True Ancestor

The Death of Experience

As I struggle to organize and synthesize thoughts for a slew of papers  -- stopping frequently to gaze out the window at winter's first brushstrokes on the backyard canvass, or play a game of online pool to which I'm hopelessly addicted -- I also find myself confronting a terrible fear. Like most of the thoughts I struggle to articulate, it's probably already been organized, synthesized and better articulated by someone else. And I could probably find exactly how, and by whom, by Googling the title of this post. Within moments, I'd have access to dozens of eloquent disquisitions on this very topic. But, for reasons that may become clear below, I'm not going to submit my forming thoughts to Googlization. It would be antithetical to what I'm trying to say here.

The passing of my brother-in-law Jacques has given added urgency to the fear I hope to properly characterize in this little rectangle of virtual contact. Jacques was a person who was held prisoner, not just by the Russians, but by life itself. Life coddles some of us and kicks the ass of the rest. We all know who we are. We live in fear that life will shunt us from the former group to the latter. Perhaps it was Jacques' ironic good fortune to have been transferred to the ass-kicked category before he was really old enough to confront mortality. He spent the rest of his life staring it down. When I think of his life one word flashes in neon in my mind's eye:

EXPERIENCE.

My fear, quite simply, is that we are living in the Age of the Death of Experience. Within the past two decades, every action and interaction has begun to be submitted to the mediation of the experience and perspective of others, at greater speeds and depths, so that now, unmediated, uncontemplated experience -- a shock to the system, a real live threat or opportunity, the sensory thrill of the immediate and unexpected that even the angels cannot know -- is something for which younger generations are becoming thoroughly unequipped. The idea that you lean into the world with your physical being is vanishing. You now deputize technology to lean for you. Search engines, touchscreens and digital hieroglyphics cease to be tools, and become replacements for experience.

I worry about this mostly for those in subsequent generations, because I have already been formed by seeking and sifting experience, and for me, the hegemony of the digital is a graft onto reality, not reality itself. The brain is a tremendously adaptive organ, and I see, especially in my fellow students and in my children, the extent to which authentic experience -- which I guess I would define here as what is undergone -- comes after the screens of categorization, rather than helping shape them.

I am not saying we should all live as Jacques did -- what he experienced as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag was not something that most people could survive physically, let alone psychologically. Nor am I saying we shouldn't attempt to order and interpret our experience, or refuse to benefit from the experience of others or technology's capacity to help us have more beneficial, salutary, thoughtfully orchestrated lives -- in other words, better experience.

What I am saying, or trying to say, is something very important is passing away, and its passing is dangerous. What's passing is instinct, sensory acuity, and sponteneity. Without these three qualities, experience is shallow, packaged, lacking individuality. It becomes more like a package of gum, and less like a meal from scratch.

We still do things. We still have experiences. But more and more, they are set up for us, in rows, by engines of organization. They lack immediacy, because immediacy is dangerous, unpredictable, and often inefficient. And an experience that is orchestrated or anticipated is moved far enough away from the narrow ledge of immediate life that, imperceptibly, we get bored by the here and now, and seek more rather than less ordering of experience to give it more customized depth and flavor. We wind up sucking the life out of life.

We also have abandoned the parental, generational responsibility of letting our children find out how to improvise around life's sinkholes. They are now children of ordered experience, and when immediacy raises its head, they panic, and speed-dial us from their smartphones.

The vast generalities I'm throwing out are, I know, vulnerable to real and legitimate criticism:

• I'm romanticizing experience. "Experience" is a euphemism for being ground down by the mortar and pestle of life, something that still happens to 99 per cent of the world's population, which would just love a little less experience, thank you.
• In writing this, I'm casting stones at the glass house in which I live. Here I am, happily typing on a keyboard, publishing thoughts that don't deserve publication, bloviating about nothing because I can, being abstract because technology makes it so easy. When I could be out "experiencing."
• In fact, by going back to school, haven't I, in some sense, chosen to shield myself from this "experience" that I'm romanticising?
  
