Scene: it's the Korean War, and the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, doesn't want to lose another kid. His son Teddy considers his options. And promptly gets distracted planning a trip to Europe.
[The naval training exercises of the Navy ROTC program] might interfere with the plans he was crafting for a bigger, better version of the previous summer's escapades with [his friend Joseph] Gargan. His father's employees had hammered out a nine-week itinerary, and applied for the necessary visas, after asking Ted what he wished to see. Kennedy and Gargan would start in Paris and range across the continent—to Normandy and Bordeaux, then Spain and Morocco, and back up through Provence and Burgundy to Amsterdam, Berlin, and Scandinavia before sailing home on the luxury liner Ile de France. His father would buy a car for them and have it waiting in Paris. Did he prefer another convertible? European-made, or an American brand?
Another Europe trip? Another convertible? A luxury liner? Nine weeks? How I smoldered when I read that passage. How nice it must be, to have such an apparent infinitude of wealth to expend towards—well, towards anything. I would like to make a Europe trip, ideally with a friend (the joke is that one of us will have to take up yoga to fit in a suitcase).
Reading
Above is an excerpt from John A. Farrell's Ted Kennedy: A Life. (Four guesses as to who it's about, and if that's too many, I can take away one right answer and one wrong answer, leaving you with two wrong answers.) It's a good biography. Farrell's a good writer, he knows how to put words together. His Nixon biograph is also very good, largely positive in the way of most presidential biographies, but willing to occasionally take pointed aim at its subject (though it should still be read in concert with Anthony Summers's The Arrogance of Power.)
Also, a collection of some of Michel de Montaigne's Essays, in a translation from the 1600s. It's a 'The Philosophy Classic' edition, and as I perhaps ought've expected from such an edition, there's some copyediting errors: commas not present where they ought to be and periods present where they ought not to bed. Because of the age of the translation, I wonder how many errors I'm simply missing.
That aside, it's an interesting collection. He's an intelligent and insightful writer, and the prose rendering—Charles Cotton, a poet, was I believe the transiator of the edition—is really gorgeous.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste and color from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us, not with their heat, but our own, which they are fit to cover and nourish. [...] And, certes, after the same manner that study is a torment to an idle man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard, frugality to the spendthrift, and exercise to a lazy, tender-bred fellow, so it is of all the rest. The things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so. To judge of great and high matters requires a suitable soul; otherwise we attribute the vice to them which is really our own. A straight oar seems crooked in the water; it does not only import that we see the thing, but how and after what manner we see it.
It's an obvious insight, but it's one based on solid and practical philosophical consideration, expressed through beautiful, elegant metaphors. It's archaic language but clear-eyed thinking. No motivational bullshit, no insincere therapy-speak, no corporatized jargon, and none of the eyepopping smugness of somebody who feels they have cracked a great secret and are now simply a beneficiary devoted to its spreading. So even though it's something I've heard before, it resonates as if fresh and new.
Lent by a good friend, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a rather entertaining read so far, filled with a specific kind of gentle sarcasm, unique to the British, that I am—for better or for worse—susceptible to. In keeping with the other Bryson work I've read, it's filled with interesting historical anecdotes and tidbits, stuff that probably isn't necessarily relevant to the actual information but which adds vital color. I enjoy that sort of thing.
I think of it as sort of akin to what Josiah Thompson, in Errol Morris's short film "Who Was The Umbrella Man?" and in reference to a John Updike article from The New Yorker, says:
He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It's as if there's the macro level of historical research where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don't happen and then there's this other level where everything is really weird.
And what Bryson does—name, career, accomplishments aren't enough, we need to know that he had an obsession with grasshoppers (to invent an example)—is sort of the genteel version of that.
Finally there is Marx's Capital, or at least the first volume of it. It's long, dense, and I don't pretend to understand all or even most of it.
New Year, New Leaf?
I tend to think that a New Year's resolution is a bit ridiculous. The new year itself is useful as a symbolic marker, in terms of chunking information, but not, I think, for making resolutions regarding behavior. If one has a behavioral alteration one wishes to make to one's self, better to start then and there. Hold off for some symbolic date, and it won't end up happening.
What might be useful at New Year's, though, is to trade in on its symbolic nature in dividing a given span of time and instead use it as a point of reflection. Indeed, one could instead create a set of New Year's reflections, and use that as a sort of anchor point, from which I could say: more of this, less of that, and keep this the same.
Anyway, I'm going to make an effort to write these Old Leaf blog posts regularly.
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