me straight. She asked to be picked up and insisted that we "go out" to a playground. I said we were staying, and hand in hand we explored the room until she was ready to wander off on her own.

Watching one man smear cream an inch thick on his baby's bottom, I caught myself criticizing his diapering before realizing that it made no difference how he was doing it, so long as he was doing it.

Actually, fathers were doing every thinggiving babies bottles, pouring juice, singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," building block houses, talking on toy telephones ("Hello, Mommy, Liisa says she's having a good time"), coaxing their children down the slide, rolling balls, wiping noses, refereeing quarrels, soothing and distracting crying children. Gradually communjtyoveIcame~competitiveness and tne Ur,gf;to be the . best father gave way to the sh~aring of fatherhood with other men.

That was my first lesson.

My second lesson involved my stubborn insistence that Liisa kick the bottle habit. At two years of age she should drink from a cup like a big girl, I thought, leaving her bottle at home. The trouble was that the others, with mostly younger children, did not leave their bottles at home. As a result, Liisa resorted to filching temporarily discarded bottles. I

byARIKORPIVAARA

tried to stay her larcenous hand for two more meetings before giving up my antibottle campaign, reminded once ~ain that flexibility is a necessary trait in parentsand the key to our sanity.

We settled into a pleasant routine. The play group gave a structure to our Sundays: a free morning for Liisa's mother, an excursion for Liisa and me.

During brief moments of calm, the other fathers and I would trade information and opinions about preschools, strollers, accidents, traveling with a child, and kids at the zoo. I amused them with my recollection of Liisa, standing in front of an elephant, pointing excitedly at the pigeon at its feet.

We fathers talked about how sugar makes kids hyperactive. Paul Schwarz mentioned an experiment with a child who could write his name very well after a sugar-free breakfast, but after a chocolate-bar breakfast his hand was so shaky he couldn't print one letter.

I never did learn all the fathers' names, but since I knew their children, I identified the men the way many children identify adults: Jane's father, Meredith's father, Jennifer's father, and so on.

Though a roomful of mothers playing with their children would not warrant a spot on the evening news, on the last day of the play group, a TV crew came to film our activities.

Fathers who nurture may not be unique individually, but as part of a group or a movement, they are an important sign of the times.

People who encountered us en masse always reacted with curiosity. One morning, as eight men and our kids waited for the playroom to be opened, a woman en route to yoga class smiled approvingly. "Fathers taking care of the children," she said.

"Yes, that's right."

"I was never so lucky," she confided.

Another Sunday, as we headed for a playground in the park, a woman who passed our convoy of strollers asked: "Is this a class or a coincidence?"

We laughed triumphantly. What are we indeed? Certainly no coincidence, and much more than a class. If anything, we are a by-product of the women's movement, the' vanguard for legions of equal-opportunity fathers.

For me, the final lesson of the play group was the most important. Within the comfort of a circle of men, I realized that I am not into fathering to impress others, or to placate my wife, or even to do right by Liisa.

I am doing it for myself, and because I love 0 my daughter.

About the Author: Ari Korpivaara is a member of the public education department of the American Civil. Liberties Union.

scene. Needing to say "He mothers that child" is like needing to say "Those sisters exhibited real brotherhood toward one and another."

But the new "sisterhood" the new "fatherhood" are returning those words to use with refreshed and refurbished meaning.

A child who grows up without a mother is said to be suffering maternal "deprivation" (dictionary definition: "loss, dispossession, bereavement").

Life without father, however, is merely father "absence" ("a state of being away"). The difference between "deprivation" and "absence" as value-packed concepts has allowed men routinely to walk out on their families and be bad guys at worst, while women who do so are monsters.

While a faculty member was introducing me to a college lecture audience, the hushed auditorium was pierced by a tiny child's high voice imitating a fire-engine siren.

There was much rustling as heads turned toward the back where a man was trying to silence a baby of 18 months or so. The baby responded with "wrroooeeeee," just as the introducer spoke my name. I sensed the collective embarrassment, watched the father hustle toward the exit, child in arms.

From the podium, I called after him: "To the father in the back row, please remain with us. If your baby begins squealing during my speech, I will make an extra effort to be heard and the audience will listen a little harder.

Although you happen to be a man, you are in the position of millions of women who, because of their sole responsibility for their children, exempt themselves from public events, or are excluded from places of education or entertainment.

"When we assume some of that responsibility," I continued, "we help parents remain in our midst. If we have learned to work, think, speak and listen to one another over the sounds of male technology-over the air conditioners, phones, jet planes, stock market tickers, photocopiers, wire service machines and computers-we can make an accommodation for the hum'im sound of one baby in a college auditorium."

The audience roared its approval. The father stayed in his seat. I delivered my speech and eventually the baby fell asleep.

I'm still hearing a lot about "bonding," that mystical connection that some say is forged between mother and child when,' moments after birth, the baby is placed against the mother's chest. Supposedly, the amount of skin-to-skin touching and face-to-face cooing and eye contact determines how close mother and child will be

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for years to come.

This is typical of the Madonna-andchild mentality that isolates the twosome and puts the child's proper place at Mama's breast and in Mama's arms.

"Mother and baby are doing fine," we say. Where's Poppa? Out of the picture.

Made to feel like an intruder in the charmed circle, he learns to stand at a slight distance gazing proudly as if at a precious possession - proprietary and concerned, but not crucial to the scene.

According to some bonding experts, "the first hours may have a lot to do with shaping the mother's attitude toward the child, the strength of her commitment to him [sic], and her capacity for mothering." Might not the same be said for those first hours' potential to "attach" fathers to their children? The bonding proponents seem to be saying that without a strong early push in the baby's direction, the fabled "maternal instinct" might not emerge. Where are they when it comes to the father-infant bond, which is in more desperate need of repair, since it hangs by a thread: paternity and little more?

If you doubt whether institutions can change, check the old and new editions of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. After 27 years and sales in the tens of millions, Benjamin Spock rewrote portions of his "baby bible" to make important nonsexist improvements, including this bit about fathers: Original: A man can be a warm father

and a real man at the same time. . .. Of course I don't mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it's fine for him to do these things occasionally. He

~ 0,

might make the formula on Sunday.

Revised: I think that a father with a full-time job-even where a mother is staying home-will do best by his children, by his wife and himself if he takes on half or more of the management of the children (and also participates in the housework when he gets home from work and on weekends).

In traditional households, there are two kinds of fathers: the father of sons and the father of daughters. These two kinds of fathers sometimes coexist in one and the same man. For instance, Daughter's Father kisses his child good-night, strokes her hair, hugs her warmly. This same man goes into the next room where he becomes Son's Father who says in a hearty voice, perhaps accompanied by a firm pat on the shoulder: "Good-night, son; see you in the morning."

Rather than be the best, most loving, most natural father he can be, this man screens his behavior. He relates to girls and boys in different ways, according to prescriptive notions of the father's role in helping each child's proper sexual identification. He has infused male-to-male affection with so many negative innuendos that father-son love is tainted with perversion.

So he holds back, is not as demonstrative as he might want to be, worries about toughening up his son for a man's world.

On the other side of the ledger, fatherdaughter relations are idyllic when the girl is young and neuter. But the more his daughter physically resembles a fullgrown woman, the more the father loses sight of everything else she is as a person, and the more he cools his affection so that their relationship not seem provo-

cative or "suggestive."

Although much has been written about the -silence surrounding sexual abuse in troubled families, few have spoken of the millions of ordinary families who have suffered from the sexist sexualization of normal father-daughter relations.

In terms of time alone, the typical American father has a long way to go to achieve parity parenthood.

One famous study found that the average father interacts with his baby for less than 38 seconds a day. In 38 seconds, you cannot even change a crib sheet or sing three verses of a nursery rhyme. The most that any father in this sample devoted to his infant in one day was 10 minutes, 26 secondsbarely time enough for a bottle and a burp.

Other fathers studied have logged up to 15 minutes a day feeding their babies, compared to one and a half hours daily for mothers; almost half these fathers said that they had never changed the baby's diapers, and three out of four had no regular care-giving responsibilities whatsoever.

