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The story of Galileo isn’t what I thought it was. It usually gets written about as if the enlightened astronomer were persecuted for being right about the sun, earth and planets, while the Catholic Church was the Evil Empire mired in reactionary ignorance.

But we often get history wrong — or at least mixed up. I’ve spent a month or so looking into the Galileo case and it turns out to be rather different from the common understanding. Some of it, of course, we get right.

Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei was born in Pisa (then part of the Duchy of Florence), Italy, on February 15, 1564, in the same year as Shakespeare and on same day that Michelangelo died. He was the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist, composer, and music theorist, and Giulia Ammannati, who had married in 1562.

He was a smart kid, went to school, did well, went to university.

By 1580, he was studying medicine at the University of Pisa where he had his first scientific insight. While attending a lecture, which seems to have bored the young man, his attention wandered and he noticed that a chandelier, swaying back and forth in a breeze, would swing wider or lesser depending on the force of the wind. More importantly, he timed the swinging with his pulse and to his surprise, whether the chandelier swung wide or narrow, the rhythm didn’t vary: A long swing took exactly the same time as a short swing.

At home, he made an experiment with a pair of identical pendulums and set them in motion, one in a wide sweep and the other in a short one and discovered that they remained in synch.

Galileo was born at a propitious time. It was the beginning of the Age of Reason, begun in the previous century when the Aristotelian explanations for the natural world had begun to come into question and a range of scientists, such as Francis Bacon, urged that we search for truth empirically.

It was a special age in Italy, which produced not only Galileo, but the philosophy of Giordano Bruno; the sculpture of Bernini; the music of Monteverdi; the poetry of Torquato Tasso and reams of painters.

With the need to make a living, he became an inventor to subsidize his small income as a teacher. In 1586, he invented a hydrostatic balance to measure the relative weights of metals in an alloy, and wrote an essay about the center of gravity in solid bodies. He later developed the thermoscope, an early version of the thermometer.

Later, as chair of mathematics at Pisa, he affirmed the indestructibility of matter, formulated the principles of the lever and the pulley, showed the speed of freely falling bodies increases at a uniform rate, experimented with inclined planes, argued that an object rolling down one plane would rise on a similar plane to a height equal to its fall, outside of friction and concluded the law of inertia — Newton’s first law of motion — that a moving body will continue indefinitely in the same line and rate of motion unless interfered with by some external force. He was on a roll. He proved that a projectile propelled in a horizontal direction would fall to the earth in a parabolic curve. He reduced musical tones to wave lengths of air, and showed that the pitch of note depends upon the number of vibrations made by a struck string in a given time.

And he posited that only those properties of matter belonging to mathematics could be objective, and all other properties sounds, tastes, odors, colors and so on “reside only in consciousness; if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

There is little question that Galileo was a genius. And he was recognized as one even then. He was someone on the same exulted level as Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.

And all that was before what he was later most famous for: his astronomy. He didn’t invent the telescope, but he improved it in 1609 (not initially for studying the heavens, but for commercial use on merchant ships). And when he turned its glass eye on the stars, he discovered startling things. And that’s when his troubles began.

In the usual version of the story, Galileo came to realize that Copernicus had been right. Centuries of belief that the Earth was the center of the universe and the sun and planets revolved around the Earth was turned around and Copernicus put the sun in the center and demoted the Earth to a mere planet, like all the others, spinning around the central sun.

The church — and pretty much everyone (although the church pretty much was everyone) — had assumed the obvious: The earth didn’t move under their feet and the sun rose each day in the east and set in the west “and hastens to the place where it arose,” as Ecclesiastes had it in the Bible. It was not at all clear that Copernicus got it right. After all, Aristotle was the smartest man who ever lived, and Aristotle taught the sun spun around the earth. Who can argue with the smartest man who ever lived?

Galileo’s record of Jupiter’s moons in orbit

When Galileo was 45 and playing with his new telescope, he discovered the four large moons of Jupiter. “These new bodies, moved around another very great star, in the same way as Mercury and Venus, and peradventure the other known planets, move around the sun.”

That and other things proved to Galileo what he had long believed, that Copernicus had it right: The earth revolved around the sun, along with the other planets. Other bits of evidence began to turn up.

Critics of Copernicus had argued that if Venus revolved around the sun, it should show phases like the moon. Then, in 1610, Galileo’s telescope revealed such phases. Later, he discovered the rings of Saturn. In 1611, he he showed the existence of sunspots and argued they proved the sun rotates.

Galileo recognized that his opinion varied from church doctrine and knew he needed support from powerful people if he was going to stay out of hot water. He sought the patronage of the powerful Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He moved to Florence and cleverly named the four moons of Jupiter the Sidera Medicea, after Cosimo’s family name, Medici. There he published his astronomical findings in a book he dedicated to Cosimo called the Sidereus nuncius, or “The Starry Messenger.” So far, so good.

Galileo was also friends with several Vatican bigwigs. And this is where the familiar story starts to fray. These powerful men of the cloth were among the brightest and most educated and forward looking of their age. They were not knuckle-dragging troglodytes attempting to destroy the honest astronomer. In fact, they gave him every opportunity to teach his ideas — as long as he didn’t insist he was right and everyone else was wrong.

And the Church was fine with him presenting his case as just that, an alternative interpretation of the facts. Just not OK with him saying it was the absolute truth. He could explain the Copernican theory, since it made celestial navigation easier to compute. And, they said, if ever he could provide actual proof of heliocentrism, then they would be forced to reinterpret the biblical citations. As Cardinal Bellarmine put it, he had asked only that until proof was at hand, astronomers refrain from making strong truth claims and present their results merely hypothetically.

In effect, the Church was willing to bend over backwards to tolerate the haughty astronomer.

We forget that Galileo had no proof for his ideas. He had inferences and metaphors. The fact that he got it essentially right and the Church was wrong was not provable at the time. Galileo had an alternative way of understanding the facts and observations. Proof of the earth’s rotation, for instance, wasn’t available until 1851 and Leon Foucault’s pendulum experiment. So, Galileo was defending a theory that had no direct evidence. We know now he was right; but he had only the weight of his belief. It was belief vs. belief at the time, not simply truth vs. superstition.

