I failed to appreciate this soon enough. While my grandfather was alive, I thought of them as him because he demanded so much attention. But after he was gone, she was still there, and her quiet became more positively apparent. It became clear just how much she accommodated him, and how little he dominated her. This is not to say that she humored him. She loved him dearly and thought much of him. Out of her strength, she provided the space and comfort he needed. I saw this all at once in the wryness, but not irony, with which she once said of him, “When he woke up in the morning, he knew everything about everything.”

She was quiet by virtue not of effort or suppression, but as a manifestation. It’s a quiet that I’ve only recently learned to recognize and appreciate. In the silence of her absence, a different sort of silence all together and one that emerged gradually over the course of her decline, I now miss her particular quiet greatly. But I have seen its like in my family. It’s what I find when I visit my brother and his family. That may well explain the profound connection between him and my grandmother.

It’s thirteen months after our wedding, which is to say fifteen months after my father’s death and about eight months after her father’s death. But in that moment, on that bench on that hill, we’re the only two people alive, and aside from that gull animating these instants, the only two creatures alive. All of the space, light, and air denied us in our apartment and our offices is here, if not for the taking, then at least for the having, and we’re overwhelmed by it. She lays her head on my lap and closes her eyes. I abide with my hand on her shoulder. Neither of us says anything, because any word, any further movement, would break the spell and we would fall back into time and life.

But eventually, in our naive and needful benightedness, we do move. We get up and continue along the trail, back down and around to where we started from. She needs to get back to the restroom, so we don’t take the additional loop in the trail out to Nauset Beach and back. We hurry to the parking lot and the visitor center, and having tarried there a few moments more, we drive back to the unexpected (foolishly so) melancholy of our guesthouse and the rest of our vacation.

I wonder (though not enough to actually read the studies) how the effectiveness of antidepressants might be measured. I can’t imagine how anyone else following me over the last year might have reliably assessed how the changes in dose affected me. It’s not like I’ve become more effective or easier to get along with. I’m not even sure such an assessor would have been able to make much of my attempts to convey how I feel. But that doesn’t make the effects of the medication, subjective though they may be, any less real, and it won’t stop me from trying to convey how I feel anyway.

I don’t know what the narrative in anyone else’s head sounds like, but mine has always been stern, sharp, worried, and relentless. I took up meditation hoping to find some respite from it, only to discover that mindfulness practice brought it into sharper focus. But having it in sharper focus has made the change in its tone over the last year much clearer. And on 10 mg of Lexapro, it was supportive where it had been stern; insightful where it had been sharp; calm where it had been worried; and reassuring where it had been relentless. With the decreased dosage, it has shifted back toward what I had come to believe was normal. I find myself feeling more threatened and vulnerable, and so defensiveness seems to motivate more of my behavior, but not so much so that anyone else seems to notice. I guess it’s not that I’m acting differently, but though I’m still doing the same thing, I’m doing it while wearing the slightly itchy underwear of my background anxiety.

When I visited the psychopharmacologist, our discussion of whether I should stay on the reduced dose of Lexapro or go back to the higher (but still fairly low) dose–a discussion greatly simplified by the lack of side effects, which had been an issue with Celexa–centered on the issue of subjective experience versus objective behavior. She recognized the subjective difference in my experience as real, but suggested that if this change didn’t translate into a difference in behavior and didn’t affect my ability to function, then I should consider staying at this dosage for the time being. I had gone into the appointment thinking that I’d return to the higher dosage, because why suffer if I don’t have to? But I came around to her way of thinking, in part because she told me that what I feel now (manageable irritation), not what I felt on the higher dosage (bliss), is normal. But also, if I simply never suffer, then I suspect the emotional “muscles” used in managing suffering would atrophy, and I’d end up the psychological equivalent of the former earthlings in WALL-E. So now I find myself on the other side of this insight:

Being willing to face the unavoidable pains of life is often a sign of courage and wisdom. Nonetheless, being unwilling to use effective therapies to relieve unnecessary pains may be a sign of misunderstanding, and of a spiritual superego run amuck.