With one-year-olds, fathers spend between 15 and 20 minutes per day, and although no one is quite sure how to measure father involvement with . older children, we have only to look at children's survey responses to learn that it is not enough. In one study: • half the preschool children questioned preferred the TV to their fathers; • one child in 10 (age 7 to 11) said that the person they fear most is their father; • half the children wished their fathers would spend more time with them; • among children of divorce, only onethird see their fathers regularly.

While reassuring harassed working mothers that what counts isn't the quantity but the quality of time they spend with their children, for the newly involved father, the challenge is to increase both quality and quantity.

After centuries-even millennia-of neglect, children are discovering their "other parent." And men are discovering their other selves.

Fathers are coming out of the still-stiff patriarchal collars of their fathers; out. from the shadows of mothers' preeminence in the nursery; out of the offices and factories where they have spent their lives being paid more the more they stayed away from their families.

This then is the new father. We've been waiting for him for a long, long time.

D About the Author: Letty Cotlin Pogrebin, an editor of Ms. magazine, is author of Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the '80s.

Seabird Sanctuary ••

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A beachfront plot in the town of Indian Shores on Florida's Gulf Coast near S10Petersburg is home to Ralph Heath and his parents.

And also to hundreds of birds. Over the last 11 years Heath has rescued and nursed back to health thousands of birds at his Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary.

The avian first-aid began in 1971 when Heath, who had completed premedical studies and earned a degree in zoology, bought fish from a local pier operator to feed a disabled. cormorant he had rescued. A few days later, the operator called Heath for help with a sick seagull he had found, and Heath's reputation as "the bird doctor" began to grow.

At first, Heath performed minor surgery on a card table in his parents' home, and used backyard rabbit cages as recuperation cages.

The Seabird Sanctuary now houses up to 500 birds and employs a staff of volunteers and full-time paid workers.

Ralph Heath, with two veterinary techni- 5 cians, still performs surg~ry in a room in his 6 home which he has converted into an infirmary.

Local veterinarians, who have volunteered their services, perform the complicated operations. The sanctuary has averaged a 50 percent survival rate.

The Seabird Sanctuary also has made important contributions to the field of bird pathology. Its most important achievement, however, has been helping to save the pelican from extinction. Pelicans, for whom Heath has a special fondness, often come to the sanctuary's beachfront lot to feed or nest, mating with the resident pelicans. More than 100 baby pelicans have been raised in the sanctuary and returned to the wild-a rare occurrence. More than 20'0 of the resident pelicans have been sent to zoos in Texas and Louisiana, where the species was close to extinction. Heath and the sanctuary have been widely acclaimed for these conservation efforts, and funds have come in from \various foundations and oil 1 companies. But,' to Heath, the most important contributors to the nonprofit sanctuary are the 4 more than 10,000 members of the "adopt a bird" program, whose small donations help feed the sanctuary's ever-growing bird population.

0 1. Ralph Heath feeds afiock of pelicans.

2. Heath and volunteer Mary Capkanis feed fish to resident pelicans.

3. Veterinary technician Allen Foley injects a pelican with an antibiotic after removing afishhook from its wing.

4. Sanctuary workers on a rescue mission in a boat equipp,ed with an observation tower.

5. Visiting schoolchildren admire a baby pelican.

6. A volunteer rescues a baby pelican that otherwise might have died of exposure.

by BEN]. WA TIENBERG and DAVID GERGEN

Since the early days of the republic, students of American politics have frequently crossed swords over a question that cuts to the heart of a democracy: Are matters of self-government too important to be left to the people?

Today, thanks to nearly half a century of painstaking effort to record the opinions of Americans on hundreds of subjects, we are in a position to make informed judgments about the basic wisdom of the people. A long line of survey researchers, from men like George Gallup and Archibald Crossley in the 1930s to Daniel Yankelovich and George Katona in more recent years, has illuminated brightly the landscape.

What does this vast storehouse of public opinion data tell us, in fact, about the American people? Does good sense run strong in the public bloodstream, or is it mostly hokum?

To be sure, the American public is usually hazy on the details of public policy issues; it can also be very tentative or ambivalent in its judgments, especially when, as Yankelovich says, it is still "working through" a new question in public life.

On most issues that have come onto the national agenda, however, the American people have displayed a remarkable amount of plain, basic down-to-earth common sense-with a good measure of generosity to boot.

Consider the matter of the so-called "social issues." For a long-extended moment in the 1960s the social issues provided the central thrust of American social and political life. Families as well as communities became sharply divided over new lifestyles, the expansion of personal freedoms and the role of traditional values. At times the debate was overwrought: Some on one side hurled epithets at the "three A's" -amnesty (for Vietnam war draft-dodgers), abortion and acid (drugs)-that were supposedly ruining the country; while those on the other side charged that the Establish-

ment had created a repressive, guilt-ridden society. .

How did "the masses" react when so many new issues were suddenly thrown on the anvil of public opinion? With a good deal of rationality, we believe. Instead of mindlessly rejecting or embracing the lot, people carefully picked through the assortment of ideas, choosing those that seemed to make sense and rejecting the rest.

Over the past two decades, public opinion polls have registered a steady increase in the number of people who believe that blacks should not be shunted to the back of the bus, that women deserve equal educational and job opportunities, and that more unconventional lifestyles are permissibleso long as they aren't flaunted. This liberalization in attitudes toward civil rights and civil liberties has arguably been one of the most significant social developments of the modern age. In 1968, for example, 32 percent of whites in a national survey said they believed that whites have a right to keep blacks from living in their neighborhoods; by 1978, support for that proposition had dwindled to 5 percent of the white population. Conversely, the number of whites saying that blacks have a right to live anywhere they can afford jumped from 63 to 93 percent. Between 1958 and 1978, Gallup found a parallel rise from 42 percent to 81 percent in the number of people who would be willing to vote for a black as President.

Surveys about civil liberties have found liberalizing changes of much the same nature. In 1954, for example, only 28 percent said that an admitted communist should be allowed to speak in their communities, while 38 percent would permit an antireli-

gious speech. By 1977, more than half of those surveyed favored tolerance of such oratory-57 percent¡ in the case of the communist, 63 percent in the case of the atheist. One could counter that changes in reality have not kept pace with these changes in attitude .(the Ku Klux Klan is still with us, as are black slums and riots), but the significant point is that among the public at large, there is a much greater climate of acceptance of and even eagerness for social diversity than existed two decades ago.

On the other hand, the public has been very firm over these same years in rejecting other social changes that directly challenge traditional American values. The sexual revolution, for example, has not proceeded as far as much of the popular commentary would suggest. True, the number who believe that premarital sex is wrong has declined from 77 percent in 1969 to 41 percent in 1978. The number who believe that extramarital sex is wrong, however, has held very steady-84 percent in 1973 and 87 percent in 1977. Similarly, about threefourths ofthe population rejected the concept of homosexuality between consenting adults throughout the 1970s, and the number rejecting it for themselves has consistently been even higher.

Thus, the Sixties and Seventies were a time of great sorting out on the social front.

Some ideas suddenly seemed so obviously right that they were welcomed-civil rights' and civil liberties the most prominent among them. Other ideas stirred deep, conflicting emotions and they remain controversial today (abortion, for example).

Still others-drug use, violence, obscenity,

promiscuity-clashed headlong with American traditionalism and were dismissed by the vast majority of the population. One may disagree with the judgments made, but the judgments themselves hardly seem impulsive or reckless. For the most part, they were made after a good deal of national debate and not a little anguish.

The same pattern of gradually sorting out ideas, trying to fit old notions to new realities, can be seen in the way that public attitudes toward government and the economy have changed. For more than four decades, the country's leaders told the public that the central government could ameliorate many of the most pressing social problems of the nation and, at the same time, steer the economy on a steady upward path. As long as it worked, the public warmly embraced this notion. But in the Seventies, when the economy was hit with a series of hammerblows and the government seemed to be holding the hammer, a major reassessment began.

