Coffee with Elizabeth Gilbert

It’s hard to meet the bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert without picturing her collapsed in tears on the floor of a suburban bathroom. That’s the image that opens her 2006 book Eat, Pray, Love, and one that seems to stick in the minds of more than 5m readers, from Oprah fans to book-clubbers to New York subway users, about a fifth of whom seemed to be reading the book on their commutes this spring.

I came across the book when a friend pressed it on me, confessing she didn’t buy it herself, too embarrassed to be one of the crowd. Instead, she got her fiancé to pick up a copy. And then she couldn’t put it down.

It’s not an ideal book for a man to buy his betrothed. Once Gilbert peels herself off the bathroom floor, she decides to leave her husband of six years, briefly takes up with a younger lover, and embarks on a year-long, multiple-continent journey to explore sensual pleasure in Italy, spiritual transcendence in India and ways to balance the two in Indonesia. There she meets the man who will become her second husband.

But Gilbert’s murder of a marriage isn’t what makes urban intellectual types like my friend squirm. Rather, it’s her relationship with religion: it is the voice of God that helps raise Gilbert from the bathroom floor; serious prayer leads her to stop taking antidepressants; and in India, learning how to meditate, she enters a higher realm in which “I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe”. Urban intellectuals expect tracts on spirituality to be delivered in world religion courses or by serious, scholarly tomes. Or even, at a stretch, in yoga classes. Not by the gushy heroine of her own real-life chick-lit.

But when we meet at the Bridge Café in Frenchtown, New Jersey, it is clear that Gilbert (number 67 in Time magazine’s 2008 list of most-influential people this year – just below Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, just above the architect Rem Koolhaas) is no calorie-counting Bridget Jones. First off, she wants to order as many doughnuts as the café can offer. “They’re home-made,” she explains, “and amazing. I just love them.” When the girls behind the counter confess there are only two left, Gilbert suggests we supplement those with raspberry strüdel.

She is tall, slim and blonde, with smooth skin and blue eyes that flicker only briefly with shyness – or, later, irritation as the photographer takes his time – and you begin to see why her book is free of the anxiety about beauty that weighs down many memoirs by women. While Gilbert writes about feeling rejected by her lover in New York, she never worries that it’s because she’s not pretty enough. In the section on Italy, five or six lines address feelings of physical inadequacy, but mostly she feels beautiful and eats her way through the country. In Indonesia, when she’s ready to start dating again, she never wonders whether she’ll have trouble attracting a man.

Male readers do react differently to Gilbert. Even before our meeting, three different men had sent me the same internet magazine article arguing that if Eat, Pray, Love had been written by a man, women would find it self-absorbed and sexist: “It’s tempting to conclude that women have serious double standards when it comes to defining acceptable behaviour,” stated the writer (he also said reading the book was like travelling the world with a girlfriend who won’t stop talking about herself). But if women do find the book self-absorbed, they also seem to find it invigorating.

Gilbert is sanguine about critics: “I’m sympathetic to people who don’t like it. Every year there are books that everyone reads, and finally I cave in and I pick it up at the airport, and I’m like, ‘I don’t get why this is so popular, I don’t understand why everyone loves this.’ Not everyone has to like it.”

She’s a regular at the café, or has been since moving to New Jersey in early 2007. While still in Indonesia on the final leg of her EPL odyssey, Gilbert logged on to the internet, found an advertisement for a converted church near Frenchtown and bought it sight-unseen. The mountains of money she’s made through Eat, Pray, Love obviously permit a certain financial confidence. A movie version – starring Julia Roberts and produced by Brad Pitt – is now in production, and it’s not the first time Hollywood has shown interest in her work: her first-person magazine account of life as a New York City bartender became the 2000 film Coyote Ugly.

It’s easier to succeed at something when you’re “not burdened by being multi-talented”, says Gilbert in modest contradiction of the determination to write that has taken her from a childhood spent in a Christmas-tree farm in Connecticut to becoming the author of three acclaimed books – Pilgrims (1997), a collection of short stories ; Stern Men (2000), a novel; and The Last American Man (2002), the biography of a backwoods survivalist. By the time she divorced her husband, she was a feature writer for GQ magazine and the main breadwinner. And when she realised her marriage wasn’t making her happy, she took measured steps to get out of it.

Why, then, does the book’s account of those measured steps make her seem so flaky? “I’m not going to deny I’m flaky,” she says after some thought. “But I think it’s the condition of the times in some ways – to live in an era when you have so many options. You worry that if you’ve chosen one thing you’ve lost the opportunity to do 10 other things. So I think I’m a very representative, 21st-century, educated woman. And if that’s flaky, that’s what we are.”

Flaky is a good description for the raspberry strüdel, so I swap to a chewy doughnut and ask Gilbert about differences in the way British readers have responded to the book. Eat, Pray, Love was first published in the UK in April 2006, and hasn’t had quite the success there that it enjoys in the US. “[In Britain], that kind of rank, emotional self-examination is not done,” she posits. “That said, I doubt very much that there’s much difference between me and what would be my 38-year-old equivalent in London.”

The day before we met, Gilbert typed the last word of the first draft of her next book, which will almost certainly fall into this revelatory road-trip genre: it’s a meditation on marriage, written while travelling through south-east Asia, and tentatively titled Weddings and Evictions.

Gilbert explains: when she and her new husband, José (EPL’s Felipe) – a handsome, older Brazilian – met in Bali, neither had any intention of marrying, having both come out of acrimonious divorces. “It was the most safe, reassuring feeling in the world to be promised you never had to do that again,” Gilbert says. But a few years later, en route to New Jersey, José was stopped by border control at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and told he’d better get married if he planned on staying in the US. The couple had three choices: they could separate, they could move elsewhere, or they could marry, and “the idea of never, ever being with him here was really hard. He loves America.”

They married but it still took 10 months for him to get permission to return to the US. During that time, travelling in Asia with José, Gilbert began to mull on the book that would follow Eat, Pray, Love. “I dove into my first marriage like a labrador into a swimming pool, and my sister pointed out that it might behove me, this time, to think about the history of this thing.” She approached her task with a scholar’s diligence, reading up on the history of marriage. She would wake up her new husband at three in the morning, she says, and say: “‘Did you know that in the 11th century women had more rights after divorce than they did in western Europe in the 1940s?’ And he’d be like, ‘That’s wonderful, that’s wonderful, but it’s three o’clock in the morning.’”

It’s this sort of cute anecdote, complete with predictable punchline, that grates on many of Gilbert’s detractors. A number of readers of Eat, Pray, Love have told me they hated Gilbert’s style – but finished all 350 pages. Gilbert says she’s noticed the too-cute tic herself: she tries to cull standalone lines at the end of long paragraphs, “The punchline or detraction or retraction or sarcastic self-demolition ... Whatever line is lying at the end is probably not as funny as I thought it was. If it’s funny at all.”

This self-censorship seems more evident in her fiction, however, which tends to treat its bright, eager female characters with scepticism and often reads more like Henry James in the American west than anything remotely chick-lit. She may return to fiction, in fact, having hesitated about publishing Weddings and Evictions. Gilbert says she writes each book as a letter: Eat, Pray, Love was a letter to Darcy Steinke, a friend and the author of the memoir Easter Everywhere, who also went through a divorce, suffered depression, and had, says Gilbert, “a spiritual journey of a different shape”. With the new book, Gilbert found herself writing to another friend, Ann Patchett, the Orange-prize-winning author of Bel Canto (2002), who is on her second marriage.

But, to judge by book sales and author events, many of Gilbert’s readers feel she is writing directly to them, helping them cut through confusion of their own marital mires by plumbing the depths of her own. She tells me about a book signing at which a woman approached and asked whether she should leave her husband. “I just said, ‘I know that you understand why I can’t do that. I know that if you think about that for just 10 seconds, you’re going to understand why that’s not possible.’” The woman came to her senses and began to laugh.

By now we have given up on the doughnuts and the photographer asks if he can take some photos of Gilbert talking, but also looking into the distance now and again. “Like you’ve caught me thinking about God?” she jokes, and obliges.

...........................

The Bridge Café
8 Bridge Street
Frenchtown, New Jersey

2x cafe lattés $7.90
1x black coffee $2.25
2x homemade doughnuts $5.00
1x piece of raspberry strüdel $1.50
Total $16.65

‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is published by Bloomsbury (£7.99)

Rose Jacobs is the deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine

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From Wife of Bath to ex-wife of New York

My local Waterstone’s bookshop is flummoxed about where to shelve Eat, Pray, Love. It could, of course, go in “Biography” – it is, the author tells us, a “spiritual memoir”. But that word “spiritual” could just as well relocate it in “Religion”, along with St Augustine’s Confessions. Its subtitle is “One Woman’s Search For Everything”. There’s no shelf for “Everything” but a whole corner of the store for “Women”. All very puzzling, writes John Sutherland.

To cut a long shelving dilemma short, the big W has dumped Gilbert’s book in “travel writing”. Oh, and in “Bestsellers”, of course. It’s currently breaking 5m copies worldwide.

All of these readers (and more – this is a book that women, particularly, love to pass on) won’t need any summary. Gilbert, a smart New York writer, finds herself trapped in what F Scott Fitzgerald called the “crack-up”.

Marriage broken, post-marital relationship screwed, and, to cap it all, 9/11. Prozac is one option (booze was Scott’s). But not this lady’s. Bags are packed. Like Bunyan’s hero, she departs the City of Destruction in search of her personal Celestial City on the hill. And God. And Love. And a number one spot on the NYT bestseller list wouldn’t go amiss.

Call it Pilgrim’s Progress, 21st-century style, or a voyage of self-discovery . In Italy, Gilbert eats herself into bovine serenity – taking in the high culture of the place as dessert. Then on to India, where she un-pampers herself into high spirituality and a respectable waist size, scrubbing ashram floors and almost attaining the “turiya state” – the elusive fourth level of human consciousness. Then on to Bali and she’s ready for love.

The frame of this book is as old as books themselves. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (five former husbands in her wake) set out for Canterbury with the same aims as our ex-wife of New York.

What gives Eat, Pray, Love its salt and savour (to use Bunyan’s homely phrase) is Gilbert’s shrewd eye, her sharp tongue and her indomitable will, not just to survive but to (Bunyan again) “progress”. And her niceness.

This last point is important because, if one turns it all around, very few Indonesian women on the rebound from a crappy relationship could circumnavigate the globe, first class, to “find” themselves. For most of the world spiritual enlightenment has to begin and end at home. Despite those months on her knees scrubbing the floor, Gilbert is always the privileged tourist. But a very nice one. And, more to the point, a damnably readable one.

Tourism of the Soul (no shelf in the bookshop for that, alas) sells big in the US from time to time. What Eat, Pray, Love inescapably calls to mind is Robert M. Pirsig’s superseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book which attained biblical status in the hippy 1970s. One Biker’s Search for Everything. Vroom vroom.