We forget also that Galileo ran into trouble with the Church not in one big trial, but twice, and for different reasons.

The first, in 1615, when he was 51, and a group of clergy brought before the Inquisition charges against the astronomer. The charge brought was not that he was teaching heliocentrism, but rather that in defending it, he was re-interpreting several verses from scripture.

Pages from Galileo’s notes

Yes, Galileo originally did not argue with the church over scientific principles, but rather the fact that he attempted to prove that his science did not conflict with the Bible. The Council of Trent in 1563 had forbidden individual interpretations of scripture, saying that “no one relying on his own judgement shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which the holy mother Church… has held or holds.” And Galileo was attempting just that. It struck the Inquisition as “dangerously close to Protestantism.”

The Inquisition was a subset of those in the Vatican, and made up of the more reactionary elements. When you were denounced to the Inquisition, you had to defend yourself and Galileo did that, again but disputing the meaning of passages in the Bible. This was not a good tactic with these priests. It was exactly what he was being charged with.

He could have been imprisoned or even executed for his “crime,” but the Inquisition showed deference to his eminence and reputation and merely forbid him from teaching or writing about the Copernican system. The judgement in February, 1616, Galileo was ordered “to abandon completely … the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the Earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.”

By 1623, Galileo’s friend and supporter, Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini, had been elected as Pope Urban VIII and Galileo apparently felt the pressure was off and decided it would be OK to write again about heliocentrism. Barberini had opposed the admonition of Galileo in 1616, and later, as pope, had given permission to Galileo to write a book presenting arguments for and against the Copernican system. Galileo’s resulting book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission. But then, they read the book.

It was a conversation among three supposed points of view, one in favor of Copernicus, one against it, and a third as disinterested third party to ask questions of the other two. Unfortunately and immoderately, Galileo named the anti-Copernican Simplicio, or “Dunce,” and put into his mouth several ideas and phrases that had previously been uttered by Urban. Not a good idea to insult your primary supporter.

Worse, Urban was facing backlash as pope from more reactionary elements, and so the pope felt political pressure not to forgive his erstwhile friend. The pope had bigger fish to fry and Galileo was a minor irritation in the big picture.

Galileo had a long history of arrogance and Galileo’s very personality made things much worse for him than they needed to be. He was a cussed pig-headed man who unnecessarily insulted the powerful people who had the power over his fate.

He wrote that “philosophy had “gone to sleep in the lap of Aristotle.” In the margin of a book by Jesuit Antonio Rocco defending the Ptolemaic astronomy, Galileo wrote “Ignoramus, elephant, fool dunce … eunuch.”

He wrote a letter to Johannes Kepler in 1596 and said in it that he feared being “ridiculed and condemned by countless people (for very great is the number of the stupid.”)

All of may have been true, but it was surely impolitic of Galileo to point it out when they had power of life and death over him.

One of his supporters, Jesuit Father Grassi, whom Galileo had once made fun of, wrote, “Many resented his arrogant tone, his presumption for speaking on theological matters, and for crossing over from the world of mathematical astronomy into the world of natural philosophy.” And later, “I have always had more love for him than he has for me. And last year at Rome [during the trial] when I was requested to give my opinion on his book on the motion of the earth, I took the utmost care to allay minds harshly disposed toward him and to render them open to conviction of the strength of his arguments, so much so, indeed, that certain people who supposed me to have been offended by Galileo . . . marveled at my solicitude. But he has ruined himself by being so much in love with his own genius, and by having no respect for others. One should not wonder that everybody conspires to damn him.”

And they did. In 1633, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy “for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world” against the 1616 condemnation, since “it was decided at the Holy Congregation … on 25 Feb 1616 that … the Holy Office would give you an injunction to abandon this doctrine, not to teach it to others, not to defend it, and not to treat of it; and that if you did not acquiesce in this injunction, you should be imprisoned.”

He was interrogated and, according to the directives of the Inquisition to be “shown the instruments of torture” to encourage his acquiescence. Galileo was found “vehemently suspected of heresy,” namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to “abjure, curse, and detest” those opinions.

He was sentenced to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life, and his books were banned, including any new works he might write. (His books remained on the Index of Forbidden Books until it was formally removed in 1835.)

Galileo’s drawing of the moon

While under house arrest, he managed to surreptitiously write a new book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, which was published in 1638 in Holland, outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. The book concerns mechanics and physics, not astronomy.

The astronomer was 69 when he was sentenced. His health declined, and five years later, in 1638, he went blind. He died in 1642 at the age of 77.

There is a common story that as Galileo was led away after his condemnation for teaching that the earth revolved around the sun, he muttered under his breath, “E pur si muove” — “And yet, it moves.” Unfortunately, he likely never said it. The earliest attestation for the quote comes from 1837, more than 200 years later.

____________________________

“E pur si muove”

—Galileo Galilei, 1633 (maybe)

____________________________

Yogi Berra, source of many notable quotes referred to as “Yogi-isms,” (“When you get to the fork in the road, take it” or “It gets late early out here”) also said, “I never said all the things I said.”

The world is full of famous quotes, and it is appalling how many of them never happened. Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.” Gandhi never said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” And Sigmund Freud never said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

These misquotes come in several varieties. A lot of historical ones come from later rewritings of less succinct utterances. Some are just wishful thinkings — wouldn’t it have been great if Galileo actually did say, “Yet it still moves.” But it is most likely he never did.

Queen Victoria never said, “We are not amused.” In reality, according to those who knew her, she was quite easily amused.

Niccolo Machiavelli never wrote, “The ends justify the means.” He may have meant that, but the closest thing he actually wrote says, “One must consider the final result.” Not quite so ringing a quote.