By the late Seventies, the public was telling the pollsters (who were telling the politicians) that it wanted to halt the growth of central government and that stopping inflation was more important than starting a new spending program. Enough was enough. Government had suddenly become the villain. Between 1959 and 1978 the number who thought that "big government" was the prime cause of inflation leaped upward from 14 to 51 percent; and from 1964to 1976, the number who said that the people running the government "don't seem to know what they are doing" rose from 28 to 53 percent. By 1978, 76 percent said that the Federal Government had become too powerful, and 84 percent said that it was spending too much money.

Yet, for all the talk about a conservative swing (and the swing is demonstrable) it is important to recognize that Americans have not been seeking to dismantle the New Deal. There has been virtually no interest in removing all of the income floors that the government has erected since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Survey after survey has revealed large majorities in favor of continuing Social Security, veterans' benefits and food stamps. Across the country, the public has been saying, in effect: Let's keep what we have that's working, let's cut out the obvious waste, and let's call a halt to mindless expansion of government spending. Again, as on social issues, the picture that emerges is hardly one of a public lurching from one emotional binge to the next, but rather of people assessing new realities and making new choices.

Similarly, Americans have tended to dence ... that strikes at the very heart and soul apply common sense to international affairs. and spirit of our m.tional will." There is a After World War II, when events seemed to good deal of evidence to support the notion dictate an active role on the international that public confidence in major institutions stage, a large majority of Americans aban- crested midway through the 1960s and doned their old isolationism. There was receded thereafter. Studies by the Universiwidespread support for the Marshall Plan ty of Michigan found, for example, that in (to aid war-ravaged Europe) and the Tru- 1964 only 22 percent said that government man Doctrine (aid for Greece and Turkey to cannot be regularly trusted to do what is combat communism), and even for the right; by 1978, that number had risen to 70 opening stages of the Korean and Vietnam percent. In 1964 only 31 percent believed conflicts. Yet, with American power at its that government is run for a few big zenith, the public was still not prepared to interests; in 1978 some 74 percent expressed spill blood recklessly or seek to acquire new that sentiment.

One could argue whether these declines territories. For the most part, people wanted to commit U.S. troops overseas only in public confidence amount to a crisis and whether the United States is suffering from in support of a good cause.

In the closing days of the Vietnam war, a deep-seated malaise (we are skeptical), many political leaders feared that the nation but the more interesting question is whether was slipping away from internationalism and¡ the public has been acting irrationally. Has into a more dangerous era of isolation. A the national will eroded because of some dark mysterious forces within the public measure of such popular sentiments, taken psyche, or have people taken a fairly hardby Lloyd A. Free and William Watts, found headed look at the way the country is that the number of "total internationalists" fell from 65 percent in 1964 to 41 percent in moving and come to sound conclusions?

1974. In the period that has followed, Taken together, the public opinion data of the past half century seem to refute the however, the public has once again demonstrated that it can quickly adapt to new idea that Americans are a nation of sheep, circumstances. dumbly chasing one fantasy after another.

As events whizzed by, Americans snap- They may occasionally lash out at the ped to attention once again. On the issue of burdens of the modern day, but they will not defense spending, for example,¡ the polls mindlessly toss out the social services of the marked a complete turnabout in public New Deal. They may long for respite from attitudes: In 1971, pollster Louis Harris international turmoil, as they did after found that only 11 percent wanted to in- Vietnam, but when the tocsin sounds, they crease defense spending and 49 percent are quick to return to the ramparts. They wanted to decrease it; by 1979 (before Iran may even lose confidence in the perforand Afghanistan came to a boil), fully 60 mance of public institutions, but they conpercent wanted to increase defense spend- tinue to show strong faith in the institutioi1s ing and only 9 percent wanted to cut it. The themselves. change was one of the most remarkable Moreover, the polls lend little credence during the 1970s. In the same period, the to the notion that a benighted conservatism number who were willing to defend Western has taken hold across the country. AmerEurope in the event of attack rose from 39 icans do feel that many of their basic values percent in 1974 to 54 percent in 1978. And are under siege, and some uphold those in early 1980, a new survey employing the values more assertively than in the past. questions designed by Free and Watts found People are also more resistant to big, that the number of total internationalists intrusive government. Yet, as we have seen, had risen to 61 percent-only 4 percent shy a large majority has also accepted rapid,¡ of the peak recorded 15 years earlier. The liberalizing changes in personal lifestyles American people, showing themselves once and, in areas such as civil rights and civil again to be ever the pragmatists, had liberties, has adopted many ideas that have apparently decided that, for better or worse, usually been considered progressive. the Vietnam era was over.

The picture that emerges from the polls Finally, let us consider the way the is of a sound, pragmatic, down-to-earth public has come to view the major institu- people struggling-with mixed success-to adapt to the realities of contemporary tions within U.S. society. Much was written 0 during the 1970s about declining faith in lifu. government, business, labor, organized religion and other institutions. One of the most About the Authors: Ben 1. Wattenberg is a senior notable speeches of the Carter Presidency fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and (July 15, 1979) went so far as to assert that coeditor of Public Opinion magazine. David the nation is beset with a "crisis of confi- Gergen is an assistant to President Reagan.

lelting IheMarkel Prevail The Reagan Administration's energy policy is committed to maximum reliance on the forces of afree market and a minimum of government intervention.

The Reagan Administration has drastically reversed the energy policies of the previous U.S. administrations. One of President Ronald Reagan's first acts was to decontrol oil prices in January 1981. He then set about to abolish the vast machinery that was designed to enforce price regulation. He even proposed abolishing the U.S. Department of Energy, which had become a symbol of government intervention in energy markets.

The Reagan Administration's approach to energy is based on the philosophy that a free market can allocate scarce energy supplies most economically and most efficiently by means of uncontrolled prices.

The administration is trying to apply these principles consistently, but it has encountered obstacles for both historical and political reasons.

A free market is well suited to supply energy. This is because energy resources in the United States. are owned by individuals or corporations, and property rights provide incentives for proper management of resources. Under competitive conditions, management for individual profit also benefits the general population. In contrast, natural resources such as water and air, which are not owned by individuals or corporations, are best left to the public sector. An owner of a lake or a pond would probably want to take care of it and not discharge wastes into it, but it is impossible for anyone to own and safeguard a parcel of

air. Government must, of necessity, involve itself in regulating air and water quality, since there are no real incentives for businessmen to control pollutions coming from market forces.

It is also appropriate for government, at the state, local and federal le~els, to regulate certain natural monopolies, such as electric power companies and natural gas pipelines and distributors.

While the free-market approach denies a governmental. role in setting fuel prices, there are still important functions which the Federal Government must perform for energy resources to be used properly.

All these functions together can be called a government energy policy. They include the following: Making sure that a free market exists. Under the antitrust laws, the U.S. Government takes action against companies or individuals that inhibit competition. The government also, along with private groups, may provide information (for example, about energy efficiency of cars) to help consumers participate more effectively in the market.

Regulating interstate transp'Qrtation of fuels and electric power. The "interstate commerce" responsibility of the Federal Government also includes authority to prevent energy-rich states from taking undue advantage of energypoor states by exorbitant taxation or other means of price discrimination.

Protecting the environment.

As a guardian of national public health and safety, the Federal Government., along with the states, sets appropriate quality standards for the ambient atmospheric and water environment, and licenses energy facilities, such as power plants and nuclear reactors. Much more could be done to streamline the process of achieving the standards and to speed up licensing.

Providing a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. U.S. dependence on imported oil and the possibility that cutoffs could cause severe economic damage led to legislation establishing a Strategic Petroleum Reserve operated by the Federal Government as one of its national security responsibilities.

Managing public lands.

When leasing publicly owned areas to the private sector for exploration for oil and gas (especially on the outer continental shelf), and for coal and other energy minerals (including geothermal energy), the government acts. as a prudent landowner; concerned with maximizing its financial return.

Supporting advanced research and development. In areas where no single industry can capture all the benefits of its own research and development investments, the government has a role-that is, to carry out basic scientific research for future energy sources, such as nuclear fusion.

