Busted! Martha and Co. strolling away from the knishery on Thanksgiving afternoon. And, no, she doesn’t have the power to melt faces. I did that…

I like to flatter myself that I’m a savvy little rat — after all, I was a mere stripling when I gave God himself the heave ho — no small accomplishment in a house full of Irish Catholics. And, yet, I am occasionally surprisingly susceptible to matters of faith in more prosaic matters. Like most people, I tend to believe what I’m told — even by people I don’t personally know, at all. Especially when they live in my television.

Artist’s rendering.

I had my faith thrown in my face on Thanksgiving Day. I stayed in the city this year and my friend Frank and I made plans to see a movie and eat Chinese. Around four in the afternoon I made my way to the Sunshine cinema on the Lower East Side and, arriving ahead of my friend, decided to stop into Yonah Shimmel’s Knishery next door to the theater to get a cup of borscht. I walked into the small restaurant and was immediately met with the image of Martha Stewart sitting at a table with her daughter Alexis and some guy. It was surprising enough seeing her in such a place but seeing her there at dinner time on Thanksgiving Day was nothing less than stunning. It was like running into Santa Claus at the movies on Christmas Eve. My first impulse was to whip out my camera and document it but thought better of pissing her off (she has done time in the slammer, after all). So I quietly paid for my soup and posted myself outside the restaurant where I snapped the shot of her walking away that appears above.

Journalistic truthiness: Mythical Martha’s Thanksgiving.

My friend was more than stunned when he saw her — he was pissed. As he rightly pointed out, at that exact moment women all over the country were breaking their backs trying to live up to the image of homespun perfection that Stewart trades on — going so far as to publish a calendar in each issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine that purports to map out the daily activities of the domestic diva. I suggested that maybe she avoids cooking on Thanksgiving precisely because she does so much the rest of the year, but realized as I said it how hollow the apology sounded. The faith shattering truth was unavoidable: if she doesn’t cook on Thanksgiving, for God’s sake, then there’s no reason to believe any of it.

As tempting as it would be to castigate Stewart it really wouldn’t be fair — she’s just taking advantage of a need we have to project our desire for perfection onto idols. Her magazine is a dream book for women (and men) who desire a home life that is… impeccable. Whether attainable or not is another story. This was brought home poignantly when I paged through the copy of the magazine that I took the calendar image above from. Nestled among the photographs of delectable dishes and clever home designs was an ad for an anti-depressant drug. It was jarring to see — as jarring as seeing Martha chilling over a knish on the Lower East Side on Thanksgiving Day. But similarly enlightening, too.

• The House around the Corner
• Amy Sedaris and Martha Stewart – a classic
• Fashion Conciousness

Catholicism on the Cheap Charles (Matthew Goode), Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) and Julia (Hayley Atwell), surrounded by similarly gaudy decoration

We’ve been spoiled. For years, Merchant Ivory and Granada produced lush period productions of classic English novels that were feasts for the eyes and the intellect and that forever set a standard — and expectations — for the kind of historical drama that we could expect from British cinema. What an unpleasant surprise then to witness the remake of Brideshead Revisited that is currently in release. We can never again assume artfulness on the part of British filmmakers — even when it comes to handling their national treasures. The new film, cobbled together by screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies and directed by Julian Jarrold, turns the passionate story of Charles Ryder’s religious redemption into a period potboiler about a love triangle gone wrong.

The original television film, serialized by Granada Television in 1981, arrived like a comet, surpassing Evelyn Waugh’s novel and becoming a significant artistic achievement on its own. Upon its first showing by PBS in the US, each episode was introduced by William F. Buckley and was analyzed afterward by Buckley in conversation with British journalist Malcolm Muggerridge. They provided context and illumination of Catholic themes in the story that might have been opaque to a nation of American Protestants. It was a big deal.

And rightly so. Over a period of 11 hours, writer John Mortimer and director Charles Sturridge invested their production with the kind of luxurious detail that only time can afford. The result was something greater than the source material from which it was drawn, with fully developed characters and complex themes that did not want for explanation. Listening to Charles’ narration, taken directly from the novel, we stand beside him at Oxford and Brideshead Castle and experience his development as a man and lover, first with Sebastian and later with Sebastian’s sister Julia. We are seduced as he is by the aquatint landscapes, the summers redolent with strawberries and wine and the rains in Venice. The affair with Sebastian is not explicit but suggested and indirect, as it would be for adolescents first learning how to love. When Cara, mistress of Lord Marchmain, speaks directly of Charles’ and Sebastian’s “romantic friendship” it is a bit jarring and we feel the embarrassment that Charles expresses to have this love given a name. But our discomfort is relieved by her sympathy and proclamation of, “how wonderful it is to sit in the shade and speak of love.” Wonderful indeed.