You’ll still find copies of Pirsig’s soul-manual in New Age bookstores. Pilgrim’s Progress, meanwhile, has been in print for nearly four centuries. I don’t think Eat, Pray, Love will be on the shelves for our great-great-great grandchildren. But, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’s still got lots of juice left in the tank.

John Sutherland is emeritus professor of literature at University College, London and the author of ‘Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction’ (Oxford University Press

Political Humour

The Greeks had their myths, the Elizabethans had their plays. In the postwar period, pop music defined western culture in Britain and America. The communists had political jokes. Of course there was every other kind of imaginative activity under communism – films, rock, punk and classical music, plays and novels ... And of course the communists told the usual gamut of jokes – including ones about sex, stupid people and racial minorities. Yet political jokes were the dominant form.

“Anecdotes were our way of speaking the truth,” Gulag survivor Simon Vilensky told me. “I met people in the camps arrested for just listening to anecdotes.”

“You can tell the whole history of communism in jokes,” said another Gulag prisoner, Lazar Shereshevsky.

“Every day there was a new joke. No one knew where they came from or who invented them, but everyone told them,” explained Ernst Rohl, whose sense of humour earned him half a year in solitary confinement in 1961.

Tickled pink: The history of communism in gags
There are relatively few jokes from the first decade of the Revolution but this is my favourite:
An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. “Oh my God,” she says, “look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse.”

Between 1917 and 1921 nationalised businesses were supervised by a bureaucracy that quadrupled in size to 2.4m employees:
An inspector is at a factory conducting an inspection. He addresses one worker: “What do you do here?”
“Nothing.”
“And what do you do here?” he asks another.
“Nothing.”
He writes in his report: “The second worker may be released for unnecessary duplication.”


In 1921 the New Economic Policy reallowed some private enterprise. Soviet industrial and agricultural output crawled back to the level it had been at before 1917:
A Party worker is trying to explain what Communism will be like: “There will be plenty of everything – food, clothing, all kinds of merchandise. You will be able to travel abroad.”
“Oh,” says an old woman, “just like under the Tsar.”

Following Marx’s description of the evolution of communism, Lenin, Stalin and their successors developed a present-tense narrative in which the Soviet Union was always progressing towards “full communism”.
Daddy, have we achieved full communism or are things going to get a lot worse?

Hungarian and Czechs shared a similar joke:
How do the Russians visit their friends?
In tanks.

In 1966 the average age of the Politburo had been 58, but it was 70 in 1981:
What has 40 teeth and four legs?
A crocodile.
What has four teeth and 40 legs?
The Central Committee of the Communist Party.

The government of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics has announced with great regret that, following a long illness and without regaining consciousness, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the President of the highest Soviet, Comrade Leonid Brezhnev, has resumed his governmental duties

In 1995 Gorbachev told a joke on the BBC. He was appearing on the Clive James Show to promote his autobiography. With the help of an interpreter he remembered a joke:
There is a line queuing to buy vodka in Moscow; it is two or three kilometres long and the men are really blaming Gorbachev.
One of them says, “I will go to the Kremlin and kill Gorbachev,” and he goes. An hour later he comes back. The line has moved on a bit but it is still far from its goal, so they ask him: “Did you kill Gorbachev?”
He says, “No, there is a longer queue over there.”
Jokes were not confined to opponents of the regime. The apparatchiks loved them too. Günter Schabowski, an East German newspaper editor and Politburo member, told me: “At the paper Neues Deutschland we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren’t blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage wherever he could. One day, we thought, all problems would be solved and there wouldn’t be any more jokes because there wouldn’t be anything left to joke about.”

I first fell in love with the communist joke on Bulevard Dimitri Cantemir, one of the epic avenues of monolithic apartment blocks that were built in Bucharest in the 1970s. I was talking to Doina Doru, a beautiful blonde woman in her 50s, who had worked as a proofreader for one of the state newspapers when Ceausescu ruled communist Romania.

A colleague introduced me to Doina. I was in the city making a television programme about Ceausescu’s propaganda. I had spent weeks in the film archive surrounded by piles of rusting 35mm film canisters, looking through footage of the shows the regime staged to celebrate its own importance. I watched hundreds of factory workers, filling the stands around a stadium, holding up coloured cards, which would form a gigantic jigsaw revealing one minute a tractor ploughing a field and the next a picture of the dictator’s wife in a lab coat. On some days, I would traipse round Bucharest meeting former artists and poets who’d eulogised the incompetent Romanian despot in their work, and try to persuade them – usually unsuccessfully – to go on camera. “We used to tell a lot of jokes,” my Romanian friends would say to me; “Doina remembers them all.” And, after all the propaganda reels, the jokes seemed like the perfect antidote.

Doina sat in her tiny flat and tried to evoke what Romania had been like in the 1980s for me, who had been growing up in a detached red-brick house in Hampstead Garden Suburb at the time. She recited a list of the shortages in communist economies in their death throes: no meat, no make-up, no toilet paper, no tampons, no heating. My mind dulled as I heard these familiar historical facts. Then she said: “We used to have this joke back then: What is colder in Romania than the cold water? The hot water.”

That was funny. We laughed a particular laugh – the chuckle at unhappy truth which lies at the source of all gallows humour. Doina’s hot water is still my favourite communist joke – as simple, beautiful and true as a Japanese haiku. “We had so many jokes back then,” she continued; “I think they were tiny masterpieces, some of them.

“There was another joke that was almost true – true to life. Ceausescu is very angry because he is not hearing any jokes about him. So he orders a huge mass meeting, and he announces, ‘From now on you are going to work without pay.’ And nobody says anything. ‘Okay,’ he continues, ‘and from now on you are all going to work for me.’ Nobody says anything. ‘Tomorrow everybody is condemned to death by hanging,’ he adds. Nobody says anything. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘are you crazy? Don’t you people have anything to say? Aren’t you going to protest?’ There’s one tiny guy who says, ‘Mr President, I have a question: do we bring our own rope or is the trade union going to give it to us?’ So that was the situation. He was hanging us and we were asking if we should supply our own rope. The situation was so desperate that this kind of joke was reflecting our reality. They were always like this.

“Why, went another Romanian communist joke, did Ceausescu hold a mass rally on the first of May? To see how many people had survived the winter.”

At this historical distance not all of the jokes were funny, but I found I liked the ones that weren’t as much as the ones that were. What mattered most wasn’t the jokes themselves; it was how the people who told them felt about them. Millions considered the jokes an act of rebellion. Doina insisted that joke-telling was “dangerous – you could go to prison for it”.

Doina’s stories were not as horrifying as I had hoped, but the disappointment did not deter me. “Sociologically speaking,” Doina said, assuming a momentary intellectual air, “these jokes were a state of mind and they represented a reaction of a segment of the population to something. So I think they did change something. They changed something in people. The jokes gave them courage.”

In 1934 the First Congress of Soviet Writers was held in the grand Hall of Columns, an 18th-century palace that the Bolsheviks had given to the trade unions. The hall was decorated for the occasion with enormous portraits of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gogol, Cervantes, Heine, Pushkin and Balzac; every important Soviet writer of the era attended the Congress: Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoschenko, Karl Radek, Isaac Babel included in their number.

Also among the delegates was Mikhail Kol’tsov, one of the leading Bolshevik journalists of the day, a member of Pravda’s editorial board and the founder of several satirical magazines, including, in 1922, Krokodil.

Kol’tsov was a powerful pro-regime satirist, although today we would describe his style as invective. His bullying columns slavishly followed the party line. But now rivals wanted to sideline the Pravda editor, and they targeted his sense of humour. As he walked towards the podium, Kol’tsov was about to defend the value of satire, not because he believed in freedom of the press but because this genre of writing was the source of his political power.

On the stand at the Writers’ Congress of 1934 Kol’tsov repeated the contorted counter-arguments that had been presented in the past decade. Even if one day, when the system was perfect, he conceded, there would be no need for laughter, there was still a place for it now. Even if the satire took the same forms as old-fashioned Tsarist humour, that was no reason to see it as reactionary. Since the working class were, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, the last class before the arrival of a classless society, their laughter was acceptable because, Kol’tsov said ingeniously, “In the history of the class struggle, the working class will have the last laugh.”

Humour offered the early communists the same philosophical conundrums that every other area of culture offered: what belonged to yesterday and what to tomorrow? Many argued that humour could be used to ridicule the old bourgeois habits that persisted ... But, said others, given that the Soviets were creating a perfect world, there would soon be nothing left to laugh at in Russian politics or society ... No, said others with equal gravity: the liberation of the working classes meant that finally the masses could take control of the language of humour that used to be the preserve of the elite ... No, not quite, a third group of straight-faced critics theorised comically, there would still be laughter under communism, but the new society would invent an entirely new sense of humour.

Kol’tsov would shortly leave for Spain, where he would report on the civil war. Other Congress delegates, among them the Soviet writer Panteleimon Romanov, won the day with a new theory of the future of laughter:

“I would like to express the wish that by the end of the third Five-Year Plan the need for satire will have disappeared in the Soviet Union,” said Romanov, “leaving only a great need for humour, for cheerful laughter.” The Soviet state would inculcate in the “New Man” of communism, a new sense of humour.

“In the land of the Soviets,” continued Romanov, “a new type of comedy is being created – a comedy of positive heroes. A comedy that does not mock its heroes but depicts them so cheerfully, emphasises their positive qualities with such love and sympathy that the laughter of the audience is joyful and the members of the audience want to emulate the heroes of the comedy, to tackle life’s problems with equal ease and optimism...”

By the time of the Congress the outpouring of independent political comic writing in Russia of the 1920s had been brought to a close – its magazines closed and its writers silenced. On his return from Spain in 1939, Kol’tsov was arrested by Stalin and executed in 1940.

Significant arrests for joke-telling probably began in 1933, when “anekdot-telling” is first described as an anti-Soviet activity in the proceedings of the Communist Party at the Central Committee Plenum of January 1933. Matvei Shkiriatov, a Stalinist zealot and future member of the Central Committee, gave a speech which presaged the purges of the Great Terror, warning of “those within our ranks who ... go about clandestinely organising operations against the party”. Among the activities of these unwelcome communists he declared: “I would like to speak of one other anti-Party method of operation, namely, the so-called jokes [anekdoty]. What are these jokes? Who among us Bolsheviks does not know how we fought against Tsarism in the old days, how we told jokes in order to undermine the authority of the existing system? ... [Now] this has also been employed as a keen weapon against the Central Committee of the party.”

As the arrests began, the joke-tellers imagined the following scenario:

A clerk hears laughing behind the door of a courtroom. He opens the door. At the other end of the room the judge is sitting on the podium convulsed in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” asks the clerk.