Negotiating international energy cooperation. The Federal Government has important functions as a party to various international agreements concerning energy. For example, the International Energy Agency was set up in 1974 to operate under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. One of its principal purposes is to provide a mechanism for sharing oil in case of major interruptions in the world oil supply.

Another cooperative venture is the International Atomic Energy Agency, concerned with exchange of information, and with safeguards against the spread of nuclear weapons.

Unlike many other governments, the United States does not purchase oil on the world market. Even the supplies used by the military are provided by private oil companies under government contract.

Owning and operating energy facilities. The U.S. Government is involved in owning and operating certain energy facili¡ ties such as naval petroleum reserves, hydroelectric plants in the Far West, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which includes hydroelectric, coal and nuclear sources for the production of electricity.

It is not easy for the Federal Government to carry out these various energy functions in a consistent manner. Its main problem is political: how to satisfy the often conflicting desires and requirements of different interest groupsenergy consumers, environmentalists, owners of oil and gas resources, energy companies, and other, more specialized interest groups.

The Reagan Administration is developing its own energy policy, using the laissez-faire approach of a free market, but making decisions incrementally. As the foundation of his energy program, President Reagan's first step was to decontrol completely the prices of crude oil and oil products.

However, he left undisturbed the "windfall profits tax" (WPT) approved by the U.S. Congress in 1980, an excise tax based on the difference between the world price (that is, the market price) and a price corresponding roughly to the production cost plus a reasonable profit. For example, oil discovered in the United States bdore 1978 has a base price of $12.89 and a tax of 70 percent above that. On the other hand, post-1978 oil and hard-toproduce "heavy" (high-viscosity) oil is taxed at 30 percent on a base of $16.55. The exact amount of WPT, which is likely to exceed $ 200,000 million over the next 10 years, and how its proceeds are to be allocated will provide some lively political controversy in the future.

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Past administrations have provided special subsidies, at the consumer's expense, to socalled small refiners, but these benefits will not be available anymore. On the other hand, the changing and shrinking market for oil products is likely to benefit refiners willing to make capital investments to produce more gasoline and other motor fuels and less heavy fuel oil from a barrel of crude oil. These changes are being made in response to market forces-without any government assistance or direction.

In the leasing of public lands, the Reagan Administration has moved more rapidly than any past administration.

As a result, the U.S. energy industry should be able to make its plans with more certainty and therefore more efficiently, which will ultimately benefit consumers.

One of the important energy policy issues has been the emergency allocation of oil products in case of a "shortage," usually as a result of a supply interruption. But in a free market this problem disappears.

With prices decontrolled, there cannot be a shortage. The price . will simply rise and dampen

demand until the market clears.

The "allocation" will be done by the market-with oil flowing to users¡ who can afford to pay a little more. This is the most efficient method of allocating during a scarcity and requires no government action of any kind. The allocations are done by price and not by political influence. Allocation by the free market is also a comparatively equitable method.

Even though the poor are hurt by the higher price, they would also lose under other systems of allocation, such as rationing by coupons (whether per car or per driver, whether kept or resold), or political distribution without a change in price. The fairest method would be to let the price rise, and recycle the increased tax revenue to provide general aid to the poorwithout regard to their energy purchases.

And so the legislatively mandated Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) may not really be necessary. Once prices are decontrolled, the allocation of any shortfall can proceed automatically. With an SPR in existence, however, the government, as its owner, has to make

a plan to release the oil: when, how much, and in what manner. Whatever method is used will create uncertaInty in the oil market and'discourage oil com; panies and individual users from maintaining their own private stockpiles. At present, the SPR exceeds 200 million barrels. Some hard decisions will have to be made before the SPR reaches its announced goal of 750 million barrels, a target which has an annual carrying cost of some $ 5,000 million.

Natural gas represents a difficult policy problem-some would sayan impossible problem. The major conflict is between those who would deregulate the price and those who support price ceilings. Supporters of ceilings include consumer advocates (who may be taking a shortsighted view), gas pipeline owners (who would like to see the price low and demand high to maximize the throughput of gas), importers of costly liquefied natural gas (LNG) and producers of expensive "deep" gas (who look upon the availability of a large reservoir of price-controlled gas as an opportunity for "rolling in" their higher-priced gas). Old

gas under contract still sells for less than 50 cents -at the wellhead, while gas from the same region, but from a deeper layer, can sell for as much as $ 9 per 28,300 liters.

Under the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978, about half of all gas, and any new gas, will be decontrolled in price by 1985. This law is likely to have consequences which are difficult to predict. The ultimate effect of the "fuel pass-through clause" (by which electric utilities can pass oil any increase in the price of their fuels) may be to make the electric utilities insensitive to higher gas prices.

If they were to stop using decontrolled gas in the United States, a large surplus would develop and gas. prices could remain below the equivalent level of oil for many years.

Residential and commercial users would then switch to gas and utilities would switch to coal-resulting in a weakening of demand for oil as a heating and boiler fuel.

President Reagan's position on natural gas has not yet been formulated. Some members of the administration would like to deregulate the wellhead prices of natural gas immediately and completely. Others favor deregulation, but would like to introduce it gradually, and apply it to all natural gas; both old and new. One of the controversial issues undoubtedly will be the imposition of a windfall profits tax on natural gas, similar to that imposed on oil.

It used to be said about coal that it is a great fuel, except that "you cannot mine it and you cannot burn it." With respect to coal, the Reagan Administration is likely to move farther and faster than previous administrations. Simplifying stripmining regulations and making Clean Air Act regulations more flexible should make coal much easier to mine and burn. At the same time, land and air resources should not be adversely affected.

The kinds of changes being discussed include: • Modifying the regulations about land restoration (following stripmining) to allow re-

gional flexibility, to permit creation of flat land where it is economically more useful, and to replace design standards by performance standards, thus improving cost -effectiveness. • Permitting the burning of low-sulfur coal without use of expensive stack gas scrubbing equipment. • Setting appropriate standards for ambient air quality, but leaving the implementation methods to the users of coal.

Some political battles will have to be fought in order to bring about these changes.

Congress and the population as a whole will have to become convinced that environmental regulations can be made more flexible without damaging the land or lowering air quality.

In the field of nuclear energy the Reagan Administration has reversed the Carter Administration's policies. Reprocessing of used nuclear fuel elements will begin soon. The export of nuclear technology will not only be permitted but also encouraged. And work on nuclear breeder reactors will resume, in order to stretch the uranium resources of the United States and other countries.

Regardless of U.S. nuclear policy, other countries are now fully aware of the advantages of nuclear energy. It is cheaper than coal and much cheaper than oil. Nuclear energy is, on the whole, environmentally benign, provided that strict safety precautions are enforced. The most significant action the U.S. Government can pursue to revive its lagging nuclear program is to streamline the licensing process. Just two steps are necessary: selecting sites for nuclear plants and other power plants well in advance, to build up an inventory of approved sites; and standardizing nuclear plants so that the licensing process can be speeded up. These steps will not only cut the time between planning and operation (and thereby lower the cost greatly) but also make nuclear energy safer.

With respect to other energy 40 sources,. the Reagan Adminis-

tration has used a laissez-faire approach. Solar energy and synthetic fuels from coal have been left largely to the market, though there are important tax benefits which provide a kind of subsidy.

Two oil shale projects and one synthetic gas project have received loan guarantees from the government. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation, set up under President Carter, has become inactive. It is clear that we are not going to see the !!overnment -subsidized crash program for synthetic fuels which has often been envisioned by high-level policy planners in the past. On the other hand, President Reagan is continuing government support of research on fusion energy-a long-term program whose impact will not be felt until after the year 2UOO. The Reagan Administration believes that conservation, whether by fuel switching or by using energy more efficiently, will best be promoted by market forces. Higher prices are supposed to achieve the optimum goal. The oft-stated idea of encouraging conservation by legislation-for example, by means of a gasoline tax-has not found much favor in Congress, although an economic case can be made for such a tax based on the negative externalities (harmful and uncompensated side effects such as accidents, noise, pollution, the congestion of roads in cities, and the need to build and maintain roads) produced by driving.

