What we leave behind with each passing day it’s not time; it’s experiences. Like albums of photographs our lives are collections of experiences – good and bad. But that’s not all. Life experiences do not stay in the past. They carry their aftertaste into the present. They leave behind memories and lessons. What we decide to take along for the journey ahead depends on how well we husband the experiences of the past or how many of them we turn into waste.
It’s Tuesday, right after Labor Day, and in America this signals that the summer of 2019 is done; the curtain has fallen and the summer season has taken its final bow. Several years back that would mean I had to get ready for another semester. The lives of academics are ruled by the semester cycle. But now I no longer have to worry about that. I now need to fill my life’s album with other experiences. So, what did I leave behind this summer of 2019?
Well, I left behind Providence and Newport, R.I., Prague, Greece and the lake in Canada. In Providence I learned that the progressive offspring of a local family that made its money by transporting slaves to the Americas founded a very fine college, known these days as Brown University. In Prague, I learned that one of its creative sons and national heroes by the name Alphonse Mucha became one of the most celebrated artists of Art Nouveau. Ironically, Mucha was not admitted to the Academy of Arts in Prague and had to study in Munich and make a name in Paris before returning and rising to a national figure in Prague. I also learned that for my taste the most reliable Czech dish is the roasted port knuckle.
In Greece I learned once more that walking around in 100-degree weather is not a comfortable experience; actually, it’s sort of masochism. Even Yabanaki beach, the one I introduced to you a year ago, was not pleasant in that heat. But our American friends would not care less. From the gyro and tzatziki to the wide vistas of the blue Aegean from a hotel terrace on the island of Aegina, everything was magical.
In the lake in Canada, I learned that catching and killing fish to eat for lunch is not what I want to do any more. After the first bass I released the rest of my catches. My son and daughter tried hard to convince me that the underdeveloped nervous system of fish spares them of physical pain, but I had none of that. Reading Frans De Waal’s book about animal emotions has made me more sensitive to animal killing. Don’t take me wrong. I am not turning into a vegetarian. All I am saying is that from now on, fishing will be only a sport for me. Catch and release; not catch, kill and eat. With lots of moral compromise I will still eat somebody else’s caught and killed fish.
Besides places, I also left behind several books I read. The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt was one of them. It makes the case of how by trying to protect young people from everything, including uncomfortable ideas, colleges and protective parents prepare a future citizenry that may stifle liberal discourse and be too weak to face the challenges of the real world. I also read Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Harry Paulson, the three main protagonists who looked into the abyss of the 2008 catastrophe and did all they could, some of it not well received, to pull us back from it. Despite the heat and all the visual distractions and with very little help from the inadequate shade and the ice coffee (frappe) at Yabanaki, I managed to finish Stories of Our Life and Others by Ted Chiang. A collection of science fiction stories each of them sending us into the dark world of technology and its ability to take an oppressive possession of our lives. We struggle to escape it by trying to take control of it but we fail. There is no exit from what we create. A cautionary reminder that not all that glitters is gold. My last read of the summer was Beloved by Toni Morrison who recently passed at a well-advanced age. Fortuitously, it turned out to be the right book-end to where my summer had started, visiting the home of slave traffickers. Only in the lines of a mesmerizing and at the same time soul wrenching story, as written by Morrison, one can feel the full extent of dispossession of human dignity and utter deprivation that slavery was and why it has left behind so many social ills.
So, it was a summer of memorable experiences and a summer of new things learned. And speaking of life as a collection of experiences, let me leave you with these verses by Longfellow:
No deem the irrevocable Past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.
And on we go into the second year of the blog.
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