There is no such subtlety in the current remake. In order to fit the novel into two hours incredible liberties are taken with the story. Sebastian, one of the most charming characters ever written, is presented as a petulant hysteric with a drinking problem. His decline is precipitated not by feelings of inadequacy before the terrible demands of his faith but by seeing Charles making out with his sister. And Julia, whose own religious crisis as a woman makes up the later part of the novel, is here presented as a Lolita with a bad conscience. She has the requisite breakdown, but the audience is left in the dark as to why.

Emma Thompson, channeling her inner Rommel, is all frosty white hair and adamantine jawline — delivering her stark speeches with almost comic ferocity. She plays Lady Marchmain as self-propelled battle axe, wantonly destroying her children with sadistic abandon. When she pronounces to Charles that happiness in this life “does not matter” and that life in the hereafter is all that counts, she turns one of the most complex characters in modern English literature into a simple Cruella DeVille knock-off. By the time of her abbreviated death scene (indicated by the clichéd little cough and stagey stagger) the audience wants to sing a chorus of “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead”. Terrible.

Though there are futile attempts at referencing the religious themes that make up so much of the book and earlier film, Waugh’s condemnation of “English charm” is utterly absent. Charm, for Waugh a particularly British penchant for the pose of guileless generosity, is fundamentally a method of seduction — it is what leads Charles Ryder astray and, ironically, acts as an agent of his eventual salvation. No, in this telling, Charles is merely a ravenous bounder — charged with being “greedy” by Julia and condemned by Lady Marchmain as wanting, “so much to be liked.” More egregiously, Lord Marchmain accuses Charles from his deathbed of having failed in love and being responsible for Sebastian’s fate. I wonder if this stunning reversal of the meaning of the Ryder character — which turns the logic of the story on its head — was even noticed by the screenwriters.

It’s not clear for whom this movie was made. It lacks any sensible logic that would appeal to adults and, with its dolled up period references and discordant invocation of Catholic themes, can hardly appeal to the current crop of young moviegoers for whom history doesn’t extend beyond yesterday’s text messages. It’s a dismal thing; not here nor there, neither this nor that. We can only hope it dies a quick death at the box office, leaving in its wake a warning to others who would tamper with greatness.

• Brokeback Redux
• Review: Third (Portishead)
• Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Jack Kerouac didn’t make it to 50 — he died in 1969 at the age of 47 from a gastric hemorrhage following decades of alcohol abuse. Wednesday September 5th marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road. I wonder if he’d be happy that after all these years the book is not only still in print, but selling 100,000 copies a year. Maybe not, considering that by the end of his life he’d turned his back on a lot of the passions of his youth. Drunk, bitter and lonely, he ended up being the antithesis of the free-wheeling angelheaded hipster he’d aspired to be once — cloistered away in his mother’s bungalow with a bottle, about as far from the open road as he could get.

Like many books that become a phenomenon, On the Road arrived at just the right place and just the right time. Simultaneously classic in its appropriation of the theme of the journey as a hero’s quest for transcendence and radical in its interpolation of modern jazz-infused rhythms of language, the book tapped into a nascent taste among youth of the day for a mythology of their own. It appeals still. There aren’t many young men, especially, who read about the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and don’t feel intoxicated by the rush of Kerouac’s language and the promise of freedom that lies out there somewhere just beyond the horizon. But, of course, it’s one thing to write it; it’s another thing to live it. Transcendence is not for sissies. Kerouac, rooted in working-class Catholicism, pantomimed a quest for deeper spiritual connection to God and the people around him — but could never really make the leap, even when he had a spirit guide right in the seat next to him. Neal Cassady was the real Beat, the man who inhabited fully every mad moment of his life — the good and the bad — completely open to the sanctity of uninhibited existence. Kerouac idolized him, but he couldn’t be him. He couldn’t even consummate their relationship, though Neal was more than willing. Perhaps he felt unworthy.