On the international scene, the Reagan Administration has made some important departures. As before, the Federal Government will stay out of the purchasing of oil and gas, and let private companies negotiate detailed arrangements with foreign suppliers, both governmental and nongovernmental.

An exception to this general policy role has been a direct purchase agreement with Mexico for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The administration is likely

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Don Hesse, St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Reprinted with permission of Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

to de-emphasize the role of the International Energy Agency.

Special sharing arrangements for oil supplies during emergencies will undoubtedly be reviewed. Since these sharing arrangements have never been tested, no one knows whether they really will work. With prices deregulated, there may be no need to have them at all.

In case of supply shortfall, oil will simply flow to individuals willing to pay more for it.

Although many "experts" have worried that an oil "shortage" could break up the Western alliance, their concerns are unfounded. Wealthy Europeans can always outbid those Americans who cannot afford the higher price. Individuals- not countries- willing to pay the higher price will get the oil. The United States is not likely to provide subsidized oil for its citizens.

A major hope of the Western world always has been to discover oil in places outside of the Middle East, to diversify sources and make supplies more secure. From time to time it has been suggested that the exploration be subsidized, or even completely financed, by United Nations agencies or by the World Bank.

The Reagan Administration prefers exploration by private companies-without subsidies.

Since many Third World nations oppose multinational companies, particularly those domiciled in the United States, they may well prefer other financing arrangements. One

possibility might be an organization which accepts money from OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) nations-particularly Arab nations with surplus funds-for investment in oil exploration in the Third World.

It is likely that much new oil will be found in the next few years with or without U.S. Government involvement. As far as the Reagan Administration is concerned, it will be without such involvement.

As mentioned earlier, there has been a turnabout in U.S. policy on nuclear energy, both domestic and international.

We shall see freer export of nuclear technology and of enriched fuel from the United States. This attitude is based on the realization that countries that wish to build nuclear weapons are not going to be stopped by the United States.

In any case, countries can build or acquire weapons directly without first developing nuclear power for electricity production. A number of technically advanced nations are now able to act as suppliers of nuclear technology and fuels, so that the actions of the United States no longer determine what happens to nuclear power in the world community.

In conclusion, it is clear that the Reagan Administration is committed to maximum reliance on the forces of a free market, and a minimum of government intervention. The price of oil is now so high that it can be replaced by less expensive gas, coal and nuclear energy. These cheaper fuels can be substituted in many applications, principally for producing heat and steam, which make up about 60 percent of world oil use. Government policies need not do much more than remove political and institutional obstacles to the use of these alternative energy sources. Economics will do the rest.

D About the Author: S. Fred Singer, a leading energy analyst, is professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

New Knowledg~ To Solve Old Problems Last month a blue-ribbon U. S. panel, headed by the Science Adviser to the President, and Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, visited India to strengthen bilateral cooperation in science and technology. Following is an abridgment of Dr. Keyworth's address at India International Centre, New Delhi.

When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited the United States last July, she observed that "for India, science is essential for development and no less for the intellectual self-reliance and creativity of our people." I find that a very wise statement. It reminds all of us that truly far-seeing societies recognize that science can meet two distinct and important needs. A country that focuses on applied science to the exclusion of the development of new knowledge will always remain dependent on other nations for new ideas. Likewise, a country that permits its pure research to stray too far from the driving forces of society's needs will find itself dependent on others' technologies to solve practical problems.

India demonstrates that it is well aware of that hazard. It would have been tempting for India, faced with many, many basic needs for its great population, to skimp on those cerebral aspects of science and concentrate entirely on applications. But almost alone among nations facing similar problems, India decided early to develop the two-pronged program that Mrs. Gandhi referred to.

There have been two notable consequences of that decision. First, as should be expected, Indians have contributed enormously to progress in world science.

Names like C.V. Raman, J.C. Bose, Homi Bhabha, Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, Har Gobind Khorana, and C.N.R. Rao are known worldwide by other scientists. But many thousands of other Indian scientists have taken their places as well on the frontiers of research, both here in India and certainly in the United States. Virtually all of us in science have had personal opportunities to work side by side with Indian colleagues; we know how pervasive their contributions have been to knowledge.

Left: George Keyworth at a press conference in Delhi; with him is Professor M.G.K. Menon, Chairman, Science Advisory Council. Above: The U.S. delegation at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. Here, Keyworth talks with the institute director, Dr. H.K. Jain. Others in the photo are, from right: Dr. D. Allan Bromley (Yale University); Dr. John Marcum (Office of . Science and Technology Policy); Dr. Nyle Brady (Agency for International Development); and Dr. Terry Kinney (Agricultural Research Service).

But there's a second consequence as well. I think partly because of this rich science tradition, India has shown the rest of the world how the applied science and technology that emerge from this tradition can serve a developing nation's basic needs. It's no surprise, then, that India has assumed leadership roles in such fields as solar energy, population planning and low-cost education using the high technology of modern satellite communications. In the past two decades, wheat production has nearly tripled while rice has also increased at a rapid rate. The,'Green Revolution was triggered by I~dian scientists who developed new, short-statured, highyielding varieties of wheat and rice.

India's successes-and its plans for the future-can teach the rest of the world how important it is to commit at least some portion of national resources to maintaining strong, diversified programs in science and technology.'

In many ways the United States and India-unique as each is-face similar problems in the 1980s. These problems )

are common to almost all aspiring nations. They include improved education and productivity of our labor forces; better use of land and natural resources; and economic climate that permits continuing improvement in the quality of life for our people-and, of course, peace in which these things can happen.

It's not surprising that we both turn to science and technology with the hopeand expectation-that they will at least help us cope with some of those problems. After all, modern history shows us how closely economic progress has been . tied to technological advance. Mr.s.

Gandhi also pointed out during her visit that "new knowledge is often the best way of dealing with old problems." I heartily agree with her.

The purpose of my visit to India is to follow up on [President Ronald Reagan's] discussion with Mrs. Gandhi on expanding our cooperation in science and technology. In my meeting yesterday with her, she reiterated her conviction of the importance of this new effort and her strong support for it. It shouldn't come as (Text continued on page 44)

ACCLAIMED - ANIMATOR SEAFARING STUDENTS STAGING SHAKUNTALA

Clair Weeks has provided a living link between animated film art in India and its most illustrious practitioners in the United States. During his long career, Weeks has worked as an animation artist with Walt Disney Productions, creating such beloved characters as Tinkerbell in Peter Pan and several 'OfSnow White's companionable dwarfs; he has also' inspired and taught animated filmmakers at the National Institute of Design in Ahmed~ abad. Last month Weeks was in India to view the premieres of some of his students' work.

Weeks joined Disney in 1936, little realizing that he would become one of the trailblazers in the art of animation. "I didn't know anything about animation," Weeks reminisces about his first job. "After graduating from Dakota Wesleyan University in Metchell, South Dakota, in 1934 I went to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles with the hope of becoming a design engineer. But the nation was in a depression, and it was a job."

Weeks joined Disney when the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was being planned. The work was hard and the pressures great. "Walt was very intent to follow his dream," he says. "He knew what he wanted and he was a perfectionist. You had to put out the best."

Although today much of the pick and shovel work of animation art in the United States is done by computers, he says, "in those days we had to draw thousands of cartoons ... until we thought we had a character the audience could respond to."

Computers will never be able to put the "life" into the work that artists do. ' Weeks left Disney Productions in 1956 to join the American Embassy in New Delhi. "It was like going home," Weeks recalls.

When the U.S. space shuttle Columbia touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in California on November 16, it had created history. Although this was Columbia's fifth flight into space, it was the first commercial mission; it launched two communications satellites into geostationary orbit. The flight was also the first to carry four astronauts; previous missions had two astrona.uts. Crew members aboard Columbia included (from left in the photo) Joseph Allen, scientist astronaut; Vance Brand, commander; Robert Overmyer, pilot; and William Lenoir, another scientist astronaut.