George Bernard Shaw never said, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” The closest actually comes from Oscar Wilde, who wrote in The Canterville Ghost, “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

In their book, They Never Said It : A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, authors Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George write: “There have always been people who liked to liven up what they were saying with appropriate statements from the writings of others. This was true even in ancient times; Plato used quotations freely, and Cicero’s letters are full of quotations. Today, however, quotations tend to be polemical rather than decorative. People use them to prove points rather than to provide pleasure. … What has been called ‘quotemanship’ (or ‘quotesmanship’) — the use and abuse of quotations for partisan purposes — has during the past few decades become a highly refined art in this country.”

The internet is awash with meme-quotes, almost always attributed to Mark Twain, Albert Einstein or Mohandas Gandhi. But Mark Twain, who said more quotable things than anyone after Shakespeare, never commented on Microsoft Word, despite the quote put in his mouth on FaceBook.

These things come in at least three forms. The first and easiest are the misquotations — close but no cigar.

Leo Durocher never said, “Nice guys finish last.” He did say, “Nice guys finish seventh in the National League.” Near miss.

Financier J.P. Morgan never said, “If you have to ask how much, you can’t afford it.” He actually said, “You have no right to own a yacht if you ask that question.”

Often these are notable sentiments originally expressed in less memorable language and later cleaned up, rewritten and made pithier.

The second source of bad quotations come from crossed, or misappropriation. Sometimes a nobody says something clever and we would pay more attention if we pretend Mark Twain said it. Or Shakespeare.

Winston Churchill did not say, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they tried everything else.” In reality, it was said by Frederick Edwin Smith, First Earl of Birkenhead, a British Conservative politician. But I doubt you’ve ever heard of him.

Marilyn Monroe is often quoted for saying, “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” but it wasn’t her; it was Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who was amused by its spread. “It was a weird escape into popular culture. I got constant e-mails about it, and I thought it was humorous.”

“There’s a sucker born every minute.” is usually put in the mouth of P.T. Barnum, but the real quote, “There’s a sucker born every minute, but none of them ever die” actually came from rival circus owner Adam Forepaugh. And even he probably stole it from famous con-man Joseph (“Paper Collar Joe”) Bessimer. And it likely predates even him. In 1930, novelist John Dos Passos attributed it to Mark Twain, one in a long line of quotes put in the mouth of Twain, who “never said all the things I said.”

The need to find a famous name to give weight to a pithy saying is enormous. It is on one hand a vestige of the Medieval “argument from authority.” If you have a recognized celebrity say it, it must be true.

And so, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” is all over the internet attributed to the incontestable moral authority of Nelson Mandela, but was really said by New Age flake and air-headed inspirational speaker Marianne Williamson.

“Success is not final, Failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts” shows up as Winston Churchill, but really owes to football coach Don Shula.

And speaking of football coaches, the most famous football quote of all times — “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” wasn’t coined by Vince Lombardi (he did repeat it, but did not originate it.) It was first said by UCLA coach Red Sanders, who also said about football, “It’s not a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that!”

The final group are those that are completely bogus. At least the source has never been identified. They are usually ascribed to one of the usual suspects, but those suspects never said or wrote the quote. And so:

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Not said by, but given to Mark Twain, or Jack Benny, or Muhammad Ali.

“Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity.” Einstein never said it.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Not found anywhere in the writing of Edmund Burke.

Mark Twain never said: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Nor: “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.” Nor: “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” And he did not say, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” That last didn’t occur anywhere until 1970, long after Twain’s demise. (And he never said, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”)

Einstein never said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And neither did he say: “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” And the supposed quote, “Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love present in his heart” doesn’t appear anywhere until 1999, when it surfaced online.

On the internet, you can make anything up and put someone’s name under it, and within a week, you’ll see it reposted a hundred times — and often with some other name given as its author. It’s a great big mix ’n’ match.

There’s an old saying in journalism. “If you mother says she loves you, check it out.” It has been credited to Chicago editor Arnold A Dornfield. But an enterprising reporter checked it out and discovered it was really said by another Chicago editor, Edward H. Eulenberg, and what he actually said was, “If your mother tells you she loves you, kick her smartly in the shins and make her prove it.” Has a bit more oomph.

And so, to quote Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Trust but verify.”

Bookshelf traveler

March 11, 2020

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D.H. Lawrence in Italy

“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: To get on the move and to know whither.”

The opening sentences of D.H. Lawrence’s 1921 travel book, Sea and Sardinia. It is one of my favorite sentences ever, first because it expresses an impulse I share, but mostly because of the odd inversion of word order and the way it replicates the order of the impulse hits.

What I mean is that when such a feeling “comes over one,” it is first unnamed. You don’t originally understand what this need is, just that it rushes your emotions. It is only second that you identify what it is that you are thinking of. To run the sentence in normal order — “An absolute necessity to move comes over one”— implies you understand what it is when it hits. It is a two-part process and the first part is non-verbal, almost primordial. Word order matters.

Lawrence is largely unfashionable these days. His novels — those “bright books of life” — can feel dated. Certainly his phallo-centric worship seem bizarre. It’s hard to read “Lady Loverly’s Chatter” without without laughing, or at least gasping. Of course, it’s not his best book. (Fashion is untrustworthy; you should read one of his novels or short stories to see just how good he is, despite his preaching).

But in addition to his fiction, Lawrence wrote about his travels and singular writings they are. Do not expect objective recitations of fact, but rather what is left after being filtered through the author’s distinct sensibility. This makes them both more interesting and relevant many decades after they were published. Many travel books are written; most drop out of date within years; a few — a very few — transcend time and place to become, dare I use the word, “literature.”

Such books are a joy to read, and give you insight not so much into a destination as into how an active mind can interact and react with place and turn its air and soil into words.

Lawrence wrote four such books. In addition to Sea and Sardinia, there is Twilight in Italy, Etruscan Places and Mornings in Mexico, which includes essays he wrote about New Mexico also and a beautiful encomium to the Hopi Snake Dance.