Where a year ago I had to recognize that my pains were perhaps unnecessary and could be more compassionately addressed, now I have to recognize again that some pain is unavoidable and find a little courage and wisdom to work with. But I do so with a sense of hope. First, I know that the medication is always available, that it’s effective, and that I don’t suffer side effects taking it. This offers the non-negligible comfort that whatever’s bothering me can be stopped if I need it to be. But also, having been through this experience in the context of a mindfulness practice, I’ve been able to see clearly that the quality of the narrative in my head, and so of the most intimate layer of all that I experience, is changeable. My very self, as I experience it, doesn’t have an inherent texture. That’s the considerable upside of impermanence.

There are all sorts of summaries of the year in gadgets out there, but for me, there were two particular gadgets that made me happy this year, one of which I’ve had for twelve years. I had the watch that my wife gave me for my thirtieth birthday refurbished, and I’ve gone back to wearing it every day. It’s not flashy or remarkable, but it keeps very good time without a battery or winding. It is purely analog and mechanical. It’s an astonishing feat of craftsmanship, and I often find myself staring at it on my wrist in awe, trying and failing to imagine the precision of its inner workings.

Similarly precise and well-crafted, but not so purely analog and mechanical, is the new camera I got in October. Though a carpenter isn’t supposed to blame his tools, may I give credit to mine? It’s made me a much better photographer. I’m still amazed by the simultaneous sharpness and creaminess (for lack of a better word) of the images it produces, and its ability to work in limited light. And I don’t yet have the lens that’s supposed to make this camera so remarkable, though it’s on its way and should arrive early next week, suggesting still more wonders from this camera in 2010.

The more fully digital world of computers has offered its own pleasures, though for me, they’ve been almost exclusively software. I haven’t really gotten any new hardware this year (except for the Magic Mouse, which, meh), but the hardware I already had became far more useful, with impressive updates to Mac OS X, iPhone OS, and AppleTV. Even Windows 7, the release candidate of which I installed in VirtualBox (another fun discovery in 2009), is a clear improvement.

But the most significant advances by far have come from Google. The Web and mobile Web versions of Google Reader were already the way I consumed the vast majority of Web content, and the Google Mobile iPhone app had already proven handy. In 2009, they added the Chrome browser, Latitude, Google Voice, and Wave, and showed a preliminary version of the Chrome operating system. I’m very curious to see where these will converge in the coming year, but I expect an exponential increase in the usefulness of the Web–much of which is already provided for me by Google–to ensue.

I can’t tout the arrival of any great new literary voices in 2009, but I’ve still managed to find much that is new to me. On vacation in May, I picked up a used copy of Philip Roth‘s Sabbath’s Theater and read it through in a week. I had previously read only Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint and enjoyed them, but wasn’t moved to read any further. But mature Roth proved to be a different matter entirely–audacious not in the superficial way so commented upon in Portnoy’s Complaint, but in the profound way running from Dante and Cervantes through Beckett. I went back through the great mid-period Roth from Zuckerman Bound to Operation Shylock, and was impressed by the many achievements he managed in that short period, including especially The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, and Operation Shylock. But they all still seem to be a sort of rehearsal or maybe extended sketches in preparation for the grim news of Sabbath’s Theater. And I still have the American Trilogy to look forward to.

And against all expectations, just as I was reconciling myself the likely reality that Against the Day would be Thomas Pynchon‘s last novel, Inherent Vice appeared. It’s lighter and more accessible than most of his other novels, but it’s still great fun. It may prove to be an even more effective gateway to his writing than The Crying of Lot 49 has often been. Perhaps there will be yet another novel from Mr. Pynchon in the coming years.

Oh, and The Awl started publication.

These are among the many reasons I look back on 2009 fondly, while still looking forward to 2010. I know that many won’t remember this year happily, but I hope you all have something like the joy I’ve had this year in the coming year and those that follow.

…film camera lenses were always properly corrected optically, so surely the use of software to achieve the same effect is simply cost-cutting, and therefore somehow “cheating.”

We think this is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it. In photography, what ultimately counts is the final image – the means to get there is relatively unimportant.

To assess a photograph based on the different ways in which a camera might generate the same image rather than based on the image itself is to mistake the map for the territory, as is seeking satisfaction in reading about camera equipment rather than taking pictures. I first encountered the phrase “mistaking the map for the territory” in an academic setting, most likely graduate school, but I’ve come across it in other contexts as well, most recently in discussions of Buddhism, where it’s sometimes used as a trope suggesting the difference between generally characterized and specifically characterized phenomena. It’s based on the recognition that a map is a distortion of the territory it describes, in that it abbreviates and excludes. If it didn’t, it would be the territory itself. The map may be used to determine how best to navigate the territory, but the navigation actually occurs in the territory. A map is judged relative to the territory; the territory isn’t found complete or deficient based on the map.