Eight 40urs after lift-off on November 11, Lenoir launched satellite SBS-3, owned by a U.S. firm, from the craft's car-

As the son of Methodist missionary, he had spent his childhood in India. While in India, Weeks' involved himself in the same kind of work he had done at the Disney Studio in California. He lectured on animation films, and assisted animation filmmakers in their work.

After his stint with the U.S. State Department, Weeks joined Orange Coast Community College in Costa ,Mesa, California, to teach film animation and graphics. But India beckoned him again.

In 1979, he joined the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad as a visiting professor to develop and conduct workshop courses in film animation production not only for the institute students but also for other government educational institutions like the Film and Television Institute of India at Pune.

During his two-year stay at NID, Weeks also helped develop a low-cost, prototype animation camera stand (rostrum) using either 16mm or super-8mm camera at the institute workshop to replace the costly imported camera stands. "This simple, low-cost, stand enables students to do their own experimental animation 'shooting' more easily and at less cost," he says.

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go bay. Twenty-four hours later, Allen launched Telesat Canada's domestic communications satellite ANIK-C. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration charged a little more than $ 8 million for each launch-which is much less than what it costs to launch satellites by rockets. (India's INSAT-B is scheduled to be launched by Coiumbia's twin Challenger next year. Beginning January 1983, Challenger will fly three missions before Columbia returns in September 1983.)

"It was a great mission," said James Abrahamson, NASA's associate administrator for space flight. "We are inaugurating real services of the shuttle. The first job was to deliver the satellites, and we did that in a flawless way."

Their classroom is a ship, and their campus the world. These are some 450 students and 20 faculty members of the Semester at Sea, who visited Bombay last month. During their five-day stay, some of them also ventured out as far as Delhi and Agra.

Semester at Sea is a unique educational program that lends a global dimension to students' undergraduate career. Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh through an arrangement with the Institute of Shipboard Education, the three-and-a-half-month semester is conducted aboard an air-conditioned ocean liner that is equipped .with classrooms, laboratories, a 12,000volume library, a closed-circuit television system, a theater and an indoor playground.

Students, most of whom are sophomores and juniors drawn from colleges and universities throughout the United States as well as a number of foreign institutions, spend half of the semester on the shipboard campus, studying courses that they would normally study at land-based colleges; the other half they visit several countries.

"A unique feature of the program," says faculty member Professor Edward Baker, "is interport lectures by distinguished writers, teachers, journalists and businessmen from the countries we visit; they join us at a port preceding their own country. During the voyage, they conduct seminars, give lectures and hold discussions with students, telling them all about their country's history, customs, religions and culture."

This interaction, he continues, greatly helps students in that when they actually visit the country "they understand it better, appreciate it more and relate to it better." (Speakers from India at the Semester have included novelist Nayantara Sahgal, playwright Jayanti Patel, journalist Pran Chopra, former director of the National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama Suresh Awasthi ~rid Professors'Ramu and Harshida Pandit at BO,mbay University.),

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or three weeks beginning October 15, Americans glimpsed yet another facet of India's rich cultural diversity: Washington's Studio Theater staged Kalidasa's fifth-century Sanskrit masterpiece, Shakuntala.

The production was a longtime dream of Joy Zinoman, a scholar of Asian theater and director/founder of the Studio Theater. Explaining her choice of such exotic fare, Zinoman, who has spent a number of years in Asia learning Asian languages and theater and teaching Western theater, said, "I am interested in acting styles, in exposing my actors and the audience to a variety of experiences.

Besides," she added, "Shakuntala is romance, it's the essence of life."

Zinoman chose ' Bharata Natyam as the basic movement form for the show, setting a challenge for the multiracial cast of 28, almost all Americans.

"During the first rehearsal, the performers concentrated on movement," she said. "They learned classical dance mudras to embellish their utterances before beginning to learn their lines."

The English language script was compiled by Zinoman herself from several translations.

Much of the inspiration and research for the performance, she says, came in Malaysia where she saw rehearsals for a production of Shakuntala last March.

In fact, the Tamil Indian Arts Society of Kuala Lumpur lent its extensive collection of crowns, armor and jewelry for the Washington production. Zinoman also visited India recently to research the play and buy fabrics and other materials for the performance.

In a review of the play in The Washington Times, Hap Erstein wrote: "Indian theater of this vintage is a colorful variety show.

It uses mime, dance, song, music and storytelling to create a

delicately elegant spectacle ....

Where Shakuntala excels is in its dance and music. Choreographer and lead dancer Nancy Johnson along with Stewart -Carerra, bring alive the ancient traditions of Bharata Natyam, an intricate joyous dance format which livens the production. The dance is accompanied by the remarkable tabla drum of Murli Pai whose near continuous improvisations are a high point of the evening .... The Studio should be applauded for its earnest attempt-and its success -in broadening the available theatrical bill of fare."

Pai, originally from Bangalore, now living in America, was the only Indian in the cast.

Nancy Johnson first learned Bharata Natyam in Boston with a teacher from Delhi, and in 1976 .took a two-year course for foreign students in dance and Carnatic singing at the Kalakshetra of Fine Arts in Madras.

The highlight of the opening ceremonies of the play October 15 was a benefit reception for the Studio Theater by the Indian Ambassador to the United States and Mrs. K.R. Narayanan. Con- . gressman Stephen Solarz, chairman of ts.e House Subcommittee . on Asia and Pacific Affairs, and ranking member of that committee, Representative Mervyn Dymally, cosponsored the event.

NEW KNOWLEDGE

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any surprise that these two leaders should decide to inaugurate a new international partnership in science. Both Prime Minister Gandhi and President Reagan are knowledgeable about and keenly aware of the iJnportance of science and technology to their nations' future.

I have brought with me an impressive group of U.S. science and technology policy officials. These include the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Frank Press, and the senior officials of the American agencies and institutions that will ¡be involved in this program. We are determined to make this a successful undertaking, and the presence of this prestigious group is testimony to our intentions.

In the course of this visit we are meeting with Prof~ssor M.G.K. Menon and other senior Indian officials to discuss the proposed areas of cooperation and lay the foundation for the detailed scientific work that will follow. We are now establishing a panel of eminent Indian and American scientists to begin this follow-on work. The panel will be headed on the American side by Dr. Allan Bromley, who is chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the White House Science Council. They'll be looking especially in the areas of food production, biomass for energy, health and materials research. We expect their recommendations early next year.

I want to stress our determination, and that of our Indian counterparts, that these projects will represent research interests of importance to both countries.

Moreover, they will draw on the particular scientific strengths of each side ....

In spite of both countries' obvious enthusiasm for programs in science and technology, I think Mrs. Gandhi would agree with us that a government's primary interest in science must stem from its ability to serve national needs. In the United States today we take the unsentimental view that our government policy guiding science, like economic policy or agriculture policy or defense policy, is essentially a tool to address pressing national needs. Not surprisingly, we have ample opportunity to use that tool these days. I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss this U.S. science policy and some of the impacts it's going to make.

In spite of the excellent American universities and the expertise of our many government research laboratories, we Americans are now learning that scien-

tific excellence does not assure sU,ccessin the development of new products. Betoday's world of high-technology indus- cause companies can forecast direct retries. We're learning some painful lessons turns on those investments, it is entirely appropriate for industry to bear the costs about the relationship between research of bringing a technology to market. and technology.

So this clear separation of roles is one In the United States today, we're concerned about the continuing ability of part of the U.S. science policy. A second our industries to compete in the interna- part is for the government to take a fresh' tional markets. This concern stems from look at the areas of basic research it the fact that technological innovation is traditionally supports in the. nation's uniour most promising route to creating .versities and government laboratories. new, productive jobs for now and for Some areas seem ripe for rapid advances in knowledge that could feed into new generations to come. technology. Fields like materials science As a government official concerned and engineering, for example, or plant with the nation's science and technology biology can very effectively use whatever enterprise, I am confronted every day additional money we can make available with that need to stimulate innovation.

