The Novel “Madame Bovary”; A 160-year Marvel by Gustave Flaubert

Just finished my first-time read of the novel “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert (the Marx-Aveling translation). Wow! Flaubert highlights what I believe is one of the most important universal questions we all repeatedly need to ask ourselves. For example, the question of the vastness and richness of life, and the potential experience and response to our lives well beyond merely: “Good little Daddy gets up and makes breakfast; “Good little Daddy goes to work”; “Good little Daddy comes home and reads the evening paper, and is a great family man”; repeat, repeat, repeat, etc.

Below is a related excerpt from The New Yorker magazine (11.5.17) from a Professor Roxana Robinson, on teaching Madame Bovary to her students each year at Hunter College:

“At the start, Flaubert encourages us to judge her [Madame Emma Bovary]. But by the end he asks us to consider what it means to sacrifice everything for a dream. He asks us to consider human dreams and their worth. He asks who among us are heroes. He asks us to consider the human body, which is such an intimate partner in our lives. How Emma’s body, so strong and vigorous in her pursuit of love, finally compels a dreadful reckoning over which she has no control.”

We begin 2020; “the strings are all in one another’s way . . .”

As we start the new year 2020, I begin with, what I consider is, a great passage from William Faulkner’s novel Absalom. Absalom!   I grew up with my father being an avid reader, including his great liking of William Faulkner.   My late father, a lawyer, would say that Faulkner’s novels were very appealing as Faulkner never shied away from acknowledging the negative underbelly of life, but at the same time never included these elements with a sense of judgment or preaching. These negative elements are depicted as an inevitable, and universal, component of our lives.

On the flip side, my father also often reiterated that this non-judgment does not mean that we simply become a passive doormat and let the world’s negative elements run us over.  No.  We should deal, as necessary, head-on with these elements using whatever response, including reasonable force, is required.

Now, after I have been lawyering for many years, where I believe we tend to veer off this non-judgmental path is when we fret and fume about the principle of a negative element. If not held in check, we focus more on being upset, and wasting valuable time, pondering and ruminating in principle about the “why”, “how dare they”. “why does it have to be this way”, “why do we have evil”, etc. Instead, I believe we are better off trying to concentrate only on actually addressing these situations directly and head on without the wasted expenditure of unnecessary fretting and rumination. This is simply my offer of food for thought as we begin 2020.

Below is the Faulkner excerpt that, in my opinion, plays directly into the suggestion I set forth above for all of us (including for me).  I believe Faulkner’s commentary is a great, realistic summary of life that can help us not fret and fume in wishing it were otherwise:

You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter.

William Faulkner, from Absalom. Absalom! [Vintage International Edition 1990]

Don’t Accept 80% of What Anyone Tells You

The title of this blog post is purposely a teaser, hopefully getting you to take a moment to read it. But, on a serious note, this title goes to a theme I believe we all should follow; a theme I also express consistently to my daughters to help them chart their way in life more successfully, more powerfully, with greater happiness, and with fewer hurdles and stumbling blocks created by others.

I express these same points often to clients as a preventive recommendation in an effort to help them avoid problems and issues (legal and non-legal) that otherwise occur from merely responding to life with a “go along to get along” attitude. I also refer further below to a related book I just finished yesterday about the Vietnam war: “The Things They Carried” (1990), by Tim O-Brien.

The key point is that we all should not simply, and without question, accept 80 percent of what anyone tells us.  Yes, from anyone. My reasoning is not that others are necessarily dishonest or purposely trying to mislead us with misinformation. But, rather, that we all communicate with inevitable limited information, bias, partiality, dogma, etc. We most often communicate only within the limited sphere of our own experience. This is normal. We also shade our communications frequently in a way to try and trigger a certain feeling in the listener (or reader). It is extremely difficult, and ineffective, to communicate only with unbiased, objective, neutral facts. This might sound possible in theory, but, in my view, it is fundamentally unrealistic.

