On Woman

God was pleased with his creation. In fact, nearly everything he made was good. The light he pried from the darkness of the void on the first day? Good. The gathering of waters into seas and the appearance of dry land with vegetation, seed and fruit to populate the dry land? All good, even, inexplicably, durian fruit. The two guiding lights of day and night? Both good. The sea monsters and birds? Yes, good. The animals and creeping things? Good. Even man, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has ever met a New Yorker, also good. "God saw everything that he had made," Moses tells us, "and indeed, it was very good."

There was, however, one thing that was not so good. It was not so good, God reflected, that poor Adam, solitary in his Edenic existence, should be without a peer to share in the good glory of existence.

And so God created woman. He had saved the best of his creation for last. For neither the gentle river watering the varied garden, nor the sun that set the ancient horizon ablaze seemed to arouse in Adam any emotion whatsoever. But Eve, simply standing before Adam in her unashamed nakedness, provoked in his stirring heart creation's first poem. Adam sang:

"This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

this one shall be called Woman."

There is a living recitation of this poem when we walk with our wives, our sisters and our female friends. 

To the Expert This Is the Wandring Wood

Shining through all Moses' statements was confidence, a faith that his system would work, a belief that personalities of tens of thousands of human beings could be reduced to mathematical grades, that promotions and raises could be determined by a science precise enough to give every one of those human beings the exact rewards he deserved. Asked once if it might not prove difficult to divide a job like that of janitor into different levels based on different functions and responsibilities, Moses replied flatly that it would not be difficult at all. To the expert, he said, such differences are "clearly discernible." When someone ventured to argue that it might be hard to bring under his system appointees in policy-making posts because policy-making was too subtle to measure, Moses could barely restrain his impatience. "There is no reason why it cannot be worked out in that way," he said.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975.

I'm often amused, bemused really, at the capacity of the overeducated, like our friend Bobby Mo here, to believe that human activity can be so simply regulated or reduced to mere mathematical formulae as if the improvement of social and economic intercourse were merely a matter of fiddling with the levers of society in order to find the proper balance. The social and economic world is not a toaster. It is not a scientific system operating with the precision and predictability of electric current charging through nichrome wires. It's a chessboard with infinite squares, a multiplicity of pieces,  and an inscrutable set of rules.

So whenever I read of great men and their ideas of improvement I'm reminded of Una and her Dwarfe's warning to the Redcrosse Knight as he prepared to set things right in the Cave of Errour:

"Be well aware," quoth then that Ladie milde./ 

"Least suddaine mischiefe yet too rash provoke:/

The danger hid, the place unknowne and wilde,/

Breedes dreadfull doubts: Oft fire is without smoke./

And perill without show: therefore your stroke/

Sir knight with-hold, till further triall made."/

"Ah Ladie," said he, "shame were to revoke/

The forward footing for an hidden shade:/

Vertue gives her selfe light, through darkenesse for the wade."/ 

 

"Yea but," quoth she, "the perill of this place/

I better wot then you, though now too late/

To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,/

Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,/

To stay the steppe, ere forcéd to retrate./

This is the wandring wood, this Errours den,/

A monster vile, whom God and man does hate:/

Therefore I read beware." "Fly, fly," quoth then/

The fearefull Dwarfe: "this is no place for living men."

 

"The Faerie Queene." Edmund Spenser's Poetry: Norton Critical Edition. eds Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield. W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

 

With His Tears

Image created using Google Gemini

According to classical rabbis, Moses simultaneously received the oral law, which served as the authoritative interpretations of the written law. The written Torah would include, according to all rabbinic sources (which are followed by the early church), even the book of Genesis, which represents God's narration to Moses of the early history of the world and of Abraham and his family. Some rabbinic sources even suggest that the final chapter of the Torah, Deut 34, which narrates the death of Moses, was dictated by God to Moses, who wrote it with his tears.

"Introduction to the Pentateuch." The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 2010.

I love this and I choose to believe it. 

Fiery Enough

The young idealist entered public service in the very year in which there came to crest a movement—Progressivism—that was based, to an extent greater than perhaps any other nationally successful American political movement, on an idealistic belief in man's capacity to better himself through the democratic process.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975. 

Because this intelligence, which is fiery enough to start a revolution, seems determined to bury passions in ashes, to die one day with the simplicity of mind of a peasant who has never left behind the sickle blade with which he has cut grass for seventy years out of eighty.