• The ability to order and direct experience, and to organize and synthesize information, is one of the hallmarks of progress, civilization -- even evolution. What could be wrong with that?
• Aren't I just being a Luddite? A cranky old man? "In my day, I walked 12 miles to school! Uphill! Both ways!" Am I just longing for what was, sensing my own obselescence?
  
• There's no such thing as the "death of experience." The numerous mediations we place between ourselves and the immediate and physical don't by one iota change the immediate and physical nature of life. It just makes it more possible for us to order and understand it, which can't be a bad thing.

To take these objections one at a time:

• This criticism fails to distinguish between "experience" and "life." While it's true that life is hard and our screens on experience are meant to sift out the unpredictability and increase individual control, the ability to simulate, orchestrate and customize also, inevitably and increasingly, deadens our senses.
• It's true, I live in the glass house. I'm throwing stones at it so I can break holes in it, and let in real air and light.
• Actually, school, so far, has been one of the most rewarding episodes of my life, precisely because it's helping me evaluate and analyze experience, which I've actually had. Although graduate school is clearly designed for younger, suppler minds than mine, it's built on a medieval monastic model of intensified concentration; distilled experience. In that way, we students are like time travelers. It feels as if we're part of an institution desperately trying to stay relevant, and doing so the old-fashioned way, by throwing us into a cloister where together we can intensify each other's experience of learning and growing.
• As a culture, or perhaps a species, we don't know when enough is enough. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we can't stop what we've begun. There comes a point on the curve where we cease ordering our experiences, and the tools we've fashioned to order our experience begin to order us, begin to modify us to conform to its own existing strengths. I suppose the Terminator films, The Matrix, Transformers, Iron Man, the Tron movies, and countless others are popular attempts to come to grips with this notion. 
• I am a cranky old man. But I only walked a block to school, and it was flat.
• Again: we are approaching a point on the experiential curve where we will be understood by our technology more than our technology will help us understand. It has begun to order, rather than deepen, our experience.

What's bugging me might be very basic: with my colleagues at school, with my son at home, I see the world being learned through screens, and I see the neural wiring being not assisted but defined by technology. This represents a huge shift in the nature of human experience. Technology has gone from shielding us from the natural world to shielding us from each other. We live in a fully-body condom of computerized conformity from which, in our corner of the world, there are fewer exits than entrances. Our growing inability to govern ourselves, to see past our own interests, to put an idea instead of a need at the center of our consciousness -- to actually do anything or make anything -- will be our undoing. (I'm reminded of the late comic Greg Giraldo's lament that we don't "make anything in this country anymore, except porn and autistic kids.")

Experience has until now begun with contact. Now it begins with a Google search. What's lost is the ability to improvise one's way through upheaval. We have, in varying degrees, the necessary sensory and mental equipment to improvise through upheaval, but that requires instinct and improvisation. When everything is ordered and rehearsed, packaged and delivered, instinct and improvisation become quaint. Communities of inquiry and spiritual seeking become little more than early music ensembles, sawing their tunes out on the ancient contraptions for which they were composed and on which they sound, to our modern ear, depressingly alien.

We will each soon be the center of the universe, and our individual ethers will be composed only of delectations chosen from our own personal menus of deliberated delight. Our days will consist of indulging in our own preferences, and our relationships will be carried on on keyboards, in chat rooms, over electronic transoms, in virtual time, from separate rooms.

Or not at all.

 

 --T.A.

My desk

is covered with books, papers, index cards. Texts in Hebrew and English lay in loose embrace; a stapler stands guard, squaring off against a calculator. A picture of my family stands on binder-clipped tip-toes. My old meditation bowl/bell sits at quiet attention.

 

I am happy here.

 

--T.A.

Gothic Dawn

Tuesdays are my early days on campus. I have a class that begins at 9:15, but in order to beat the traffic and get some studying done, I leave the house at around 6AM, arrive on campus at around 7, and read or study (or do this) and drink coffee until class starts.

The University of Chicago was the institution that overshadowed my childhood. Many of my friends' parents were professors here. I attended the Lab School from 4th grade through high school. The university's academic rhythms set the tempo and the outlook of my youth: urbane and urbane, yet, somehow, simultaneously isolated and provincial. Condescending of and aghast at other political viewpoints. Fiercely, competitively, ambitiously intellectual but fusty, nerdy and detached from the physical. I was happy to leave this little enclave, and yet here I am again.