Therefore, resting on the notion that there can be no (or very little) unbiased, objectively neutral discourse, we should discount most of what we hear from others, until we thereafter run it through our own framework. In other words, stop and view the information through your own perspective before simply accepting the information someone else places before you. You will be much happier in life, and (because this is a legal blog) likely end up with fewer unintended, or blindsided, problems that require you to seek costly legal counsel.

Now, my last point. Feelings? Seriously? Why do I refer to our wanting to convey a certain feeling to others in the context of our communications? What I am trying to say is that our communications are much more effective if we can trigger a desired feeling in the context of what we are trying to communicate. Whether we are consciously aware of it, we are bombarded every day with communications, arguments, platitudes, dogma, advertising, all designed to influence how we feel about the information.

This idea of purposely triggering feelings really jumped out to me in the book The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. Click here for more info about this book. It is about O’Brien’s late-1960s infantry stint in Vietnam. It is one of the most powerful Vietnam books I have ever read. O’Brien discusses along the way in this book how he purposely augments and fictionally shades certain of his war stories in order best to convey the feeling he trying to express to the reader.

In other words, without O’Brien augmenting his war stories with these shadings, a reader might become aware only of the objective, factual nature of the war event, but will not feel the experience. I have never prior to reading The Things They Carried had anyone better than O’Brien express this “feeling” distinction about the art of writing. I also have never felt a war experience from any book more powerfully than from The Things They Carried. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in further refining the art of writing, or who simply wants to envision and feel what it was like to have fought in the Vietnam war.

Finally, and as to my legal work, I am not suggesting we shade or fictionalize facts when we are required to present those facts ethically, truthfully, and honestly. But, we need to be aware (and be on alert) that even a recitation of ostensibly truthful facts can be presented in a manner (with inflection, rhythm, adjectives, related metaphors, etc.) substantially coloring how one might feel or react to those facts.

Really? Gone with the Wind

 

I am working with a lawyer who grew up, and lives, in California, virtually her entire life in LA, and who attended undergrad at UC Berkeley as an English literature major.  She has never lived in the South. Over lunch recently in LA we were talking about our favorite books, etc.  To my great surprise, she said Gone with the Wind (by Margaret Mitchell) is one of the books she most frequently has re-read over the years.

I was shocked.  I asked “why”?  I told her I had never read it, and candidly never had an interest in reading it.  I thought Gone with the Wind was just a simple, overly-long, southern romantic novel. To the contrary, her response was that Gone with the Wind conveys more powerfully than most any other book she has read the difference between those who survive and those who do not survive, and the dimensions of that distinction.

I am now one-third into reading Gone with the Wind, and admit I was greatly mistaken, narrow-minded, and uninformed about this brilliant Margaret Mitchell novel.

This blog is merely to convey my recent reaction to one extremely powerful passage from Gone with the Wind, as I state further below. [Mitchell was a phenomenal writer;  there are dozens of other such passages that struck me very powerfully.]

But, let me first clear the air in stating Gone with the Wind very effectively conveys the broader, tragic, and costly narrow-minded ignorance of the South in its Civil War opposition to the abolition of slavery.  Also, Gone with the Wind is the only portrayal of the horror of war that took place in the geographic area I know so well, Atlanta. No doubt, wars that have taken place elsewhere are no less tragic, but reading Gone with the Wind as it took place in Atlanta, with Americans killing other Americans, gives me a powerfully vicarious extra-dimension, that I have never previously experienced.

Now my primary blog point. And, this is a spoiler if you plan for the first time to read Gone with the Wind.  The excerpt below from Gone with the Wind is after Scarlett O’Hara returns to her home “Tara”, in Jonesboro, Georgia, after General Sherman overtook Atlanta. She is 19.  Her mother Ellen died the day before Scarlett makes her arduous journey back from Atlanta to Tara.  I purposely, so as not to expand this spoiler, do not detail what events lead Scarlett up to her following internal dialogue, as she pondered her horrific, changed world:

Nothing her mother [Ellen] had taught her [Scarlett] was of any value whatsoever now and Scarlett’s heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her that Ellen could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization in which she raised her daughters, could not have anticipated the disappearing of the places in society for which she trained them so well. It did not occur to her that Ellen had looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful. Life treated women well when they had learned those lessons, said Ellen. Scarlett thought in despair: “Nothing, no, nothing, she taught me is of any help to me! What good will kindness do me now? What value is gentleness? Better that I’d learned to plow .   .   .    .