Though I’m well past my own idolization of the Beats and Kerouac in particular, I made a small pilgrimage to the house in my neighborhood where On the Road was written. A few years ago, the New York Times reported that apartments at 454 West 20th Street in Chelsea [were up for sale] — the cheapest one costing $2.5 million. How times have changed since Jack banged out the legendary scroll during Benzedrine-fueled marathons. But walking around the block, I did get a sense of his presence. Moran’s saloon is still around the corner, as it was then, and we can be sure he knew that place. And across the street there still stands the imposing brick and stone seminary that would have been his view. That seemed especially fitting. Sitting in his room like a latter day monastic scribe, pouring out a wild American hymn of beatification onto an endless scroll, the shadow of his faith falling across the window.

• Madeleine, the tesseract, and me
• Brokeback Redux
• Hillary’s Consolation (prize)

All I will say is that I find it interesting that God’s servant on Earth was taken at age 73, when my chain-smoking, hard-drinking, divorced parents made it to 74 and 76 respectively. Probably doesn’t mean a thing. I’m just sayin’…

• Born Too Late…
• The Semiotics of Smoke
• Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A slick self-promoter best known in New York as a man who never met a microphone he didn’t like and who made his name during the notorious [Tawana Brawley fiasco], Sharpton hardly seemed the proper foil for Hitchens’ intellectual challenge of scripture and its place in public life. Though “ordained” at the age of nine (whatever that means), he has never shown much ethical compunction in his own public life, so it was unclear how he could be seen as a defender of religious ethics in the public lives of others. Perhaps, having recently achieved a coup of sorts by raking Don Imus over the coals for his racist mutterings and contributing to his downfall, Sharpton felt that he was anointed to speak on matters of public morals. Ah, but as we know from Proverbs 16:18 Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. As events would turn out to show…

The Debate of the Century. Pardon the shakiness of the shot, I was snoring when I took it.

Moderator Jacob Weisberg of Slate started the proceedings off by asking each of the participants to make an opening statement and Hitchens, still thinking this was a real debate, took to it with gusto, riffing on Sharpton’s age nine ordination by remarking that at about the same age he had lost his faith as a result of being able to see through the idiotic explanations that the nuns who taught him provided for natural phenomena (e.g., vegetation was made green by God because that is the most restful color for people to view). He wrote his book because he is offended by the increasing insistence of the faithful to introduce religion into formerly secular areas of public life. Likening theocracies to North Korea, he argued for reason as the basis of politics. Bulldog that he is, Hitchens then prepared to destabilize his opponent by treading onto truly holy ground for African-Americans: the religious motivation of Martin Luther King. He raised the question of whether King — who had studied Hegel and other philosophers — required religion to support the moral imperative of desegregation, or merely used references to Genesis and Exodus as metaphor. Saying that he preferred to refer to King as “Doctor”, a truly honorific title, he closed his speech by saying pointedly to Sharpton that the title “Reverend” was something to be lived down. Ouch.

He needn’t have brought out the big guns because it was clear within minutes that Sharpton brought nothing in return. Though the book under debate had surely been provided to him in advance, Rev. Al’s reading of it apparently never got past the title because in his response — and throughout the interminable event — he merely stated that Hitchens argument was apparently with the misuse of religion by certain of the faithful, but did not directly address why, in fact, God is not great. It was a rather literal reading of even just the title, but it was a point nonetheless. Hitchens — I imagine already popping a bead or two of cold sweat — explained that there was no way to know whether God existed or not, so his book dealt with its operational manifestation in public life. Wasted breath. Sharpton, who would not or could not respond to Hitchens’ criticism of scripture, merely repeated his complaint and added that, in addition to the goodness of God standing outside the veracity of scripture (the debate, such as it was, was ceded at that point), God was required for the goodness of men, else we are lost to the perils of moral relativism.

I watched Hitchens throughout the increasingly inane parrying that followed. At first he seemed to relish having such an easy adversary and there was some delight in receiving Sharpton’s coup de grace of the evening when he referred to Hitchens as a “man of faith” because he still believed in Saddam’s WMDs (applause), but by the time Sharpton said, “In the name of God North Korea has done bad things” I think it started dawning on Hitchens the awful implications of the evening for him. He was visibly squirming toward the end when Sharpton started referring to him, for some reason, as “Richard”: he had become the second banana in a bad comedy called The Rev. Al Show. That the story that came out of the debate was all about The Gaffe, wherein Sharpton said that we don’t have to worry about a Mormon running for president because, “those that really believe in God will defeat him anyway”, could only pour salt on a wound.

As I said at the start, I almost feel sorry for Christopher Hitchens. The author of [Why Orwell Matters], diminished by his public alliance with a government that Orwell would have despised, still tries in his brutish way to carry forth the fight against fascism. That’s what the atheist polemic is about, though even there his punch doesn’t land. He’s late to a party that, since the resurgence of the Democrats in the last election, is already breaking up. He’s got the stink of yesterday on him and if he’s not careful he’s heading toward irrelevance and more public embarrassments like this one.

