Riga - An Inauspicious Arrival

We landed in Riga in drizzly overcast this morning.  There’s no one to meet me. They probably didn’t pay attention to my email about the flight change.  I couldn’t get hold of my university contact, as it’s Sunday.   Lost an earring.   Felt foolish hanging around the airport.  Weighed my options, then grabbed a cab to hotel.  Got into conversation with the cabdriver, who’s Russian.  He says the majority of people speak Russian in the cities.  I knew that Russians were a significant proportion of the population of Latvia, mainly thanks to Stalin’s machinations but I had also thought the Latvian government was actively suppressing the use of Russian.  Guess that’s not working as well as the Latvians might like.  If I can get around in Russian, I’ll feel a bit more in control.

At least check-in at the hotel went as planned.  Small place, snug, in heart of town.  Room is nondescript, with the bare essentials.  Don’t recall being so disorganized with setting up before.  I throw stuff out of the suitcases on the bed, on the chairs, on the desk, without any sorting, paying special attention to getting the suits and blouses hung before the wrinkles harden.  Gradually, I make a semblance of order.  The lack of drawers and of sufficient hangers complicates things, also the lack of shelf space in the bathroom.

Tried phone again with mixed success.  Still unable to connect with my university contact.  I send panicky email to the phone rental place, then try calling another number, that of my friend, Slava.  This time, I get a connection.  It’s a peculiar set-up: make the call, get a “call refused” message, wait a few seconds and then get a ring back and the person’s on the line.  I wonder: was the university switchboard closed because it’s Sunday?  Good thing I have email as back-up.  But this does not enhance confidence in this phone I’ve rented.

But this day will end happily.  Slava and Luda will come over and we'll got out to dinner.  Tomorrow begins my schedule and presumably, contact will be established.

Riga - On Being in Transit

After packing and schlepping, after navigating the check-in bureaucracy and the security theater, I plant myself at the gate and bask in the liberation of being in transit.  All I have, all I need rely on, is with me, like a backpacker.  There’s a sense of being in a separate world, neither “here” nor “there” as I wrote on another trip.  A strange economy in this world, though: how do these shopping concourses, with their apparel, games and jewelry kiosks stay in business?  Are there really enough customers wanting this merchandise, so overpriced?  Do people really buy last-minute gifts here?  And here’s a store selling luggage—how many people buy luggage at an airport?  A baggage disaster would require a handy luggage kiosk, but that can’t be a steady source of income.

Transatlantic flight went as usual (thankfully).  At Helsinki airport passport control the official asks the usual questions, questions he knows the answers to because they’re in front in front of him on the computer monitor: Been to Riga before?  When are you leaving, do you have a ticket for your return flight?  Some new ones: What will I be doing in Riga?  Teaching.  Teaching what? Law.  To whom?  Students at university.  He probably has those answers, too, on the monitor.  Just testing my honesty.  Officialdom knows too much.

At the gate for the plane to Riga, I changed from jeans and shirt into better pants and sweater with scarf.  I practiced “Pleased to meet you,” in Latvian.  As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered.  More in next blog post.

Ready for Riga

I'm crushed.  Three days before departure and I got the class list.  Only 14 people signed up.  My colleague who taught last spring had 25.  Maybe it’s the timing of the seminar, so soon before the Christmas holiday?  Or the topic?  Will my chef d’oeuvre on the U.S. court system be viewed by only 14 students?

Take a deep breath; this is not all about you, said my other voice.  With fewer people, there will be more opportunity for spontaneity, for discussing other topics, for being flexible with the outline.  There will be more cohesion (perhaps) and a greater likelihood of student participation in question-and-answer and in projects.  For the others who didn’t sign up: their loss!  Perhaps they will want to audit—if such a thing occurs in European universities.

In reviewing the class list, I spot one clearly Indian name, one Finnish, one Russian.  I recognize several names as Latvian but others could be either Russian or Latvian.  Too bad I bought 30 souvenir pens!   That was a month or so ago during a special trip to midtown Manhattan to hunt souvenirs.  It would have been risky to wait for the last minute on that particular chore.   CILS expects us to hand out souvenirs to the students and gifts to the professor, a kind of goodwill exercise to keep the universities interested in the CILS program.  That’s my take on it.  No, I’m not cynical; I’m just a realist.  The gift to the professor I can understand, since the university is putting me up at its cost, but really, giving students a gift for attending one’s class? I suppose I can give some of them as random gifts—Slava’s grandkids, for example

The gifts make it a challenge to pack.  I could’ve stuffed in several more shirts, even another coat maybe, if I hadn’t had to schlep heavy gift books.  Oh well.  If I need anything, I can probably buy it in Riga.  Wow—what a fraught statement that is.  When I traveled to the Baltics in the old Soviet days, one could never, ever rely on buying any necessary replacement or extra item.  Amazing what times we’ve lived through!