Walking onto campus, I'm bombarded with sense memories: the dusty smell of fallen leaves and the cool shadows of the gothic buildings transport me straight back to senior year in high school, when I just looked forward to the next slow dance, the next vacation, the cliff-dwelling solitude of my bedroom in our 4th-floor apartment.

When the Sun comes up and these gothic buildings emerge from the gloom, I feel simultaneously privileged and lost -- just as I did in high school. Blessed to be here, thrilled to be steeped in learning. Hopelessly unworthy, profoundly alone.

Being a PhD student requires a lot of collegiality and a lot of initiative (the word my dad hurled at us whenever he was infuriated at our passivity, which was often). No one will tell you what needs doing -- just be sure you get it done. This is perhaps the main similarity between my experience in the Academy and the "real world."

This morning, as the buildings glower under a gray Chicago sky, I am besieged by friendly ghosts clutching musty books, and by the smell of autumn leaf-dust. Somehow, the leaf-dust memory is a mnemonic for the smell of Herbal Essence shampoo wafting off a girl during a final slow dance to "Reasons" at a high school party.

The Sun rises from behind its scrim of autumn ennui. The fragrance of memories rise with it. The radiator in the classroom hisses. A door closes, and the echo roams down the stone corridor -- another friendly ghost.

And then, suddenly, the past recedes, and the day is bright, and voices pass by underneath, and another day in my long life (please God) as student has begun.

--T.A.

Reflections of an Old Student

Next week, within spitting distance of my 51st birthday, I begin my quest for a PhD in the History of Judaism from the U. Chicago Divinity School. I've decided to use this blog, largely dormant for the past year or more, to write about the experience, because I'm going to need a therapist, but I won't have time for one, so this blog will be it.

In June, I earned my M.A. in Divinity from the D School. A lot of my friends, most of them Jewish, didn't know Divinity was something you studied, much less earned a degree in. I get asked about it a lot: "Divinity? What's that?" The shortest answer is that it's the study of theology. The longer answer is that it's concentrated thought about and study of the (theory of the) divine. It's viewing matters of the spirit from an intellectual and historical perspective.

It's also a kind of fudge, ironically.

The urge to learn has always been with me, as have the need to write and (more recently) the enjoyment of teaching. I hope that combining these interests will yield some kind of quiet satisfaction; that sitting in the reedy silence of Regenstein Library, or in the fusty old classrooms of Swift Hall, will proffer a delightful anonymity, and an intellectual stimulation, that will keep my gray matter from settling into the Barca-Lounger of Senility. At the University, in whose shadow I grew up, I can learn for learning's sake.

Of course, it's rarely that easy. In the business world, competition is on the surface, but in the academy, it's under layers of politesse and intellectual code, creating a cozy viciousness of an almost Kabuki-esque intricacy and intensity. In the business world, you execute. In the academy, you debate and deliberate.  And then there are the more practical considerations: how do I still get my job done? How do I devote enough time and energy to the PhD? How do I get all this done, without cheating my family?

And most important: Why am I doing this?

I thought and I prayed and I analyzed and investigated. I studied, I read, I thought. I talked to people, I meditated, I did an accounting of my "internal books." Then I took the Graduate Record Exams, my first standardized test in almost 30 years; and I applied to two graduate admissions programs, and got admitted to the Divinity School, which so far has surpassed my wildest expectations.

In this space, I'll explore the experience of the older student, not just for myself, but for everyone who's curious about it. I'll explore Jewish philosophy and theology, and life in the academy, and I'll ponder how it affects life at home (without violating the privacy of the One True Wife, or of Gabe, who does not want to be written about).

I think going back to school, if you can afford it, beats the hell out of buying a Porsche or having an affair (not that I've tried either of those, mind you). It's both challenging (like a Porsche) and liberating (like a Porsche), but it costs less.