Oh, Mother, you were wrong!” She did not stop to think that Ellen’s ordered world was gone and a brutal world had taken its place, a world wherein every standard, every value had changed. She only saw, or thought she saw, that her mother had been wrong, and she changed swiftly to meet this new world for which she was not prepared.

Excerpt from Gone with the Wind (Chapter 25) [I added the bolding].

So, why do I like the above excerpt enough to include it in this blog post? I will not bore you with a long-winded explanation. But, I state two reasons.  One, in my view Scarlett arrives at the correct realization that the world is not simply some nice, loving, everyone-should-be-good, kumbaya platitude. This platitude in my view, generally from parents, schools, religious organizations, those already holding the upper hand, is too frequently and easily expressed, with a silent denial of the other side of life (which Scarlett is forced to observe and accept). As a father of daughters, I also believe girls — to their longer-term detriment — are expected to buy-into this little nice, neat platitude as an unfortunate goal so as to “go-along to get-along”.

Two.  This point goes to why I enjoy being a lawyer. With a realistic acknowledgment that the world is not simply made up of positive, mutually loving, lack-of-self-interest elements, my primary goal is to help level the playing field for my clients as to the other negative side of the coin, especially when the other party greatly overextends its own self-interest, power, advantage, etc.  Also, from a preventive perspective, I find many clients end up with costly litigation or other legal problems simply because they signed documents, or agreed to inequitable terms or circumstances, or failed to object to situations, on the notion that they did not want the other side to get mad, or they assumed the other side was being fair and equitable, etc.

Finally, the more-balanced conclusion Scarlett expresses above, in my view, will add to her longer-term happiness and response to life, even though she has to dismiss the fairy-tale notion of a kumbaya world. A more realistic, and balanced, acceptance of both the good and bad elements of life is akin to the comfort of knowing you have on your seatbelt.  Realistically take into account the worst, but hope for the best.

What Powerful Writing; I Just Read “Ulysses” by James Joyce

I enjoy my lawyer world in which words are extremely versatile, powerful, and often play out on the tipping scale of success or failure (both in litigation and non-litigation).

Compare, as a simple example, the two sentences: “The respondent’s assertions frustrate the permissive mandate of Code Section 2056″ versus “The respondent’s assertions obstruct the permissive mandate of Code Section 2056.”  I am not suggesting one sentence singled out alone necessarily makes a difference;  but the greater weight of an abundance of words used effectively in persuasive writing can, in my view, greatly help move the reader both intellectually and emotionally in your desired direction. Stop for a moment and ponder your own reaction to the above “frustrate” versus “obstruct” distinction, and how the words shade the nuance and impact of the sentence.

I also enjoy reading for pleasure and often react with virtual awe in response to certain writers’ use of words and language.  My recent reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses has stunned me with its powerful effect.  I don’t think “stunned” is an overstatement. I have had Ulysses on my tentative reading list for years;  but kept putting it off. I was aware from hearing and reading comments from others that Ulysses would not be an easy task to complete.  It was not easy.

For this brief blog post, I attempt below to state why I reacted so favorably to Ulysses. But, and this next point sounds like new-age mumble-jumble, my attempt below to express these reasons falls way short of my overall joy and reaction to Ulysses. Also, I fully admit I am no scholar or expert on Ulysses or James Joyce. I am merely a reader. One other preface point I make here is that the entire Ulysses novel takes place only within one day:  June 16, 1904, in Dublin.

Here are my eight brief points:

One. This also sounds new-age; but as I was reading Ulysses, and now after finishing it, I find myself in a kind of foggy, joyful awe. I tell my friends that Ulysses is a miraculous work. It has powerfully affected me in a way that I believe is a permanent, positive change.

Two.  This positive change is that Joyce, by depicting in Ulysses only one day in the life of his characters — June 16, 1904 — describes that life in a way that makes me now more aware of appreciating, and continuing to ponder, the vast richness that our daily lives make available to us. Each day is a tremendous event in life that, if we are attuned to life, has a depth and richness we tend to forget when we persistently ponder yesterday and tomorrow.

