The Scarlet Letter

Claiming that we are all sinners nowadays might evoke a chuckle from those among us who have rejected the possibility of spiritual salvation.  These same people would have us believe that the times have changed and that they with their non-committal commitment to relativity, hedging, oneupmanship and admissions that we know nothing apart from the obvious fact that we can safely rule out the existence of a higher power, are at last in the majority.  Centuries upon ignorant centuries passed in the obscurity of religious humbug, where whole nations shook at the sight of a cross or minaret, everyone was thoroughly convinced that we were just puppets in some omnipotent overlord's hands, and we were all sinners who deserved the wretchedness life foisted upon us.  The brave few who did not buy this codswallop were burned, hanged, drawn and quartered, drowned, or simply tortured into confessing their blasphemy, and in this way the wicked powers that be held sway in all governments of the world at all times.  Thank God – no, actually, we can't thank Him for this –that science finally rose from beneath the cesspool of filthy propaganda to enlighten us with its truths, its methods, and its evidence that no one is looking out for us except ourselves.  History was then rewritten.  Gone were all the miracles, conversions and happiness that so many believers have attained from their faith; in their stead came mounting reports of malfeasance and hypocrisy, of a Church (just to use one obvious example; the criticism was ecumenically fired at all religious institutions) whose leaders had no faith in God but took every precaution to persuade their mindless minions of the populace's need for such an entity.  History in its newest form tells us everyone was religious, stupid and irresponsible, with the significant exception of the mandataries of these teachings.

Should you find yourself nodding along to these accusations as if your own eyes had witnessed them, you might not want to consider that the world is probably more religiously inculcated now than it ever has been.  While many have denounced faith as a useless crutch, many more – from all creeds, races, nations, and income levels – educated themselves and still selected the path of spirituality.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the world wars of the twentieth century (not, I should add, the atrocities carried out during these wars) had no religious motivation whatsoever.  Their engines of terror were driven by power and greed, with a dose of ideology for sure; but power and the concomitant material gain fueled the destruction of almost sixty million human beings.  That is because no one can believe in money and power and simultaneously desire the greater good of mankind; no one can rise every morning without a drop of spirituality and truly claim that they will do nice things for people they don't know and reconcile that approach with their goal of money and power; no one can hope to overcome the evils that the worship of money and power promotes by asserting that they are very moral people who simply have chosen not to believe in anything.  If you don't believe in anything higher than yourself, then you only believe in yourself.  And soon enough you will become convinced that your idol (that would be you) deserves everything you can give it.  Worst of all, you think yourself justified because you and you alone are the arbiter of all moral dilemmas, which brings us to an old tale of injustice.

Our story begins after the fact, after the birth of Pearl to a certain Hester Prynne, a young woman whose husband is far away, either above or below the distant seas.  We are dutifully reminded that this is Puritan Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century, site of some of the most infamous witch trials in modern times and a place where nonconformity may merit banishment or annihilation.  Hester is by all indications a striking beauty and as voluptuous as a woman could be in those rigid times, a perfect target for the mediocrity of thought and appearance that would ironically distinguish much later regimes.  She walks the crowds and they look at her with disdain, not because she is a queen among weary pilgrims but because she has been branded like a head of cattle with a bright mark: an A.   Her sin is her child out of wedlock, and she is to be noticed henceforth only for that crime and nothing else.  At the beginning of the novel she is taken before a committee of town elders and asked about the identity of Pearl's father, an interrogation to which she has obviously been subjected many times before.  It cannot be her husband – who must be dead, murmur the townfolk, and, lo, she doesn't have the slightest remorse for his extinction – yet it could be anyone, absolutely anyone among them.  And like every previous inquisition, Hester refuses to answer, which infuriates the crowd including as it were, her long-lost husband, who is much older than Hester and now goes by the name of Roger Chillingworth.