This doesn’t mean that maps aren’t incredibly useful. Their compression makes them far more suitable for carrying around in a jacket pocket or glove compartment than the city of Venice of the U.S. interstate highway system would be. Yet their limitations must be understood if they’re to be used properly. We must know that one inch on the map is a mile in the territory, and that we won’t be able to see on the map what the gas station at which we’re to turn will look like. But precisely because they’re so useful and, given their abstraction, so much easier to manage, maps often come to replace in our experience the territory they’re meant to represent. If our map is good enough that the dissonance we experience as a result of treating it as the territory it represents is manageable, we may cease to engage with the territory entirely. This could lead to us following the directions provided by our GPS navigation system into a lake. Or it may lead to the worst sorts of fundamentalism.

Schools of thought, belief systems, and the like are more sophisticated maps of less tangible, but no less real, territories. Isaac Newton provided one map of the world that was suffcient to get us through the industrial revolution and to the moon. Albert Einstein provided another that proved more accurate on a smaller scale, which is taking us through and beyond the information revolution; and scientists are seeking still more precise maps. But that process will never lead to the truth, in the sense of getting beyond the map to the territory. As long as these efforts yield descriptions, they cannot be that which is described. Maps do not become the territory, so science will only ever be able to approach the truth asymptotically.

I’ve recently been reading several of Philip Roth‘s books, including the Zuckerman Bound trilogy and epilogue, The Counterlife, and The Facts. It has been fascinating to read those books in chronological order and watch Roth create Nathan Zuckerman, develop him as a character, and, at the point when he becomes more real to the author than Roth himself, flail at (and even toy with killing) him and then try to flee from him into autobiography. You can see Roth discover and revel in his power of creation, much as Cervantes did in the second half of Don Quixote, but you can also see him recoil from the abyss just beyond that creativity, of which Hamlet could have told us, had he but time. At the end of The Counterlife, Zuckerman claims, in essence, that there are only maps, or that maps are all that we might know of one another and ourselves, which for him, comes to the same thing. Roth begins his next book, the autobiographical The Facts, with a letter to Zuckerman speculating about the causes of the breakdown (or “crack-up,” as he puts it) that Roth suffered after he finished writing The Counterlife. News of that breakdown came as no surprise to me, having just finished reading it. In the course of The Facts, he fails to find a satisfying grip on himself in the allegedly straightforward realm of autobiography. He seems only to find a map of the territory of himself, leaving us with a fairly uninteresting and un-Roth-like tale. And in the letter to Roth from Zuckerman that serves as the book’s afterword, Zuckerman tells Roth as much, and it seems that Roth is hopelessly lost in his maps. I look forward to reading on through his oeuvre to find out where this leads.

The writing most susceptible to this sort of misreading is allegory. Not only is allegory, like all writing, a map, but it’s a map of a map, a generalization of a generalization. It seeks not just to compress one set of events into a tale, but to compress the common events of a whole set of possible tales into a single tale. Only gross misunderstanding and considerable suffering can come from a literal reading of something so distorted, as is demonstrated by all of the fundamentalisms with which we’re beset. I don’t know that anything beyond simple instructions can be read literally, but I’m certain that scripture, from Abrahamic to Darwinian to Freudian, cannot be. I know of no better measure of intellectual maturity than the ability to realize that insight.

Followed by his Men of Saintship, yet advancing with the grave mysterious loneliness of the elephant, he came within several miles of Kapilavastu where the sumptuous palace of his youth still stood, as unreal now, in his enlightened mirror-like reflection, as an indicated castle in a child’s tale told solely to make children believe in its existence. The King heard of his arrival and came at once, eagerly concerned.

On seeing him he uttered these mournful words: “Thus, now I see my son, his well known features as of old; but how estranged his heart! There are no grateful outflowings of soul; cold and vacant there he sits.”

