I just watched Frantic last night, video on demand and - forgive me - I love Roman Polanski’s movies. I have no answer for the moralist’s question of how you can go on patronizing wonderful artists who also happen to be harmful human beings. The fact that a man can dazzle somebody with his camera doesn’t forgive his trespasses against underage girls, nor chip any time off his sentence. Well, it does, but it shouldn’t. If a murderer had painted The Creation of Adam, we would still be stuck with two absolutes: the murder and The Creation of Adam: and it would be a crime against humanity if we let the murder go unredressed just as it would be if we scraped clean the Sistine ceiling and gave Thomas Kinkade the commission. (One may be a greater crime than the other, but I have to confess, I go back and forth on which it is.) Perhaps the only commentary I’ve heard that rests on completely solid ground belongs to Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty campaigner, who says, “Any human being is more than the worst thing he’s ever done.” And even that doesn’t give much guidance on whether we should give the paint brush back to the unrepentant frescoer/murderer or the movie camera back to the director of Chinatown. Perhaps so many people have been ridiculous about Polanski the persecuted filmmaker versus Polanski the rapist not for his sake but for their own, because they’d like their own path through Right And Wrong to be a little more stone-tablets-written-in-fire and a little less Sophie’s Choice.

Anyway: Frantic is not one of Polanski’s best movies, but just for that reason it’s simply amazing how much of him is in it - how he manages in nearly every film he makes, great and small, to create a story that plays out his own life with its own demons, only barely painted over like a dream. You scratch the surface and there, invariably, is an uglier, deeper, less forgiving, sometimes self-flagellating story on display.

Here for instance  is Polanski’s life in a nutshell, in the years from 1969 to 1988, when Frantic was released. A successful filmmaker wakes up one day to discover that his wife has disappeared. (In fact she has been murdered in grisly fashion by the Manson family.) He doesn’t know how to cope. He flails around for help, but everybody is too busy with their own trivia; the only thing Hollywood people are really interested in, after all, is the next project. He gets involved with younger women, including the famous 13-year-old model he raped … and the young French actress Emmanuelle Seigner. People say he was always like this, that his tears for Sharon Tate are crocodile tears, that he was cheating on her, that their supposed great romance was a sham.  He always contends that - whatever his faults, his infidelities - she was the love of his life.

Now, here is the movie. A successful doctor (Harrison Ford) comes out of the hotel shower, on a combined business trip / second honeymoon in Paris where so far he and his wife have been going back and forth singing Cole Porter’s “I love Paris in the springtime,” to discover that his wife has disappeared. He doesn’t know how to cope. He flails around looking for help - looking for someone who speaks English - but the hotel staff, the French police and the American embassy offer only the most perfunctory help. Each one in turn suggests that perhaps his wife has gone off to meet another man, that she is being unfaithful to him, that we’re not really seeing a crime but only the last legs of a marriage. He growls at them, “You’re talking about my wife,” but the question hangs in the air. The only lead he has is a suitcase - a dead-match for one of his own - that his wife mistakenly took at the airport. He breaks it open to find the dissheveled, random personal possessions of a young French woman he eventually tracks down at the scene of a grisly murder … a woman played by the young French actress Emmanuelle Seigner. Hmmm.

The two of them go around Paris trying to get the mistaken suitcase to the Middle Eastern criminals who are looking for a certain something in it (the details - like Alfred Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffins - are unimportant). Along the way she takes her clothes off in front of him (he closes a door to block the view). They run into colleagues of his, in town for the conference where he’s supposed to speak, who all note the young leather-clad woman at his side and raise their eyebrows. At one point, Ford realizes that all these people are now impediments to getting his wife back, so he plays on their assumptions and starts telling them Seigner is just a little piece he’s having on the side, and that they shouldn’t pay any attention to her. (”Has Paris really changed that much since I was here last?”) They end up at a nightclub, waiting to make the final exchange. Seigner - dressed in a blood-red dress, the same color as the dress in which he last saw his wife - drags him out onto the dance floor for a long, sexy body rub that the camera lingers over until you’re wondering what exactly this has to do with the plot. And at that moment Ford sees the man who has kidnapped his wife is and barrels straight over to him. The final final exchange takes place under a bridge along the Seine, where - visually, the way the shot is set up - Ford exchanges the one young, sexy, woman in a red dress for the older, duller, far less appealing woman in a red dress - there’s a moment where they cross, and you see them as alternatives, the younger one and the older one. And in this telling of the story, it’s the young woman who gets murdered, and the last scene has Ford in a taxi heading back to De Gaulle Airport, pulling the older woman against him and saying, “I love you.”