• Preaching to the choir
• Jerry Falwell faces judgment. Finally.
• Madonna Dearest

Video of the late [Rev. Kenneth Hagin] leading a “Holy Laughter” Pentecostal revival meeting. A sociological goldmine. Small wonder the mainstream churches are losing members — who could compete with this?

• Taking to the Streets
• Short Bites
• Mark Allen and Lypsinka’s Lovechild

Forty years ago, Time magazine detonated a bombshell with [a cover story] on the decline of religion in America. Caused quite a stir back in the day. Reading it today, the article is remarkable for, among other things, the contrast with the world as we know it: back then not only were lay people comparatively unreligious (they quote a Harris poll showing that though 90+ percent of respondents professed belief in God, less than a third considered themselves very religious), but theologians and leaders of mainstream churches were actively moving away from the concept of a personal God in order to fall into step with congregants. Forty years later we know how long that lasted. And yet, just recently it seems, voices of radical dissent are bubbling up. Atheists like [Sam Harris], Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are suddenly everywhere, writing books, giving talks, appearing on television and YouTube. Following them is a phalanx of suddenly animated scientists and intellectuals decrying the dangerous effects of religious faith. The New York Times, in a [story] on a conference of scientific apostates recently held at the Salk Institute in California, quotes Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg as saying, “anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.” Deicide is the new new thing.

Why now? Probably because of 9/11 and Iraq. For the past five years Americans have been witnessing the results of fundamentalist faith — ours and theirs — on our lives and they don’t like what they see. This is worse than a bunch of loony Bible-beaters trying to teach the kids of Kansas that Adam and Eve chased dinosaurs around the Garden of Eden — it’s life and death. Dangerous times call for radical remedies and, so, dissenting voices that might otherwise have remained unheard are given an opportunity to blunt the effects of radical faith. I see it as akin to the Democratic sweep of Congress — not really a signal that people are walking away from conservatism so much as angling for mental breathing room.

Into the breach steps Richard Dawkins of Oxford University. Until recently Dawkins was known as an evolutionary biologist whose major contribution was as a popularizer of Darwinian theory in books like [The Selfish Gene] and [The Blind Watchmaker]. He’s always been an ardent atheist, more than willing to lace into his religious adversaries with a lancet-like tongue, but since the runaway success of his book [The God Delusion], he’s turned into a freethinking entrepreneur. His very elaborate [website] doubles as a portal of sorts to all things atheist, including lists of local chapters of atheist organizations, backlists of lectures and videos, forums and event calendars — even an online store (”Coming soon!”). Dawkins is the de facto leader of the new atheist movement and he’s traveling far and wide to spread the good word on God’s bleak fate — even to Lynchburg Virginia — hometown of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University:

This video is the 70 minute Q&A session that Dawkins held at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg. The session consisted of many visiting students from Liberty trying to best Dawkins with not-very-subtle challenges to his statements about the illogic of religious belief. As might be expected, Liberty University doesn’t attract the most intellectually gifted youngsters in America, so Dawkins deflects their pathetic challenges without breaking a sweat — but a few interesting things happen that offer insights into Dawkins himself. At one point a young woman from Randolph-Macon asks if it is common for people experiencing “deconversion”, or loss of faith, to feel angry. Dawkins professes naive ignorance of what she means. He asks the crowd if they share her experience and there is a resounding chorus of agreement. He seems baffled at the idea of anger as the result of enlightenment. It’s a remarkable moment, not just because it betrays a profound ignorance of the psychological complexity of others but a stunning lack of self-awareness. The man is driven by anger.

I’ve often wondered why public atheists — people who make an issue of other people’s faith — are so exercised by what others believe. It’s a small minority — in any culture — that are really crazy with religion and pose a threat of intellectual or bodily harm and they can (and should) be dealt with through legal methods and public ridicule. But we all know that most people wear their faith like a suit of sturdy clothes. They take it out of the closet a few times a year for ritual purposes, march up the aisle in it, then, when the candles have been snuffed and the holy books put away, return it to the closet and go about their lives rationally, comforted in the knowledge that God is there if they need him. Why rob them of something benign and comforting — to what end? Why are atheists so angry at God? Do they ever ask themselves this question?