“I’ve just heard the funniest joke of my life,” says the judge.

“Tell it to me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just sentenced someone to five years’ hard labour for doing that.”

This is an edited extract from ‘Hammer & Tickle’, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£14.99). To buy it for the special price of £11.99 plus postage and packaging please call the FT Bookshop on +44 (0)870 429 5884; www.ft.com/bookshop

Intellectuals

At first glance, Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal suggests that its author is not a typical postmodern European intellectual. Judging the slender book by its cover, you nod approvingly at the plain white dust jacket with the single adornment of a tiny stylized torch, suggesting the classical; flipping through it, you note such reassuring names as Socrates, Goethe, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and especially Thomas Mann. Riemen himself, moreover, is the founder of the Nexus Institute in the Netherlands, whose mission, according to its website, is “to act as a leading international centre for intellectual reflection and to inspire the Western cultural and philosophical debate.” CULTURAL PHILOSOPHER EXTOLS CLASSICAL HUMANISTIC VALUES AS KEY TO THE FUTURE, blares the marketing copy from Yale University Press. Man bites dog!

And yet this collection—consisting of a strange and lengthy introduction, a biographical sketch of Thomas Mann, a second essay questioning whether philosophers are suited to be kings, and another exploring the notion of intellectual bravery—disappoints on numerous counts. On the matter of America, it’s true, that second essay is refreshingly un-European, denouncing anti-Americanism in general, as well as the “sizable group of prominent and leftist intellectuals,” from Dario Fo to Norman Mailer, who portrayed the murderous terrorism of September 11 as a legitimate attack against an evil empire. Riemen rightly notes the long history of such intellectual complicity with evil. “How many academics, writers, poets, artists, scientists, simply pushed civilized life aside to line up behind the triumph of the lie, dictatorship, and violence?” he asks. “How many scholars placed their intellectual talents in the service of the justification of terror? We don’t dare to count them all. The list is endless.”

The essay also performs the immensely valuable task of reminding us of the century’s greatest fictional depiction of intellectual evil, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Riemen refers to just one (unforgettable) episode from the novel, which describes a crowd of respectable intellectuals gathering in Munich between the World Wars; they include, Mann writes, a “philosophic palaeozoologist” who uses fossils to verify ancient German sagas, an historian who has written a “much esteemed history of German literature from the point of view of racial origins,” and a poet whose bloody masterpiece approvingly describes a ruthless emperor, one “Christus Imperator Maximus,” who “levied troops prepared to die for the subjection of the globe.” The intellectuals eagerly anticipate “an old-new world of revolutionary reaction, in which the values bound up with the idea of the individual—shall we say truth, freedom, law, reason?—were entirely rejected and shorn of power.” They reject the viability of the democratic Weimar Republic, assuming that such a form of government must eventually surrender to absolute despotism. But this future of “violence, authority, the dictatorship of belief” does not alarm them; on the contrary, they sympathize with it. “It is coming, it is coming,” the narrator imagines their thinking, “and when it is here it will find us on the crest of the moment.” Their philosophy not only predicts but enables the rise of Hitler.

Riemen’s caution against trusting intellectuals is very useful, then—but the rest of the book too often confirms his warning in an unintended fashion. Start with that strange and lengthy introduction, in which Riemen recalls a conversation with Mann’s daughter and an eccentric composer, one Joseph Goodman, shortly after 9/11. The composer is working on a piece called Nobility of Spirit, and he maintains that that idea—whatever exactly it means—is somehow “the great ideal . . . the realization of true freedom,” “the incarnation of human dignity,” and even the way to “get beyond the war on terror.” A few months later the composer destroys the piece in a fit of depression and then dies. Mann’s daughter asks Riemen to “continue his work,” not in music but in words, and not long after dies herself. Because she has mentioned Goethe parenthetically, Riemen starts reading Goethe, and that leads him to Spinoza:

The essence of freedom, [Spinoza] teaches, is nothing more than dignity itself. Only those who know how to comply with the call to be human, only those who won’t allow themselves to be possessed by desire, wealth, power, or fear but instead manage to make their own that which is lastingly and truly good and allow freedom and truth to guide them—only they know the true meaning of freedom. . . . This is what Spinoza taught Goethe about true freedom. And this freedom—as exceptional as it is rare—this life’s ideal, is what the erudite poet called nobility of spirit.
However vaporous the eccentric composer’s attempts to define “nobility of spirit,” Riemen’s own, it seems, aren’t much solider. What exactly is “dignity itself” or “the call to be human” or “that which is lastingly and truly good”? One expects better from the paragraph purporting to define the book’s enigmatic title. The unfortunate consequence is that one finishes Nobility of Spirit without any understanding of what it is about, or of how its essays complete the composer’s project. The injection of the occasional wise present-tense generality (“You cannot plan the most important events in your life—they happen to you”; “Some conversations are unforgettable”) confirms our suspicion: we are reading a critic attempting to be hazily luminous.

There are worse problems with the book than haziness, though. Consider its final essay, in which Riemen seems to include the text of Socrates’ famous defense in Plato’s Apology. And why not? Is there any better exemplar of intellectual bravery than Socrates? But look closer, and you find that while some of the paragraphs are identical to Plato’s, an alarming number are not—are paraphrases at best and Riemen’s interpretations of Plato at worst, though enclosed within quotation marks. Or consider Riemen’s account—presented as historical fact—of the first meeting of Socrates and Plato, complete with dialogue. How many unfortunate readers will come away from Nobility of Spirit convinced that Socrates sent Plato off to fight for Athens, welcomed him on his return, denounced “that damned war,” and then commenced the instruction of his greatest pupil? The episode appears utterly invented; the nearest parallel that I have found is an unreliable anecdote in Aelian’s third-century Varia Historia in which precisely the opposite happens and Socrates persuades Plato not to become a soldier. But it is impossible to determine whether Riemen has concocted this new story himself or is quoting some other fabulist, since the book has no citations—this in tribute to the eccentric composer, who had proclaimed, “I hate footnotes!”

Such a cavalier attitude toward history would be troubling enough in an ordinary collection of essays. On Riemen, who depends heavily on the anecdote, it throws even more doubt. When he writes in his biographical sketch, for instance, that Mann’s wife and daughter decided not to disturb the author with the radio’s news of war in 1939, does he have evidence to back up the claim? When, in the essay about intellectuals, he describes in detail an October 1946 meeting in Paris among Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Manès Sperber—giving us their words, their gestures, even their thoughts—is he again indulging in invention? For that matter, why should we believe in the existence of the conveniently antibibliographic composer?

The only remotely plausible defense for this sort of thing is the postmodern. Perhaps we are wrong to insist so rigidly on the age-old distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Instead of pedantically separating historical fact from creative invention—a separation impossible anyway, since all history is historiography and intrinsically unreliable, on this view—perhaps we should embrace imprecision, which is at least honest in its abandonment of objective truth.

Does such a defense hold water? For answer, there’s no better place to turn than, again, Doctor Faustus, which deals with exactly this tendency of the modern intellectual to exchange humanistic scholarship for irrationality.

Mann’s monumental novel concerns a composer named Adrian Leverkühn who confronts a great artistic problem. In what Leverkühn calls “an age of destroyed conventions and the relaxing of all objective obligations,” how can one possibly create original art? Or, as another character astutely puts it, “Every composer of the better sort carries within himself a canon of the forbidden, the self-forbidding, which by degrees includes all the possibilities of tonality, in other words all traditional music.” The existing forms of the artistic canon are “forbidden” to the composer striving for originality, of course—but eventually that canon becomes impossibly broad. What to do, then, when not only classical precision but also Romantic abandon and even late Romantic dissonance have become old hat?

That astute character, it so happens, is the devil, who strikes a deal with Leverkühn, promising him “the archaic, the primeval, that which long since has not been tried.” He continues: “Not only will you break through the paralysing difficulties of the time—you will break through time itself, by which I mean the cultural epoch and its cult, and dare to be barbaric, twice barbaric indeed, because of coming after the humane.” Leverkühn has already anticipated something along these lines, telling his childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom—the humanist scholar who is also the book’s narrator—that current civilization lacks “many a colourful barbarism which altogether perfectly agreed with culture.” To restore culture, Leverkühn suggests, “we need a system-master . . . with enough genius to unite the old-established, the archaic, with the revolutionary.”

Archaic, barbaric: like so much of Doctor Faustus, these words apply not just to Leverkühn’s music but to his homeland. Not for nothing is the novel subtitled The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend: Leverkühn’s Germanness is emphasized because the musician’s experience throughout is an allegory for Germany’s before the first and second World Wars. When the devil promises Leverkühn that he will “break through time itself . . . and dare to be barbaric,” he is using the same terminology that Zeitblom uses to describe Germany’s imperial ambitions. “A new break-through seemed due,” he recalls bitterly. “We would become a dominating world power.” What resulted, of course, were “crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness. . . . the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards.”

Part of Mann’s ambitious project is to identify the elements of German culture that led it to commit its barbaric crimes, and again he does so symbolically through Leverkühn’s biography. We become acquainted with the composer’s birthplace of Kaisersaschern, a town with a “distinctly mediaeval air” containing “a morbid excitement, a metaphysical epidemic latent since the last years of the Middle Ages.” We hear about the theology that Leverkühn studies, and also “the infiltration of theological thinking by irrational currents of philosophy, in whose realm, indeed, the non-theoretic, the vital, the will or instinct, in short the daemonic, have long since become the chief theme of theory.” We meet a fellow student of Leverkühn’s who deifies the idea of immature youth: “German youth, precisely as youth, represents the spirit of the people itself, the German spirit, which is young and filled with the future. . . . German deeds were always done out of a certain mighty immaturity.” And we read about the “nationalistic-Wagnerian-romantic forces of reaction,” which promulgate what another, more perceptive student calls “a myth of doubtful genuineness and not doubtful arrogance: namely, the national, with its structural romanticism of the warrior type, which is nothing but natural paganism with Christian trimmings.”

These elements and many more paint a horrifying picture of Germany in the early twentieth century, a land whose greatest thinkers, the Munich intellectuals included, worship at a cult of unreasoning violence—“outrageous contempt of reason” indeed. They have thrown rationality overboard, appalling the humanist narrator, who is a son of the Enlightenment. What Zeitblom writes about Leverkühn in another connection applies to German scholarship as well: “The proudest intellectuality stands in the most immediate relation of all to the animal, to naked instinct.”