Also, it's not some shadow existence or some prestigious and presumptuous physical asset. It's a gift. As an older student, I'll care less about what my professors think of me. I'll be more directed, hungrier, more willing to take risks (I hope). And as someone involved in business, I'll be able to watch how a major university and its departments run, how they compete internally and externally, and how they are facing up to the massive changes with which colleges and universities are about to be faced.

And of course, I'll also write about the stuff I'm thinking about: meditation, syncretism, post-Holocaust Jewish theology; Jewish memory and Jewish history; and life as a man who loves his family and is nonetheless doing something terribly self-indulgent.

Read along and comment, if you like. Wish me luck, if you would. And, perhaps, think about what you would do to make a new path open for you.

More soon.

--T.A.

Open Letter to Pat Robertson: For the Love of God -- Shut Up

Dear Pat:

As you have at other times in the past, you took the opportunity to announce that a cataclysm -- this one natural, not man made -- was a manifestation of the will of God. Specifically, you said, and I quote:

"You know ... something happened a long time ago in Haiti. … They got together and swore a pact to the Devil," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club" Wednesday.

"They said, 'We will serve you if you get us free from the French.' True story."

This is not odd or aberrant behavior -- at least, not for you. You attributed Ariel Sharon's stroke to the fact that he ceded Gaza to the Palestinians. You suggested that the September 11 attacks were God's retribution for loose morals. And Hurricane Katrina, according to your finely tuned theology, was due to anger over abortion.

There are only two possible conclusions that can be reached:

• Yours is a God in urgent need of professional help; or
• You have placed yourself and your pronouncements above any genuine sense of the Divine; you have, in effect, become either an idol worshiper -- and you are the idol you worship -- or you are one of the wicked who prosper on the misfortunes of others; one of the ones the prophets warned about before destruction came.

Let us consider the first option first.

If God is angry over the division of His holy land, then that land should be a Matrix-like ward of individuals on life support. Ariel Sharon is hardly alone in crafting compromise with the Palestinians (one, it should be added, that also had the goal of extending Israel's life as a Jewish state). Every soldier who helped evacuate Gaza, every statesman and diplomat who helped negotiate Oslo -- even the hawkish Netanyahu himself should be lined up on gurneys outside the overflowing ICUs of every Israeli hospital.

Why does your God prefer pinpoint strikes in some instances, and wholesale slaughter of innocents in others? Read Voltaire's poem on the massive 1755 earthquake in Lisbon; you might begin to understand that any God that communicates through mass murder is a God that virtually guarantees alienation from witnesses and survivors. Such a God must not want followers and adherents. Voltaire joins me in my plea for your silence:

Will ye reply: "You do but illustrate
The Iron laws that chain the will of God"?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

If your God is the Creator of All, then certainly that God will do as He sees fit with His creation. Perhaps we cannot know the will of such a God -- but how can we faithfully serve one Whose will is incomprehensible? Whose punishments are so, well -- sloppy and fratricidal? Whose vengeance is visited upon the "guilty" either weeks or centuries after the crime, without clarity or precision instruction, with only after-the-fact prophetic pronouncement? 

When earth its horrid jaws half open shows,
My plaint is innocent, my cries are just.

We can only conclude, under the first option proposed above, that the Reason we have been granted, the order of our will, the clarity of our intentions, are greater than those of your Creator. That it is not we who are fallen, but your Creator: He is deranged.

Will you accuse me of heresy? The cries of the crushed innocent answer you. Can they drag their mangled limbs from the wreckage to undo the "pact to the Devil" that you allege? Will such suffering drive more into the arms of your bloodthirsty Destroyer? Have they done so in the past?

Are ye so sure the great eternal cause,
That knows all things, and for itself creates,
Could not have placed us in this dreary clime
Without volcanoes seething ‘neath our feet?
Set you this limit to the power supreme?
Would you forbid it use its clemency?
Are not the means of the great artisan
Unlimited for shaping his designs?
The master I would not offend, yet wish
This gulf of fire and sulphur had outpoured
Its baleful flood amid the desert wastes.

Of course, the first option -- the derangement of God -- is untenable. We must then consider the second option: that you are among the wicked of whom you speak.