Which is the point at which my friend Dan Summers would say, “Paging Dr. Freud.” I think all my favorite artists are people who do this, who find ways of packaging and repackaging the traumas and exaltations of their own lives in one plot after another, but are always really having some kind of private conversation with themselves - the kind that typically comes in a moment of bliss too pure to explain, or at five o’clock in the morning, with the dismal gray light of a hangover morning looking in the window. You can just see Harrison Ford and even Emmanuelle Seigner (now Polanski’s second wife) going through the paces of what they thought was a tight Hollywood thriller, while Polanski is leaning over their shoulders, smiling, but saying to himself, this is what it felt like to hear Sharon was gone, this is how I feel about these younger women, and this is how I feel about my wife. Right now my son Alex is reading The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, another man who doled out pain to friends and lovers by the cupful. It’s a great great novel, one of my very favorites, that - along with The Power and The Glory, Monsignor Quixote, Travels With My Aunt, The End of the Affair and half a dozen others - is always telling the troubled unresolved story of Graham Greene.

I am a stepfather - I’ve been doing it for seven or eight years now, depending on your deference to legal definitions. And it’s an odd role to play. Biology tends to seal the case for the (typically biological) parents a child sees around her when she first opens her eyes. They’re right there; they’re somehow hers; they seem to spring from the same place the universe springs. They touch her with their hands when she is first discovering hands. They take her out under the sky when she is first discovering sky. No matter how much history she comes to share with a friend or a lover, it never starts where her own story starts; those opening scenes are a secret she shares with her parents alone. The seams between the way she loves them and the way she loves life are faint when not invisible. And if she’s fortunate, she may keep this sense of grace for the rest of her life. If less fortunate, she will chase after it for years to come (through careers, marriages, children, achievements, acting out) or - what’s really the same thing - she will come to hate the parents who abandoned or disappointed her. She will never be indifferent, though, because being indifferent to the people who brought you into the world is like pretending color doesn’t catch your eye in a field of black and white.

A stepparent, however, is always an interloper - someone who comes into a girl’s or boy’s life for someone else’s reasons, who hangs around the house like a bear that wandered into her snug little cabin late in the season and is too big to get rid of. She may come to love a stepparent, or to hate him, or to forget, the moment she goes off to college, that he was more than a shadow in the corner. It’s an open question. And for the stepparent himself, well, you feel like you’ve walked out to your mark on center stage not even sure there’s any acting there to do. “Am I playing the father?” you call out to the director, down there in the dark. But he’s too busy arguing with the writer. “Am I the good friend?” you call again. “Am I the stand-in?” But then the other actors pick up where the scene left off and the director looks at you, hands on his hips, like he’s just stumbled onto a prime fool, and says, “What are you doing here? Isn’t somebody watching the door?” You wonder if, given the unstable ground, there’s anything you can do that’s appropriate for whatever will come, that will withstand the picking-away of time no matter what role you end up playing. In the fable, the best and brightest advisors of a caliph, who had asked for a phrase that was appropriate for all occasions, told him that the only one they could think of was “This too shall pass away.” But - I’ll confess to you - as a stepparent you kind of hope there is something less wise and more potent you can leave the children you want (very naturally) to see as somehow yours.

I have recently being waking out of a long depression. My writing hadn’t been going well; no one seemed to be interested in what I had to offer. My friends seemed too far away. My past couple of jobs weren’t especially challenging, and - since the last magazine I worked for went out of business, with a whimper, several months ago - unemployment hasn’t proved a refreshing experience either. I didn’t feel bright or resilient; I didn’t feel like myself at all. I wondered where the man had gone that I used to find it so easy to love. Well, as I said, I have been waking up from this, coming to see the foolishness of walking in circles of discouragement that dig me into a deeper and deeper rut. And as I have, I’ve managed to remember - like a glove I used to wear, a tune I used to hum, the bicycle I used to ride - what it feels like to be justified with the world, the cat’s meow, beloved, wonderful, deserving and able to do anything that crosses my path. I remember this so well only because, back when I was a teenager like other teenagers - when I was self-involved, barely adept, sometimes obnoxious (I’m sure), seething at every pore with careless judgment and impatient hormones - my own mom and dad treated me as if I was wonderful. They saw it when I was wonderful and equally when I wasn’t. They told it to me when it must have come out through gritted teeth. My mother was a woman of fiery temperament, who didn’t suffer fools gladly and rarely held back from explaining why, but the farthest she ever went in dressing me down was to say, when she was very hard-pressed, “I always love you, Mitchy, but sometimes I don’t like you very much” (which was rare, and stung). I don’t know if they were aware of it, but they were equipping me for the desert miles I would someday have to cross, placing the bone-knowledge that I was wonderful in my shirt pocket so that it was never more than a hand’s motion away, there to draw it out when I needed it and say, “Ah yes, I remember now: Yes, this is what it feels like. My place, my life: I am wonderful.” It must have cost them some pain to give this to me. They must have doubted at some moments that what they were saying was true. But they persisted, and left me with something that, because so so familiar, does not pass away. I don’t really have the words or the paper to thank them for that.