My above comment also is not along the line that we should be grateful for each day.  There is nothing necessarily wrong about the platitude of being grateful, but that is not my point. Rather, each day has its own richness and fullness that can contribute to our joyful experience of life, regardless of whether the day might appear quite mundane on its surface.

Three.  The way in which Joyce displays this one June 16th day is the miracle. To preface my point here, think for a moment about what happens when you attend a dinner party.

Sure, there are various objective visual and auditory activities going on around you. The plates and forks are clinking with a steady drone. The new Lady Gaga / Bradley Cooper music is loud. The speakers don’t have as much bass as you like. You hear the kids’ TV in the other room. Susan is drinking from her new wine glasses; John is ranting about some recent political event; Mary looks older and tired as though she possibly had a long sleepless night with her new baby, etc. The sauce has a too-strong butter odor. The napkins are too thick and too rough. The lighting is very pleasant.

But, in addition to these objective / auditory activities, we persistently have a lot of other stuff going on at the same time, such as our own internal dialogue; our self-talk; mental perceptions, unspoken criticisms, judgments and thoughts about what we are seeing and hearing; our interspersed dream-like visual imagery and sounds about the past and the future; our fantasy-day dreams connected at times to what we are seeing within our surroundings (that can veer off in any number of directions, with sudden starts, stops, changes in direction, etc.).

What Joyce does in Ulysses is capture all of the above in the one-day June 16 context of his characters. I am almost certain I will again be able to read other fiction; but, as of now, Joyce presented this Ulysses novel in what I believe is the fullest, most accurate and realistic depiction of our external and internal, meandering lives.  Other fiction I will later read, I anticipate, might seem too one dimensional.  I feel as though Joyce spoiled me for other novels.

Four.  I admit I almost quit reading Ulysses at about the half-way mark. But, many readers who had already made the journey (that I found on Google book sites) recommended readers stick with the book to its end. It will be worth it, they all said.  I almost quit because briefly I felt (prematurely) like the novel was not headed in a direction that struck me;  no story;  no plot.  I could not keep up with all the details.  But, then, almost by an imperceptible degree, I began having a great feeling in general about life and about the characters in Ulysses.  Simple, daily life.  I told my wife that this feeling hit me about half-way through the book, and has stayed with me ever since.

Five.  Go back to the dinner party example above. There is a lot of stuff going on externally and internally. There is no way you can fully take all of it in. You will listen and observe only some of the external and internal stimuli. At most any dinner party you will not pay close attention to some of the activity. It is impossible to take it all in. You and the other dinner party guests will tune into some subjects and comments; you also effectively will simply let other items go by with a bare hearing or perception of the content.

Because Ulysses includes a similar vast litany of external and internal stimuli during the course of one single day, don’t expect that you will take in or be perceptive to each and every detail you read.  Rather, take it in as you would at the above dinner party.  Some items will stand out during your reading; some will not.  This is how life runs its course; in this case life on June 16, 1904. Straining to retain and digest every facet of Ulysses will ruin the reading experience. You do not need to retain and digest every facet of the day in Ulysses.

Six.  Joyce is a master with words. His writing and crafting of Ulysses strikes me as pure genius. If I had to recommend to someone a portion of Ulysses merely as one small sample of Joyce’s fine writing, it might be the start of the beach scene in Chapter 13. The intro section stopped me in my tracks. The writing is so good that I had to return and reread the opening section of Chapter 13 twice before I could move on to the end of the chapter. Click here for a Google link to Chapter 13.

Seven.  At the halfway point of reading the hard copy of Ulysses, I purchased the audible.com audio version. I continued to read some hard-copy portions, but also used this great audio version. The audio narration is superlative. Click here for this audible.com version of Ulysses. I also googled Cliff Notes for a couple of the chapters that gave me a good background understanding of those particularly difficult chapters. Three or so of the chapters I reread twice before moving on due to the powerful, weighty effect those chapters had on me.