“How is man to get himself into relation with the vast living convulsions of rain and thunder and sun, which are conscious and alive and potent, but like the vastest of beasts, inscrutable and incomprehensible? How is man to get himself into relation with these, the vastest of cosmic beasts?”

Such books go back into antiquity. Few books are as readable, or as revealing of their authors, as the Histories of Herodotus. While the book functions mainly as a history of the Persian Wars, in it our gentleman from Halicarnassus takes us everywhere from Egypt to India, serving up travel tidbits that may be true, may be lies, or may be simple misunderstandings.

His story of ants in India the size of dogs that go into the desert and bring back gold could perhaps be a mistranslation of a word for marmot rather than ant, and a further misinterpretation of Himalayan marmots who dig into the sand and catch gold-bearing sand in their fur. He never says he actually saw such ants, but only heard travelers tell of them.

Herodotus is sometimes called the “father of lies,” but he is always lively.

There are other classical travels, too, such as the Anabasis of Xenophon and the Description of Greece by Pausanius. Xenophon is pretty straightforward, but others, such as Ctesias of Cnidus stretched the credulity of their readers. Ctesias wrote a book about India, called Indica (existing now only in fragments, but quoted often by other authors), in which he describes such things as a race of men with only one leg, and whose feet are so huge they can be used as umbrellas.

In the Second Century, Lucian of Samosata ridiculed such outlandish claims in a book he called “A True Story,” in which he reported on “things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say.” In this, he says, he is therefore much truer than such liars as Ctesias or Herodotus because he admits his tales are all lies from the get-go.

The most famous of questionable travel books is certainly Livre des Merveilles du Monde or “The Book of the Marvels of the World,” also called the Travels of Marco Polo, which appeared in the late 13th Century. (I say “appeared” rather than “was published” because there is no authoritative version. It sprung up in many languages in many countries at the same time, often with conflicting content.) It was ostensibly compiled by a Venetian hack writer named Rustichello of Pisa who shared a prison cell with Marco Polo in Genoa and transcribed Polo’s tales of his travels to China.

The trustworthiness of Polo’s Travels has been questioned since it first appeared. Parts of it are surprisingly accurate, geographically and historically, but other sections are cribbed from other books written by Rustichello, ripped whole-cloth from his popular fictions. Scholars have been arguing over the book for hundreds of years.

It is, however, and despite some tedious repetition, a good read, which is why it came out in six different languages and 20 different editions in just a few years.

The discovery of the New World led to many journals, books and manuals. Perhaps the most famous is now just called “Hakluyt’s Voyages,” and was published in 1589 by Englishman Richard Hakluyt. His many books informed William Shakespeare’s sense of the world and its peoples.

The title of his principal work is nearly a book all by itself. There was a fashion for long, descriptive titles back then. For instance, what we now call Shakespeare’s King Lear, was first known as the “True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters, With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam: As it was played before the Kings Majestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes.”

And so, Hakluyt, not to be outdone, titled his travel book: The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over Land to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1500 Years: Divided into Three Several Parts According to the Positions of the Regions Whereunto They Were Directed; the First Containing the Personall Travels of the English unto Indæa, Syria, Arabia … the Second, Comprehending the Worthy Discoveries of the English Towards the North and Northeast by Sea, as of Lapland … the Third and Last, Including the English Valiant Attempts in Searching Almost all the Corners of the Vaste and New World of America … Whereunto is Added the Last Most Renowned English Navigation Round About the Whole Globe of the Earth.

And that’s why we now call it “Hakluyt’s Voyages.”

But it is in the 18th Century that travel writing went mainstream. It was the era of the Enlightenment, and learning about the other quarters of the globe became a part of what we were enlightening ourselves about. Scores of travel diaries and memoirs were published.

Samuel Johnson wrote A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which is about a country he had little affinity for, and his sidekick, James Boswell wrote about the same trip in his The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL. D. Johnson wrote about Scotland; Boswell wrote about Johnson. In one notable episode, they extolled a hearty dinner consisting entirely of cold butter and milk. Yum.

Novelist Tobias Smollett wrote a popular Travels Through France and Italy, published in 1766, which is not much read these days, but in contrast, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Laurence Sterne, is a classic. Smollett didn’t much cotton to foreign ways and pretty well grumped his way through the Continent. Sterne, in his book, from 1768, took a much more amiable view. Sterne actually crossed paths with Smollett in Italy, and satirized him and his pique as the character Smelfungus.

HMS Beagle in the Straits of Magellan

In 1839, Charles Darwin published what is now known as The Voyage of the Beagle, which was his portion of the scientific and geographical expedition of the H.M.S. Beagle around South America and into the Pacific.

The trip provided Darwin with much of the data that led to his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. But much of the book is just a good read, with the author’s reactions to what he discovers.

Bahia jungle

In mid-summer the ship stopped at Bahia in Brazil. Darwin wrote: “The day has past delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again.”

Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft

In 1844, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, published her Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843. The book combines memoir with political analysis and was widely praised at the time.

It followed the path taken by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 1796. In it, Wollstonecraft wrote that “The art of travel is only a branch of the art of thinking.” And she wrote that travel writers should have “some decided point in view, a grand object of pursuit to concentrate their thoughts, and connect their reflections.”

Mark Twain in the Holy Land

It is the point of view that distinguishes travel literature from mere travel writing. And you get that in spades in four books by Mark Twain. He published The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress in 1869 about a trip he took two years earlier to the Holy Land, with side excursions all through the Mediterranean. It was his best-selling book during his lifetime. And the source of one of his most famous quotes:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

He followed it up a few years later with Roughing It, an account of his travels and travails in Nevada and California. Then in 1880, he followed with A Tramp Abroad, which details a trip he made through Germany and the Alps. In it, he included a screamingly funny pasquinade on the Teutonic tongue, called “The Awful German Language.”

For instance, linguistic gender baffled him. “Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; … In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.”

Finally, he went around the world, including to Hawaii and and India, and wrote about the trip in Following the Equator, published in 1897. The heat in India got to him: “I believe that in India ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.”