Is Mann’s contention that deliberately irrational thinking can have dangerous consequences overwrought? Consider what Riemen’s own casual, presumably well-intentioned “violation of the truth” leads him to. Nobility of Spirit concludes with another apparent invention, a scene supposedly hallucinated by the Italian journalist Leone Ginzburg—again an example of intellectual bravery—before his execution by Nazis. The scene is a monologue by a mysterious man who was once a priest but is now a Nazi sympathizer. He says to Ginzburg:

Doesn’t it amaze you that a Catholic priest like myself is now wearing a swastika? Isn’t the Roman Catholic church the best institution to teach absolute obedience and the art of adaptation? . . . There aren’t that many substantive differences between Catholicism and Fascism. The Germans overdo it with their anti-Semitism. Judaism is not something that we have a problem with—I certainly don’t. On the contrary, I’ve always greatly admired your intellectual tradition and your sense of being the Chosen People. I recognize myself in that.
Are we to understand that, since these words are never rebutted, Riemen endorses them? Or that, since the hallucination wears a swastika, his hateful characterizations of Catholicism and Judaism as fascist are not Riemen’s own? Or what? There’s no way to tell through the narratological fog of the historical fiction, or fictional history, or whatever this postmodern genre is supposed to be.

None of this is to say that Riemen is the equivalent of the evil intellectuals he describes in his second essay. But those intellectuals exist today as surely as they did in Mann’s time, as surely opposed to peace, justice, prosperity, and simple rationality—and Riemen, perceptive though he is in his analysis of anti-Americanism, too often swims in their waters and is almost necessarily contaminated by them. For too long, too many European intellectuals have embraced deliberate irrationality. What hope can we hold out for them if their self-styled foe can write a book like this?

Benjamin A. Plotinsky is the managing editor of City Journal.

Beware of Greeks --- Even if They Bear Gifts

Poor old Pythagoras is slipping away from us. He was always a shadowy figure in Western thought -- his followers were secretive and he himself wrote nothing, as far as we know. Even in his own time and place, the Greek cities of southern Italy in the seventh century B.C., Pythagoras was a kind of myth-magnet. Over time a large body of thought about him developed, though it was based on precious little evidence. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, Pythagoras became yet more mysterious.

In 1962, the Swiss scholar Walter Burkert -- using a close reading of earliest written accounts of what Pythagoras was supposed to have said to his followers -- published a monumental debunking of the Pythagorean tradition. Fellow scholars were persuaded that what little they thought they knew about Pythagoras was probably wrong.



Until then, it had been said that there were two sides to Pythagoras -- which is a little ironic, given his presumed association with triangles. He had a religious side as the miracle-working leader of a cult that believed in the transmigration of souls (that "the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird," as Shakespeare's Malvolio puts it in "Twelfth Night"). And Pythagoras had a "scientific" side: He was a pioneering mathematician and philosopher who regarded geometry and numbers as the keys to the universe's harmonious structure.

Only the first side emerged intact from Burkert's scrutiny. The picture of Pythagoras as a mathematician and philosopher was a "mistake," Burkert said, an error resulting largely from the eagerness of self-styled "Pythagoreans" in later centuries to attribute their work to the master himself.

It now seems that Pythagoras did not invent the notion of mathematical proof after all. (Bertrand Russell and Arthur Koestler thought he did, which is why they both proclaimed him the West's most influential thinker.) Nor did he discover the theorem that bears his name -- that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It was known a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia. He may have noted a link between some harmonic intervals in the music of his time and certain simple numerical ratios. But there is no reason to think he was the first to do so.

Still, even if the old Greek magician himself did not have much to do with it, Pythagoreanism played a sometimes important role in Western science before Newton, especially in astronomy, as Kitty Ferguson illustrates in "The Music of Pythagoras," an engaging survey of the ideas that have been thought of as Pythagorean.

For example, Plato's "Timaeus," with its account of a creator fashioning the world out of basic geometrical shapes, reflected the ideas of Plato's friend Archytas of Tarentum, a mathematician who regarded himself as a Pythagorean. "Timaeus" was the basis for most cosmology in the West for the first 12 centuries of the Christian era.


In the early 17th century, the astronomy of Johannes Kepler was suffused with Pythagorean themes, including the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." In ancient times it was much discussed why this sound, allegedly made by the heavenly bodies as they whiz through space, cannot be heard by human ears. Aristotle wryly noted that humans cannot hear it because there is no such sound.

In general, Ms. Ferguson's theme is that Pythagoras himself is responsible for the notion that numbers reveal hidden patterns in nature and that this notion amounts to a fundamental principle in science. It is indeed likely that Pythagoras regarded simple numbers and ratios as the keys to the universe; this much survives the skeptical thrust of recent scholarship about him.

Ms. Ferguson is familiar with the scholarship, but it is not clear that she has grasped its significance. Pythagoras' interest in numbers was primarily mystical, with little scientific content. He was concerned more with numerological symbolism (four was justice, for example, and five was marriage) than with measuring things. And the hope that it is possible to provide a unified account of the universe, using quantitative tools, is fundamentally Greek rather than specifically Pythagorean. The idea is found, in crude forms, in Pythagoras' immediate predecessors, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes.

Ms. Ferguson closes her book with a hurried meditation on the threats to the conception of an orderly universe that are allegedly posed by 20th-century math and science. Were the Pythagoreans -- or, we might as well say, the Greeks -- correct to assume that there are comprehensible patterns in the universe? Or has that turned out to be a false hope? Ms. Ferguson skips briskly through quantum mechanics, chaos theory, set theory and more, wondering whether they show, in their sometimes surprising and always complex claims, that the universe is not rational after all.

But each of these fields has added to our rational understanding of the world and has done so by means of mathematics. The universe may not be as simple as some early Greek mathematicians imagined it to be, but it is proving ever more comprehensible by the day.

Mr. Gottlieb is the author of "The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance."

Whose Antiquities?

To what culture does the concept of “cultural property” belong? Who owns this idea?

It has, like much material property in the last 50 years, often changed hands. And in doing so, it has also changed meanings and grown in importance. It now affects the development of museums, alters the nature of international commerce and even seems to subsume traditional notions of property.

It was brought to modern prominence in 1954 by Unesco as a way of characterizing the special status of monuments, houses of worship and works of art — objects that suffered “grave damage” in “recent armed conflicts.” In its statement Unesco asserted that such “cultural property” was part of the “cultural heritage of all mankind” and deserved special protection.

But the framers of that doctrine with its universalist stance would hardly recognize cultural property in its current guise. The concept is now being narrowly applied to assert possession, not to affirm value. It is used to stake claims on objects in museums, to prevent them from being displayed and to control the international trade of antiquities.

It is critically surveyed in an illuminating new book, “Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage” (Princeton) by James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago and former director of the Harvard University Art Museums. The idea is as troubling as Mr. Cuno suggests. It has been used not just to protect but also to restrict.

In the United States, for example, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required every museum getting public funds to survey its collections; identify Indian remains and funerary, sacred and other objects; and consult with Indian tribes and ”repatriate” the artifacts if requested. Such objects may have been legitimately purchased a century ago from the tribes or have no issue clouding their provenance, but claims of ordinary property give way before claims of cultural property. The grievous sins of the past are now being repaid with a vengeance. And the risks of repatriation and the requirements of tribal consultation have led to promotional, uninformative and self-indulgent themes in exhibitions about American Indians.

The idea of cultural property also led to the Army Corps of Engineers’ bulldozing an archaeological site in Washington State in 1998 that had yielded a 9,200-year-old skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, the oldest ever found in North America. Without any evidence local Indian tribes claimed the skeleton was their cultural property — the bones of an ancestor — and they successfully prevented a complete scientific examination. The bulldozing was apparently a new form of protection, philistinism triumphing in the name of enlightened ideas.

The idea of cultural property has become a political trump card. At a conference in Athens in March, organized in part by a Unesco intergovernmental committee, the concept expanded even further: “Certain categories of cultural property are irrevocably identified by reference to the cultural context in which they were created (unique and exceptional artworks and monuments, ritual objects, national symbols, ancestral remains, dismembered pieces of outstanding works of art). It is their original context that gives them their authenticity and unique value.”

Those artworks, objects, symbols and relics do not just merit protection; they should be “returned” to their “countries of origin,” the only places, supposedly, where they can be fully appreciated. This has nothing to do with whether they were obtained illicitly or inappropriately.

The countries of origin, of course, are modern states, which are increasingly asserting control, a point emphasized by Mr. Cuno. In 1970 another Unesco agreement said it was “incumbent upon every state” to protect its cultural property. Cultural property — almost by definition beyond the control or disposition of individuals — is linked to the powers of the modern state and its political demands.

On the one hand, this idea might seem commonplace. We expect a state to protect its citizens, so why shouldn’t it also protect works of art or monuments? The demand may be ineffective; it hardly prevented the Taliban from smashing non-Islamic objects in the Kabul Museum in Afghanistan or from destroying the great stone Bamiyan Buddhas. But the Taliban’s deliberate demolition of cultural property was indeed an offense against mankind’s heritage, and this concept helped make that violation clear.

The idea of state responsibility also lay behind criticism of the United States’ failure to prevent the looting of Baghdad’s museum during the early months of the Iraq war and may be fairly leveled at any nation’s failure to control the illicit markets in antiquities.

This is the main reason why the idea of cultural property has so many advocates: It seems to establish a bulwark against the plunder of antiquities. The state asserts its control over cultural property and asks that other states intervene in improper trade. Many recent cases of objects’ being returned to their regions of origin — like the Metropolitan Museum’s ceding the Euphronios krater to Italy — are based on assertions of illicit transmission.

But Mr. Cuno points out that the claims go far beyond concern over looting. Italy, for example, affirms as its cultural property “virtually every kind of object produced in or imported to the land we now call Italy over 1,200 years of recorded human history.”

One result of such demands and restrictions, Mr. Cuno says, is not a decrease in the world’s looting and plunder at all; there is simply a shift in the market, with fewer and fewer objects purchased for public museum display.

Meanwhile, as the Athens conference suggests, an imperial notion of “cultural property” is taking shape. It is as if some states were seeking to nationalize all artworks and antiquities, wherever they are situated and whatever their provenance, even those objects that have nothing to do with the modern state staking the claims. Recently the Greek authorities told The Guardian of London, “Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back.”

And while touring the Metropolitan Museum in 2006, Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that even nonlooted objects were “icons of our Egyptian identity,” adding: “They should be in the motherland. They should not be outside Egypt.”

Archaeology, of course, has always had a political element, but here the sweep is enormous. What is fueling this fever is another kind of conviction: that the great Western museums are stocked with items of plunder, and that it is time for restitution.

There are more than enough historical examples of such looting. (That is, for example, how the Rosetta Stone made its way to England.) But that practice is not historically peculiar to the West; such plunder, as many ancient objects show in their carvings and images, has long been commonplace.

What was profound in the West was not the looting but attempts to end it, along with ambitions that went beyond assertions of power and possession. The desires of the greatest collectors and museums have been to preserve and to understand (leading, for example, to the decoding of the Rosetta Stone and the preservation of artifacts that would have otherwise been lost). This gave birth to what Mr. Cuno calls “encyclopedic museums,” those that encompass the world’s cultures while seeking an Enlightenment ideal of universalist understanding.