Chillingworth, who confronts only Hester with his resurrection, is the second part of the equation.  Our sole remaining task is to find the true father (should he be among the living) and follow these three branches until they wither and snap.  Since the goal of the novel is not suspense but the tracing of moral consequences in three intertwined lives, the candidates are limited, which allows me to include the following with a clear conscience:

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all others, she could readily infer, that, besides the legitimate action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor, fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her – the outcast woman – for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw – or seemed to see – that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of human kind – links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material – had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

That "terrible machinery" is the skulduggery of a single individual who shall remain nameless even if little sleuthing is required, but let us digress for a moment.  Hawthorne's style never again achieved (I spent many a summer night on his other works, to little satisfaction) this twinning of artistic precision and clarity of righteousness.   Passage after passage, you will be stunned at what beauty he finds in a collation of trivia, asides, gestures, and very private thoughts.  You may have leafed through or been forcefed The Scarlet Letter during your high school years and shaken your head at the hypocrisy of all involved (children and adolescents love it when parents lay down the law but then forget to follow their own rules),  and you were probably told some rot about how the book depicts a uniquely American experience.  Unfortunately, uniquely American experiences tend to involve economic freedom, labor mobility and extreme multiculturalism; the tale as Hawthorne spins it is as old as time itself.  Consider then why he should tell it again and what is added to our lore of extramarital affairs, small-minded townsfolk, red-cheeked revenge and the gnaw of guilt that can eat someone's entrails bite by bite.  The retelling not only reflects Hawthorne's particular views on the history of Massachusetts (that is the boring detail that gets many simple-minded teachers very excited), there lurks first and foremost an artistic urge to write the perfect allegory.  What could be more perfect than a sin that taints everyone in close proximity like a virus and then proceeds to watch them flail and kick against the crimes they have committed – and we are not talking about Hester.  Is this not the pinnacle of artistic achievement?  After all, it is Hester who has suffered: society has shunned and mistreated her to such a degree that she can no longer "measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself."  Whatever you think is moral and whatever seems to you to be just, if Hester truly cannot grasp that the moral law is both within and without her, she is no better than a desperado cowboy barging into a saloon and gunning down anyone who looks at him for a second too long, much less scoffs at his choice of drink.  But that's an American tale for another day.

Don't Look Now

Our tendency when informed that a film is a "horror movie" has developed astride that of modern culture.  It used to be that horror meant something otherworldly or eerie (or the German equivalent, unheimlich, which might be loosely etymologized as "not of the home"); this included the usual slew of specters, banshees, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and other disfigurations of life that served as foils to our own existence.  Now we are confronted with nothing more than disturbed humans, victims of an illness or a horrific childhood, who, as stated in a recent film in a somewhat different context,  "just want to see the city burn."  They are neither inherently evil nor have they ever really known the Good; they are instead fruit that was rotten upon birth or shortly thereafter and exculpated from any misdeeds they subsequently commit.  I have always found this later version of wickedness dull for one very good reason: its perpetrators are not free.  Let me correct that: we are not allowed to perceive them as free.  They are as much the victims as the hapless fools on whom they vent their inner demons.  Whatever the legal loophole or medical reason, they cannot be held responsible for their actions because we are apparently all logical animals who would never kill unless absolutely forced to do so to defend ourselves or our loved ones, although animals kill for many self-serving reasons all the time, not just for food or out of despair.  No, these killers are more repulsive than terrifying.  It is when you sense a second layer to life, and when that layer is not amenable to your well-being or some sign is being given that you might not understand, that you should be frightened out of your wits.  And few films are creepier than this horror classic.

In the very famous first scene, we meet an attractive young couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), and their two small children Johnny and Christine.  No harm is done to your enjoyment of the film by revealing that Christine drowns in one of the ponds at their large British estate garishly embalmed in a plastic red mackintosh.  At almost precisely the same moment, John is staring at a picture of a Venetian church he will spend the rest of the film restoring.  On the right-hand side (but the sinister left if one were actually at the altar) is a figure in a red cowl.  The figure's back is to John and to us, but the color of the hood is so red that we, just like John, start imagining a crimson gush across the whole picture.  John senses something is amiss and runs to find Christine lifeless and crimson (in her coat) in the aforementioned pond.  He screams one of those noiseless screams that detonate true anguish and is echoed by Laura's much louder shriek.