When the Prophet Jeremiah foretold the destruction of Israel and Judah, his prophecies contained special wrath for those who had grown prosperous on the misfortunes of others:

For among my people are found wicked men: they watch, as fowlers lie in wait; they set a trap, they catch men. 5:27 As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxed rich. 5:28 They are waxed fat, they shine: yea, they overpass in deeds of wickedness; they plead not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, that they may prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge.

Are you pleading the Haitians' cause, Mr. Robertson? Or are you enriching yourself with retrospective prophecy of the sort that is designed to enhance your donor base?

the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means;

Mr. Robertson, every penny of donated money you keep, after remarks of the kind you made about Haiti, is a penny falsely earned, because it is earned through blasphemy. Even your brethren say so: 

Dr. Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas said, "It is absolute arrogance to try to interpret any of God's actions as a judgment against this person or that person. … Our duty as Christians is to try to help these people pray for these people and to help them."

To retrospectively interpret such heartbreaking suffering as a 200-year-old quid pro quo is to prophesy falsely.

Then Jehovah said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name; I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake I unto them: they prophesy unto you a lying vision, and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their own heart.

How else are we to interpret your comments, other than by the two options above?

Perhaps only with the words of Voltaire:

Would it console the sad inhabitants
Of these aflame and desolated shores
To say to them: "Lay down your lives in peace;
For the world’s good your homes are sacrificed;
Your ruined palaces shall others build,
For other peoples shall your walls arise;
The North grows rich on your unhappy loss;
Your ills are but a link In general law;
To God you are as those low creeping worms
That wait for you in your predestined tombs"?
What speech to hold to victims of such ruth!
Add not, such cruel outrage to their pain.

Wouldn't it be more useful merely to lend a hand? Wouldn't it be more honest, Mr. Robertson, to freely confess that we cannot know why such things happen, and to whom they happen? 

But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!

Voltaire beseeches you, in the name of all who are grateful for life, to beware of mocking God, and to extend to the suffering, not retroactive omniscience, but something far more valuable:

A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
"To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
What thou dost lack in thy immensity—
Evil and ignorance, distress and sin."
He might have added one thing further — hope."

--T.A.

2010: Make a Big Difference in a Small Way

Andrew Sullivan quotes Reinhold Niebuhr:

"There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it...

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; there we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; there we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

What this means -- to me, right now, on the eve of another Gregorian decade -- is that we ascribe too much importance to our own existence and not enough to the consequences of our actions.

And because we ascribe too much importance to ourselves and too little to our actions, we miss the fragmentary,  inherently asymmetrical and unsatisfactory nature of life itself. If we could just make peace with that, we wouldn't take everything else so personally.

I doubt if anyone other than a religious thinker could have come up with a statement like Niebuhr's; on the other hand, none but a religious thinker could create its evil twin, either. Consider this quote from a Youth for Christ rally by Josh McDowell in 1994:

Tolerance is the worst roar of all, including tolerance for homosexuals, feminists, and religions that don't follow Christ.

The intolerance of all believers -- regardless of what they believe in -- is the Inquisition, born over and over again in systems and sects that cannot stand a world not made in their image. As Einstein said:

The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.

It isn't as funny as it used to be.

Religious tolerance requires religions that are tolerant. It requires religious adherents that are tolerant. Individuals that are forgiving. Societies that do not incubate narcissism and fratricide. Religious tolerance requires steady, principled dissent from tenets of intolerance, even as it requires forgiveness for the intolerant.

The only way to evolve -- spiritually or otherwise -- is to first attempt the impossible. The impossible task for the decade ahead is to try to understand how inconsequential and utterly indispensable you are. Ironically, your meaningless acts reverberate endlessly -- so you're indispensable but not inconsequential. That means you have to ratchet it down a notch -- all of it. You must make suffering your business, but without making your suffering into your profession.

Only a religion that insists on its own unimportance can contribute something important to the world. Only a nation that addresses its own flaws can demand the same of others. And that individual who grasps how incomplete and unsatisfactory his or her efforts will always be -- only that individual can persist in a way that will, in time, make a difference.

Happy New Year.

--T.A.

50

Tomorrow I turn 50.

I have very little to say on the subject. I find myself, unexpectedly, stunned and sad.