Eight.  Reading Ulysses is worth it. I am more than delighted I completed this laborious reading journey.  My life (again, this sounds new-age-like) has been permanently changed for the better, and I have a much greater appreciation for the miraculous nuance of each single day.

RE-POST: “In 48 Hours, I Had to Practice What I Preach”

My July 2008 blog still ranks as the most popular of all my blog posts (in terms of responses from readers and the blog click data, etc.). My 2008 blog post was in response to my personal situation at that time where a preliminary medical diagnosis – fortunately – was wrong.  But, at the urgent time I thought I could possibly die in a couple days.  I also had two children under age 10 at that time. Thus, my title of the July 2008 blog was: “In 48 Hours, I Had to Practice What I Preach”.

I am re-posting below my earlier 2008 blog, in its entirety.  The post includes ten related take-away “lesson” references. Also, as an important aside, as we and our parents, etc., all get older, the Thomas Mann excerpt in the post below from his novel The Magic Mountain remains one of the most comforting and satisfying responses to life and aging that I have found.

Here is my July 2008 post:

“Many of us in the service industry are like the proverbial cobbler (yes, including lawyers): we provide shoes with the best fit and finish for our clients, but we leave ourselves and our families poorly shod, or worse yet, barefoot.

This is an unusually personal newsletter about a recent 48-hour period in my life; it began with the complete blindside of a Friday night hospital ER diagnosis (tentatively very chilling) and a much more optimistic Monday morning follow-up.  During this long 48-hour period, my wife and I were suspended within vast uncertainty.

At that time, we believed the 48 hour-period could potentially have been my last chance to get my affairs in order. The situation caught us completely off-guard, with many loose ends in my own personal “I’ll-get-to-it-later” family matters.

I now am back in full swing and the 48-hour period is behind me; my sense of urgency no longer exists. This 48-hour period, however, strongly impressed upon me the need to stop procrastinating and get my own family affairs in order.

Although we lawyers like to believe we are the unshakeable rock of Gibraltar for our clients, I was in near-panic during this 48-hour period as I organized various topics and notes of final instructions for my life. This, quite frankly, was due to a level of worry and concern over my unfinished family business that I hope never to experience again, especially when facing my own mortality.

I share the following relevant aspects of my recent experience so as to motivate you, if you are by chance a procrastinator, to avoid a similar 48-hour surprise, or in the worst case, a situation with zero lead time.

Your Current Estate Planning Documents are Your Final Versions

As a trust and estate lawyer, I experienced briefly during the 48 hours an imagined level of after-death embarrassment; embarrassment that my wife might end up with problematic documents.  Even though I insist on updated estate planning documents for my clients, my personal estate planning documents were much more out-of-date than they should be.

Lesson No. 1 — The 48-hour period made me experience first-hand the reality of a completely unexpected event, that can effectively freeze the status of whatever estate planning documents we have in place — or fail to have in place.

No Guardian Designation for My Children

During the 48-hour period, my wife and I also discovered we did not have the updated guardian provisions that we desired for our children. This omission could potentially have been much worse than that kitchen faucet I kept promising to replace but never got around to.

Insurance Records

The permanent and term life insurance I have on my life for my family’s benefit includes certain options to allow additional payments beyond my normal premium amount without additional insurability underwriting (thus, a related increase in death benefits at my original preferred premium rate), a conversion option to a universal policy, a disability waiver if I am disabled, and the ability to extend the coverage beyond the guaranteed term.

Lesson No. 2 — I have all these excellent insurance policy options, but had failed to inform my wife about them and about the circumstances where she and my children could benefit from triggering the various options.

During the 48-hour period, I made sure my wife had the name and phone number of our insurance advisor, and made her promise that she would rely on our advisor‘s advice for assistance with our insurance situation, if needed.

Internet Access Information

The simplicity of this next point belies its importance.  My wife and I both handle a great deal of our affairs by internet. I really had to scurry around during the 48 hours to provide my wife with all of my known internet accounts: all access passwords, and other relevant information about automatic bill-pay schedules, etc.