Seen in this light the very notion of cultural property is narrow and flawed. It is hardly, as Unesco asserted, “one of the basic elements of civilization.” It illuminates neither the particular culture involved nor its relationship to a current political entity. It may be useful as a metaphor, but it has been more commonly used to consolidate cultural bureaucracies and state control.

But if cultural property really did exist, the Enlightenment museum would be an example of it: an institution that evolved, almost uniquely, out of Western civilization. And the cultural property movement could be seen as a persistent attempt to undermine it. And take illicit possession.

Library

'It's always good to be an excuse for a stretch," the donor of the New York Public Library's largest gift in history, Stephen Schwarzman, said Wednesday at the dinner in his honor after the 180 guests gave him a standing ovation.

Later, they serenaded him with "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

The attention acknowledged not just his gift of $100 million, but the timing of his gift.

"At a time of some retrenchment, some stepping back, Steve is not stepping back, he is stepping up," a board member of the library, Joshua Steiner, said.

One of Mr. Schwarzman's motivations is that the library itself is stepping up with transformations to be funded by a $1 billion capital campaign.

Referring to construction at the flagship Research Library on 42nd Street, which will be renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the president of the library, Paul LeClerc, said, "We will turn this historic building into the most extraordinary, comprehensive library that has ever existed in human history."

"Imagine an area three football fields large, 31/2 stories high, hallowed out for use by the public," Mr. Schwarzman said.

And just what is his football-field-sized ambition for the Research Library? To become the most visited cultural institution in New York City — taking the laurel away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he said.

Mr. Schwarzman, who is a co-founder and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, also welcomed his family, including his mother and younger twin brothers. He then said he was like everyone else in the room — a room, by the way, filled with such philanthropic luminaries as Barbara Goldsmith, Lewis Cullman, Marshall Rose, Elizabeth Rohatyn, and Annette de la Renta.

The biographer of Andrew Carnegie, David Nasaw, was summoned to give some grand historic context.

"Somewhere Andrew Carnegie is watching us with a $100 million smile on his face. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than money well given. This is money well given," Mr. Nasaw said, adding that Mr. Schwarzman's gift "shouts out to the city that books and knowledge matter more than ever."

Mr. Schwarzman's mother had her own thoughts about the gift. "Because he's Jewish, he knows about tzedakah, which means when you make it, you are obliged to give back. That is what his grandfather Jacob and father, Joseph, taught him," Arline Schwarzman said from her seat at the dinner, next to Rabbi Arthur Schneier.

Mr. Schwarzman sat for dinner (of asparagus, halibut, and sorbet) in between Caroline Kennedy and the chairman of the library, Catherine Marron, who, with her husband, paid for the event. Mr. Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat next to the Mr. LeClerc at another table, where Edward Cardinal Egan was also seated.

........yes we felt it necessary to comment, but Deborah Ross does it so much better.............

I do know that not everyone gets Sex and the City. Bubbles, for example, does not get Sex and the City. ‘I don’t know what you see in this crap,’ he would say, whenever I watched it on television, and before going off to do something pointedly manly in his bowl, like scratch his bits with undisguised gusto. (Seriously, you try living with Bubbles.) But if you do get Sex and the City — note how I use ‘get’, rather than ‘like’, implying that it only appeals to smart, special people, such as myself — you will so love this movie. I totally loved it. OK, maybe it is, at 145 minutes, just five episodes glued back to back, and maybe bigger isn’t better — there is just more of it — but I laughed, I cried (twice; properly) and, when Carrie turned up for dinner in a corsage the size of a serving platter, I did not wonder why nobody said, ‘Jesus, Carrie, what on earth do you think you are wearing? Take it off, woman. Take it off.’ To wonder would, of course, mean you just don’t get it at all.

It’s been four years since the TV series finished and since we last saw the girls and you know what? I’ve missed them. I’ve missed Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and even Charlotte (Kirstin Davis), the rather dull preppy one who is never given much to do but does have great hair. (‘I’ll give you that, she does have great hair,’ even Bubbles will concede.) I am still trying to work out why I actually care. Do I identify with them? Nope. Do I wish they were my girlfriends? Certainly not. Have I ever confused sex with shoes? Only once, in Clarkes, and it was so embarrassing I swore never, ever again. It’s just this marvellous package, one which is not just fun, but also sells its menfolk deliciously short — it is such a hoot, seeing women objectifying men — embraces real drama along with all the fashion hoo-ha and has, at its heart, four women who are such busy professionals they only have time to meet for breakfast, elevenses, lunch, six trips round Bloomingdales, tea, a detoxifying body wrap, cocktails, Botox, four opening parties, dinner and a nightcap. Sometimes, Miranda and elevenses can be a close-run thing, but then she is an ‘exhausted working mother’, too. Sex and the City is the sort of wonderful wallow that you can take as seriously as you so fancy. This may be its beauty.

The film opens, as those that get it would absolutely expect it to, with a voiceover from Carrie. It goes: ‘Year after year, twenty-something women come to New York City in search of the two “Ls”: labels and love. Twenty years ago, I was one of them, having gotten the knack for labels early...I concentrated on love.’ The quartet have matured. Carrie no longer types in her underwear and has suggested to Mr Big that they tie the knot. Miranda lives in Brooklyn with Steve and their son, Brady, who has the colouring of an orang-utan, which has to be a worry. (‘Even I’m worried,’ says Bubbles.) Samantha, who once made my heart sing by shouting ‘I’m fortyf******five and proud of it!’, is living in California with Smith and wilting with the dreary monogamy of it all. Charlotte and Harry have a little Chinese daughter who also has great hair, although this may not have been the main reason behind her adoption. The premise is: now they’ve all found love, and are no longer searching, what happens next?

OK, last week I said that Indiana Jones did what it said on the reel can and, to a certain extent, so does this. There are the shoes and the frocks and a multitude of those ‘what is she wearing?’ moments and for one brief yet sublime moment even a revival of the tutu that Carrie wore in the opening credits of the TV show. But, along with the laugh-out-loud moments — Samantha and the sushi; prissy Charlotte pooping her pants — there are also moments of real and involving heft, including a wedding sequence that is a full-blooded heart stopper. (Parker, by the way, is terrifically good; amazing.) This is the other beauty of Sex and the City: just as you’re beginning to think enough of this cliché-riddled rubbish already, it’ll do something to grab you by the throat and thrash you about a bit. There is a reunion scene on Brooklyn Bridge that had me blubbing like the lachrymose old fool that I am.

Actually, the Sex and the City movie may even be more than the sum of the TV episodes which, in turn, might be quite something. No, it doesn’t break new ground, but it does know its own ground perfectly. Not that Bubbles will have any of it. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m off to read my Top Gear magazine. I’m an issue behind as it is.’

Religion (God Optional)

With respect to God's existence I am an indifferentist - not a theist, not an atheist, nor even an agnostic. Theists believe God exists; atheists don't; agnostics don't know; indifferentists don't care. For me, God's existence does not matter. I try to live a morally good life - that is, one based on these two principles:

1. Other people are enough like me in order for how I feel to suggest how they feel. This principle of ethical reciprocity is, of course, also known as the golden rule (typically in religious contexts) and the categorical imperative (in non-religious contexts). 2. With respect to non-human organisms, I try to treat them no worse than they treat each other. Thus, I eat meat but I hope the creatures I eat have not been tortured to death.

Why do I try to behave this way? Because I feel better when I do than when I don't, and because other people (and even animals) seem to behave better towards me when I treat them kindly than when I treat them unkindly. Assertions such as "We need religion to underpin morality" strike me as odd, suggesting we already know what "morality" is - yet seek frantically some way of buttressing it. But why not start from the observation that morality works: in other words, that it is good both for society and for the individuals that live therein? From a Darwinian point of view, morality favours survival.

And after we die? It is hard - and repugnant - to imagine a God who needs our belief in Him so much that He will unhesitatingly damn a good person simply for disbelief. I want my computer to work properly, not worship me. I want my child and grandchildren to love me. But if they seem not to, I do not punish them. Rather, I ask myself: Where have I failed them? A decent God would rather learn from atheists, agnostics and indifferentists than condemn them to hell.

Such, then, is indifferentism: unconcern with metaphysical problems (eg, God's existence or the eastern equivalent, karma and reincarnation) with no direct bearing on morality. Its bland name at least makes clear that indifferentists will not kill for their beliefs. That is worth saying, because it has been suggested that when the evidence for a controversial proposition is inconclusive, the result is not indifference, but polarisation. Thus, although there seems to be no conclusive evidence that God exists - or that God does not exist - people have been only too willing to take murderous sides on the matter, whereas to such unproven assumptions indifferentism is, indeed, delightfully indifferent.

Nevertheless, religion remains a source of endless enjoyment and some edification. I relish all manner of liturgies and am as likely to learn from religious teachers as from anyone else. I can be religiously promiscuous because, as an indifferentist, I take all religions figuratively and none literally. By contrast, believers are restricted to their one true faith, for which meagre diet they deny themselves the world’s wealth of tastes.

Imagining the "East"

Once dismissed as imperialist fantasies about the Muslim world, British orientalist paintings are once again becoming popular. Their exotic visions tell us much about the social and cultural history of Victorian Britain


A snake writhes over the desert sands that half submerge the Sphinx. A crafty merchant examines a coin presented by two anxious, veiled customers. Heavily laden camels kneel at an encampment. Bored, gorgeously clad concubines lounge in the secret depths of a harem. The British orientalist paintings of Tate Britain's forthcoming exhibition "The Lure of the East" are colourful, exotic, often technically brilliant. But they are also controversial, variously perceived to be collecti ble masterpieces, ugly kitsch, or imperialist fantasies on a par with tabloid images of burqa-clad women and bearded Islamists.

"This exhibition is about paintings, not how they illustrate the relations between west and east," says Nicholas Tromans, the show's curator. The selected 70-odd watercolours, oils and sketches date from the late 18th to the early 20th century, the heyday of British artists' love affair with the Middle East. But it is impossible to disentangle the paintings from the politics; the lure of the east is a permanently touchy subject.

For most of the past century these images of bazaars, curled-toe slippers, slave traders, camels, veiled beauties and silk carpets have been bargain-basement art: unfashionable and, since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, politically unsavoury. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, newly wealthy collectors in the Gulf - including the emirs of Sharjah and Qatar, the sultan of Oman and Saudi princes - began to buy them up. The pre-Raphaelite style of high orientalism crept back into fashion, and international prices rocketed. But even fantastical images are still vulnerable to the peaks and troughs of east-west relations. Seven weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks, Christie's held a high-profile auction of orientalist art in New York. It was a disaster - once sure-fire favourites, the paintings were now impossible to sell.