And increasingly, Americans, observing over the coming years. As we continue to the profound changes taking place in reduce the government's involvement in their society in the 1980s, are aware we expensive development-type activities, can no longer simply assume that, as in we're shifting some of those resources' the past, all American industries will be into support for promising basic research. able to compete successfully in the world A third part of our science policy marketplace .. American industries are comes back to that problem of isolation now being strongly challenged. Neverthe~ of basic research in the United States. We less, they still remain very strong-espedo a poor job-particularly in light of cially in high technology-and certainly what countries like Japan do-of putting haven't lost the ability to compete inter- new knowledge to use. So we're determined to encourage better interaction nationally ....

Our broad goal is to take advantage of between academic and government scien~ our strong scientific researcq" establish- tists and engineers on the one hand and ment and turn it to addressing national their industrial counterparts on the other. needs and opportunities. How? These actions-separation of governFirst, in light of the importance of an ment and industrial responsibilities, independent private sector in the Amer- strengthening the most promising and ican economy, we're sorting out the best basic research and improving the federal and industrial responsibilities in flow of ideas between the laboratory and science and technology. the marketplace-constitute three ways Obviously the government b~ars the the Reagan Administration is using scienresponsibility . for the health of basic ce policy to strengthen the country. science-the long-term building of a We're trying to develop new partknowledge base. These are the kinds of nerships between government and busiscience for which there's .essentially no ness. For too long we've operated our commercial rationale for investment. science establishment as if there were no Areas like particle physics, mathematical obvious connection between the two. topology, astronomy, chemical dynamics. Now we're faced with serious economic With rare exceptions, commercial payoffs problems. We're forced to rethink these from this kind of research are uncertain linkages and to look for better ways to and delayed. Yet that accumulating body apply the knowledge we're so good at of ideas eventually underlies new tech- producing. nology. Moreover, the academic research Let me close by expressing my appreprocess is also the primary means of ciation for the long-standing cooperation training the students who will be tomor- between our countries in science and row's industrial scientists and engineers. technology. My own scientific career has Government takes that responsibility been greatly enriched by my many convery seriously. tacts and friendships with Indian scienConversely, the other end of the re- tists. Scientists throughout the world, in search and development spectrum clearly fact, owe a tremendous debt to the belongs to industry. Development-the contributions and inspirations of our design of technologies with obvious com- Indian colleagues. For good reason I look mercial uses-is tied to the marketplace; forward with great optimism to the sucindustry is in the best position to guide cess of our venture.

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An Interview With John Huston "I always shot every picture as though it was the most important one I ever made," says John Huston. That could be the secret of the phenomenal success of the man who has made almost a movie a year for the lastfour decades, won numerous awards, and directed some of the I gendary stars of Hollywood-Monroe, Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. He talks about them in afascinating interview.

The Quest for Young Krishna His interest in political science brought Francis Hutchins of Kentucky to India as a student. But it is India's art and culture that bring him back"again and again and have resulted in an exquisite book: Young Krishna, his translation of the Krishna saga from Sanskrit.

Science on the Food Front Agricultural miracles dot the success stories of the Indian Agricultural Resea ch Institute in New Delhi and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Interviews with Indian and u.S. scientists and color pictures give a glimpse of their scientific wizardry.

Humorist for All Seasons "I am not responsible for the behavior of the people I draw .... " And the people-and dogs and seals and assorted animals-James Thurber drew or wrote about did the funniest things. Twenty-one years after his death, they are still provoking chuckles all over the world.

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The

Hvdrogen Man Roger Billings has great faith in hydrogen; he uses it to run cars, heat houses and generate electricity. Here, he is seen drinking his car's engine exhaust (above) and standing beside a tank that holds 30 kilograms of his precious fueL (below). At left, a technician at his company tests a car engine that can run on both gasoline and hydrogen.

Missouri n there's a man who likes to drink his car's engine exhaust in front of company. He sips slowly, relishing its flavor as if he were sampling fine wine.

Then he passes it around to his wide-eyed guests. Most of them politely decline the offer, but there's always someone curious enough to taste it. Anybody who does is amazed at the discovery. "It's water!" the person exclaims. "Plain, ordinary water!"

That's usually the reaction Roger Billings gets when he offers his guests a sip of exhaust from his hydrogen-fueled car. It's been that way ever since he converted his first car to hydrogen when he was 16 years old. Since then he's converted just about every kind of engine, from car engines to tractor engines, to run on hydrogen. He's even built, and lived in, a 'hydrogen-powered home.

Billings is a man with a vision. He sees hydrogen as the fuel of the not-too-distant future, and he's been spending his time and energies coming up with a technology that makes it easier to use, whether for fueling the vehicles we drive or heating our homes or generating electricity.

At the age of 33, Billings is a director of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy, an organization that includes some of the top hydrogen researchers in the world, and he's the 'president, chairman of the board and director of two corporations: Billings Computer Corporation and Billings Energy Corporation.

Fresh out of college with nothing more than $400, he formed the Billings Energy Corporation in 1972. At the beginning it had only one employee: himself. Today it employs more than 250 people, including George Romney, a former Governor of Michigan and former head of American Motors Corporation.

In its short life the Billings Energy Corporation has become one of the most respected and most successful hydrogen-technology companies in the United States-so successful that several oil companies have tried to buy it, without any luck. "We want our technology to be bought, but we don't want to be bought," Billings says. "Roger Billings and his little crew of creative people are just not for sale."

Since he built his first hydrogen-powered car, Billings has nurtured a dream of seeing the United States become energy independent. The fuel that will give us that independence, he's convinced, is hydrogen. He has been devoting his expertise, and the profits from his computer corporation, to bringing that about. His is a fervor that impresses his colleagues. "We see hydrogen as a fuel for the distant future. Billings sees it as being used more immediately," says physicist Walter Stewart, a hydrogen fuel expert at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

As a future fuel, hydrogen has a lot to offer. It's the most abundant element in the universe. On earth it is mostly bound up in water, which makes it almost inexhaustible. It's also highly efficient. It produces more energy per pound than fossil fuels do. Best of all, hydrogen can easily be substituted for natural gas, diesel fuef and gasoline.

Up to now the greatest problem has been how to store it. Once it could be put only into a pressurized bottle in its gaseous form, or cooled to - 253°C, at which point it becomes a highly explosive liquid. But in the last 15 years there's been a breakthrough in what are called hydrides,

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metal alloys that absorb hydrogen gas the way a sponge does and release the gas when they're heated. Both the safety and the limitations on the amount of gas that can be squeezed into a container have been improved so that it's now possible to build hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

While just a high-school senior, Billings converted his father's old Model A Ford ("he wouldn't let me touch his new Chevrolet") to run on hydrogen. That feat won him the Gold and Silver Award at the 1966 International Science Fair in Dallas, Texas, and a scholarship. His fascination with hydrogen continued when he studied systems engineering at Brigham Young University in Utah. While there, he continued his work on hydrogen technology with a grant from the Ford Motor Company.

Today much of that has paid off in the work he's done on hydrogen vehicles. One of his pet projects has been to take a compact car, a Dodge Omni, and make it a two-fuel' car that can use either gasoline or hydrogen. In addition to a regular gas tank, it has a hydride tank specially designed by the engineers at the Billings Corporation. The size of a spare tire, it fits snugly under the trunk and has enough fuel capacity to take the car about 160 kilometers.

To make it go farther, Billings installed a simple switch on the car's dashboard. Flick it one way and you're driving on gasoline. Flick it back and you're on hydrogen again.

Billings made the cars dual-fueled for the simple reason that it's tough to buy hydrogen at your neighborhood service station. "If a driver happens to go on vacation, he's got to have some other fuel. So this is a way of being able to get one foot in the door without converting the whole world," he explains. So far he's converted 10 automobiles to his dual-gasoline-hydrogen system.

As a car fuel, hydrogen can't be excelled. It's clean, and the engine also wears better. "The gasoline engine," Billings says, "operates at almost the same efficiency on methane, methanol, or gasoline. But when you convert the engine to run on hydrogen, you get a 40 percent boost in efficiency." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rates the Omni's overall fuel economy at 12 kilometers per liter of gasoline. The hydrogen-powered Omni averages 18.5 kilometers per liter and can hit a top speed of about 130 kilometers an hour.