I wish I could mention all the wonderful and quirky travel books I have read: Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson; The Alhambra by Washington Irving; Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (yes, it’s a travel book, of sorts).

And those I wish I had read: A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling by Ibn Battuta; Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt; Travels With Myself and Another: A Memoir by Martha Gelhorn (the “other” is Ernest Hemingway); The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara.

But there are finally three more that I have read and recommend to everyone:

—The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Matsuo Basho, which recounts a journey he made, mostly on foot, around the wilder parts of the north of Japan in the spring of 1689. It is a haibun, a combination of prose and poetry — mainly haiku — and functions as both a travel diary and a poetry anthology. It also has profound things to say about life, time and consciousness.

“Months and days are travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float off on ships or who grow ancient leading horses are also forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them.”

—Voyage autour de ma chambre (“Voyage Around My Room”), published in 1794 by French writer Xavier de Maistre. He wrote it while under house arrest, and managed to turn his confinement into a pilgrimage, as he wandered around the room, 36 paces in circumference.

“I have just completed a 42-day voyage around my room. The fascinating observations I made and the endless pleasures I experienced along the way made me wish to share my travels with the public; and the certainty of having something useful to offer convinced me to do so. Words cannot describe the satisfaction I feel in my heart when I think of the infinite number of unhappy souls for whom I am providing a sure antidote to boredom and a palliative to their ills. …

“When I travel through my room,” he writes, “I rarely follow a straight line: I go from the table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there, I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado.”

—Finally, I want to offer George S. Chappell’s 1930 Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera: A Fascinating Trip to the Interior. The title seems self-explanatory, but the book antedates Raquel Welch’s breakout film Fantastic Voyage by three and a half decades.

Our hero, along with an ornithologist, botanist and cameraman, first enter the mouth, do some spelunking and climb the cliffs of the molars. As they explore the innards of the human corpus, they escape from an enraged Amoeba, and discover the Heeby-Geebies that infest the Nerve Forests of the Lumbar region. Pausing only to carve their initials on the spinal column, the four brave souls reach Lovely Livermore and search for the source of the river Bile. Scarcely have they had time to shoot the rapids at the conjunction of the Gall and the Spleen and view the dance of the Hemoglobins when a violent upset in the interior forcibly ejects them.

What can I say? It isn’t only travel that is fatal to bigotry, but so is reading, especially reading about travel.

Ex urbe ad orbem

December 27, 2019

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I grew up on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. At the other end of the bridge was the wider portion of the world. It was the escape from parochial suburban concerns and into a life infinitely richer.

New York city was not just the gateway to the larger world, it was the larger world.

One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother taking me at age three, maybe four, into Manhattan to see the Christmas display windows at Macy’s department store. I remember being frightened by the subway and being returned like Odysseus from the underworld up to the snowy Seventh Avenue.

It was only a few years after the war and the city was still the one described by E. B. White in Here is New York, published a year after I was born. It was the city of yellow cabs, of subway roar under the sidewalk grates, Con Edison steam pouring out of street vents. The Third Avenue El blocked the sky and the Horn and Hardart automat flipped out sandwiches and soup. Barges carrying freight cars crossed the Hudson from Weehawken and Hoboken; Penn Station and Madison Square Garden — the old one — were still standing. The GWB was still only one level. Skyscrapers were still mostly stone, brick and steel. The Empire State Building was still the tallest in the world.

When you are young and the world is that new, every encounter with it imprints and becomes the ur-version of your Weltanchaung. Everything you later learn is first compared with these initial impressions.

And so, two great geographical “gods” I grew up with were the Hudson River — every other river until I crossed the Mississippi failed to earn the name — and New York City. A city wasn’t a city unless it had sun-blocking canyons of impossibly tall offices, apartments and hotels. If it didn’t have a subway or a ring of bridges and ferries. Or the wharfs with their ocean liners and longshoremen.

As I grew up, the city remained the touchstone not merely of urban-ness, but of civilization itself. It was where I went to find bookstores. There was Little Italy, Chinatown, Harlem and Spanish Harlem. I saw Puerto Ricans and Arabs, Norwegians and Hindus. The idea of a mixed population seemed absolutely normal.

As White wrote, “The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world.”

And all that makes a kind of poetry: “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal [combustion] engines.”

That music includes the sound of jackhammers, car horns, squealing bus brakes, street-corner arguments, police whistles, sirens, and on special occasions, marching bands.

Through high school, and later when I returned home from college, I would take the Public Service bus to the bridge and walk across it from Jersey to Manhattan, looking down on the way to the little red lighthouse. Up past Cabrini Boulevard to the 175th Street IND subway station where a 15-cent token would take me anywhere in the city: Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, the Sheridan Square Paperback Corner, the Hayden Planetarium.

The city became so much a part of my world-view that it took traveling halfway around the world to break me open. That is the importance of travel. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” wrote Mark Twain. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

The Mississippi River was more river than the Hudson, and the Columbia was a drained a greater area. The St. Lawrence was a wider gouge on the continent. And once I left the New World and stood on the banks of the Rhine in Dusseldorf, I marveled at night over the racing current and the moon reflected in the waves — so big a river and so rapid a flow. This was the Rhine of the Lorelei and the Valkyries. Robert Schumann wrote his Rhenish Symphony in Dusseldorf.

And so it was with cities. Philadelphia and Chicago were smaller imitations of New York, but so many others created their urban civilizations on other patterns. I would have to come to terms with Los Angeles, with Seattle, with Miami.

I had avoided LA for many years — decades, really — with the unearned disapproval of an East Coast snob. It wasn’t really a city at all. What did Dorothy Parker call it? “Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.”

LA was the city where the people who pass you on the freeway are always better looking than the people you pass. The city where all the women are beautiful and all the men wear shades to protect their eyes from the shine of their own smiles.

My tune has changed. After many trips to Southern California, I have come to love LA, with all its traffic and sunshine.