Maybe not. At one point in the Q&A a meaty fellow from Liberty gets up to answer one of Dawkins’ challenges to God’s existence based upon the laws of nature by basically saying, “God plays by different rules.” The inability or unwillingness of the young man to engage his critical faculties in argument is almost too much for Dawkins to bear and he dismisses the young man by saying, “well if you want to believe that it’s up to you.” Then, just a few minutes later a young woman stands up and timidly asks what may have been the most subtle and profound challenge of the evening to Dawkins’ tirade against faith. “What if you’re wrong?” she says very quietly.

“What if YOU’RE wrong?!” he barks back at her. The young woman stands quietly as he stares her down and is too gracious (or perhaps intimidated) to mention that his response is not an argument.

UPDATE 12/25: ‘Tis the season — Edge.org posts [photos] of Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris posing by their (*gasp*) Christmas trees.

More importantly, The New York Review of Books [reviews] The God Delusion and finds Dawkins… underwhelming.

• Preaching to the choir
• 50 Years On the Road
• Here Come the Memorials

The book under discussion, a pocket-sized polemic (literally, at 5 x 7.5 inches and less than 100 pages), is hardly worthy of serious consideration. It simply rehashes ages-old atheist complaints about the inconsistencies of ancient religious texts and the disconnect between the moral protestations of conservative Christians and their immoral behavior. In it, he holds up a straw man version of Christianity — closely identified with the loonier precincts of the faith — and ridicules it.

Ho hum.

The entire effort reeks of “up-sell”, an attempt by Harris and his publisher to make a few more coins off the popularity of his first book, [The End of Faith], especially during a political season where the Christian Right and GOP are expected to take a drubbing in the mid-term elections. Though the book is written in the form of an open letter to Christians, no faithful Christian would touch it — it’s clearly targeted to the legions of Harris fans who have turned him into something of a star on the freethinking left. Fans like the spry little lady who popped up during audience Q&A and prefaced her question by gushing that she considered Harris to be one of the smartest people on the planet! She then asked him how he would solve some of the more vexing problems facing the world. You know — from an atheist perspective. I don’t think the irony of her question — asking an atheist for his prescription for salvation — was lost on Harris, who looked pained and remarked, “Yes, I was waiting for that question.”

It’s too bad Harris isn’t using his intelligence to plumb the more essential qualities of religious fervor (such as the spry lady’s desire for a figure in which to invest her faith) and seriously analyzing how they do or do not adapt to a world made more dangerous by technology. But that would require seriousness and subtlety and one thing you will not find in books like his, or those of his zealous friends Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins, is subtlety. They are quite happy to chuck thousands of years of bathwater out with the accursed baby. Granted, there is something exhilarating about calling out crazy religious ideas — but it’s the same exhilaration a 16-year-old feels once he realizes that he can thumb his nose at God without fear of a lightening bolt. One would hope that by the time he is old enough to write books, the nose-thumber had acquired a more sophisticated view of the meaning of religion in the life of humanity.

Harris is supposedly working toward a Ph.D. in neuroscience. We can see where this is going. He aims to find the part of the brain that lights up when we think of God and surely it will only be a short jump from there to finding a cure for what ails us. But who, of those who need it most, will buy it?

• God’s Assassin
• Hitchens debates Sharpton. Both lose.
• Why do I blog (when I do)?

The story has the familiar hallmarks of “trend journalism”, where a few examples, liberally seasoned with grab quotes from “experts” are cooked up into a souffle of national “crisis”. Stein presents just four examples of healthcare workers who withheld services: an ambulance driver who would not transport a woman to have an abortion, “fertility specialists” (2, 10, 100?) who would not assist a lesbian with artificial insemination, a pharmacist who would not provide the morning after pill to a rape victim, and a nurse who won’t dispense abortifacients. Though the writer opines that the problem is serious and will only get more serious as new controversial therapies related to stem cells, etc. come up, it’s pretty clear this is primarily about abortion — with maybe a sprinkling of homophobia for good measure. This is news?

Maybe to Stein it is. I grew up in a small town in upstate New York where social conventions were, well, conventional — and internalized. I have a feeling that more than a few young women seeking abortions as a method of birth control would have traveled out of town to Albany to get a service that they would have felt uncomfortable asking from their local physician — if it was even provided. Right or wrong, my point is that there is nothing new to this. The more interesting question from a journalistic point of view would have been the regional character of this “crisis”, and how it relates to socio-economic level. One can look for hints about these factors in the Washington Post story — a number of the healthcare workers are from the south or midwest, as is the one patient quoted — but it is not addressed directly. Harder to make the case that this is a national issue, if it tends to happen more where one would expect it to happen — in the Bible Belt.