Lesson No. 3 — My wife’s potential ability to step in and seamlessly handle all of my online business matters (banking, internet bill-pay, renewals, etc.) would have been seriously hampered, if not impossible, without the knowledge of what family business I handle over the internet, the corresponding URLs and, most importantly, the passwords.  I now keep this data in a safe place for my wife’s access, if ever necessary.

As an aside, to my wife’s credit she handles the bulk of our family bill-paying, banking, insurance, and so forth.  She is much less the procrastinator than I (but come to think of it, I don’t know where she goes online, nor what her passwords are).

Lesson No. 4 — Find out about your family’s internet business access.

Social Security Benefit Information

From a bundle of non-specific files, I dug up a copy of my latest annual Social Security earnings statement in order to remind my wife that she and my children would be entitled to survivor benefits.

Lesson No. 5 — The Social Security Administration can provide you with an annual statement of your earnings history and the projected benefits your survivors will receive.

Read the earnings statement carefully and make sure the annual earnings information is correct, as federal law applies a 3-year statute of limitations for making corrections.

Misc. Loose Ends

This seems humorous now that I am out of harm’s way, but during the 48 hours I also noted various important items for my wife’s attention, such as making sure the air filters in our furnaces are replaced every two months; making sure the homeowners and property tax payments are made on time for our small cabin in rural NC;  and making sure our annual LLC registrations are current (that I had been handling by internet).

Lesson No. 6 — Jot down this small-but-still-important stuff.

Names of Our Team Members

In the past my wife and I alone handled virtually all of our family legal and business affairs. Over the years, however, I have become smarter on this point and put into practice the benefit of having a quality team of advisors who are available to assist my family in my absence (such as for tax return preparation, investments, insurance, etc.).

Lesson No. 7 — I made sure my wife had the names and contact information for all the members of our  team.

Last But Not Least: the Name of a Good Lawyer

This next point, due to my ability over the years to be my own family’s lawyer for most matters, was a very important discussion with my wife during the 48-hour period.

Lesson No. 8 — The variation in lawyers’ judgment and expertise is as wide-ranging as is human nature; lawyers are not fungible.  I wanted to make sure my wife would have a successor lawyer in whom she has complete confidence and can feel comfortable asking questions or seeking assistance.  Because my situation is now back to normal, I can keep this name filed-away in with my personal records (to which my wife now has access).

No More Ill-Fitting Shoes

I now have made great progress in mending my cobbler ways and providing my family with the best shoes possible (figuratively speaking), sooner rather than later.  I never want to experience this 48-hour scramble again in such ill-fitted shoes.

Finally, a Comforting Consolation

Until this 48-hour incident I had not been in a hospital since my teenage years for wisdom teeth removal; I had virtually no first-hand experience with illness and hospitals.

Lesson No. 9 — Even though the 48-hour period was difficult due to my lack of preparedness for the above matters, I found my mind and spirit both adapted well – much better than I expected — to this emergency medical experience.

This adaptation is a surprising consolation and, I believe fortunately, is the way our minds self-protect us in these moments of unexpected urgency. This positive note reminds me of the following passage from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, that goes to the heart of this consolation:

The pity the well person felt for the sick – a pity that almost amounted to awe, because the well person could not imagine how he himself could possibly bear such suffering – was very greatly exaggerated. The sick person had no real right to it. It was, in fact, the result of an error in thinking, a sort of hallucination; in that the well man attributed to the sick his own emotional equipment, and imagined that the sick man was, as it were, a well man who had to bear the agonies of his state. Illness so adjusted its man that it and he could come to terms; there were sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis; nature came to the rescue with measures of spiritual and moral adaptation and relief, which the sound person  .   .   .  failed to take into account.

Excerpt  from  Thomas  Mann, The Magic Mountain 466-67 (H. T. Lowe-Porter, trans., The Modern Library Edition 1992)(1927).

Lesson No. 10 —  This is an important point.  Sufficient advance planning can help us more easily not have to contemplate or worry as much about the future. We have the future covered, so to speak. And, with the future covered, we can enjoy our lives, family, work, hobbies, much more freely in a relaxed, present state of mind.

Thank you for your indulgence.  And, finally, thank you for allowing me to share my personal experience.  I hope it might be of value to you.”

