Home Archives Quotable 2008

I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery Of a new symbolic western frontier and I am waiting for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the second coming And I am waiting For a religious revival To sweep thru the state of Arizona And I am waiting For the grapes of wrath to be stored And I am waiting For them to prove That God is really American And I am waiting To see God on television Piped into church altars If they can find The right channel To tune it in on And I am waiting for the last supper to be served again and a strange new appetizer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for my number to be called and I am waiting for the Salvation Army to take over and I am waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth without taxes and I am waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs and I am waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody and I am waiting for linnets and planets to fall like rain and I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed and I anxiously waiting For the secret of eternal life to be discovered By an obscure practitioner and I am waiting for the storms of life to be over and I am waiting to set sail for happiness and I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and TV rights sold in advance to the natives and I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the Lost Continent in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the day that maketh all things clear and I am waiting for retribution for what America did to Tom Sawyer and I am waiting for the American Boy to take off Beauty's clothes and get on top of her and I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence and I am waiting for Childe Roland to come to the final darkest tower and I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last long rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn to catch each other at last and embrace and I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder ---Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Want a man, or a worm?

Among mammals, expecting monogamy tends to run against the grain of nature.

By David P. Barash
March 12, 2008

As an evolutionary biologist, I look at New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's now-public sexual indiscretions and feel justified in saying, "I told you so."

One of the most startling discoveries of the last 15 years has been the extent of sexual infidelity (scientists call it "extra-pair copulations" or EPCs) among animals long thought to be monogamous. It's clear that social monogamy -- physical association and child rearing between a male and a female -- and sexual monogamy are very different things. The former is common; the latter is rare.

At one point in the movie "Heartburn," Nora Ephron's barely fictionalized account of her marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein, the heroine tearfully tells her father about her husband's infidelities, only to be advised, "You want monogamy? Marry a swan." Yet thanks to DNA evidence, we know now that even those famously loyal swans aren't sexually monogamous.

One species that is, and, significantly, perhaps the only one that could be reliably designated as such, is Diplozöon paradoxum, a parasitic worm that inhabits the intestines of fish. Among these animals, male and female pair up while adolescents; their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain sexually faithful until death does not them part.

One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female differences, deriving especially from the production of sperm versus eggs. Because sperm are produced in vast numbers, with little if any required parental follow-through, males of most species are aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can. Males who succeed in doing so leave more descendants.

A story is told in New Zealand about the early 19th century visit of an Episcopal bishop to an isolated Maori village. As everyone was about to retire after an evening of high-spirited feasting and dancing, the village headman -- wanting to show sincere hospitality to his honored guest -- called out, "A woman for the bishop." Seeing a scowl of disapproval on the prelate's face, the host roared even louder, "Two women for the bishop!"

On balance, the Maori headman had an acute understanding of men. He also reflected a powerful cross-cultural universal: Around the world, high-ranking men have long enjoyed sexual access to comparatively large numbers of women, typically young and attractive. Moreover, women have by and large found such men appealing beyond what may be predicted from their immediate physical traits. "Power," wrote Henry Kissinger, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Power-as-pheromone is pretty much the default among mammals. Elk, elephant seal, baboon or chimpanzee, in a wide array of species, females eagerly mate with dominant males while disdaining subordinates. And they do so, more or less, in harems.

Not surprisingly, before the homogenization of cultures that resulted from Western colonialism, more than 85% of human societies unabashedly favored polygamy. In such societies, men who accumulate power, wealth and status gain additional wives and consorts. In avowedly monogamous cultures, successful males accumulate a wife and often additional girlfriends. Even if, thanks to birth control technology, they do not actually reproduce as a result (and thus enhance their evolutionary "fitness"), they are responding to the biological pressures that whisper within men.

Part of being successful, moreover, is a tendency to feel entitled and often to be uninhibited -- in part because one outcome of our species-wide polygamous history is that successful men have been those who took risks, which paid off. The losers were mostly found among the unsuccessful bachelors who, by definition, did not contribute very much to succeeding generations of men, or to their inclinations.

All of which contributes to the apparent sex appeal of such less-than-stunning physical specimens as Kissinger, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton, not to mention the persistence of sex scandals among the popular and powerful across the political and ideological spectrum, including Thomas Jefferson, JFK, Hugh Grant, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig and a long list, receding almost to the infinite past as well as likely into the indefinite future. For men at the top -- rock stars, successful athletes, politicians, wealthy CEOs, the jet-set glitterati -- such opportunities are exceedingly numerous, not so much because they have insatiable sex drives but because they are dominant males in a biologically randy species.

Some readers may bridle at this characterization of Homo sapiens as EPC-inclined, but the evidence is overwhelming. That doesn't justify adultery, by either sex, especially because human beings -- even those burdened by a Y chromosome and suffering from testosterone poisoning -- are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses. Especially if, via wedding vows, they have promised to do so. After all, "doing what comes naturally" is what nonhuman animals do. People, most of us like to think, have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human.

