The Options List

You can't always get what you want...

The perfect title for an autobiography was already taken by 1938, when British author  W. Somerset Maugham published The Summing Up. Comprised of a pretty small amount of personal information for its genre, the book instead offers a lifetime of reflections on various subjects, the best part being, I think, an examination of career choices.

Maugham was a trained physician and had worked in the secret service during World War I.  However, his ultimate vocational  pick was full time writing, despite almost starving during the first ten years.  He persisted because "an artist can be free.  In other callings (medicine, the law, etc.) you are no longer free."  Looking back on your legacy, sir, beyond the several books which became classics, you could have done a lot worse than to be a major influence on George Orwell.

Often, choosing the harder thing to do is the right thing.  Sometimes your available options look no better than Mr. Hobson's.  And often you may look back ruefully on a major missed opportunity or a wrong road taken.  Or possibly you might wonder how you had gotten so undeservedly lucky.

I can't say it any better than Amor Towles did in his 2011 book Rules of  Civility (Viking Press):

Life doesn't have to provide you any options at all.  It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics.  To have even one year when you're presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, you character, your course -- that's by the grace of God alone.

Life is less like a journey than it is a game... In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions -- we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second.  And before you know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

 

 

The Princess and the Corpse

At age sixteen in 1824 Italy's richest heiress, Cristina Trivulzio, married her prince and acquired the name she would be known as -- even though they separated soon after -- Principesa Cristina Barbiano di Belgiojoso, throughout an adventurous life, which she was lucky to escape with several times.

Cristina associated with the revolutionaries attempting, for decades, to expel foreign rulers and unite Italy.  Living in the Austrian Empire's territories in northern Italy, that attracted the attention of the Empire's police, and the principesa fled to France.  There she wrote articles in support of the struggle for independence and met with exiled rebels along with the leading intellectuals and artists of the time such as de Tocqueville and Franz Liszt.  There was time for other diversions, though, as she had a daughter (Maria) in 1838, probably fathered by her personal secretary Bolognini.

When Europe erupted in revolution in 1848, Cristina organized soldiers in Milan and supported the short-lived Roman  Republic by establishing a corps of nurses and administering a hospital.  Not pleased with her once again, the Austrian secret police meanwhile searched her villa in Locate (south of Milan) for evidence they could use to arrest her.  They did not find it, but what they did find, in a wardrobe, was the body of her secretary Gaetano Stelzi who had been deceased (from tuberculosis) for about a year.  Rumor has it the princess and her maid had embalmed Signor Stelzi in the kitchen, dressed him and hid him.  It seems she had a thing for male secretaries.

Again a step ahead of the Imperial police, Cristina escaped on a ship to Istanbul, Turkey.  She settled on a farm she had purchased, and supported by a successful opium poppy harvest, spent the next ten months touring Syria and Palestine.  Rather shocked by the subjugation of women in these lands, she wrote two books, Oriental Harems and  Scenery, and Of Women's Condition and Their Future.  

Returning to  Italy in 1856, our intrepid princess continued her work with the independence movement and finally saw unification in 1861.  What a gal.

Divided Italy in 1848

Thinking About 1066

"At the base of many a great fortune there was a great crime"

You don't have to be a history fan to know about the year 1066 A.D., when William, Duke of  Normandy, crossed the English Channel and after one battle on its southeastern shore, ended Saxon rule and rather quickly and efficiently took over the whole country.  Those who had served him were given the demesnes of the evicted Saxon lords and all the poor souls who had worked the land for them (meet the new boss!).  It was a perfect crime, and the perpetrators benefited for many generations.

There were many other well-executed thefts before and after.  Early in the First Century B.C., Roman proconsul Caepio, during the confusion of the Cimbric War in southern Gaul, found the hoard known as the Gold of Tolosa and made off with it. Where did this trove come from?  It had previously been stolen from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece by raiding Gauls. Caepio's family back in Rome, which was noble but usually short on funds, were soon known for their great wealth.  The last heir was Marcus Brutus, main assassin of Julius Caesar.