The Tate exhibition tells us as much about Britain as about its eastern subjects. "Orientalist art began with British trade, warfare and diplomacy with courts such as this," says Tromans, leading the way into Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, seat of the Ottoman sultans who reigned over the three star cities of orientalist art: Jerusalem, Cairo and Constantinople. The show's earliest paintings are 17th-century portraits of exotically costumed adventurers and diplomats - either Middle Eastern visitors to Britain, such as the turbaned, scowling Moroccan ambassador to Elizabeth I, Abd el-Wahed Ben Massoud Ben Anoun, or westerners, painted in the unfamiliar clothes of their eastern travels.

The exotic outfits were seized upon by the leisured classes of the next century. "Eighteenth-century Britain was swept by a craze for oriental dressing up," explains Tromans, pointing out the original sweeping, brightly coloured silk robes worn by the sultans and their courtiers. In a society addicted to masquerade balls and fancy-dress portraits as temporary holidays from rigid social etiquette, "Turkish dress" became wildly fashionable.

For wealthy British women, eastern fashions meant not simply fun, but freedom. In 1717 the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accompanied her ambassador husband to Constantinople. The Turkish Embassy Letters she circulated upon her return caused a sensation by suggesting that the women of the harem, far from being hapless slaves of lascivious orientals, were freer than their "civilised" European sisters.

Jonathan Richardson's imposing 1725 portrait of Lady Mary the celebrity traveller "in Turkish dress" - a low-cut golden robe with jewelled and feathered turban - was equally calculated to cause a stir. Though her portrait costume does not look particularly practical, Montagu championed the liberating qualities of eastern women's clothing, which included loose trousers under knee-length skirts. This "harem costume" eventually became the "reform dress" adopted by Victorian feminists - to public outrage - when campaigning against the crippling women's fashions of the 19th century.

But artists usually turned the harem to less challenging ends. For professional Victorian artists looking to turn a profit, the harem, with its lurid reputation for sex, cruelty and secrecy, was a guaranteed bestseller. Its titillation factor was increased by the fact that prohibitions on enslaving fellow Muslims meant that the sultan's concubines were light-skinned, Christian slaves - Greeks, or "Circassians" from the Caucasus - who were then forcibly converted. To a society gripped by self-righteous anti-slavery fervour following the Abolition of Slavery Act 1833, the combination was irresistible.

"The imperial harem - the 'grand seraglio' - was the prototype for all the artists' imaginings of harems," says Tromans as we look over the sultan's balcony to the stone pool in which his concubines were made to bathe naked before him. And they were imaginings: even though the empty "seraglio" was eventually opened to the public after the fall of the Ottoman empire, frustrated travelling artists discovered that Middle Eastern women's quarters were strictly off-limits. They relied on second-hand reports, typical interiors and posed prostitutes or western models, to often spectacular effect. Some never travelled to the Middle East at all.

The harem craze was fuelled by John Frederick Lewis's 1850 watercolour The Hhareem (not in this exhibition), in which a lounging Muslim nobleman and his three light-skinned wives assess a potential fourth, an Abyssinian slave, unveiled by a laughing black eunuch. Encouraged by the stir it created, Lewis returned to the subject many times. In Hhareem Life, Constantinople (1857), two languid-looking, sumptuously dressed women watch a cat shredding a peacock-feather fan. The atmosphere is heavy with indolence and cruelty.

Lewis's harem paintings are calculatedly sensational, both in their subject matter and in their astonishing draughtsmanship and technical mastery over impossibly complex interiors of carved wood, ceramic tiles, patterned silk and intricate shadows. The Hhareem was described by one critic as "the most extraordinary production that has ever been executed in watercolour". They were also intended, from the details of the rooms and costumes to the "authentically" Arabic "hh" of the titles, to display his intimate knowledge of the world they depicted. Lewis was unique among the orientalist painters in his knowledge of the Middle East, having lived in Cairo for ten years, exhibiting no work but amassing thousands of preparatory sketches.

On his return to London in 1851, Lewis became the pre-eminent orientalist artist. At his modest suburban home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, he turned his mass of sketches into fantastically detailed and exotic paintings. Images of Cairene street life - such as The Seraff: a Doubtful Coin (1869), in which a two veiled women ne gotiate with a merchant, and romantic desert scenes, such as the virtuosic watercolour A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1842 (1856) - sit beside many repetitions of harem and domestic scenes, often posed by Lewis's wife, Marian. The public adored them and, unusually for such a populist subject, the critics agreed. Even Ruskin, who despised exoticism, rhapsodised over Lewis's technique (in particular his handling of camels' eyes) and begged him to work in durable oils rather than watercolour.

Lewis's painstaking technique and leisurely stay in Cairo were the exception. Most Victorian orientalists were caught in the annual grind of travel-sketch-paint-exhibit-sell, their paintings dictated less by fantasy than economic necessity. "They were permanently worried about meeting budgets and deadlines," explains Tromans. "The Royal Academy exhibition was in May, and if they could sell some paintings there, it might fund the summer's travelling and sketching."

The itinerant lifestyle attracted colourful personalities. Richard Dadd was a Royal Academician and expedition artist in Egypt and Palestine who became delusional while travelling back up the Nile. On his return to Britain in 1843, he murdered his father and spent the rest of his life in Bedlam, and then Broadmoor, secure hospitals. There, Dadd painted strange, dreamlike scenes drawn from his travels in the Middle East, including the moonlit Halt in the Desert (c.1845) and the lurid, apocalyptic Flight Out of Egypt (c.1849-50). Edward Lear, also known for his nonsense poetry, was the 20th child of a suburban family and suffered from untreatable epilepsy and depression. Forced to support himself, he gave up his career in zoological illustration to travel and paint around the Mediterranean. His landscape paintings, including Petra (1859) and Beirut (1861), are highly coloured and stilted, but sketches such as The Dead Sea (1858), scrawled over with diary-style notes of the colours of the hills and clouds, are beautifully vivid.

As fashions in art changed and the British and Ottoman empires declined, so, too, did orientalist painting. Augustus John's famous portrait of T E Lawrence in Arabian dress (1919) was one of the last - a self-conscious throwback to old orientalist celebrity images such as Thomas Phillips's portrait of a robed, turbaned Lord Byron (1814). "Lawrence helped dismantle the Ottoman empire," says Tromans, looking around the garishly decorated apartments of Topkapi. "The last sultan, Mehmet VI, left this palace for ever in 1922. There was no more room for orientalist art." But these paintings, with their luscious colours and intriguing subjects, were created to be popular. Having weathered reversals of fashion and politics, their popularity - despite their post-colonial critics - again seems assured.

"The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting" runs at Tate Britain, London SW1, from 4 June to 31 August. More details: http://www.tate.org

China and Art

China throws our Western categories of art into confusion. Where we see ‘decorative arts’ in the porcelains that were exported in great quantity to south-east Asia, the Middle East and Europe, or even in the great bronze ritual vessels, the Chinese take a quite different approach. The ancient bronzes used for offerings to the ancestors are among the most highly valued of all their ‘arts’ for two reasons: they were central to the most important religious activities of the earliest Chinese states and some of them carry inscriptions that describe events of those distant centuries. Thus they join the present to the past.

Ceramics, on the other hand, were rarely admired unless they had close links with the taste and collections of the imperial household and officials. The blue-and-white so much valued in 17th-century Europe was merely utilitarian. Religious sculpture
was not esteemed as art; even today, few museums in China have significant collections of Buddhist or Daoist sculpture. The greatest Chinese art was always and still is calligraphy; close behind was the painting in ink that grew out of the calligraphic tradition.

In this year, in which China hosts the Olympic Games and the British Museum has just closed its exhibition of the terracotta warriors from the tomb of the First Emperor (221-210 bc) after more than 800,000 visitors had queued to see this unique archaeological discovery, we should take stock of the very different approach to art in China. It is only too easy for the West to take its definition of art for granted. This is an art that grew out of images of human and spiritual figures, sculpted and painted, and married to stone architecture. The processions of people and animals on the Parthenon or the saints lined up at the portals of the cathedral at Chartres have in the West been regarded as expressive of the highest human skills and aspirations. Alongside these, it seems easier to admire the 6th-century Buddhist sculptures of Xiangtangshan or the terracotta warriors than the extraordinary bronzes, used in large sets, which drew together ancestors and descendants in shared ritual banquets.

If we are to look at and admire much of Chinese art, we need to see the figures or the bronzes as part of a much larger whole. Almost all the imperial tombs of the emperors who succeeded the First Emperor over two millennia were, like his, intended to create
a suitably rich and successful afterlife for their occupants. These immense tombs inhabit the Chinese landscape and make a new landscape art: the Tang (ad 618-906) or Ming (ad 1368-1644) tombs are set within large ranges of mountains and create in them new universes for the emperors after death.

Many Buddhist sculptures, likewise, were part of the Chinese landscape. Xiangtangshan, described here (pages 36-41), is only one of many extraordinary groups of caves carved into mountainsides to make places for worship and to record the piety of their benefactors. It is no surprise that the greatest of all early Chinese painting is of mountains. For these provided the sacred spaces for the worlds of the deities and for the life after death, even when they had to be realised in tomb mounds. Perhaps we should credit the Chinese with the invention of art that embraces the physical landscape.

As China modernises, it has taken hold of and reworked many of the tropes of modern Western art. Colour, photographs, sculptures – all are now deployed to comment on society. In the past, poetry in particular calligraphic styles and paintings of notable landscape spoke to an élite versed in the subtlety of criticism in a different mode. Yet while the Chinese join – and even perhaps claim, in due course, to lead – the 21st century, if we are to understand their and our present we should look backwards and appreciate the vision that created bronzes for banqueting with the ancestors and landscapes for eternal lives.

Chesterton

It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, (books by this author) born in London, England (1874). He's remembered today for his detective novels about the bumbling, crime-solving priest Father Brown, but during his lifetime he was primarily known as an essayist. He wrote constantly, about politics, society, literature, and religion. He was one of the first critics to argue that Charles Dickens was a great novelist, after the decline of his reputation in the early 20th century. He was one of the first people to argue that the influence of religion on public life would be replaced by the influence of advertisements.

SCIENCE & HUMANITIES

Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has been going on so long, babies have been born, and they’re already walking and talking.

That’s nothing. The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they’re already dead.

It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.

Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.

Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson’s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published “Evolution for Everybody.” In Dr. Wilson’s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?

“There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences, and some of the stereotypes have to be altered,” Dr. Wilson said. “Darwin, for example, established his entire evolutionary theory on the basis of his observations of natural history, and most of that information was qualitative, not quantitative.”

As he and Dr. Heywood envision the program, courses under the New Humanities rubric would be offered campuswide, in any number of departments, including history, literature, philosophy, sociology, law and business. The students would be introduced to basic scientific tools like statistics and experimental design and to liberal arts staples like the importance of analyzing specific texts or documents closely, identifying their animating ideas and comparing them with the texts of other times or other immortal minds.