On Attending a Wedding

I have been invited to a wedding.  That means dragging out the formal dress and giving thanks it still fits; digging out the evening shoes and the useless evening bag, which can’t hold all the necessary items.  And packing the minimum amount of basic necessities for an overnight stay.  And hoping the traffic doesn’t delay my arrival or that any of the other dozens of things-that-can-go-wrong go wrong.

So far, so good.  The logistics go well and I arrive in time.  Now I must deal with the event.  The rabbi is excruciatingly “PC” and blathers on about what the bride and groom like, admire and treasure about each other.  This could have been omitted.  We know they have positive feelings for each other; they’re getting married, for cryin’ out loud.  And we could have been spared the successive prayers for empathy, openness, compassion, love and whatever else their getting married is supposed to improve in the world.  They’re one among millions of couples getting married; their union is not going to have that much of an effect.  Besides, we’ve been sitting patiently long enough; let’s eat.  (This is, after all, a mostly Jewish wedding.)

But even when we’re released from the lofty sentiments and allowed to party, we face a preliminary heat: the cocktail reception.  In a crowded room with insufficient tables, waiters and waitresses pass around hors d’oeuvre trays just out of my reach.  The noise of chatter mingled with piano music presses on my ears, jangles in my skull.  I escape down the hall, somewhere, anywhere where sounds are muted and I can recover a semblance of psychic balance.  When the stress ebbs, I return to make inconsequential conversation, hard enough over the background noise, harder still to grope for worthwhile things to say to people I barely know.

Finally, we are permitted to enter the ballroom for the sit-down dinner.  More loud music, to make conversation even more of an effort.  Music composed after 1956 is not meant for people in floor-length formal gowns to dance to, nor is it meant as background music.  Nor is it meant for women in high heels (if men want to wear high heels, they can bloody well dance in them if they think it’s so exciting).  I take off my shoes in order to dance and take heart from the admiring glances of other women in evening shoes.  I’m further validated by the sight of still other women who’ve taken their own shoes off.  So I manage to do what has to be done: eat, drink, congratulate, dance – and leave as soon as acceptable after the dessert.

I think people should elope.  It spares many of us a great deal.

On Napoleon and Conquerors in General

I don't know whether Napoleon is universally admired (except, perhaps by the French) or whether Alexander the Great is considered a hero outside Greece or Macedonia.  Both were complex men and the achievements of both included positive things along with blood and mayhem.  Napoleon toppled much of the medieval structures that permeated Europe and introduced the idea of "civil" society; i.e., a society that was not based on a state religion for the regulation of human activity.  I doubt that even Napoleon's most fervent admirers would downplay, let alone deny, the carnage his conquests produced.  Alexander marched east leaving devastation and death behind but established a link between eastern Europe and Asia that endured despite different empires and religions.

One can debate the merits and demerits of empires, but I have been particularly amused and confused to hear notionally progressive people comment admiringly on empires, for example that of Genghiz Khan.  His present-day admirers note that it was said (by whom, I forget) that a woman could walk from one end of the empire to the other bearing a load of gold without being molested. That's after he piled up mountains of skulls, so I guess there were no people left to molest travelers.  But some folks persist in liking centralized power for supposedly keeping things (and people) organized.  And to give the devil his due, empires have the effect of bringing people into contact, which has advantages.

Our history is never totally abhorrent, let alone totally benign.

On re-re-reading Tolkein

Having finished the stack of library books (and having no time to troll the shelves for more) and having finished the week's magazines, I was desperate for reading material.  I can't eat supper without a book propped front of me and what else is there to do afterwards?  TV has many channels of nothing to watch; the Internet has many more Web pages of not much at all.  I was in the mood for escape fiction, and fantasy is my favorite type.  There are hundreds of new titles out, but as with the library, so with the bookstore: no time to troll through the shelves.  Besides, so much of the new stuff seems juvenile lately.  More on that perhaps in another blog. 

I took down my dog-eared paperbacks of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  "The world's only four-book trilogy," quipped my friend Rick in our college days.  Why not read them again?  I forgot how many times I’d read them before, but enough time has passed that many of the details are hazy.  One test of a good author is whether you can discover new things in his work each time you read it, and Tolkein is no exception.  In previous readings, I had recognized the shift in author tone between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the similarity between the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the stages of a chess game, and Tolkein’s focus on vegetation and terrain.  I wondered what would strike me this time.

This time, I was struck by the borrowings in Tolkien's tone, sometimes quaintly medieval, sometimes downright biblical.  I was also struck by the formality of the characters' dialogues.  Their speech patterns were like oratory, not conversation.  Suitable for heroic literature, as Tolkein intended.  I looked for Tolkein's anti-modernist bias, which reviewers and critics had noted.  It was there, at some times more subtle than at others, downright overt in the final volume.  In the second volume, Orthanc, Saruman's tower, and Mordor itself are described in terms that one might use for an industrial wasteland.  The "ruffians" who cause all manner of sorrow in The Shire in the last volume are a cross between fascist gangs, industrial union-busters and communist commissars.