Billings plans to sell his two-fuel Omnis to anyone willing to pay the steep $30,000 price tag. After the first 10 have been tested out in the marketplace for a year, he hopes to build 100 more, at less than half the original price. In the meantime he's designing conversion sets for those who want to change their engines to run on hydrogen. The kits might be out by the mid-1980s.

Meanwhile the news has got around that what Billings. does, works. "We have a lot of people who write us letters, saying, 'I want to convert my car today. I want to convert my helicopter, my boat. How much will it cost?'"

He's even been contacted by the'Los Alamos Sci.entific Laboratory, asking him to help convert the engine of a --Buick Century so it could run on hydrogen fuel.

Billings has designed a ready source of at-home hydrogen. When the driver wants to refuel, he simply connects his car to a Billings electrolyzer. Overnight the unit splits water coming from the tap and pumps hydrogen into the tan~. By morning he's ready to go. But making hydrogen with house current is expensive-more expensive inmost places than getting gasoline at the pump. That would change if America converted to a hydrogen eCQnomy.

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Today the most exciting break in hydrogen technology might come from solar-energy research. For instance, at the third International Conference on Photochemical Conversion and Storage of Hydrogen Energy, sponsored by the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), scientists announced that it may soon be possible to produce hydrogen from sunlight.

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin, from the University of California at Berkeley, announced that he had developed a synthetic chloroplast, a man-made copy of the part of the plant cell that is responsible for photosynthesis, converting solar energy into stored energy in the form of a sugar, glucose.

In nature, the plant chloroplast uses the energy of sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen then fuses with carbon dioxide from the air to build carbohydrates, and oxygen is set free into the . atmosphere. In Calvin's design, the man-made chloroplast produces molecular hydrogen instead of carbohydrates.

Calvin has a way to go before his process can be used commercially, but solar experts are convinced that he, or someone equally ingenious, is going to come up with a system that will effectively extract hydrogen from water, using sun power. One SERI official adds, "We're almost there. " Meanwhile Billings has grand energy plans of his own.

With the help of an old technology, he hopes to make the United States totally energy independent by the turn of the century. Billings calls his master plan for this selfsufficiency Project Liberty.

It is Billings' answer to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Since there are vast coal reserves in the United States, Billings wants to build coal-gasification plants to change coal into hydrogen. The 40 coal-gasification plants now operating throughout the world make only synthetic natural gas, with hydrogen as a by-product. Not only is it more energy efficient, Billings says, to gasify coal into hydrogen, but it's also cheaper.

By the year 1990 this hydrogen-minded Johnny Appleseed wants to sprinkle the country with t:rrough. coal-gasification plants to offset all foreign oil imports. He figures that it will take 50 hydrogen plants to replace just the gasoline made from imported oil and that another 50 will be needed to eliminate foreign oil imports completely by the year 2000. "We could do it faster than that. And I'm unhappy to say," he adds, "that we could have done it at least 10 years ago."

India has established a Hydrogen Energy Task Force as part of its governmental effort to reduce oil imports.

Japan is planning to produce commercial hydrogen; first it will use nuclear energy in the 1980s, then solar energy in

the 1990s. West Germany already has hydrogen-fueled buses in service in both Stuttgart and West Berlin, and the West Germans are involved with newer hydrogen technology as well. Three years ago the West German Government sponsored an international symposium on hydrogen in air transportation, at which aerospace experts dIscussed developing a small fleet of hydrogen-fueled widebody jets.

Not one to be easily discouraged, Billings is not waiting for the government to get going. In 1980 he moved his corporation from Provo, Utah, to Independence, Missouri, to begin Phase 1 of Project Liberty: a hydrogenpowered community. He is in the process of changing 20 homes and 100 vehicles in Independence to run on hydrogen. Even the mail delivery vehicles, donated with the blessing of the U. S. Postal Service, will be hydrogenfueled. Since there isn't any coal-gasification plant in Independence, his company is going to supply the city with hydrogen by piping it in from firms in the area that produce the gas as a manufacturing by-product.

Billings is modeling the homes after the one he and his family lived in for two-anrl-a-half years before they moved to Missouri. Everything in it, from the hot-water heater and the barbecue to the garden tractor and the family car, ran on hydrogen. A computer system that the Billings Computer Corporation manufactures monitored the hydrogen production and storage as well as the inside controls for heating and cooling and even the security of the place. Besides the 19 homes he is converting in the community, Billings is building a new hydrogen home for himself; this is not something he recommends to the individual homeowner. "Hydrogen is not a fuel you convert a home to," he says. "It's a system you convert a community to."

Project Liberty is a small step in that direction. His next project is a wholly hydrogen-powered town in Iowa.

A few years ago the town leaders of Forest City, Iowa, heard of Billings' work. They wanted some kind of inexpensive energy alternative. They couldn't produce their own electricity because the town's generating plant needed expensive, hard-to-get diesel fuel. Their only alternative was to buy the electricity they needed, at high rates, from another utility system. They told Billings about their situation. He went in and looked the place over and decided to build his first Project Liberty coalgasification plant in their town.

Iowa coal is so cheap that Billings estimates it would be the equivalent of producing gas at 12 cents a liter. The hydrogen-fueled plant is expected to provide all the industrial and domestic electrical needs of Forest City's 4,000 residents and still have power to spar~ to heat every home there and to fuel every car. Billings is confident that his plant is going to be up and operating by 1984.

Further in the future he has grander hydrogen dreams: a mammoth hydrogen/electrical complex, where he will gasify coal and pipe it to facilities 3,000 kilometers away, and another large plant he wants to construct in southern California.

There he envisions a hydrogen-powered Los Angeles: a city that has no energy shortages, no gasoline lines, and, ultimately, no smog.

0 About the Author: Kenneth Jon Rose is a free-lance writer specializing in science.

CJ,ristmas ill Sall eprancisco Christmas and California don't seem to go together in most Americans' minds. Now a good New England Christmas with stuffed geese and carollers, that sounds reasonable. And with the passel of Southern writers that have been around for so long, eating possum and sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas sounds very Christmassy too.

But California brings to mind surfers and hot tubs, not jolly Saint Nick.

Well, San Francisco is a magic city. Christmas just adds to its glow. There's seldom much snow, for the traditional White Christmas, but the spirit of that lovely city by the bay matches the spirit of the season.

For one thing, you can't get a bad meal at a San Francisco restaurant. Simply impossible. Some people credit the free-enterprise system for this fact: They say that the competition is so intense to present irresistible comestibles that any restaurant serving less than the best will be driven out of business, deserted by the gourmet denizens of the city. It won't last long enough to lure gullible tourists. Another explanation ¡for the fine eating is the cosmopolitan mixture of ethnic groups. San Francisco is regarded as the most "Asian" city on the U.S. mainland and the wonders of Chinese and Japanese cuisine have set a lofty standard. Fish and seafood are abundant in the

neighborhood-as are some of the most luxuriant vegetable gardens in America. The city's vistas and the buildings and streets are colorful, beautiful, good for the soul.

It's a city that was built by pioneers-and rebuilt by indomitable families after the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906.

So let's look at the Christmas the San Franciscan sees: the colorfully lighted boats docked in the Embarcadero, the harbor in the bay that feeds into the Pacific (top); on the facing page at top is a store window featuring the traditional Santa Claus as created

by Thomas Nast in the late 1800s (he was a New Yorker through and through, but San Franciscans are tolerant); below that, Santa Claus himself rides his sleigh to Pier 39 on the bay, using horses instead of reindeer; below that, customers pick out their own Christmas trees from a "Choose and Cut" lot in a suburb; to the right, a family sits down to a traditional Christmas dinner with fresh California produce, and above that scene, we see an "enchanted tree" borrowed by a department store from a children's_ science museum-it lights up in response to humming, particularly "Jingle Bells." And on the back cover is a San Francisco home decorated for the Christmas season. This month SPAN has gone coast to coasf-New York to San Francisco-between two thin covers.