And it’s something that, simply because I’m here to bear witness, I can aspire to give to my own stepchildren, Jennifer and Alex, who are very, very wonderful as well.

You may know Monticello as one of the most beautiful houses ever built. I’m okay with that. But I learned when I visited Jefferson’s estate back in the 1990s that he looked at it a different way. He had designed the classic, utopia-of-learning campus of the University of Virginia to be a showpiece; his work on the state capitol in Richmond was likewise intended for the public; but Monticello was for himself. If you ever take a tour of the place, you’ll see oddly shaped rooms and misbegotten spaces, experimental designs that don’t quite work. You’ll be enchanted one moment and feel you’ve wandered into a storage closet the next. He had a restless mind; he was always learning and revising; and - since he happened to like architecture - this was the grand-scale equivalent of the cluttered writer’s desk, the mess of an artist’s studio, the blackboard scrawled with equations. I have to admit it’s a bit unsettling. Works of art - especially ones that today would involve cranes, delivery trucks and an army of workmen - are supposed to be finished. They go through the process of creation, and then they’re complete.

One of the greatest gifts of social-media revolution may turn out to be that nothing is ever finished, it is always in progress. A novel is preserved in amber; a blog always has ink on its fingers. The generation that follows ours may not understand the value we place on things that are complete - it may look at art as something that’s alive … until it stops moving, and then it’s irrelevant. It will be a hard style of thought for me personally to adapt to. As a writer I like to see my work in final form, set in a handsome font, printed in a book and stored on my shelf. I don’t want to see Madame Bovary in constant flux (although Gustave Flaubert was such a perfectionist it actually was in flux throughout his life). I don’t want to see the pyramids improved upon (although a glass pyramid did improve the Louvre in the 1980s). I like the feeling that a pinnacle has been reached and may now be admired safe from the ravages of time. It scares me to think that a work I’ve labored over for months is only as good as the next thing I do to it, is only as valuable as the way I adapt it for next week and next year … although I admit it may be good training for life. Past generations quarried the marble of Vermont and Carrara to build monuments that would last forever, because they knew they were going to die and didn’t like the fact at all. Future generations will keep themselves busy recycling their Pietas and Pantheons and perhaps only look up from their brush and chisel to notice they’re about to die. “Just let me finish this one last thing,” they will say … their last - and happy - words.

I use this grandiloquent introduction simply to say, I’m currently learning how to use Flash, the software that powers (whether you know it or not) your favorite, dazzling websites as well as the annoying but beautifully produced ads that get in your way when you try to read The New York Times online. Here is my first Flash movie. It’s quite simple (and self-involved) but it will spread and grow into something finer, grander and more inclusive until I look up one day from my keyboard… Well, anyway, here it is.

Once I spent three never-to-be-refunded months of my life studying formal logic. A wasted enterprise. The book I was reading began with the great syllogisms. “A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C” and so on. It went on to pretzel-like syllogisms of stunning complexity, subtle interpretations of the meaning of English sentences, fascinating conclusions using fuzzy logic. Only by the end did it come home to me that none of it means a thing in the real world unless you’ve accurately defined A, B and C, and doing that is something formal logic can tell you nothing about. I have an example in my own home. I wrote in my last post that I like people. Actually, that’s the result of a syllogism. My wife, Neeta, and our kids say they hate people. I contort my face when they say it as if they’ve shoved a dozen limes in my mouth. I shake my head. I hesitate, say, “Well…” and then look down at my book. My meoldramatic silence, they say, speaks volumes. I don’t hate people, therefore I must love them. (If not A, then the anti-A.)