One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and parlance in nontraditional settings — graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book felicitously puts it. “If you do statistics in the context of something you’re interested in and are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational jump,” Dr. Wilson said. “You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you’re doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple nuts and bolts stuff, nothing more.”

To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. “He was completely different from a dog,” she said. “He was terrified of things in the human environment that dogs are perfectly at ease with, like the swishing sound of a jogging suit, or somebody wearing a hat, and he kept his reserve with people, even me.”

Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people’s attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. “In the standard humanities approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze previously published texts about wolves,” and that’s pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to gauge people’s responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.

It’s an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong.

“These firsthand responses give me more to work with in understanding how people read wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts,” Dr. Heywood said.

Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.

“They were competing predators that occupied the same ecological niche as we did,” she said, “but it’s possible that we learned some of our social and hunting behaviors from them as well.” Hence, our deeply conflicted feelings toward wolves — as the nurturing mother to Romulus and Remus, as the vicious trickster disguised as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.

In designing the New Humanities initiative, Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists and ardent Darwinists have done.

“You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can conclude that yes, they’re deeply biologically driven, they’re essential to our species, but there would still be something missing,” he said, “and that thing is an appreciation for the work itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context.”

Other researchers who have reviewed the program prospectus have expressed their enthusiasm, among them George Levine, an emeritus professor of English at Rutgers University, a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University and author of “Darwin Loves You.” Dr. Levine has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism, the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays. What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young, fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.

“When you maximize the importance of biological forces and minimize culture, you get something that doesn’t tell you a whole lot about the particularities of literature,” Dr. Levine said. “What you end up with, as far as I’m concerned, is banality.” Reading the New Humanities proposal, by contrast, “I was struck by how it absolutely refused the simple dichotomy,” he said.

“There is a kind of basic illiteracy on both sides,” he added, “and I find it a thrilling idea that people might be made to take pleasure in crossing the border.”

The Mirage Economy

Suddenly, it seems, we're getting hit from all directions.

Energy and food prices are soaring. The housing market continues to collapse. Government revenue is falling, and taxes are rising. Airlines are jacking up fares and fees while reducing service. Banks are pulling credit lines. Auto companies are cutting production once again. Even investment bankers are losing their jobs.

The tendency is to see these as separate developments, each with its own causes and dynamic. Fundamentally, however, they are all part of the same story -- the story of the global economy purging itself of large and unsustainable imbalances that for a time allowed many Americans to think they were richer than they really were.

Most of us understand that an overabundance of cheap, easy credit created a housing bubble that artificially inflated the price of land and housing, produced too many homes and homeowners, and persuaded too many Americans to dip into their home equity to support a lifestyle their income could not sustain. Now that the bubble has burst, we are coming to accept the reality of lower prices, reduced production, declining homeownership rates and the wisdom that a house is not an ATM or a substitute for a retirement fund.

Put another way, residential real estate is finding a new equilibrium, that magical place in the economist's imagination where supply and demand of houses and mortgages come back into some sort of rough balance at a lower price.

But the thing to remember is that it's not just residential real estate. The same factors that were behind the housing bubble were also at work, to varying degrees, in the auto bubble, the commercial real estate bubble, the travel bubble, the college tuition bubble, the retail bubble, the Web 2.0 bubble and most recently the commodities bubble. Unlike housing, which began losing steam two years ago, these other sectors have just begun the painful process of repricing and finding a new balance between supply and demand.

Take the case of the airline industry, which likes to blame its woes on skyrocketing fuel prices.

While there's an ongoing debate about why the price of oil has doubled over the past year, there is little doubt that the declining dollar is a significant factor. The decline is the result of years of large and growing U.S. trade deficits that should have caused the exchange rate to adjust years ago but didn't because so many of our trading partners in Asia and the Middle East were intent on linking their currencies to the dollar. In the process of maintaining those dollar pegs and reinvesting those surpluses in Treasury bonds and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, they created a surfeit of cheap credit that spawned all those bubbles.

Now that the process is reversing itself, the overvalued dollar is being repriced. But in the short run, it has played havoc with the cost of commodities, most of which are priced in dollars. Producers have raised their dollar prices to prevent a decline in the global purchasing power from their commodities sales. At the same time, some of the excess credit that financed mortgages and corporate takeovers has been shifted to commodity speculation, turbocharging the swings in prices of everything from corn futures to jet fuel. At some point, that speculative bubble will burst and energy prices will plunge. When things finally settle down, the new equilibrium price is almost certain to be well above where it was last year at this time.

That said, jet fuel is hardly the airlines' only problem. The reality is that for too many years, airlines have sold too many tickets at prices that failed to reflect the real cost of providing the service passengers want and expect. That includes such things as cleaning planes; handling reservations, check-ins and baggage without undue waiting; serving a decent meal when necessary; and treating passengers fairly when flights are canceled. But they also include costs that may be less obvious, like keeping up with preventive maintenance, hedging fuel costs, paying a decent wage to front-line employees, investing in modern air traffic control systems, and paying a price that reflects the true value of scarce air space and landing rights.

Airline executives will say that if they were to charge enough to reflect all these costs, they would have many fewer passengers. That's the point: A sustainable equilibrium will inevitably involve a smaller industry with fewer planes, fewer flights, fewer passengers and fewer employees.

And what about that $199 round-trip fare from Washington to L.A.? Sad to say, it was no less a part of the previous economic mirage than the no-doc subprime loans, Google at $750 a share and takeover deals financed at 80 percent leverage.

What I've described is a double whammy for American households: the slower growth that comes with downsizing a number of key industries that expanded as a result of the credit bubble, along with rising prices for a food, energy, health care and almost everything imported. And you can add a third blow, this one from government.

Across the country, state and local governments are already hip-deep into budget crises in response to declining revenue from property assessments and real estate transfers. Here in Washington, a dramatic drop off in revenue from business profits and capital gains has wiped out any hope of reducing federal operating deficits that, under the likeliest political and economic scenarios, will exceed $500 billion a year for as far as the eye can see.

This is another example of an unsustainable equilibrium that has roots in the trade deficit and the credit bubble. Despite the happy talk you might be hearing from the presidential candidates, it presents Americans with a stark and unpleasant choice.

One option is to raise taxes and leave less money for private spending, which is what many state and local governments have begun to do. The other is to accept lower levels of government service and subsidies, which inevitably will lower the incomes of some households while forcing others to go without services or pay for them privately. Either way, it amounts to a lower standard of living than we thought we had achieved.

Is all this the end of the world? For the richest country on the planet, certainly not. But it does represent the end of a decade or more during which Americans were permitted and even encouraged by the rest of the world -- and by their own leaders -- to live way beyond their means. As a result, the United States has gone from being the largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor. For the first time since the early 1980s, Americans will have to endure several years of uncomfortably slow growth and uncomfortably high inflation as the U.S. economy regains its balance and creates a foundation for more solid and sustainable growth.

Steven Pearlstein can be reached atpearlsteins@washpost.com.

Chacun á son Goût

Sah-Koh-Zee!!!!!!

Looking over the headlines at a news kiosk in Paris this spring was like examining an array of autopsy reports and clinical case studies. "The Man With the Bags Under His Eyes" read Le Point, a right-wing weekly that might normally be presumed to bolster France's right-wing president. Nicolas Sarkozy's visage stared out sadly from behind the magazine's block letters. The newspaper Libiration didn't even bother with a head shot; its cover simply sported a black silhouette to suggest a missing person: "French Seeking President," it announced ominously. The page-one editorial was titled "Pathology." "When one judges a head of state, one generally asks, 'Is he a good president or a bad president?'" it began. "In the case of [Sarkozy,] one must ask, 'Is he a president?'"

Sarkozy's career, for the past several months, has been in a dizzying downward spiral. Every fresh magazine cover in la belle France, every weekly and every tabloid, seems to offer new evidence of his destruction. Even though -- as many a Frenchman will tell you -- he runs them all. Or at least his friends do. Arnaud Lagardère, a witness at Sarkozy's second marriage, owns Paris Match; another pal, Serge Dassault, presides over Le Figaro; longtime associate Martin Bouygues heads up the television channel TF1 ; and Vincent Bolloré -- the notorious billionaire who outraged the country by lending Sarkozy a yacht for two and a half days after his year of presidential campaigning -- controls Matin Plus.

But with friends like these, you don't need enemies. "The Meltdown of Nicolas Sarkozy," flashes yet another headline. "Should he resign?" puzzle the commentators. Many say yes. Sarkozy's approval ratings have plummeted to the 30th percentile. Sarcophobia has entered the French language and is here to stay. So has the acronym TSS -- Tout Sauf Sarkozy ("Anything But Sarkozy").

What happened? How did this man -- elected with an imposing margin over his attractive Socialist rival, Ségolène Royale, less than a year ago -- sink so low so fast? He hasn't drawn corruption charges, as did his predecessor, Jacques Chirac. He hasn't started wars. He hasn't made even a dent in the economy. In fact, he hasn't had time to do much of anything yet. His problem is one of style, not substance.

As the newly translated book about him by the famous French playwright Yasmina Reza suggests, Sarkozy is a man at war with French niceties. He's a plainspoken tough who dispenses insults more easily than he absorbs them, wishes to save France from apathy and irrelevance, suffers from an acute case of restless legs syndrome, and, in the end, possesses a heart of gold.

Reza followed Sarkozy for almost a year of presidential campaigning in 2006-2007, and she continually reprimands him for, of all things, his obsession with love. In a 30-page speech to the youth of France, he says "amour" 53 times, Reza laments. What's with this guy? Reza is an intellectual, a skeptic. Her literary works (among them the international theater triumph Art) teem with ironic asides and tragic heroes. Indeed, Sarkozy is the first nontragic hero to merit Reza's attention in some time, she confessed to a reporter after the publication of Dawn, Dusk or Night: A Year With Nicolas Sarkozy . She tries, in many ways, to turn him into a tragic hero. When he tells her, "Love is the only thing that matters" and "I can only love a landscape if I'm in it with someone I love," she mocks his naïveté. "A formula so vain," she sighs.

She hints broadly at his disappointment in private life. There is something to this disappointment. While Reza was writing Dawn , Sarkozy was campaigning alone -- his second wife, Cécilia, with whom he had officially reconciled after she'd left him to cohabit with a New York millionaire for several months, was conspicuously absent from his side and never found the time to vote for him in the final election. He was incessantly checking his cell phone for news from her. In fact, one of the book's most poignant moments comes when Reza describes Sarkozy, alone in a train compartment, opening and shutting his mobile phone: "I see him turning on his cell phone, turning it off, never going any further than the home page...[his youngest son's] face appearing and disappearing dozens of times." He never makes a call; he only waits for one.