They are in a restaurant in Venice when we see them next.  Christine died in the fall and this is winter, but the actual timelag is never established.  The couple has gone through what can only be described as a living hell, although a stiff upper lip, John's endless work, and a lot of pills for Laura have alleviated some of the pain.  They exchange listless niceties about John's church and the food, always a good topic for a stay in Italy, until Laura espies two elderly women staggering towards the bathrooms; they are, like Laura, British, and one of them has something caught in her eye.  And here is where the coincidences, if that's what you want to call them, begin to accumulate.  It turns out that the two women, Wendy and Heather, are sisters.  Wendy can't dislodge whatever got stuck in her eye because Heather, who has some of the deadest, shark-like blue eyes you will ever find, is herself unable to see the physical world.  Heather compensates by seeing what we would wish to look into: the psychic world.  Her visions are both auditory and visual, but she also senses the beyond in many curious ways (including a later séance which seems to have sexual implications).  Of course, we know at once that she will see Christine among her thoughts, a healthy, radiant Christine "sitting between her parents and laughing."  Anxious to latch on to anything, Laura believes Heather because of the detailed description of the red mackintosh, which brings us to the subject of red.

The director of Don't Look Now was once the cinematographer on an adaptation of this classic Poe tale in which red represents, literally and figuratively, the end of everything (there is even a billboard exclaiming "Venice in Peril," although no further detail is provided).  And why the color red?  There is no symbolic meaning other than its unnaturalness, its audacity, its boldness.  When Laura finally feels better, she puts on red leather boots and takes along a red purse.  But John experiences something drastically different: he begins to see a small, cowled red figure darting between the innumerable Venetian alleys.  He is told that there is a killer on the loose, but that red coat reminds him so much of Christine (he even sees her reflection in the water as the figure scampers by) that he cannot decide whether what he sees is a symbol of Good or a harbinger of his own doom.  You will hold your breath whenever red enters your purview – it is rather amazing – and you will feel the mounting turpitude in the empty streets, the scowls, the subdued disdain that John and Laura find on every face.  There are many faces in the crowd, one of whom is the bishop (Massimo Serato) of the Church that John is restoring, and you do not have to see the film twice to notice something incredibly wrong with this man.  I suppose there's a reason the bishop asks Laura whether she is a Christian, and she says she's nice to children and animals because that is what we think of Christians today.  The bishop winces at the thought of foul play, although one gets the impression that he owes his annoyance to not having thought of the misdeed himself.  "I hope that's not another murder," he says casually as a body is fished out of the canals, while every part of his face and body hints at a mild satisfaction with the outcome.

Yet what is most wonderful about this film is the proximity of its angles: simply anything could jump out from any corner at any time.  The buildup, as is the case in any great story of suspense, is painfully slow to the point that you will want what is about to happen more than the characters who are living it (most evident perhaps in the fantastic scaffolding scene, in which we feel as disoriented as the people involved).  The camera lingers on doors, corners, windows, empty spaces, and we fill them with our fears.  The strange scene in which the bishop is talking at, but not to, a beautiful and ashamed woman sitting across his pious desk; the blind woman going up the steps without any help; the twitch in the deputy's face as John leads the blind woman out of the detention center; the quick interlude where the psychic and her sister are seen cackling in their room as Laura tells John that these "two neurotic old ladies" are helping her get over the tragedy; the bust in the room of the psychic and her sister, a small boy in ebony called Angus, who also died very young; a devilish bust underneath a hood atop what appears to be one of the church's gargoyles, which might foreshadow another scene; the passing, as John discusses the matter with an Italian official, of a couple of old women underneath the official's window as he starts making blasphemously evil doodles on the police drawings of these women; the fact that John is reading this German play about the ills of the Catholic church in the original language.  All of these details converge around a statement about John made by one of the characters that he never gets a chance to hear.  What he does hear is that the canals sound different to Heather – they sound "like a city in aspic full of dead people after a dinner party," at which point she mentions the greatest of all poets and his love for Venice.  All the scenes are linked by virtue of their being gathered together, just like the nightmare whose form they assume.  A shame perhaps that such a clever and unusual movie would have such a tepid, almost banal title (you can blame the original work); yet evil, real evil, is always banal.  And at the end of this nightmare there is little more than evil.         