But I have learned a few things.

Instead of some emotional treatise, I'll offer here 50 things I've learned during this blink of an eye that may be helpful to you. They're in no particular order -- just the order in which they occur to me. Some will be platitudes; that doesn't mean I haven't experienced them to be useful and true. Some will be controversial and may generate more than the usual share of whacko, hate-filled, anonymous comments: oh, well. To commence:

1. Eating peanut butter with a spoon is good for you. It's gotta be. Somehow.
2. Sandals are for people with pretty toes.
3. 99 per cent of all political argument is a waste of time.
4. The other 1 per cent is a draw.
5. Anyone who calls you a name with "-ist" at the end had a very unhappy childhood.
6. Cultivate humility: get married.
7. Cultivate patience: have kids.
8. Cultivate compassion: volunteer more.
9. Cultivate a sense of humor: take advice from your mother.
10. If light is both wave and particle, no point in dusting.
11. Baseless hatred is evil.
12. Hating the Cubs is not baseless.
13. Cultivate understanding: live for at least three months in a place where your native tongue is not the official language.
14. Write an ethical will. Good practice for making yourself understood.
15. Men: wear a tie as seldom as possible.
16. Women: re: pantyhose: see #15.
17. Your religion is healthy for you in direct and inverse proportion to the amount of time you spend trying to force that religion on other people.
18. Not forgiving is toxic. When in doubt -- and even if not -- forgive.
19. And if you can't forgive, make a voodoo doll of the person you can't forgive. Then give it little shoulder massages and micro-manicures. You won't believe the results.
20. You can't go home again, but you can refinance.
21. Your parents had no idea what they were doing. 
22. Neither do you.
23. The difference between parental calamity and parental calm: genetics, and #6 and 7 above.
24. Ballroom dancing looks corny and uptight, but it sure is fun.
25. The last piece of cake contains more calories than the rest of the cake combined.
26. Don't eat after 7PM. If you need calories, switch to alcohol.
27. There is an omnipotent and unforgiving presence that rules your life.
28. Fortunately, your mother-in-law lives in Arizona and doesn't know how to "friend" on Facebook.
29. A teenager is like a dog with a cell phone.
30. It's probably better they're "sexting" than smelling each others' butts.
31. "Don't ask, don't tell" is crappy policy in the White House or any house.
32. Stay in touch with old friends. They're the ones who know what you're like underneath.
33. Your loyalty to your college football team is deeply boring. Nobody cares.
34. If you don't spend as much time listening to your friends as talking, you ain't no friend.
35. It's good to fast all day, at least one day a year; if for no other reason than you realize how much more you eat than you need.
36. Freaking out about big birthdays is a waste of time.
37. Think of what you'd like people to say about you at your funeral.
38. Then pay someone to say it, because #37 is never gonna happen.
39. Figure out how much energy you're wasting in your home.
40. Then look at the rest of your life. Odds are, they're proportional
41. If you want to learn about yourself, and aren't afraid, ask a teenager who knows you well to imitate you.
42. Get help for the following afflictions: gout, self-loathing, kleptomania, sleep apnea, Seasonal Affective Disorder, or being a Yankee fan.
43. Never be afraid to start something new.
44. A good alias helps.
45. Everything is impermanent, except your extra weight and my neighbor's toupee.
46. If you're doing forgiveness right, you've forgiven before the deed.
47. Which means it's too late to forgive me for this list.
48. If you've read this far, all the advice in the world won't save you.
49. Please forgive me.
50. Good job. See how far you've come?

Happy Happy --

T.A.

14

Probably my best times with Gabe occur when we're in the car. There's something about the "parallel play" aspect of it that makes it easier for him to actually enter into a conversation with his father (something that I remember dreading when I was 14). Gabe likes to roll the window down, and if I'm not paying attention, he'll stick his head out like a dog. He'll scroll through an astonishing repertoire of noises, whistles and imitations he can produce, almost like a parrot. He'll listen to the comedy channel on satellite radio. He'll make fun of me. And maybe, just maybe, he'll talk.  On the way to the dreadful White Sox-Oakland game yesterday, he was doing his homework, but on the way home, after dropping off my parents (who met us at the ballpark) we had nothing but time. And we talked.