Reza accurately captures the vulnerability of this man, so infamous for arrogance, for bravado. Early on in her meetings with him, she notices that he has a slight limp. She notices that he is hardly taller than the 10-year-old son of a firefighter being honored on the anniversary of September 11. The president strikes her as a little boy. "When I tell his entourage that he looks like a child, I get stunned stares," she notes.

Sarkozy is indeed an arresting mix of strength and weakness. At times he seems very much the hero, the strongman, the larger-than-life action figure. He raised eyebrows throughout France in 1993 when, as mayor of the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, he burst into a school held by a gunman and emerged carrying a young hostage in his arms. No other politician in recent history has risked his skin the way Sarkozy does. At other times, it is his frailty that attracts attention: his hair-trigger temper, his vulnerability to Cécilia, his physical tics.

I, too, noticed his limp when I arranged to join him -- Reza-style -- on a day trip to an apprentice-training outfit in the east of France where he hoped to promote a new Gallic work ethic. Arriving with a cavalry of handlers, he resembled a child star on a sitcom. For all his conscious swagger and broad, thrown-back shoulders, he wore soles several centimeters high. His voice, when he answered journalists' questions, was almost preternaturally soft.

This was a man who only two weeks earlier had raised a furor in France for calling a farmworker a "poor slob" when he yelled "Keep your dirty hands off me!" as Sarkozy greeted supporters at an agricultural event. How unpresidential, raged the critics. Never mind that Sarkozy hadn't skipped a beat or broken his smile. Jacques Chirac, it was pointed out, had been similarly accosted once: "Asshole," a man yelled at him. Chirac stretched out his hand in greeting: "And my name," he said graciously, "is Chirac." That, many decided after years of reviling Chirac, was class. Sarkozy was a boor.

I had expected someone more aggressive. Standing half a meter from Sarkozy, I had to strain to hear him. The words he spoke were forceful: France, he declared, had come to punish its citizens for working. The brightest minds expended their talent figuring out how to do as little as possible. The state had to stop providing so many handouts and start creating more jobs. Yet even as I listened to Sarkozy speak, he reminded me of a mime -- not only because of his quiet manner, but because of his expressive face. Sarkozy's mouth is huge, his eyebrows thick and dark, as though splashed on with an oversize brush. His smile and frown are theatrical.The thick-soled shoes make his feet look big. There is something clownish, something Marcel Marceau-like, something cartoonish but, at the same time, imposing about the man.

To be loved, a man must have in his face something to pity and something to admire, says Stendhal. It is probably hard to spend a whole year writing about a public figure -- a figure whose schedule becomes your schedule, whose movements become your movements, whose successes become your successes -- without falling a little bit in love with him, and Reza hints (both in her book and elsewhere) that this is exactly what happened to her.

In many ways, her narrative reads like a long-running tale of foreplay. Reza is pulsingly alive to Sarkozy's moods, his foibles, his ambiguities. Few observers of Sarkozy have been more finely attuned to his outbreaks of megalomania and anger, to his one-on-one combat with the angel of time. Reza perceives his restlessness with the attention of a woman enamored; she notices his nervous movements, his impatience with people's questions and reports, his fear of letting life slip through his fingers. "They brutally tell you it's too early [to act]," Sarkozy tells her at one juncture. But "then, no less brutally, they tell you it's too late. The advice always adds up to: not right now." Rather than miss the right moment, Sarkozy barely shuts an eye. He plunges into every fray. He is in perpetual motion. As a result, he sometimes resembles "a fox terrier running everywhere, barking." Other times, he evokes Macbeth -- edgy, driven, tortured, noble.

But Reza's tale also acquires an airless quality, a narrative claustrophobia. One senses that she is waiting, rapt, for Sarkozy to make a move on her. Their circular conversations about love; their stagey disagreements; their implicit superiority over surrounding journalists and administrators and colleagues. Reza's frustration -- that her subject never, in fact, makes his move -- becomes the frustration of the book. Tirelessly, she drops hints that she is engaged in a sexual waltz with the man who will be president: she, the great writer, he the great politician -- two Übermenschen in a state of attraction.

Warned by her artsy friends not to meddle with political men because "they are stronger than us," she responds archly, flirtatiously: "I don't believe [Sarkozy] is stronger than I." A photo taken of Reza and Sarkozy shows her, arms akimbo, bosom thrust toward his chin, staring him felinely in the face. He smiles at her like a gentleman chagrined, flattered, compromised.

In a particularly maddening scene toward the end of the book, Sarkozy has just won the presidential election and Reza has announced with mysterious abruptness that she will cease to follow him. He summons her to his new office in the Élysée. "I could say, 'Why did you want to see me,' but I don't say it. He could say, 'Why do you want to stop [accompanying me],' but he doesn't say it. What for? We know the answers," she says coyly, "and any kind of explanation would be demeaning." The new leader and the longtime celebrity contemplate each other in charged silence. They contrive small talk. It is tense. But it is also -- and this is the problem with much of the book -- essentially dull.

Just as the reader is about to scream with exasperation, comes the coup de théâtre. Sarkozy stands up. He moves across the room. We can feel Reza's heart stop. And then he picks up...a table. He picks up a small table by the window and carries it to the other side of the room. He sets it down next to the wall. And that's it. He sits back down again.

"That's crazy what you just did," Reza says, after a beat. "You think so?" asks the president.

It's as close to a declaration of love as Reza gets in this book. And since such a declaration is so clearly the main point of the whole exercise, its absence makes for a memoir that is irksome, desk-pounding, futile-feeling.

It also makes for a memoir that is unfair. For Reza ends up slightly bitter about her resistant subject. "Did he attempt to seduce you?"; a brazen French reporter asked her after the book's publication in Paris. "No," she said. And then: "Come to think of it, it is almost insulting to spend a year with a man without his even trying to seduce you." Ironic? We are probably supposed to think so. But in irony lies truth -- especially for a writer like Yasmina Reza. "Were you attracted to him?" pursued the reporter. After complimenting her interlocutor on the "audacity" of the question (thus admitting that he was on the right track), Reza told a lie as bold as it was pompous:

"I would like to respond to that question impersonally," she said. Sarkozy "is one of those men who...are very desirous...[but who] were one day forced to stop diversifying [this desire]." It is "a form of desiccation," she explained: "Beings who once possessed the capacity to move life in many different directions become one-tracked." In other words, where Sarkozy once would have allowed his life force to spill into the seduction of Yasmina Reza, he has now truncated it so violently that it suffices only, alas, to "seduce France. "

Really? Is this the man she needled for nearly 200 pages about his fullblooded faith in love; the man who, it should be mentioned, himself wrote a memoir, in 2006, Testimony, whose most-cited passages are declarations of passion for Cécilia? This man is now incapable of "diversifying" his "desire&"? In Reza's offended soul, he has become a political machine, a windup toy that buzzes off into political Neverland without so much as pausing over the flowers on the way.

If Reza is a flower, Sarkozy may in fact have resisted alighting upon her petals. But to blame this on his defects of character rather than on, for example, his loyalty (however unreciprocated) to his wife -- or indeed on his indifference to Reza -- seems to signal a fundamental dishonesty and vindictiveness on Reza's part.

"Anyway, you'll reinvent him," said a friend of Reza's upon hearing that she would be writing about Sarkozy. And so she has. She has captured certain aspects of him in glinting detail; others she has altered, darkened, and altogether misunderstood.

Whatever else this hurried, harried president is, he is large; he contains multitudes. He can divorce a woman he begged endlessly to take him back and then marry someone else three months later with apparent -- and convincing -- devotion. He can tell a man at an agricultural salon to "get lost, poor slob" and on the next occasion be as gentle as a dove. He can want badly to reform France -- to shake up its citizenry and sound a clarion call to work -- and believe that love (not industry) makes the world go round. He can remind the French of the Americans and the Americans of the French: he can jog like Rocky and flirt like Alfred de Musset. (Recall: he first met Cécilia when -- as mayor of Neuilly -- he presided over her marriage to another man.)

The last thing this man is is narrow or "desiccated." Or predictable. Despite his current trials, his detractors are holding their breath. I talked in March with a spokesman for Paris's left-wing mayor, Bertrand Delanoë -- himself a presidential hopeful for 2012. It was the middle of the "meltdown" phase of media coverage of Sarkozy. "Don't bury him yet," my friend said. "He is like Lazarus. If people are disappointed in him, it is first and foremost because he raised such high expectations."

Sarkozy struck people as a man of his word. Whereas other candidates for public office make their promises with a certain perfunctoriness, Sarkozy looked his electors in the eye: "Everything I have spoken, I will perform," he said fiercely. "I will scrupulously adhere to my promises and to my word. "

In many ways, he has done just that. Even leftist media watchdogs dedicated to charting his downfall admit it. Rue89, a Web site that vowed to monitor the new president for the five years of his term and demonstrate how easily he forgot his oaths, has, it seems, thrown in the towel. Its "Sarkoscope" registers that after a few months in office, Sarkozy has successfully instituted (or is in the midst of instituting) eight of the 10 specific policy reforms he had announced on the campaign trail.

From simplification of the European Union's clunky internal procedures and mandatory penalities for repeat criminal offenders to overhauls of the country's 35-hour work week (henceforth, French employees can work overtime without being punished for it), Sarkozy has delivered what he promised. The operators of the Sarkoscope can resume their day jobs.

Still. The president didn't just make a beeline for target statistics. He also, and more importantly, "diversified his desire." He dove ardently into education reform (dispatching a 30-odd-page tract to surprised school authorities), into the urgency of religious respect, into the rights of crime victims, into debates about the Shoah. He made rousing speeches about France's need for "rupture" with its past. As he told audiences toward the end of last year:


I still remember some of my friends trembling...because I used the word rupture. 'It's a mistake,' they said to me. Change would be better. In other words, the smell of rupture without the rupture. But I do not fear the word rupture -- rupture with habits of thought, with ideas, with behaviors of the past that have prevented us from advancing, from grasping the future between our two arms...I want rupture with intellectual conformity...I want rupture with halfheartedness, I want rupture with conservatism, I want rupture with immobility. This rupture I believe necessary. This rupture I have betrothed myself to. This rupture the French people have approved. This rupture I will perform.
Even as he hailed political rupture, Sarkozy confronted personal rupture: he ended one marriage and celebrated another. It took him no more than three months.

He still has four years to change the country he adores, the country his Hungarian father folded fast into his heart. So the poor slob at the farming event oughtn't write him off just yet. Nor should the European media, the next American president, or the previous French one. Neither, finally, should the acclaimed playwright who followed him. Yasmina Reza may not think Nicolas Sarkozy is stronger than she is. But guess what, Ms. Reza: he is.

Cristina Nehring lives in Paris. Her book, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the 21st Century, will be published by HarperCollins early next year.