Private Fears in Public Places

The slow but systematic demolition of cultural stereotypes has been heralded as one of the great benefits of the unstoppable force known as globalization, a point which  I will not belabor.  However you may feel about this development (and this will truly depend on your cultural heritage and station in life), we would all do well not to make simple assumptions about other traditions, nations, and peoples, even if we are somewhat obliged to do so to gain some preliminary understanding of how we might have to adjust.   In this respect, admittedly, I am an old-fashioned prig.  I advocate and will continue to advocate immersion into the foreign culture without surfacing for air until the seafloor has been sufficiently investigated.  Perhaps it is obvious that spending a week in a hotel in Florence with scant knowledge of the language and no interest in anything save this museum does not qualify you as an expert in all things Italian.  But many scholars of languages and cultures consider themselves well-versed in their field after a frivolous summer sipping malted beverages, reading some overexposed popular novel, and cavorting with the local party people.  For many, this will be the only time they will have to enjoy world travel, a privilege that we tend to take for granted, and experience the grandeur of cultural Meccas that have enthralled visitors for centuries.  We cannot blame them for being socially labile, and, in point of fact, we won't.

Nevertheless, over time, devoted students of a discipline will come to certain provisional theories about their passion; the really good ones will continue to subject that passion to repeated scrutiny.  Take, for example, French film.  If you had to come up with one short sentence to stereotype the very rich tradition of cinema in France, what would come to mind?  Jaded philosophers sitting for hours in cafés, arguing about the abstract but doing nothing particularly active?  Frisky love affairs and romantic walks by the Seine?  You might find a lot of this, I suppose; but the true indicator of French cinema is something terribly French: attention to the details of character (commercially-driven directors think the "details of character" entail a lunchbox of petty neuroses, as if neurosis has ever made anyone more interesting).  Details of character are revealed by what people do, but really more by what they say.  The French, they will tell you themselves, enjoy arguing and build rapport through arguing; they have few problems communicating how they feel; and they do not shy away from grandiose approaches to everyday issues.  For that reason, if you watch this recent film set in the 13th arrondissement of the City of Lights, you may wonder why the six characters – five of whom are French-born, the other being Italian – behave so curiously.

Without peeking at the credits we might also consider other oddities.  The characters are paired off according to romantic interest or familial obligation and, for the sake of narrative, permitted to overlap to make each member of the sextet significant.  We have Dan, the discharged soldier (Lambert Wilson); his Italian-born girlfriend Nicole (the ever-stunning Laura Morante); Thierry (André Dussollier, who recently appeared in another French film that has nothing French about it), the real estate agent who shows the unhappy couple a few apartments they probably couldn't afford; Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré), Thierry's much younger sister and flatmate; Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), a religious fanatic who happens to work with Thierry; and Lionel (Pierre Arditi), the bartender who lends Dan a half-cocked ear, a much better proposition than coming home to his ill and belligerent father.  This may all sound like a lovely soap opera setup – yet there are a few kinks.  Charlotte may indeed have found God, but she has not lost much of the sex appeal that allowed her to pursue other professions prior to her conversion.  Lionel, on the other hand, is completely oblivious to any women in his immediate vicinity.  In our modern age, the personalities of these once-gagged characters are given full vent, which shows us exactly how far we've come.  The problem is, there is little more to them than that.  Charlotte is enlisted to care for Lionel's father while he works, and comes up with some energetic methods to entertain her patient.  And Lionel, for his part, doesn't do much at all.  He listens to Dan, who has no money, spiraling interest in his bossy girlfriend, and plenty of self-doubt following his dishonorable release from the armed forces.  Is he attracted to Dan?  Clues from the film promote such a reading.  And yet, how can any character be developed if his only trait is his non-vanilla sexuality?

Herein lies our problem.  Private fears in public places (unfortunately rechristened as "Hearts" in French) was originally a British stage production by this famous playwright,  a fact which should surprise us about as much as Dan's insufferable lack of self-awareness.  All six characters are unhappy in some way: antsy, presumptuous, hesitant, almost repressed, their thoughts and emotions reflect nothing of the mix of warmth and arrogance that typically color the figures of French cinema.  That's not to say that France does not or could not contain such people, but rather that they exhibit more typically Anglo-Saxon behavior.  To put it another way: you would be hard-pressed to find a Danish film where everyone is warm, friendly, physically affectionate and devoid of that special brand of wry humor that only seems to exist in Northern Europe.  When I watch a Danish film, I expect a certain restraint, a certain formality of emotion, a certain yearning that cannot quite be expressed.  These expectations are reinforced by experience, yet they also tell you a bit about why you like one country more than another.  I have always loved Northern Europe precisely because when emotion is expressed, it is invariably sincere.  It might be hard to make a Dane ebullient or effusive, but once turned on, you have something very valuable.

