Nature's Social Union

 Driving through Providence tonight I took an unnecessarily round-about way home, just because I knew the way and it would save me having to plug directions into my phone. This familiar course took me down Blackstone Boulevard—a highfalutin tree-lined avenue bisected by a long island of park-like foliage. As I was carefully picking my way, trying to keep my speedometer within reasonable distance of the allotted 25 mph (a restriction they enforce in this spot with exceptional zeal), I was suddenly beset by the kind of frumpy dismay the squares must have felt when Marlon Brando's The Wild One came to town. 

You see, I was suddenly and unwillingly surrounded on all sides by men on ATVs. And I mean literally all sides! Several of them were gunning the motor while racing through the middle of the island that runs between the two sides of the street. Another was directly behind me, popping a prolonged wheelie. I harrumphed and continued to putter along, as I had been doing, trying not to go too fast and risk being flagged by the cameras that surveil the street. But due to the noise of the ATVs, I soon no longer had the road to myself. 

Atrocities

 In a luminous book of essays, Marguerite Yourcenar turns at one point to the work of a partisan of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, who depicted with unequalled zeal and outrage the martyrdom and persecution of the Huguenot Protestants in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Yourcenar—an incredibly gifted essayist, it turns out, though she is better known for her novels—cites a number of the well-chosen images the poet used to stir the indignation and awaken the pity of his readers. 

In depicting an auto-da-fé, for instance, of which his fellow Protestants or like heretics were the presumed victims, he dwells on the resemblance between the victims' ordeals and that of Calvary—of the humiliations and tortures to which they were subject, so like the crown of thorns, even as they are persecuted in the supposed name of the Christian faith. He culminates in a depiction of the callous hypocrisy of the executioners, who—in a final parody of official "mercy"—offer their victims a choice between craven submission—which earns them the prize of instantaneous strangulation—or continued resistance, for which the penalty is the far more painful death by burning at the stake.

Friend Juice

 At the severe risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I have to say it: people seem to like my company. For all that I've managed to construct an adult life for myself as an affirmed single, it turns out this does not necessarily prevent one's daily life from becoming a ceaseless struggle against the tide of various platonic entanglements. My phone lights up each day with whatever one would term the non-romantic equivalent of billets-doux. The importuning of amicatory suitors. Tonight, at 11:30 PM, a text message arrives for instance. "I'm low on friend juice," says a friend whose last few calls I'd ignored. "I need a refill." The good-natured guilt-trip worked. I phoned him up at last. 

When asked to account for this need of my company, my friends and family all give versions of the same answer. "Why does everyone want a piece of Josh?" I asked recently to my best friend from high school, my well of humility having run dry. He came out with the ready answer: "Because you're fun!" My sister and I, more recently still, got into an argument during COVID, because there was a time when I wanted to barricade myself in my own home, eliminate all possible sources of outside contagion, and experience a week of monk-like seclusion. When she objected, I got angry: "Why can't you let me live my own life?" I demanded. "Because I want to hang out with you and watch Drag Race!" she replied. 

Krishnapur/Kabul

 It is rare to find a work of literary fiction that denies itself none of the pleasures of swashbuckling adventure, the full range of comedy from mordant irony to outright slapstick, the grand tragedy inherent in a protracted human disaster, all while making a serious thematic point. J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur must be one of the very few such works in existence. I picked it up over the weekend with little expectation that it would become such a consuming passion over the next few days. It is all of the things I named above in one; though if one has to ask the novel to present itself in only one of its roles for our purposes today, let us settle on reading it as a satire on the pretensions of Empire and Victorian civilization. 

Seen in this aspect, the novel is primarily the tale of one senior British official, Mr. Hopkins (the "Collector" of Krishnapur) —charged with overseeing the defense of a Company-controlled town in the midst of the 19th-century Sepoy Rebellion—as he gradually loses his faith, not only in the God of the Anglican Communion, but in the full roster of Victorian pieties. These include, as the Collector himself lists them in the course of one excited interior monologue: "Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops!" 

Adjustment, or Complacency?

 The late twenties of one's lifespan—the time when one has, perhaps, obtained and settled into what one considers to be one's first "career job"—are marked by a nagging fear: What if I'm not living up to my potential? At some point after thirty, this is replaced by another, superficially similar, but really quite different fear: What if I am living up to my potential?

A friend asks me: "didn't you always assume that you were going to be great; that you were destined for greatness?" I agree that yes, I did always assume that. But then I settle into what has become my more comfortable thirty-one-year-old view-point. "But you know," I say, "greatness is a spectrum, not a binary. One doesn't wake up one day and discover one is great. One can gradually make greater incremental progress toward greatness." 

Excuses

No sooner did the firing commence in the latest escalation of the Hamas-Israel confrontation than the familiar excuses on both sides started to rain down. There is of course no sound way to justify any party's violations of the laws of war: neither Hamas' indiscriminate rocket launches into Israeli territory, endangering civilian lives, nor the Israeli Defense Forces' disproportionate air strikes frequently seeming to target—or at the very least, foreseeably jeopardize—civilian infrastructure and the lives of innocent people. But the very impossibility of the task of making excuses for such things seems to have incited some to make the attempt. Perhaps they are just eager for a challenge.

Indeed, the contortions they have come up with are often quite ingenious. First, the apologists of each side urge us to note the "provocations" that allegedly forced their favored party's hand. Israel's comprehensive blockade of Gaza, we are told, and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, left Hamas no choice but to fire its rockets. So too, we are informed, the IDF has no alternative but to retaliate in the face of Hamas' attacks, and the densely-populated areas where their militants operate will inevitably become military targets, leading to the collateral loss of civilian life.