Actually, despite what I said earlier, I do neither. I don’t actively spend my time loving or hating people, blaming or exonerating them, labelling them smart or stupid. I find it doesn’t pay. For many years I was a professional journalism reformer, the author of a book on the subject (Doing Public Journalism), and busily working with hundreds of other people involved in the common enterprise of trying to make participatory democracy a concrete reality. Are the American people really capable of participatory democracy? Well, I’d definitely argue “yes” in the abstract sense: It’s within the realm of human capability. But are the actual 300 million capable in the sense that there’s even a squirrel’s chance at the Westminster Dog Show that they will do the work necessary to make this a participatory democracy? Strangely, my colleagues and I spent almost no time thinking about this question. We saw that the news media didn’t give people a sense of drama essential to keeping their interest (not horse-race drama, but people-rising-to-citizenship’s-demands drama), so we invented new ways to provide it. We realized people wouldn’t talk about serious issues with strangers unless they had some structure, so we invented the structure. We kept playing to the weak points, looking for ways to shave a few percentage points off the odds against people rising to the ideal of citizenship. But we never added up the score, because in our minds we knew we were going to keep pushing, trying, inventing until we got the democracy we were looking for. Well, no, I can’t say never. Once a couple of my colleagues went to a baseball game, where a fight broke out in the stands, and people threw hot dogs, soda cans and various things made out of styrofoam onto the field. My colleagues looked at each other and said, “These are the people we expect to make decisions on foreign policy?” They bought themselves a stiff drink. The next day, they went back to work.

Similarly, when I hear about something terrible that someone has done, unless they’ve done it to me I rarely think, “Wow, that’s a terrible human being.” Instead I ask myself why they did it, and the question spreads out into a reflection on human nature, an investigation of causes, a sense of dread or awe at the common things (uninterested parents, wounded pride, a knock on the head at age 10) that can send a person spiralling into criminality or cruelty. To me it’s a dead end to say, “Americans are stupid” or “serial killers are cruel”; it’s a life’s work and a mental and spiritual (yes, I said it) exercise to imagine what we can do to help people act in smarter ways and to reflect on the ways in which cruelty begets cruelty. Perhaps there is a level on which to know all is to forgive all, or on which you can accept people for being people, set them as your benchmark, and judge them generously. I don’t know. But there’s something else going on here besides giving people a pass. We really don’t know what they’re capable of until the whole game is played out, and so it’s always more important to play than to keep score - to influence and observe rather than to judge.

The great, beefy, loud and gregarious oral historian Studs Terkel compiled a book in 1992 on Race: How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel About the American Obsession. The most moving set of interviews centered on C.P. Ellis, a one-time Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, North Carolina, who in 1971 was named to a steering committee on school desegregation by local white leaders who felt he was a safe (and obstructionist) vote. But many strands make up a human being, and one of Ellis’ strands involved a sense of civic duty. He had been assigned to work with a local African-American civil rights activist on the committee, and he decided that - though he hated her, at least on principle - he was going to give it a try. The activist, Ann Atwater, blindsided Ellis by inviting him to her civil-rights group and insisting they listen to everything he had to say, and - long story short - they melted Ellis down by respecting him. He tore up his Klan membership card at a public meeting and became an organizer for black and white labor unions in Durham. He realized poor people had more in common than white people do. He told Terkel he was simply glad to be over the hate; it had been a weight on him; and now he was free. When you can’t depend upon a Klansman to remain a Klansman, you know we live in a fluid world.

So the reason I don’t hate people isn’t that I necessarily love them. It’s that it misses the point.

There is a great divide in my household. My wife, Neeta, hates people. I’m not mischaracterizing her, she says so herself - freely and often. She looks around her and sees venal Congresspeople, gay-bashing Republican voters, woozy-headed skeptics about evolution and global warming, drivers who blast through traffic in their SUVs, bigots, serial adulterers, tinpot dictators, unrepentant ex-colonial powers, collaborators who claim to have been heroes of the French Resistance, and so forth, and says, “people are self-centered, greedy liars … and they’re stupid. To hell with them.” I remind her that she’s a person … that I’m a person, our children are people and Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Yo Yo Ma and Martin Luther King, Jr., are or were people, and she pirouettes on Linus Van Pelt’s maxim - “I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand” - to say humanity is a cesspool, but a few people here and there manage to rise above the muck.