Los Angeles is genuinely cosmopolitan; I feel there as I must likely have felt in Amsterdam in the 17th century or Venice in the 16th century. I cannot remain awake and self-satisfied at the same time.

St. Louis

Of course, when something is cosmopolitan, that means it includes a great deal we might feel uncomfortable about.

Mystery writer Walter Mosley wrote, ”It’s a land on the surface of dreams. And then there’s a kind of slimy underlayer. The contrast of beauty and possibility and that ugliness and corruption is very powerful.”

You ride up over Sepulveda Pass on the 405 and spread out before you is all of the San Fernando Valley, one vast Vaseline smear of suburbia and middle-class values — and you know that this is the world capital of porno films.

From Simi Valley to Costa Mesa, you find every food, every culture, ever language, every social class, every fast-food joint. There is high culture at the LA County Museum of Art and history at the La Brea Tar Pits; there is outdoor dining at the Farmers Market on West Third Street and Fairfax; there are the oil wells on the Baldwin Hills, pecking at the ground like so many chickens.

When my late wife and I first began to travel, we avoided cities. As long-time Easterners, we were besotted by the empty West and its long horizons and open skies. Driving down carless roads that measured straight for 20 miles or more at a stretch, wiggling in the distance through the lens of desert heat, it was the isolation that fascinated us. Cities only slowed things down and gummed them up with stoplights and bumper-to-bumper glue.

It was only later that the cities opened up their gifts to us. Since then, I have come to love several cities, and cherish their idiosyncrasies and talents.

First among these is Paris. I have been back many times. It is so different from New York, so compact, so comfortable. You can walk almost anywhere, and with only a miserly few skyscrapers, it is a human-scale place. In New York, restaurants can seat hundreds at a time; in Paris, a typical restaurant has maybe a half-dozen tables and only two workers: the waiter and the cook.

Tourists think of Paris as the Eiffel Tower or the streetside artists of Montmartre, but we never went there. Instead, we walked the streets near where we were staying and got to know the butcher, the florist, the baker. A morning visit to the patisserie for a pastry, a stop at the bookstore to pick up a Pleiades edition of Victor Hugo, a duck-in to a small neighborhood church that has been there for only, say, 400 years.

Cape Town

The most beautiful city I have ever seen, based on its setting and geography, is Cape Town, South Africa. It sits in a bowl surrounded by peaks, including Table Mountain, which is a long, flat cliff over which a fog often drapes, like a tablecloth. The streets are wide and sunny, and the houses clean in the sunlight and often brightly colored. I was there near the end of the apartheid era, and while the Afrikaners to the north held fast to their racist ideology, in British-heritage Cape Town, I saw black and white Africans comfortably together on the beaches, despite its being technically illegal.

Chicago (left) and Johannesburg

Back north in the former Transvaal, the city of Johannesburg, or “Jo-berg,” was more familiarly urban. In fact, if you didn’t know where you were, you could easily confuse the city with, say, Chicago. If you thought of Africa as elephants and zebras, the high-rise congestion of Jo-berg could come as quite a surprise.

Durban

I have a special warm spot for the city of Durban, on the Indian Ocean, with its thick tropical humidity and dense pack of various humanity.

Seattle

I lived for a while in Seattle, and came to love it for its weather. What elsewhere might be called rain is hardly noticed in Seattle, unless it’s a downpour. Most days, it seems, the air just hangs with a slowly-dropping mizzle. The city is built on hills, and you are always going up or down, and until the recent and ugly development of a self-regarding amour propre, Seattle was a kind of forgotten city. That was the city I came to love. Now, it is overrun with Starbucks and hipsters. It used to be cool; now it knows it is cool, which is never cool.

New Orleans

New Orleans is a city I used to despise. I thought of it as infested with cockroaches and humidity. But as I’ve gotten older and have begun to decay myself, I find a bit of deterioration admirable. Now, it is one of my favorite cities. How can you not love a place where the restaurants feature 60-year-old waiters in formal dress?

San Francisco

There are other cities I hold dear: London; Oslo; Vancouver; Miami; Mobile, Ala.,; Halifax, Nova Scotia; San Francisco; St. Louis; Tijuana — yes, if you leave the tourist center, it is a wonderful city.

Las Vegas

And there are places I have never come to love. I really dislike Las Vegas, for instance. It gives me the creeps. I see those retiree women sitting at the slots, their eyes turned into lifeless ball bearings in the soulless, windowless casinos with their dead, ringing bings. The horror; the horror.

Atlanta seems like nothing but traffic; Dallas like endless freeway flyovers; Houston like a fungus that grows to eat up a wedge of southeastern Texas. Once you enter the city limits, it seems as if you can never get out. Houston covers more ground than Rhode Island, and paints it with minimalls, Comfort Inns and tire dealerships.

Phoenix

I have been avoiding mentioning Phoenix. That is because my feelings are ambivalent. I have always called the city “Cleveland in the desert.” It has little actual character and the roads are as regular as jail bars. I lived there for a quarter century and came to love many things about it, and made many friends, who I now miss since I left. But the city itself has little to recommend it, outside of being in the middle of a desert paradise. Of course, you have to drive at least 60 miles in any direction to even get out of the city into the desert, and the remoteness of the desert only increases as the city expands.

Yet, even in Phoenix, I get the feeling of civilization — both good and bad. Civilization is defined by cities. Before cities, life was villages and farms. After the growth of Sumer and Ur, and the creation of writing and the spread of trade and political power, it became possible for the cooperation and interaction that cities allow.

And, even if an urbanite doesn’t leave his city, he will encounter those who have come from elsewhere. He will be forced to give up his “prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” City life tends to make one cosmopolitan and therefore, tolerant. Maybe not universally, but largely.

It explains, in part, the vast political gulf we face, not so simply between red and blue states, but between urban and rural. As cities grow, the nation gets bluer. If we encounter what is “other” and discover it is not, we give up fear and dampen hatred. Cities work because everyone has to put up with everyone else. It is what makes New York such a model.

“The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity,” wrote White. “The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite.”