Sebastian, Mihail. For Two Thousand Years. Penguin Modern Classics, 2016.

I read these two sentences on the same day and my first instinct was to reach out for my copy of Бесы.

Hike Minds

And as he walked, he dreamed.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975.

Same, Bobby Mo. Same. 

Please Pardon My Cynicism, Truly

Confident that if the citzenry only knew the facts about government it would take the right steps, the three young men decided first to determine and disseminate such facts.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975.

They have yet to introduce an emoji sufficient to express the intensity of laughter, the gargantuan guffaw, that met with the reading of this sentence. 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

What framework they did have was undermined by blatant corruption, their governments controlled by private interests and by political bosses who, with their Christmas baskets and everything the baskets symbolized, marshaled hundreds of ignorant voters into vast, seemingly impregnable political machines. "With very few exceptions," asserted Andrew D. White, "the city government of the United States are the worst in Christendom—the most expensive, the most inefficient, the most corrupt."

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books, 1975.

I wonder how many post-Jane Jacobs community board meetings Caro has attended where the topic under consideration is the construction of new housing? He might need to write a new book. 

The Impossible Definition (Part I)

An experience (or an idea or feeling), and the urge to tell about it in the best possible conjunction of words.

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry. Ecco, 1994.

The dictionary definitions of poetry are terrible. The great Mary Oliver gets us closer here. 

Triborough

I had planned to begin The Power Broker on Tuesday but events beyond my control precluded that from happening.

My neighbor, an elderly and amusingly racist Hungarian man with an Ecuadorian wife of formidable indigenous extraction—an improbable coupling only made possible by Queens, New York City, USA—asked me to drive the happy couple to JFK for their annual trip to Budapest Tuesday morning. I agreed, good neighbor that I am, with the belief that this would only take a small bite out of my day. I'd have plenty of time for the book. But when the aging Inca reached the check-in desk and realized she had grabbed an old passport that had expired nine years previously a series of unfortunate events transpired that kept me busy helping these two unfortunates get to Budapest for two whole days.

The details of this misadventure with the dotards are immaterial. I only share the story to say that during my multiple travels to and from John F. Kennedy International Airport, I enjoyed the sights of outer borough New York City as seen from the Grand Central Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. All of these, reports the introduction to The Power Broker, which I finally got around to reading this morning, were built by Robert Moses.

As I am wont to do while contemplating this great metropolis, and with the standstill traffic between my apartment and the airport there was plenty of time for contemplation, I fell into an imperial reverie about the awesome nature of this city.

Is there a more imposing skyline than Manhattan which rises over the horizon like a parliament of Titan Gods as one drives west over the Grand Central Parkway? Hell, even my outer borough neigbhorhood's "downtown" is bigger and more impressive than most American real downtowns. What engineering feat is more expressive of mankind's creative genius than this colossal city? None. And then, of course, the relentless, Whitmanesque barbaric yalp that screams $1.3 trillion worth of economic dynamism at you from all sides and at all times from our wildly diverse people and their infrastructure. It's a soul-blistering circus and I love it.

So then: how to reconcile the fact that New York City is a peerless global alpha city with Caro's subtitle for this book: The Fall of New York? The pessimism of this subtitle runs throughout the introduction and culminates in a passage related to its antique epigraph: "In the evening of Robert Moses' forty-four years of power, New York, so bright with promise forty-four years before, was a city in chaos and despair." I see only a beautiful chaos and the only despair I'm familiar with are the lamentations born of an encounter with the olfactory nightmare that is Bangladeshi cuisine.

The answer to the question of how to reconcile the book's subtitle with the greatness of the city is found in the year of the book's publication and Caro's undeniable strengths as a nonfiction writer.

First, this book was published in the Fear City era of New York. The Bronx was burning. Crime and disorder was rampant. The Mets were terrible. The city was a mess. Secondly, in my opinion, Caro is arguably the greatest writer of nonfiction in the English language. He writes with the eye and ear of a novelist and like a good novelist he understands the need for a good villain. Who better, then, to blame 1970s era NYC dysfunction on than Bob Moses?

So I'll be reading the book through the lens of a Tolstoyan anti-great man theory of history and with the idea that Caro needed a villain to explain the dire straits the city found itself in during the time of the writing of the book.

Any disagreement I might have with Caro though certainly won't detract from my enjoyment of the book. I'm already in love with it. Caro is great. In particular his description of Randall's Island surrounded by a protective "moat."