I disagree. I like people. I like them intensely. It’s one of the purest, strongest, most dependable pleasures in my life to meet new people and learn about their lives, to imagine myself in their skin, to visit foreign countries, not to see the church steeples but to see the way they rise in the morning, drink their coffee, kiss their wives and catch their fish. When I look at a man or woman, I don’t see a Yes or a No - a Good or a Bad - but an unfolding, shaded, complicated story, and as a storyteller by profession, I love stories. Our kids more or less agree with Neeta; they see my easy benevolence as a form of softheadedness or delusion; so I have tended to keep the details of my heterodoxy unspoken. But I think it’s time to break my silence, because the argument usually goes to the person who speaks. I will try to make my case in this post and the next, and I’ll start by relying on my favorite opening paragraph of any novel, John Steinbeck’s from Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

So just why is it that a person sees the world he sees? Somebody reminded me the other day that kidnap victims and abused spouses tend to take on the beliefs of their captors. When somebody’s whispering in your ear every day that you’re a criminal, that your people are oppressors, that your actions are inadequate, you gradually come to believe it’s the simple truth. What the hooded terrorist and the wife beater are doing to their victims isn’t so very strange. It’s only what all of us do to ourselves by necessity every day. We tell ourselves what we’re seeing. We listen to other people tell us what they’re seeing. Our understanding of the world is like a sandy Cape Cod cliff that’s always in danger of falling away, and so we’re always scooping up the fallen sand and tamping it back in place, rebuilding the seawall, telling ourselves the world is like this and this. Because there’s always contradictory evidence unless we train ourselves to discount or ignore it. And like in a dream, if we’re any good at life, our world becomes less transparent and more solid with each confirmation, solid enough to jump up and down on without any danger of breakage. The bigot always manages to see Willie Horton and Bernie Madoff and to miss or make excuses for Barack Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg; tell him he’s delusional and he’ll say, “Just look at the world.”

In one of my favorite New York novels, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, (spoiler alert!) the main character travels back to 19th-century Manhattan not by jumping into a contraption and spinning a bunch of dials, but by surrounding himself with the physical paraphernalia of the year 1882 and persuading himself that’s where he is. Not even Time is solid. It’s as if all ages lie like transparencies on top of one another, and the only reason we see 2010 rather than 1882 is that we make ourselves aware of all the cues, the messages, the physical objects that tell us it’s 2010. I’m not recommending Finney as a physicist (although if we ever travel through time that’s secretly how I hope we will do it). I’m just saying I didn’t invent the idea that we don’t live in the world directly but only after a long detour through our minds.

We make a mistake, then, when we talk about what the evidence tells us about the world. Before any such evidence there is The Choice: Will I look at the world this way, or that way? Will I open a bigger window for proofs that people are rotten, or that they’re wonderful?  I started thinking about this fifteen years ago, after the verdict in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. I knew people, both white and black (although the white ones were mostly sports fans), who were sure in the aftermath that Simpson had been innocent; I knew many more people who thought he was a murderer. I had watched the trial myself and couldn’t believe there was a rational disagreement: The man was guilty as sin. The evidence had been overwhelming. If there was proof in this world, it had been given, and still more, and then some. But then I admitted to myself that, going into the trial, I had already been half-persuaded - just from the first few news stories and a kind of roughshod logic. From then on, every day, as the evidence was presented, I mentally stood somewhere near the prosecution table, listening to the witnesses for evidence that I was right. A skepticism arose when the defense lawyer began to speak; I granted the prosecutors (even the inept ones) the benefit of the doubt. I asked myself what it would have been like had I mentally started on the other side of the courtroom, standing alongside a man whom I regarded as a beleaguered black defendant. Would I have heard everything a different way - doubted the police more, seen the famous glove as conclusive, taken Mark Fuhrman’s casual racism as evidence of a great conspiracy? Would I have kneaded and clipped and prodded the evidence any more to come to those conclusions than to come to the ones I actually came to? I really don’t think so. I don’t doubt that there’s a truth here, and I believe the truth is that O.J. Simpson murdered his ex-wife, but I’m still amazed that, even with a judgment so simple, direct and concrete as this - so much simpler than the general Goodness or Badness of the world - our temperament begins to shape and reshape things practically from the first word.

Where that temperament comes from, I leave it mostly to psychologists to tell me. But if there is even a small window for choice, then I remember what my one-time public-journalism mentor Jay Rosen used to say, that if you’re forced to choose between thinking too much of people or too little, why not err on the side of too much? Myself, I would much rather like this world than dislike it, appreciate people than be repelled by them. Even if I’m only where I am because my genes have put me here, I’m happy to be on this side of the family divide.