As before, I noted the difference in tone between The Hobbit and the books of LOTR.  The Hobbit is whimsical.  Its tone reminds me of Kenneth Grahame’s tone in The Wind in the Willows.  In both works the author occasionally breaks into the third-person narrative to offer dry observations on the characters and the situations.  There is a consummate "Englishness" about the worlds of both; both authors exalt their characters’ tidy homes and orderly, ordinary lives.  Tolkein’s hobbits abhor adventure; Grahame’s Mole frantically sets about to rescue Rat from heading off to sea after his imagination was fired by the stories told him by a wandering seaman rat.

Like The Wind in the Willows, there is a stream of wry humor running through The Hobbit, as if Tolkein himself couldn’t really believe he was writing a story about a small humanoid dodging trolls and slaying dragons.  My favorite example is the scene in which Bilbo, having rescued the dwarves and brought them to Lake-town, catches cold and can only say "Thag you very buch" to the dwarves as they toast his health.  The fantastical adventures juxtaposed with stuffed-nose dialogue—what could be more drily English?

Once we enter the world of Lord of the Rings though, the mood is quite different: lofty, formal, elegiac, nostalgic, even gloomy.  Although it’s the same world as that of The Hobbit, we’re given to understand that the civilization which nurtured Bilbo and his contemporaries is fading away even as its greatest threat, Sauron, is vanquished.  With Sauron's fall, nothing will be as good as it was before the One Ring was destroyed.  Even when the Ring was in play, when all the good guys of Middle Earth were fretting about Mordor's threats, they told themselves things weren't as good as they were in the Old Days and were never going to be.  Their gloomy prediction is borne out when in the end, with the One Ring gone, the Elves must leave.  Their rings no longer work and their exquisite forests and dwellings must fade.  At the moment of triumph, Middle Earth loses something unique and noble: the elves, who are the acknowledged superior to humans and hobbits, not only physically but also in taste and culture, like the English aristocracy.  The humans who remain are a lesser sort.  Aragorn, the only human who comes close to the elves in stature (and who has the unique privilege of marrying one), is the last of the Dunedain, “supermen” of a past age.  We don't really know where they came from (unless The Silmarillion provides that information) and why, exactly, they were so superior, but Tolkein makes it clear that he considers humans and hobbits a comedown on the Middle Earth evolutionary scale.

Whence comes this nostalgia for the Good Old Days?  This phenomenon goes back to the Greeks, if not before.  The Greeks believed in a first age of gold, followed by one of silver and now ("now" being 500 B.C.E.) the disappointing, degraded age of copper.  Maybe every human civilization has tales of a better, more heroic and virtuous past.  Anyone who seriously studies history knows that the old days were not at all wonderful.  Maybe it's a universal human habit to think the past was better.  Maybe it originates from thinking about childhood when everything seemed to be so easy.  But anyone who really reviews his or her childhood will come up against rough spots: the helplessness, the lack of control, the petty humiliations visited by siblings and classmates.  As with individual lives, so with history.  The past was rife with incurable diseases, food shortages, hard labor and little opportunity for individual betterment.

Exalting the past seems irrational, but Tolkein plays it straight in LOTR, in contrast to his wry irony in The Hobbit.  Perhaps the suspension of irony is necessary to produce heroic literature.  Indeed, there's not a trace of irony in LOTR, let alone humor.  No one cracks a joke; although there are a few occasions marked by song and merriment, but they are fleeting.  Not even violence merits irony in LOTR.  War in Middle Earth is a means to achieve glory and to accomplish something worthwhile, as the dying Theoden says to his nephew Eomer.  No disillusioned pacifism for Tolkein; the epic tale he has to tell must have drama and what more intense drama than war?  Epics can't be built on economic activity.  Heroes don't import and export; glory isn't accomplished by growing crops.  After Sauron’s defeat, Tolkein must end his tale because he has nothing more of interest to write about.  Aragorn will be presiding over a kingdom that is no longer under threat, and his subjects will have to make a living.  You can’t make a heroic fantasy novel about that.

On Finding Nothing of Interest on the Internet

Formerly, it was 500 TV channels and nothing to watch (still is, in fact, for the most part).  Now it's 2 billion (give or take 10 million) Websites and nowhere to surf.  I've posted snarky replies to snarky comments, informative replies to ignorant comments and appreciative replies to intelligent comments.  I've skimmed articles and essays that say things I've agreed with and things I’ve disagreed with.  Everything I’ve read seems like something I’ve read before, somewhere else.
 

Walt Kelly wrote, "Ah the mystery of foreign tongues … if we could plumb their secrets, a pall of dismay would fall upon a world newly tutored in the knowledge that dullards about in every clime."   So it is with plumbing the depths of this planetary bulletin board that is the Internet.  I must log off and resume real life.