That said, the film is exquisitely acted and shot, which, given Resnais's previous masterpieces, we might tend to overlook.  And there is something quaint about trapping the characters in a British play, forcing them onstage in Noah's Ark pairs, and asking them to spout off cultural witticisms that the French language is unaccustomed to holding.  Dan's sour grapes routine propels him to the forefront of the sextet, perhaps because the most important character will necessarily be the one exhibiting the broadest range of flaws.  But we should not forget Thierry, who seems old enough to be Gaëlle's father (as it were, the actors are twenty-five years apart in age), and his marvelous misinterpretation of Charlotte's intentions, nor Dan and Gaëlle's date, nor Nicole's attempt to make something useful out of her boyfriend, an exercise in futility typified by their discussion of Dan's "study" (Dan is a non-reader).  And the tone is set perfectly by Paris and softly falling snow, at once reminders of paradise and slow extinction.  How strange to think that one of the few features of Ayckbourn's play not retained is the most fitting: the name.  Ah, but the French always have to do things their way.

The Norwood Builder

Were you to review modern cinema's development of the thriller, you would come across a singularly ingenious topos called the "framing of an innocent fugitive."  Ingenious in that it often involves a situation in which the opinion of the world is so vehemently opposed to considering the fugitive's innocence that he himself thinks he might have committed some wrongdoing in an altered state.  Once upon a time we had demons; now we have drugs, hallucinations or mental illness, but the lack of responsibility or blackout periods remain (indeed, sleepwalking was one of the least satisfying ways of explaining gaps in memory, and is featured as the solution in more than a few prominent nineteenth-century crime novels).  There are, of course, other methods for handling the subject, including the possibility that a mandarin plot is afoot.  This is the worst fate of all, because the conspirator is near-omnipotent and, if truly diabolical, wise to any moves that you might undertake.  Such is the conundrum facing John Hector MacFarlane, a young solicitor who seeks advice and refuge in this story.

Being green and unobtrusive, MacFarlane cannot overcome his amazement when a well-to-do fellow bachelor, Mr. Jonas Oldacre, approaches him in his office one day and asks him to cast his last will and testament "into proper legal shape."  The fifty-two-year-old builder is a verbal stranger to MacFarlane, although  the cantankerous Oldacre was at one time acquainted with MacFarlane's parents. Papers are examined, hands are shaken, and the young man promises to come by Oldacre's house the following night to examine some scrip and housing deeds.  Yet that is not all: the sole benefactor of the will is none other than MacFarlane himself, a condition justified by the relationless Oldacre's having known his family and wanting to reward a "very deserving young man."  MacFarlane proceeds to the builder's estate, staffed only with a housekeeper, and discusses the terms of the will before suspiciously open French windows and a suspiciously open safe.  The examination of the paperwork takes much longer than expected, forcing the young solicitor to pass the night in a nearby inn.  The next morning, by his own account, he learns that Oldacre's estate was damaged severely in a fire that had begun the night before, and that Oldacre himself perished in the inferno.  All of which makes the young MacFarlane a very wealthy and, unfortunately, very wanted man. 