But it doesn’t. Not normally. In fact, the diversity of the city is more than merely tolerated, it is enjoyed: Who would want to live in a city where you could not get a good mu-shu pork or a good osso buco; not find a movie theater showing the latest Iranian film; not be able to buy a kofia and dashiki; not hear a Baroque opera?

Asheville

I have learned to widen my definition of what counts as a city. Even the Asheville, N.C., I now occupy has, in its tiny compass, an urban feel. The downtown is old and brick, and pedestrians walk up and down its hills. The stores and restaurants are busy and it is hard to find a parking spot. It is a concentrate of urban-ness. I can eat Ethiopian injera or find a well-used copy of Livy. It is a blue city in a red state. And thank the deities in the stars for that. It still echoes the New York that is buried in my deep heart’s core.

Click on any image to enlarge

Off with their heads!

April 19, 2014

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How to be an American

January 25, 2014

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“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway wrote.

In that book, nearly every theme that identifies our art as American is established and explored: migration, race, individualism, anti-intellectualism, optimism, religion, social climbing, moneygrubbing and the comfortable informality that marks us as a people.

It’s as if Huck Finn were the instruction manual for how to be American. In that, Twain is just as clearly American as Debussy is French or Basho is Japanese. We often look to our art for clues to national identity. But although Twain gives us Americanness in concentrated form, most of the arts made on this continent, from Capt. John Smith’s General History of Virginia (1624) and Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, all the way up to this week’s latest rap song, partake in certain common traits.

What are they? First, we need to eliminate some of the things we like to think are particularly American, such as patriotism or respect for family. Every culture feels these qualities are particularly their own, but in fact, they are universal.

Even such negatives as bigotry and racism have their American coloration, but they are evils found in every culture.

It needs to be noted, too, that what we admire in ourselves is not necessarily admired elsewhere. Americans are direct, which others often see as rude. We are informal, which others translate as slobbishness. We are optimistic, which can be taken as arrogance. We believe in individualism, which others see as selfishness. But there are six things that we can see as particularly American: migration, individualism, optimism, religiosity, informality and expansiveness.

Migration

The one thing all Americans share is that we are immigrants.

Even Native Americans, although they hate to think so, came here from somewhere else, whether it is across an Arctic land bridge or up through a sipapu.

It is the parent fact that gives birth to all our other traits. Even after our ancestors came here from far shores, we have never ceased from peregrinating. First we moved West, populating the great wilderness.

Now, we move away from home to college or career, and find our parents retired to Florida and our siblings spread across four time zones.

To Europeans or Asians whose families have lived in the same villages for centuries, we must seem utterly rootless.

So it can hardly be surprising that the central metaphor of Huck Finn is a journey: The book is many things, from its hero’s double negatives and “ain’ts” to his climactic choice to follow his instinct instead of his schooling about runaway slave Jim, but first and foremost, it’s a “road book,” marking the peripatetic nature of American life.

Much of our art reflects this continuous travel. From the moment we arrived on the Atlantic Coast we began moving west. As art, The Godfather speaks of the immigrant experience, but so does every B Western ever filmed.

All the other traits we think of as American ultimately owe their birth to this constant moving: It gives birth to our self-reliance, our willingness to risk tomorrow on faith, and our freedom from many of the cultural straitjackets found back in the Old Country. It’s all there in the art. All either necessary for immigration or fostered by it.

Individualism

Make that “rugged individualism.”

We trust our own instincts, like Huck Finn, rather then the wisdom of the group. We are Mr. Smith in Washington, Gary Cooper at high noon, Ellen Ripley blasting aliens.

The single most potent distillation of this individualism can be found in John Wayne, love him or despise him. But Wayne didn’t spring up ex nihilo; rather, he grew from the soil: He was originally Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales: self-reliant, unschooled but wise and practical, with an unshaken faith in his own code of behavior. He’s Walt Disney’s Davey Crockett saying, “Make sure you’re right, then go ahead,” which is just a pop culture simplification of Henry Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.

Sometimes it’s shocking to realize how of a piece our cultural heritage is.

The flip side of individualism is our tendency to isolationism: “Good fences make good neighbors,” as Robert Frost ironically wrote. Going it alone is usually seen as a virtue.

The downside of this self-reliance is our anti-intellectualism. We trust our own ignorance more than someone else’s knowledge. This is nothing new: It’s why Andrew Jackson was elected president. It’s Huck Finn fearing to be “sivilized” by his Aunt Sally. It’s why one of the most powerful political factions of the 19th century was called the “Know-Nothings.”

It’s a trait of national identity that we should never misunderestimate.

Optimism

Against all reason and the evidence of history, Americans believe they can do anything. It is our “can-do” attitude, and you find it in the barking joy of Walt Whitman’s poetry and the songs of Oklahoma!.

To others in the world, this makes us look naive and foolish; fatalism is not part of our makeup.

Which is why America is home to pop psychology and Doris Day. As a corollary, for Americans, the future only holds a better world. “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Annie sings. “Make it new,” said poet Ezra Pound, and although he was speaking of literature, he could just as well have been speaking of Thomas Edison, the Chrysler Building or Elvis Presley.

Take what you’re given and do something new with it. Never accept the past as the final word.

Religion

Many peoples are religious, but in America, religion is something else.

From the utopian religious communities of the 19th century to today’s fundamentalism, there is a glint of zealotry in American spirituality. Elmer Gantry would not be thinkable in France.

We have gone through at least four “Great Awakenings,” in which we rediscover the old-time religion and the narrow virtues of belief.

It was, after all, religion that founded this country, whether it is Congregationalists in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Roman Catholics in Maryland. Each of them came here for religious freedom, although they were perfectly willing to oppress any religion not their own.

The separation of church and state in our Constitution is there not because we were an agnostic nation, but because everyone was so nuts on the subject and we wanted to keep from each others’ throats.