 

What a Great Line

I am currently reading the novel A Thousand Acres (1991), by Jane Smiley.  This is essentially a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s King Lear involving a father’s disinheritance of a daughter from the family farm (a 1,000 acre farm) and the destructive effects of deeply rooted, and long denied, family issues. This novel also is a powerful depiction of estate planning discord. [There are certain tragic elements in the novel that I fortunately do not see often in estate disputes.]

One line in this novel notably jumped out at me the other evening.  It refers to one of the farmer-neighbors named Harold who, often to the humorous and bemused talk of the other neighbors, marches to the beat of his own drummer, but who also is one of the most successful farmers in the community:

Here is the line referring to Harold:

It’s just that he’s [Harold] cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there’s a lot of freedom.

This line is powerful.  In contrast to Harold, many people are much too concerned about what others think about them. These people stifle their own freedom.

A tie between the above line and this blog post is that my great joy in lawyering is helping clients respond to the currents of life from a position of strength, power, and independence. Independence particularly in terms of having control over their lives, including preventing legal issues, disputes, litigation, not bowing easily to the expectations or judgment of others, and avoiding the time- and emotionally-draining interference and overreach by others.

In one of my earlier blog posts, captioned “Helping Clients Have Power;  Blog Post 2 of 3” (click here for this earlier post), I referred to two of the saddest characters in literature: Willy Loman in the play Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller) and George Babbitt in the novel Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis). Each of these characters demonstrates so powerfully the sad, unhappy mistake of maintaining such a persistent, engulfing concern about what others think about them. The complete antithesis of power.

Finally, one ancillary legal point.  Liberty is the environment that (fortunately) allows us to be free;  Actually exercising our freedom in the above context is our own responsibility.

The late Robert Persig (4-24-17): Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert Persig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, died yesterday (April 24, 2017). This book has had a continuing effect on me since my first reading during college. If I were asked to state in the briefest possible way why this book is so influential, my inarticulate attempt might be to say Persig compels us to examine, and more-fully contemplate, our lives rather than merely being swept along in a kind of half-asleep, herd-like, obsequious manner. And, that we possess an innate ability to sustain this level of self-reliance.

Immediately below, I am reposting my earlier 2013 blog post about Robert Persig and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a gesture of my continuing appreciation for him and his book.

My earlier 2013 blog post:

This is not a legal or tax post, in the event you wish to stop reading at this point. Rather, it includes a couple of key thoughts in response to my recent second reading of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. I first read this book during college.

For reasons I do not address more fully here due to my desire to keep this post short(er), this is one of those powerful books that affects readers permanently.

Among the many threads of thought in this book, two are the subject of this blog post: Quality. And Death.

As a trust tax lawyer, I deal constantly with both quality and death. Quality in terms of seeking to find the differences that make a difference for a successful, efficient, effective outcome for clients.

Death in terms of a great deal of planning for clients in anticipation of death and in handling numerous after-death issues and problems, both tax and non-tax. I have had a number of very likable clients die over the years. With strong nostalgia, I feel sometimes as though I am an undertaker.

As to quality, one of the aspects I enjoy most about lawyering is that many problems crossing my desk do not trigger immediate, easy, solutions or answers.

Rather, in most cases the idea, kernel, or thread of a solution or answer ends up surfacing in due course, unscheduled during day or night. It is the subconscious working of the mind that most often is the courier delivering these ideas to the forefront of consciousness.

Persig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, discusses in a very convincing way the subject of “Quality” and “stuckness”, including his reference to this subconscious aspect of the mind, as follows:

• “But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can’t prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck every time. What’s really getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.  .    .    .
• It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.”

Back to my own comments. What I like about Persig’s notion of stuckness is that our accepting and relaxing into these stuck moments results in the most effective and successful way to get unstuck. This is in contrast to fuming, fretting, and remaining doggedly impatient or upset that you do not yet possess an immediate solution or answer.

Back to my reference to death. Persig’s son Chris, who at age 11 rode with Persig on the motorcycle trip described in the book, was stabbed to death 10 years later in San Francisco during a street mugging.