The bias of the writer is showing in the way he fails to detail even the specific cases he cites as evidence. The situation of the pharmacist who denied the abortifacient to the rape victim stands out by contrast as this is counter to what most people would consider morally acceptable. But the other cases seem less stark, more along the lines of social control: discouraging behavior (such as abortion as a method of birth control) by making it difficult. Not impossible. As Stein notes, patients do get the services they want, but from other people. I see nothing wrong with this. I suspect Stein does — he wants care providers to leave their moral and religious beliefs at the door of the examination room and pharmacy. You can often tell the writer’s bias by reading the penultimate paragraphs in a story like this — that’s the point in the arc of a story where the writer presents the view he wants you to take away, often couched in carefully chosen quotes or things like “Others say…”. In this case, we are left with “Others” who “say that professional responsibility [to provide controversial services] trumps personal belief”. Further, “Doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who cannot find a way to fulfill their responsibilities should chose [sic] other professions, some say.” Got it, Rob.

Small wonder people brand the media as liberally biased. There could well be an interesting story here, about the types of services (e.g. abortion in toto, vs. as a method of morning after birth control) that people are refusing to deliver, where it’s really happening and what the implications for social effects are (e.g., do unwanted pregnancies decrease in an area where abortion as a method of birth control is made more difficult?). Maybe someone at the Washington Post will do more footwork to find out for us.

• Prayer 0, Stairmaster 1
• Short Bites
• Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

He was rail thin, obviously very ill. His clothes weren’t shabby but they were too young for him — baggy jeans and an outsized sweatshirt — though the day was warm and bright. “They’re donated clothes,” I thought. The pants’ seat was dirty from street grime. He moved so slowly.

I threw away the butt, went into the building and headed downstairs to the restaurant for lunch. But it wouldn’t work this time. The incredible absurdity of what I had done replayed itself in my head. Hannah Arendt made her mark recognizing that evil is often the result of banality. Evil can also be an absurdity. I told him I had nothing for him and my pocket was full of money. I was about to spend some of it to make my fat ass fatter and that man looked like he was starving to death. Why had I lied? What was I protecting?

For a moment — and all of this happened within a matter of seconds — I bargained with myself that, from this moment on, I would make it a rule never to deny a beggar. That worked for about one second. What about this beggar? Then the thinking simply… stopped. I turned on my heel and headed back up the stairs, went out of the building and searched for him. Couldn’t find him in the midtown lunchtime throngs. I headed in the direction I had last seen him and, getting to the corner, looked both ways. Found him about 50 feet away. As I approached he was submitting his request to a young man who sinned just as I had done. I was tempted to review the face of the young man as the interaction ended, but denied myself that. It would be selfish and it wasn’t about him.

I walked up and put my hand on the man’s shoulder and in that moment acknowledged how rarely I touch anyone that I haven’t know for years. He stopped and looked at me, not wary, not fearful, not anything beyond present. And now we have to turn the handle on the zoetrope very slowly because time shifted. In a matter of perhaps two seconds I said, “You asked me for something. Will this help?” and offered five dollars. He looked down, took the money and said, “God bless you, sir.” I smiled and nodded and walked back into the building. And that was that. But this is what really happened:

I looked at his face. It was a small sweet face, very lined and weathered, fringed with gray hair that squeezed out from under his baseball cap. His eyes were reddened and deadened but he saw me. I looked away in shame and then looked back because I couldn’t just walk away without acknowledging our interaction. I smiled, I hoped reassuringly. He couldn’t react quickly, his ailing body couldn’t. He looked after me as I walked through the door and I felt as heartbroken as I have ever felt in my life because I couldn’t linger with him. Even for another moment.

A long time ago I took a class with Sara Ruddick at the New School that addressed the question of thinking on moral action. Finally, I know what to say in class: thinking may promote benevolence — but it may also inhibit native compassion and attention to “the small voice within”, as Iris Murdoch referred to it, that can lead us to treat others humanely. The thoughts I had after I walked away from that man, and the lesson learned, are too personal to write about. But the experience opened my eyes to the possibility of everyday grace in a world hardened by personal fears and cold abstractions. Out of nowhere, unbidden, a man asked me a simple question and, perhaps, hopefully, changed the way I treat people as I go through my days.

Believe it or not I’m not religious. Really.

“And when we think we lead, we are most led.”
- Lord Byron

• Autumn in New York
• Heath Ledger
• Thinking of Mom