So I will tell you how human beings look to me. I see their great capacity for friendship, love, laughter, song, creativity, seriousness of purpose. I had an alcoholic, at times unreliable mother who still loved me fiercely and left me feeling fiercely loved, so I can’t see people’s ample flaws as being more real than these other qualities. I have sat up too many nights with friends struggling over how to do the right thing; I have seen love grudgingly overtake anger in too many pairs of eyes. I can’t fault human beings for not being as beautiful as gazelles or as loyal as dogs, as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes or as noble as the man or woman we might create in our imaginations; they are what they are. But I take note of the direction in which they point themselves, too. I think every one of Neeta’s examples of human depravity is true, and yet: I look around me and see that society has held together, that we are not islands, that people still write books and take to the streets and volunteer (as I once volunteered with the Peace Corps) to try and make the world a better place. I see people ever-balanced on the knife edge, choosing between being kinder and being crueler, and often choosing to be kinder. I see them regretting the flaws that led them to choose the other way. In fact, I see them being a lot like Graham Greene’s whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, thinking at the end of their muddled lives that it would have been so easy to have done everything better. I am happy when I see these qualities surface and I feel I would be destitute in a world without them, so perhaps I blow gently on the flame and see them as more universal than they are. They represent the human beings we could be and sometimes are … and perhaps those are the people I really like, in the end.

I had wanted to begin my blog with a bang. Instead I’ll begin with a whimper, and let the bangs come as they may. The important thing in any conversation is to start talking; the beauty and sense will either come or they won’t, unexpected, spontaneous and felt.

I am a great admirer of Henry David Thoreau. It’s not one of the things that distinguishes me, but hear me out. I read Walden for the first time when I was 38 years old, sitting in a diner called “Eat at Joe’s” on the stormswept shore of Galveston Island, Texas, in the middle of a three-month-long car trip across the United States that I hoped would wash out the disappointment of my divorce and stalled career. I would arrive on the West Coast - California, where I grew up - a new wineskin ready for a new life. But stories in real life don’t end quite so simply. I had bought a cheap Dover Thrift edition of the book a month earlier at Walden Pond itself, just outside of Concord, Mass., in the woods near the small lake that’s just as you would imagine it to be but nothing like the way it was when Thoreau built his cabin there. I was tempted to buy a sweatshirt as well. It didn’t have my favorite quote from the book (the one about the first message coming across the TransAtlantic cable) but my second-favorite, “Simplify Simplify.” It’s a wonderful rule of thumb that Thoreau himself didn’t really believe in (or else why not just say “Simplify”?). I’m sure that life at its most beautiful, its deepest current, its most mellifluous sound really is extremely simple: an attitude, a calm, an acceptance just slightly off from the way you and I experience it which - much like riding a bike - you need only to learn once in order to have forever. The trouble is learning it even that once. It’s perhaps the hardest thing of all to picture life a different way than the accidents of experience have taught you to see it, to cast off the neglectful parent, the failed romance, the unfulfilled promise as bumps in a road rather than templates for living. And so we spin out all our big, complicated stories in order to find our way to that smallest, simplest one.

Take “Eat at Joe’s,” for example. I didn’t choose it for the food (this looks all the more true in retrospect) but because when I was 12 or so I had wanted to own a restaurant, one that served every possible dish, from whale to Beef Wellington, from South Sea island mahi-mahi to Tibetan yak. This shows in one fell swoop what kind of a person I am and why, 26 years later, I would still be so lacking in business sense. I was a dreamer. I was going to call the restaurant “Eat at Joe’s Around the Corner” - with a simple unassuming door through which you could visit the entire world. By the time I was 24 I had joined the Peace Corps, lived in Africa and actually ate some of the more exotic things that would have shown up on my restaurant’s menu, including termites, grubs (roasted they taste like CornNuts), crocodile, rat, caterpillar (strangely, the most disturbing) and I had even been in the same restaurant one night with a cooked monkey’s head and a bottle of beer but decided that’s where I would draw the line. I never owned a restaurant; I just spread the germ of the idea out into my life; but I’ve always leaned a little in the direction of “Joe’s” and particularly “Eat at Joe’s” as a way of honoring and stealing some of the happiness from my earlier self. I will eat tough chicken and wilted salad and overburned coffee, happily, just for the chance to enjoy the irrelevant associations I’ve sprinkled on top. I’m afraid there is no task in my life that’s simply a matter of picking a place to eat, a book to read, a way to spend the afternoon: It’s all echoes built on shadows built on umbras. Which makes me a maddening person but (I hope) an interesting one, too.

And one who’s unable to simplify at the same time that - like Henry David - he wants to very much.