In the book’s “Afterward” that he added in 1984, Persig describes his persistent stuckness about his son Chris’s tragic death. This stuckness appeared to have no possibility of resolution:

• “I [Persig] tend to become taken with philosophical questions, going over them and over them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round until they either produce an answer or become so repetitively locked in they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the question became obsessive: ‘Where did he go?’ “

In an extraordinary, moving, and comforting passage within this Afterward, Persig gives a response to the “Where did he go” question. Persig’s response similarly is what I hope can ultimately be in line with my own reaction if one of my family members were to die.

Also, for me to include here the content and substance of Persig’s response to this question would fill up a much longer portion of this blog post. You can read the Afterward for yourself and draw your own conclusion about Persig’s response [Google: Afterward Zen]. And my own praise for Persig’s response to this death question is not to suggest other readers agree or disagree with the response.

Rather, in my view, and because universally we each ponder death from time to time, I personally believe Persig’s commentary – at least for me — is one of the more satisfying responses to this hard, difficult question.

This Book Passage Stopped Me in My Tracks.

The post continues my repeated theme:  That is, we all need to prioritize and value our finite time as an opportunity to enjoy life.  We ideally should expend as little time as possible on time-consuming (and financially costly) disputes, problems, difficulties.  Or, essentially we should prevent death by a thousand paper cuts.

My passion in lawyering is helping clients smooth the sharp edges and corners of life (with preventive planning, and if necessary, aggressive, strategic challenges to resolve disputes, litigation, etc.).  All this lawyering directed at giving my clients simply more time to enjoy life.

As an aside, the following excerpt from the novel Middlemarch, by George Eliot, stopped me in my tracks as one of the most succinct and powerful observations I have read in quite some time on this notion of our finite time and enjoyment of life:

 “…it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.”

from Middlemarch, George Eliot

Click here for my earlier post on how strongly I am impressed with Middlemarch.

Time is Not Money (BTW, I am reading Middlemarch by George Eliot)

The above title is both hopefully to bait the reader with interest in this blog post, and is a fundamental theme underpinning my view of clients and lawyering. That is, the value a client can obtain from getting good legal advice for preventive protection from otherwise losing valuable time. Time wasted dealing with legal issues, litigation, and the broad array of problems that in large part can be prevented. One can accumulate more money and stuff. But, universally, no one can get back lost time. Time is our only finite asset.

Now, why Middlemarch?

This novel powerfully reminds me to be aware of the passing time of life.  In a good way. Attentive to the interesting and worthwhile nuance of daily life. Not burdened with problems requiring costly legal help and wasted time.

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life by English writer George Eliot.  She wrote this in 1870 or thereabouts.  Frankly, I expected this novel to be a dull Victorian era read, with my interest lasting possibly only a chapter or so.

To my pleasant surprise, I cannot wait each evening to get back to this novel. I am captivated by Eliot’s powerfully understated and astute commentary about the nuance of everyday life.

My next comment about Middlemarch touches on primary character Dorethea Brooke who has agreed to marry the much older Rev. Edward Casaubon.  Casaubon is a long-time, studious bachelor.

As merely one brief, fine example of George Eliot’s astute observations, Casaubon’s anticipation of marriage to Dorethea far outweighs his diminished actual response.  He can, however, vaguely only admit this to himself.

Here are a couple of Eliot’s observations about this situation that, to me, demonstrate her wonderful ability to convey these subtle nuances:

“He (Casaubon) did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight, — which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.”

“Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts of his affections would not fail to be honored. Fully all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act faithfully on the strength of them.”

Also, here is how I stumbled recently across reading this novel.   A woman Rosa Lyster recently wrote a web piece on Medium about her father rediscovering fiction when he read Middlemarch. He was an avid non-fiction-only reader.   She writes, in part:

I was visiting my parents for the weekend when he (her father) was about halfway through (Middlemarch), and he walked around the house like a man in a trance. His eyes were all misty, and he kept raising his hands to his head.”

I don’t take Ms. Lyster’s comment as an overstatement.  Check out her web piece.   It is worth the time.  Click here.