Two later thefts kept the early Empire solvent.  In 70 A.D., Titus took away the treasures of the Temple in Jerusalem after suppressing the Jewish Revolt, proudly commemorating his appropriation on the Arch which bears his name.  At least a more useful Coloseum got built also.  Emperor Trajan went after the Dacians in what is today Romania , subduing them in 107 A.D.  Do you think he probably didn't want much more from them than a cessation of their frequent raids?  Not a chance.  He relieved them of 165 tons of gold and 330 of silver.  As valuable as precious metals were the captured unfortunates who became slaves.  It is estimated that over a million Gauls suffered their liberty being stolen from them during Caesar's campaigns in what are today France and Belgium.

A multi-talented American lady, Lizzie Magie, was disenchanted with the unrestrained monopoly rampant in the U.S. economy, typified, for her and many others, by Mr .J.D. Rockefeller  In 1904, she published an outline of what she considered an instructive entertainment called "The Landlord's Game."  It circulated around, being changed and developed in the meantime.  A Quaker group in Atlantic City (of all places) renamed the property squares after their local streets.  Unemployed salesman Charles Dawson was introduced to the board game by his Quaker friends on a visit to A.C. and -- as you have probably guessed -- just took it as his own, selling it in prominent toy and department stores and then to Parker Brothers in 1934.  He didn't even come up with the catchier name; some Philadelphia business school students had.  Ms. Magie had to settle for a $500 quit-claim payment while Dawson became a multimillionaire.  They say there's little justice this side of the grave.  We  can only hope things are more honest on that other side.

Lizzie Magie, 1930s

    

A Ghost World

Nan Madol
House and canal

The Devil's Post Piles, Mammoth Lakes, California

Venice of the Western Pacific

My brother and his wife generously send me their copies of Archaeology magazine and special issues from National Geographic, which allow me to escape to lost worlds while wishing the contemporary one would get lost.  The usual areas are covered:  the Mediterranean basin, China and Indochina, ancient Britain, the Meso- and Incan Americas, but I never tire of them and you can always learn something new as season after season, dedicated people dig and translate.  But who would have thought of an imposing stone city built on a coral reef far out in the Caroline Islands, the loneliest dots in a vast ocean?

 Pohnpei Island (one of the four islands comprising today's Federated States of Micronesia) has been settled for over 2,000 years, but one would think its housing would have been built of organic materials,constantly  replaced after a generation or two or after a typhoon, and leaving little behind.  From around 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. it was the capital of an increasingly stratified society, ending with the centralized and all-powerful Saudeleur Dynasty, which ruled a population of around 25,000.  And did they leave something behind.

For hundreds of years, most intensely in the 12th century, a complex of stone houses and temples separated by canals was erected for the exclusive use of the ruling class.  Artificial islands were built on a coral reef in a lagoon off the main island for their regal isolation.  There is no food or fresh water there, so it was likely built much more for psychological effect than practical reasons.  One is immediately reminded of the Aztec and Egyptian pyramid builders and the high, formidable structures of the Inca. 

On Lake Texcoco at Tenochtitlan (today's Mexico City), the Aztecs built many such islands out of organic material, not stone, for the completely practical purpose of agriculture. Nan Madol, like today's gated communities and security-encased high rise condominiums, was built for the safety and status of an elite class only. And well-built it was, from 400,000 hexagonal basalt rock columns, shaped like logs, of up to 10 tons each which were quarried from the island's interior.  These formations are found elsewhere so we know what they look like.undisturbed (i.e., at Mammoth Lakes in California and The Giants' Causeway in Ireland). How they separated and transported and then raised them to such heights is a mystery; the orally transmitted myth has it that a magician flew them to the lagoon.  As good an explanations as we have, I suppose.

One can almost hear the long-ago king and his nobles telling the nameless people who built their private city and brought them their food (to turn Eva Peron's song in Evita upside down):  "We keep no promise; now keep your distance."