But even a smidgen of evolutionary insight suggests that maleness plus money plus political power isn't likely to add up to the kind of sexual restraint that the public expects. A concluding word, therefore, to the outraged voters of New York state: You want monogamy? Elect a swan. Or better yet, a Diplozöon paradoxum.

David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist, is professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

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On Travel and Travelers

What's in your Passport?

I hate a room without an open suitcase in it... it seems so permanent
--Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) American writer

The soul of the journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
–William Hazlitt (178-1830) English writer

“Go West,” said Horace Greely, but my slogan is “Go Anyplace.”
–Richard Bissell (1913-1981) American writer

The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster
–Matha Gellman (1908-2006) American writer

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards policies, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; the trip takes us.
–John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer

I think there is a fatality in it –I seldom go to the place I set out for.
–L. Sterne (1713- 1768) English writer

The next best thing to being rich is traveling as though your were.
–Stephen Brinbaum (b. 1937) American editor and writer

The vagabond, when rich, is called a tourist.
–Paul Richard (b. 1939) American writer

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
–E. B. White (1899-1985) American writer

When you go by boat or train or car you travel. When you go by plane, you are sent.
–Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) American writer

Not traveling is like living in the Library of Congress but never taking out more than one or two books.
–Marilyn Van Savant (b.1946) American writer

Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore.
We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong.
–Vita Sackvile-West (1892-1962) English writer

Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.
–Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) English writer

Women have always yearned for far away places. It was no accident that a woman financed the first package tour of the New World, and you can bet Isabella would have taken the trip herself, only Ferdinand wouldn’t let her go.
–Roslyn Friedman (b. 1924) American writer

Road, n. A strip of land over which one must pass from where it is too tiresome to be and where it is too futile to go. –Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) American writer

The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life will never be the same again after your passport has been stamped.
--Graham Greene (1904-1991) English writer

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hope for or imagined—how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
—Peter Matthiessen (b. 1927) American writer

It is so like living in a new world, so free, so fresh, so vital, so careless,
so unfettered . . . that one grudges being asleep.
—Isabella Bird, 1831 English Traveler

There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different, and that of the traveler, who says “Anywhere but here.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Three kinds of people die poor: those who divorce, those who incur debts,
and those who move around too much. —Senegalese proverb

Down to Gehenna or up to the throne,
   He travels the fastest who travels alone. —Kipling, The Winners

They change their clime, not their frame of mind, who rush across the sea. —Horace

I have not told even half of the things that I have seen. —Marco Polo

Travel is the ruin of all happiness!
There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy. —Fanny Burney,1782, Cecillia

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the older a part of experience.
   He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language,
   Goeth to school, and not to travel. —Francis Bacon, 1625

Some minds improve by travel, others, rather
Resemble copper wire or brass,
Which gets narrower by going further! —Thomas Hood, 1799

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
                                                                     —Robert Louis Stevenson

A good traveler is one who does not where he is going,
and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.
                                                    —Lin Yutang 1895, The Importance of Living

The Devil himself had probably re-designed Hell in the light of information
he had gained from observing airport layouts.
                                                                      —Anthony Price, 1928

The shape of Africa resembles a revolver, and Congo is the trigger.
                                                                            —Frantz Fanon, 1925

Faust never reached a place where he wanted to ‘remain’. I cannot even glimpse
anywhere worth the attempt.
                                                   —Fridtjof Nansen, 1861

Sir, Saturday morning, although recurring at regular and well-foreseen intervals, always seems to take this railway by surprise.
                       —W. S. Gilbert, 1911 letter to the Station Master at Baker Street, on the Metro Line

I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
                                              —Paul Theroux, 1975 The Great Railway Bazaar

But how strange the change from major to minor
Every time we say goodbye.
                          —Cole Porter, 1944, Every Time We Say Goodbye

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
                                                        —John Rusk

The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.
                                                                                    —Mason Cooley

I owe my travels to myself, to my need to touch the world with my own hands. I never paid attention to the premise that you don’t have to leave your own bedroom to know the world. I traveled, I continue traveling, and I sometimes think that in all those displacements, parts of myself are being left behind.
—Luisa Valenzuela (b. 1938) Argentinian writer

Mumbai, Striving and Sinking

MUMBAI, India — This city, before it was a city, was a dusting of seven islands in the choppy brine off India’s western coast. Beginning nearly three centuries ago, it was gradually reclaimed from the sea, seven masses forging one, and claimed by the teeming country at its back. Dangling in the Arabian Sea, it has become Mumbai, India’s stock-trading and film-making capital and its window to the world.

But if the reclaiming was complete, the claiming never was. The city was tethered to the subcontinent by a land bridge in the northern suburbs, 20 miles from the upper-crust stronghold of South Mumbai, where mainland India felt remote. The rich were in India but not of it. When news arrived of distant floods and famines, malfeasance and malnutrition, they told themselves that theirs was a world apart.