Gabe was impressed by watching my aged and revered parents navigate the long march up the steps from our seats to the concourse, but he was saddened, too, by how hard it is for them to do these things that for him are very simple. He started asking questions about my family, about my dad's upbringing, about my dad's dad. I mentioned that I'd never met my paternal grandfather -- he died long before I was born -- but I told him what I knew of his qualities, including that he wasn't very emotionally expressive.

Gabe asked what that meant. I said that it meant he didn't really enjoy talking about his feelings, or expressing himself emotionally. Gabe said, "I'm like that, too," and then it struck me: he really is a Gottlieb.

Gabe said he'd never seen a picture of my dad "in his prime," and I said I would get the old photo albums and show him some shots. We have one old brochure from my father's summer camp; in it, there's a picture of my father, at about age 10, holding up a fish he has just caught. The resemblance to Gabe is astonishing (my dad, not the fish.)

One of the good things about being around extended family is that, when young, you're in closer and more regular contact with the stages of life. You see how people change. You see generations come and go. Just when you're getting used to being the center of the universe -- you're a first cousin once removed, or (God willing) an uncle. A huge fuss is made over the baby, and suddenly, you're not so cute and so young.

On the eve of high school, Gabe is a much more centered person than I was at that age (and probably than I am today). He does not get pressured into doing stupid things. He goes out of his way not to be hurtful, but he has a quick wit and a sharp tongue in reserve, and it seems as though his classmates respect him. He's a pretty good athlete, but he doesn't hang his self-esteem on that. He's very perceptive. He's thoughtful. He's funny as hell. And, for a 14-year-old, he's disciplined.

In some respects, I am already letting go of him. He is watching me for clues, but most of his guideposts are well beyond me, on the horizon: he is determined to be more competent, more even-keeled, more accomplished and more wealthy than he considers me to be. He doesn't say so; I just know.

Leaving the ballgame last night, he helped my father up the stairs, until my father insisted he could handle it himself. When we got outside the park, I asked for a wheelchair to take my dad from the gate to our car. About 100 yards short of the car, my dad got out of the wheelchair and walked the rest of the way. Gabe asked why my dad did that, as he was clearly exhausted.

I told Gabe that my dad has lived into his 90s because he is still engaged in the world, and because he is an optimist. He is still interested: in sports, in playing bridge, in the environment, in real estate; he still decries the idiocy of war, which deprived him of his only and dearly beloved sibling more than half a century ago. He wants to do as much as he can, every day, even if it's a little less than he could do the day before.

I also told Gabe that watching my dad has been a great lesson for me: you spend far more than half your life in physical decline -- and that's if you're lucky. If you let that get to you, the decline is (or feels) steeper, and the color leaches out of your life. My father has stayed as mentally and physically engaged in life as his mind and body have allowed. What a great thing for a son and grandson to be able to witness.

Gabe's dreams are changing; he may talk to his sisters and his mom about them; I'm not sure. He doesn't talk to me about them. That makes me a little sad, but I'm pretty sure I understand.

What I am sure of is that he is living proof of how love and evolution are somehow twinned. The love that created him, that surrounds him, that's within him, has made him a better human being than I can ever hope to be.

And that makes me happy.

--T.A.

16

Twenty years ago this weekend, I said goodbye to my first wife. We both cried; we were both relieved. She walked me the block and a half from our apartment to the Amtrak station in Springfield, Massachusetts. ('Here's your hat, what's your hurry?', was the feeling I had as she escorted me out of town.) I had one suitcase of belongings and about $200. Mere months from turning 30, I was broke, depressed, jobless and emasculated.

Twenty years on, I am none of those things. OK, maybe a little emasculated, but that comes with the territory.

The One True Wife and I celebrated 16 years of marriage last weekend. You can't pause long in life to congratulate one another, but a successful second marriage for each of us was worthy of some celebration. We'd (mostly) raised two daughters from the Wife's first marriage; had and (partly) raised a son who is a "joint production"; survived my joining her brothers in their real estate business, and a move from Denver back to Chicago and the sometimes smothering bosom of her family; weathered multiple and sometimes painful job changes on the part of the Wife, and my own perilous journey back to being a student; and through it all managed to remain close and even become closer.