Surely, one might snicker at this "filthy wealth of coincidence" (to use this author's expression); yet upon reflection of most any important event in one's life a plethora of hitherto unnoticed data may surface.  This is a very modern phenomenon.  Our advances in forensics have enabled us to construct situations in which we can identify the culprit from processing all the evidence on hand, regardless of the personality, motives, or relations of the people involved.  Indeed, it is really with the introduction of Holmes and Watson – two men of science – that we begin to do away with what is specifically called Menschenkenntnis in German, or a "knowledge of human nature" (the fact that we have no exact term for it should be explanation enough).  While I applaud any progress made in the field of identifying or verifying criminal perpetrators, one should not forget that these persons, while desperate, ignorant or evil, are still just like the rest of us, that is, motivated by very personal issues and factors that can be grandly categorized but not fully understood without an understanding of how people tend or tend not to do things.  When Holmes became world-famous at the end of the nineteenth century, he was praised by scientific pundits who saw him as a paladin against the Romantic notions of human behavior.  Here was a man who thrived on proving things by testing every physical detail against every other; whose creator and sidekick were both medical doctors; and who shunned theories that encapsulated superstitions, curses, or other unprovable agencies.  But what many forget is that Conan Doyle himself believed in all these forces, and spent the greater part of his life promoting their importance.  Was this a natural recoiling from Holmes's massive shadow?  Was it owing to his realization that he would forever be known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great Sherlock Holmes?

Perhaps, although unlikely.  Despite Holmes's empiricist methods, he is a wise knower of men.  He understands the little details that might turn an otherwise pleasant human being into a criminal, and re-imagines this evolution at its every stage.  As for poor MacFarlane, a preponderance of proof lies against him:  he was the last visitor to see Oldacre; his fingerprints are on the primary documents as well as all over the house; he had no connection to Oldacre, having just met him, and was relatively impecunious and living with his parents; and, of course, he stood to inherit a heaping pile of banknotes as a result of this crime.  And while a new piece of physical evidence cements the police's case, Holmes plows on owing to a hunch that has nothing to do with all the daggers he sees before him.  But it does have to do with that most despicable of human fallacies, the unwillingness to forgive, the opposite of all we should strive for.  And for grudges there is rarely any physical evidence.

On Frivolity

Some may surmise that these pages have arisen as a consequence of a society that encourages relativism, as well as its distant, more provincial cousin, frivolity.  While I will not gainsay such allegations, frivolity is a staple of childhood and adolescence, a condition that we only acknowledge more clearly as the years pass and our values – one would hope – gel into a structure that promotes a universally applicable moral law.  A philosopher, especially one of the last hundred years or so, would not hesitate to ask whether frivolity and morality are in any way mutually exclusive; well, they are in most ways; but it would be difficult to argue that the idle pastimes of the young and very restless are necessarily immoral.   An economist of any time period (they really do begin to resemble one another upon close inspection) might calmly explain that with the exception of professional athletes – a very small percentage of our population – people tend to get better at their jobs as they get older.  That is why in places like Denmark so many citizens start university in their mid- to late twenties, having spent five to ten years traveling, partying, and loving.  There are, of course, extenuating circumstances (family illness or invalidism, for example) that would hamper such escapades; but for the most part, this can be accomplished with a bit of imagination, luck, and intestinal fortitude.  Mostly, as it were, to combat the solitude that frivolity inevitably begets.  And a poet of some caliber would write an ode to frivolity, because frivolity and odes, and the writing of frivolous odes, are almost intrinsically linked.  Wine, women, and song was a phrase I heard uttered many a time as a child, and it seemed rather ridiculous that someone could devote his life and work to the momentary lapses of hedonism.  But if the poet himself cannot truly write what he feels in his heart and his loin, he may be relegated to eternal frivolity and then to regret.  This is, we come to understand, a particular form of damnation.

And yet there are advantages.  Frivolity becomes desirable in the wake of a relationship of some importance, ostensibly because we want to rid ourselves of emotional responsibility for one night or a bit longer.  The irony of course is that such interludes only underscore the importance of what we have just left.  From a male perspective, one has less of a tendency to break down in middle age (also known as prime daddy and breadwinner age), acquire a red convertible sports car and a barely legal convertible girlfriend, and race off into the sunset or whenever the car and the girl lose some of their luster.  That this maudlin occurrence keeps, well, occurring allegedly tells us how important it is to exploit the variegation and vicissitudes of youth.  Many very happy people may boast of teenage titillation that has grown into lifelong partnership, and I have always admired such souls.  I have admired them because life would be much simpler and safer that way.  Most of us, however, require practice, perhaps because we are less sure of what we want, or perhaps because we have always envisioned exactly what we want.  So when, in the quiet stability of our middle years, temptation rears its very pretty head, we may stroll down a crooked, frisky path in the bottom of our soul and take solace in the fact that the adventure portion of our program has been completed.  And this is why we are encouraged to indulge our frivolity when we are younger: we have to build a set of memories, people, places, feelings, and thoughts that will serve us later when we look back at our accomplishments and failures, and act as a guide for further action.  The only question is at what point we should start looking back.  We want to know that what we have done, experienced, and lost, has taught us well enough to enrich our futures with expectations, hints, shades, colors – everything that makes us smirk at those young fools who know nothing of life.  We know, and we're right.