Escapism was constant. In the 1960s, young elites observed the Western music hour on All India Radio like a religion. In the 1980s, wealthy women flew to London to avoid the steamy bazaars. Recent years have brought diversions like gelato, sushi, fashion shows with Russian models, velvet-rope nightclubs, restaurants that cook the ever-less-sacred cow medium-rare.

Here the highest social boast is that you “just got back” from abroad; the loftiest praise for a restaurant is, “It’s like you’re not in India.” Mumbai’s globalized class hungers for it to be a world city, and its leaders pledge to make it Shanghai-like by 2020; the plan is, to put it gently, behind schedule. The rich blush when Madonna dines at Salt Water Grill and Angelina Jolie drinks at Indigo: portents, they say, that Mumbai will join New York, London, Paris in that coterie of names emblazoned on the epidermis of boutiques everywhere.

Arriving from overseas, one encounters first this outward-looking city. But in the layers below, a strange truth is buried. If the elite live in virtual exile, seeing Mumbai as a port of departure, the city teems with millions of migrants who see it as the opposite — a mesmeric port of arrival, offering what the mainland doesn’t: a chance to invent oneself, to break destiny.

For the writer, the Dickensian lens offers an easy view of Mumbai: wealthy and poor, apartment-dwelling and slum-dwelling, bulbous and malnourished. In office elevators, the bankers and lawyers are a foot taller, on average, than the less-fed delivery men.

Luscious skyscrapers sprout beside mosquito-prone shantytowns. This is at once a city of paradise and of hell. But Mumbai’s paradox is that it is often the dwellers of paradise who feel themselves in hell and the dwellers of hell who feel themselves in paradise.

What you see in Mumbai depends on what else you have seen. For those who grew up in Westernized homes, the standard is New York. That comparison is hard on Mumbai.

To be sure, in my five years here, which are now ending, the city has inched toward world-city status. Restaurants began to serve miso-encrusted sea bass. Indian-Western fashion boutiques started to attract global jet-setters. The air kiss became as Indian as not kissing once was.

But it takes a muscular suspension of disbelief to pretend that Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay, is what its elite wishes it were. Residents will tell you that Mumbai is “just like New York,” before launching a tirade about why it isn’t: nowhere nice to eat, same incestuous social scene, no offbeat films, no privacy. There is a sense in this crowd of a city forever striving to be what it isn’t.

Still, minute after minute, migrants pour in with starkly different pasts and starkly different ideas of Mumbai.

They arrive from India’s 660,000 villages. Perhaps the monsoon failed and crops perished. Perhaps their mother is ill and needs money for surgery. Perhaps they took a loan whose mushrooming interest cannot be repaid from cow-milking and wheat-sheafing. Perhaps they are tired of waiting for the future to come to them.

They arrive by train and locate relatives or friends to help get them on their feet. They walk the streets asking building security guards if the tenants inside need a servant. They live in cramped rooms or huts in a vast slum like Dharavi, where one million people pack one square mile.

In these labyrinthine hives, spaces and lives are shared, card games last all night and rivers of sludge navigate the gullies. And the slums ever metastasize.

These dueling claims on Mumbai explain its mongrel look: like a duty-free mall in parts, in parts like a refugee camp. The wealthy complain that the surge in migration has strained public services, turned 15-minute drives into two-hour odysseys, rendered real estate into slum estates. They say migrants spit, steal electricity, commit crime, harass women, drain the public dole.

Perhaps this is why the affluent dream of New York.

But the migrants relish Mumbai, for they know other places. Places where tradition tells you to die where you were born and live as your parents lived. Places where a son of the leather-working caste with a scientific mind must let it atrophy. Places where unapproved love can bring murder.

And in these squalid acres they savor what the wealthy take for granted: the ability to get a job without “knowing somebody”; the lightness of being without roots; the possibility of reinvention; the dignity of anonymity.

Yet it is a strange, absentee dignity. They suffer the indignities of sleeping in shanties, on sidewalks, on the hoods of their own taxis in order to earn respect in villages they may never revisit.

Walking amid the polychromatic chaos of Mumbai, one might ask: What other city so concentratedly distills the human predicament, in the fullness of its tragedy, its comedy, its absurdity and its promise?

Mumbaikars, as they are known, cannot resist one another, cannot resist Mumbai. Those who crave departure could depart if they wanted. They are still here. The newly arrived could have stayed in the villages, basking in their certainties. They too, choose to invest themselves here.

Neither investment is total, unreserved. But Mumbai works on the agglomeration of these hopes: Because so many cast their lots here, it becomes a place worth casting lots. The longer you remain, the less you notice what Mumbai looks, smells, sounds like. You think instead of what it could be. You become addicted to the companionship of 19 million other beings. Surrounded by hells, you glimpse paradise.

   ANAND GIRIDHARADAS


                                                               --The International Herald-Tribune

     See Also: SHANTARAM
     By Gregory David Roberts