Right now is a challenging and transitional time. The One True Wife has a fairly demanding part-time job; she has recently seen Oldest Daughter graduate college and begin adult life in another town; she has struggled with some health issues that have, thankfully, been merely painful but not life-threatening; we have both been busy and not terribly good at finding ways to surmount the routine and have fun.

But that's life, right?  It's all challenging, it's all transitional. All relationships are confrontations, collaborations against solipsism, alliances in combat, diplomatic relations between different planets. Marriages are the closest and most mystifying of all partnerships: the twinning of strangers, the merging of galaxies. The alchemical conversion of an emotional attachment into a business arrangement, or vice versa.

The Wife and I are rediscovering our individual interests and ambitions, and working to indulge and pursue those, while at the same time taking care of the house, and each other, and remembering to have fun. I remember standing outside the synagogue with my brother, the morning of our wedding, and telling him that I had no idea what I was doing.

I still don't. But I also have no regrets. When the train pulled out of Springfield, my life as an adult, and as a blessed human being, was just beginning.

--T.A.

City of Self-Importance

Henry Paulson ramping up production for the stimulus package: "Warp speed, Scottie!"

Gabe and I paid a weekend visit to Oldest Daughter in DC this weekend. O.D. graduates from college in less than 2 months, and the three of us had some memories to make.

We paid visits to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the International Spy Museum and the Newseum. We ate Chinese, Indian, and the Daughter's own inspired home cooking. We walked til our legs almost fell off, and we saw I Love You, Man, a very funny story about how to get married and make friends at the same time.

Traveling with Gabe, 13, is a little like traveling with a dog. Give him some exercise and plenty to eat, and he's very happy. At the end of the day, a little cuddling disguised as tussling, and he passes right out.

But seeing Oldest Daughter living off-campus with four friends, keeping house and nailing down post-graduation employment, it quickly becomes clear how fast these people grow up and move on. A rabbi friend of mine likes to say at bar and mat mitzvahs that, once they're 13, you only have a literal fistful of years left with them under your roof. At 14 or 15 they start high school, at 16 they get behind the wheel, at 18, with any luck, they leave for college.

Washington is an impressive and somehow ominous city. It radiates self-importance. It bathes in self-reference. In the same way that the street grid radiates out from the Capitol and the White House, the muscle of its bureaucracy and the grandeur of its collective ego seems to peer down at you from Art Deco/New Deal facades, from grand memorials, from hidden cameras.

Washington's denizens have a seriousness and a purposefulness about them that even makes Sunday feel like a workday. I left Gabe asleep in the hotel room this morning and went to a Starbucks down the street; there they all were, studying the New York Times and Washington Post like yeshiva students poring over a page of Gemara. Or else hunched toward their laptops. In a way, it wasn't all that different from the basement lounge of the U of Chicago Divinity School. Only the coffee wasn't as good.

Most of Oldest Daughter's roommates joined us for breakfast. It came up in casual conversation that three of them came from homes where the parents had divorced. I'd forgotten how common it is. They had all already met O.D.'s biological father, and it felt like there was some amiable scrutiny occurring. Maybe not. When you're a step-parent, you just assume that's what's going on. More likely it was Sunday morning, they were a little tired, hung over or both, and they were just happy to be fed.

More sobering was the fact that their job prospects are dim. A couple of them are interning for media or PR companies. These internships would ordinarily lead to a job, but the companies have made clear that that's not going to happen this year. These young women are emerging into the worst job market of my lifetime, let alone theirs.

Middle Daughter has a job waiting for her after graduation. In government consulting -- surely one of the only growth industries out there. When I told my old man what she would be making, he shook his head. "That's more than I made in any one year of my entire working life," he said. She is lucky, but she's made a lot of her own luck. Still, there's so little of the self-important about her. She seems strangely . . . mellow.

Gabe and I flew home this afternoon, leaving our hearts with Oldest Daughter -- and also our camera. Perhaps she'll bring it home with her at Passover.

--T.A.