Strange is it, then, that we counteract this overwhelming desire to be right – which we only get to be once we're adults – with the encouragement of frivolity in our children.  You will hear it in the well-worn phrase, “a child needs time to goof off and be a kid.”  Few truer things have ever been said.  But why is this true?  Perhaps when we are wee chicks scurrying about the henhouse, sometimes after other chicks, the frailty of our bonds seems temporal and dull.  When I reflect upon all the time wasted in the pursuance of things that neither help me now nor had any edifying or interesting qualities whatsoever (listening to popular music being one of the more egregious sins), I shudder at so much of life fretted away.  I remember time plodding along as a child because my memories – however deep, however yearning for significance – were hopelessly superficial replicas of the memories of others, of what we are taught as children to think and believe.  We all learn that childhood and adolescence are garish tributes to frivolity; that adults might indulge us our observations, even occasionally chuckling at their unintended appropriateness, but that we really know nothing about this world; that we may yearn to be adults and then spend our adult lives reminiscing about the freedom from responsibility that so characterized our younger years; and most of all, we learn that to fit in with everyone else our age, we must embrace this frivolity.  We are then ranked by our peers as to how quickly we have assimilated this mediocre manner of existence where the only thing mocked more than excellence is ineptitude (high schools have much in common with governmental bureaucracies).  Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more infuriating than watching a bunch of teenagers react in perfectly predictable fashion to some lewd provocation.  It is the end of all thoughts, the moment when we become base robots for the most mindless (and often cruelest) goading, all in the name of claiming to understand what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to think.  Which, if so many adults wander through life without a clue about, neither a child nor a teenager will be able to grasp.  We know this now, and children have an eerie premonition about it as well.  They know they are not adults; they know that they really don’t know a lot; and yet they persist because otherwise they might admit defeat and make their actions before the age of twenty-two or twenty-three completely and utterly valueless.  But later it is precisely these early years that we cherish for their innocence, for their discovery, for their simplicity.  And once again we find ourselves staring at a mirror and seeing regret.

But life is about memory not regret.  We may choose to remember or obliterate certain things, yet others envelop us without our consent; things we learn and things we experience from life outside of efforts to improve ourselves intellectually.  In time we are left with two testaments, legacies that require formal terminology, so let us call one intellectual pension and the other, its opposite and ally, mnemonic pension.  Intellectual pension is what we learn over a lifetime, what people truly bound to the accumulation of systematic knowledge are to take with them into the grave and perhaps into a beyond.  Obviously, intellectual pension is optional but highly recommended: we don't really need to read, to learn, to improve ourselves, although history tells us we should do everything possible in that regard.  Mnemonic pension is what we all feel at one point or another, our nostalgia for youth or for what we have experienced regardless of age.  It is the river that we cannot enter twice; it is the storage of moments – sweet and bittersweet – we have when we have come to the realization that we are no longer twenty-one or twenty-two, or even twenty–five, and that a distinct part of life is gone forever.  At what point exactly this understanding sets in, and whether it is necessarily joined by acceptance, varies from soul to soul.   But mnemonic pension is stacked full of frivolity: in fact, most of our memories mean nothing to anyone except us and almost all of them have little valence for the course of human events.  These are flashes of smiles; moments of hurt or joy; for someone like me, words used in particular circumstances that will always be associated with one person or one event; sounds, smells, the softness of fabrics, glimpses at something out of the corner of our eye.  And there will be regrets, because anyone who has decided not to take a risk will have pangs of remorse while gazing upon a purple sunset.  O those frivolous days lost to our calendars of order and assignment!  There might have been something to them after all.