You hear the religion in the symphonic music of Charles Ives and in Negro spirituals. It echoes in Moby-Dick, and even the window behind the dour couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

Informality

“I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass,” Whitman writes in a poem of expansive informality, turning his back on the formal expression of European art: No villanelles for Americans, no Rime Royal.

In Europe, you have Oedipus, in America, Stanley Kowalski. Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in colloquial American English and even put a note about it at the beginning of the book. Take that, Henry James!

“Whatever is not of the street,” wrote novelist Henry Miller, “is false, derived, that is to say, literature.” And he wasn’t using the word as a compliment.

You can see it in the portrait of Whitman at the front of his book, Leaves of Grass: There he is, sleeves rolled back, collar unbuttoned, hips shifted comfortably, hat at a rakish angle. You could never imagine Tennyson like that.

Expansiveness

Everything in America is supersized, whether it’s fast food or our landscape.

In America, bigger is better: We drive SUVs and watch blockbuster movies. It’s a Texas mentality. Star Wars isn’t big enough; we need a director’s cut, added scenes, a DVD packed with extras. A movie isn’t a success unless it makes $200 million. And the TVs on which we watch those DVDs continue to grow; soon they’ll cover our living room walls.

One Marilyn Monroe isn’t enough; Warhol must print her by the dozens, just as Babe Ruth must eat hot dogs by the score.

The tall tale is our national mythology, from Paul Bunyan to Jim Carrey’s face.

Of course, how could it be otherwise with the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains? Our very landscape calls out for grandiosity and grandiloquence. Over the top is America’s starting line, and the next frontier is our constant goal.

OH, AND AMERICANS LOVE LISTS:

Most-American Americans

John Wayne: Love him or hate him, we can’t think of him as merely an actor. He has become an icon, the movie roles and the man bound into one, indivisible: the lone, laconic hero, man of action rather than words, graceful and bullying in turns.

4 more:

Louis Armstrong: American as soul.

Eleanor Roosevelt: American as do-gooder.

Babe Ruth: American as appetite.

Thomas Edison: American as inventor.

Most American Movies

The Godfather Saga, Francis Ford Coppola, 1977: The conflated version of the first two Godfather films tells the immigrant experience writ large: family, business, love, loyalty, betrayal and the move west, told with the force and mythology of opera.

4 more:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford, 1962: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Star Wars, George Lucas, 1977: Good vs. evil supersized.

Gone With the Wind, David O. Selznick, 1939: History whitewashed.

Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee, 1989: Race will not go away.

American Contributions to global culture

The Constitution: Our “governmental instruction manual” has become a model for the world, and its first 10 amendments have become the guiding principles of many an emerging nation. It’s more than merely political, it’s at the center of our culture, and the one thing the world really does want from us.

4 more:

Jazz: From which all popular music ultimately derives.

Hollywood: America’s secret plan for world domination.

Technology: The physical evidence of the can-do spirit.

Coca-Cola: Las aguas negras del imperialismo.

Most American Novels

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: The Great American Novel, filled with everything, good and bad, about ourselves: race, individualism, anti-intellectualism, optimism, religion, social climbing, moneygrubbing and our comfortable informality.

4 more:

On the Road, Jack Kerouac: An essential national theme takes center stage.

Beloved, Toni Morrison: The evils of slavery haunt even the freed.

The Leatherstocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper: The invention of John Wayne.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: Money, glamour, celebrity and loss.

Most American Plays

Angels in America, Tony Kushner: The hugely ambitious “Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” takes on more American themes than anything since Huck Finn: politics, sex, generations, religious revelation, Reaganism, bigotry and forgiveness; so expansive a single night can’t hold it.

4 more:

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller: The underside of the American dream.

Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein: Gushy, American cornpone classic.

Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams: Torn T-shirts and sweaty thighs.

Fences, August Wilson: Black view from Pisgah.

American Classical-music compositions

Three Places in New England, Charles Ives: The crusty New England composer reinvents classical music to make it more American: loud, brash, nostalgic and patriotic at turns, and finds its subject in landscape and history.

4 more:

Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin: Jazz, Tin Pan Alley, Chopin and Carnegie Hall.

Appalachian Spring, Aaron Copland: Shaker hymn goes mainstream.

Symphony No. 3, Roy Harris: The type of the American symphony.

New World Symphony, Antonin Dvorak: Is the Most American Symphony written by a Czech?

American Architecture

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson: Just as equivocal as its owner and designer, this icon from the back of the common nickel is both paean to Europe’s classical past and the American’s love of invention, gimmickry and nature: Palladian windows and a moose head.

4 more:

Chrysler Building: American industrial dynamism with grace.

Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland: Architecture as play-pretend.

Fenway Park: So cranky we actually love it.

Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright: Built over a waterfall like a diving board.

American Poems

Song of Myself, Walt Whitman: The “good gray poet” could not have arisen anywhere else; he is completely American, from his deification of democracy to his catalogs of diversity to his “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

4 more:

Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Closest thing we have to a national epic poem.

Poems, Emily Dickenson: Nothing more American than her quirky New England eccentricity.

Howl, Allen Ginsberg: “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!”

Mending Wall, Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

American Visual arts

American Gothic, Grant Wood: This iconic painting is more enigmatic than the Mona Lisa: encomium of hardcore American values or satire of Midwestern provincialism? Conservative or avant-garde? He’s not telling.

4 more:

Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley: Art ripped from the headlines, circa 1777.

Marilyn Monroe multiple, Andy Warhol: If one is good, a dozen must be better.

Dogs Playing Poker series, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge: Now, that’s OTT!

Freedom From Want, Norman Rockwell: Turkey, potatoes and lots of corn.

American Popular music

Shenandoah: A folk song of undetermined origin, this is the quintessential song about migration and loss; with its odd strophic form and 19th-century sentiment, it borrows elements from Irish shanties and African-American blues.

4 more:

One O’Clock Jump: Count Basie and swing.

Born to Run: Rebels on wheels, a la the Boss.

Hound Dog: Elvis frees America all over again.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The suffering of a people, caught in the throat.

—Richard Nilsen

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