There was a dull crack. The plane bounced as though it had gone over a speed bump a little too quickly, and then it started to descend. The oxygen masks dropped down from their overhead compartments, and one of the flight attendants instructed the passengers to place the nearest mask over their mouth and nose, reminding those with children or others needing assistance to put their own mask on first and then to help others. His mother, seated between him and his brother, had been through this as a child. Then her father had efficiently put a mask over his own face and, with the same lack of ceremony and without any attempt to soothe or comfort, put another over her face. She was frightened, and the mask was uncomfortable. It dug into the bridge of her nose and the sides of her chin. She resented it, but her father wouldn’t let her move it. She survived to repeat the experience as a parent. Perhaps she was rebelling because of that resentment, but whatever the reason, she now put the mask on her head like a child’s party hat and told him and his brother to do the same, allowing them to do it for themselves. When she became short of breath, she would put the mask over her mouth and nose for a moment and then replace it on the top of her head. Watching her do that, he figured out that he should do the same, but his brother didn’t.

Eventually, he realized that he was more comfortable if he just left the mask over his mouth and nose. His mother noticed and commented that he was “just like Them.” He was seated on the aisle, and looked around to see that, yes, everyone else was wearing the mask over their mouths and noses, and though anxious and frightened, They looked much better off than his brother. His brother, fading in his corner against the window from the lack of oxygen, couldn’t see what anyone else was doing. His mother was doing better than his brother, but she seemed to be moving more slowly and taking longer between breaths from the mask that she occasionally remembered to pull down from the top of her head. He looked around the cabin again, saw how much better off everyone else was, and thought, “This is absurd.”

He pointed to his brother and asked his mother to help him to put on his mask correctly. She sleepily waved him away and asked who he thought he was to tell anyone what the correct way to wear the mask was. He tried to reach across her to help his brother with his mask, but she pushed him away. Animated by the effort, she pulled her mask over her mouth and nose, took a deep breath, and scolded him.

“Stop trying to control your brother. Respect his decision to wear his mask that way.”

“But look at everyone else. Look at us. The masks worn correctly are giving us the oxygen we all need. There isn’t enough oxygen in here without the mask.”

“Why are you so sure that you know the correct way to wear the mask? There is more to life than cold facts and logic. There is deeper wisdom; warm outflowings of soul. I once read of a man in a similar situation who wore the mask over his forehead and saw God.”

“Look at him. He’s turning blue. He’s going to die.”

“Are you sure that isn’t your own fear of death speaking? Your ideas about what your brother should and shouldn’t do are just projections of your own emotions.”

Denied both logical argument and emotional appeals, he had no idea how to proceed. But just then, the plane leveled off and began to climb, and the cabin pressure returned. It took his mother some minutes to return to full lucidity, but his brother never did. He suffered permanent brain damage from his partial asphyxia, though his mother refuted both the diagnosis and its cause until the day she died.

The most profound effect I’ve noticed so far has been on my dreams. Not on the dreams themselves, but on my relationship to them. It started with me remembering more and more of my dreams; seeming hours worth of clear, calm, vivid narrative, evolving over the course of a night from image to image and situation to situation. And as clear as they were, they were strangely impersonal, as though I were watching a movie. I wasn’t confused or disoriented, and it wasn’t as though I was trying to solve a puzzle or fulfill any particular responsibility. I was just watching events–events that I was in the midst of but that didn’t involve me, or with which there was no me to be involved–unfold with a sense of gentle curiosity and a vague awareness that it was just a dream. As this experience has become less exotic, the boundary between my dreams and my waking thoughts has become less clear. I’ve been lying in bed following a particular train of thought, with my eyes closed picturing all of the associations and implications of those thoughts, and been awakened by a noise or a movement, only to realize that I had fallen asleep and the train of thought I had started while still awake simply continued uninterrupted as a dream. And if I wake more gently, I find that the dream can also continue uninterrupted as a waking train of thought.

As I said, I don’t think this is a change in the dreams themselves. I think it’s just a change in my relationship to them. Having gone back and forth in an unmediated way between dreams and waking thought, I’m struck more by their similarities than their differences. Waking thought is more driven by associative leaps and the tangled, non-linear connections and dreams are more bound by logical connections and recent experience than we usually realize. The only real difference between my waking thoughts and my dreams seems to be that when I’m awake, external events or my own conscious intentions shape and focus my train of thought. Asleep, the dreams wander based on their own internal logic. Having experienced those deeper similarities, I can, for the few minutes I’m waking up each morning, hold a different relationship to my thoughts about the day to come. As I’ve gone on at great length about elsewhere, this relationship to our waking life, this sense that we’re dreaming it as it happens, is one way to analogize enlightenment. We’re dreaming, and in becoming enlightened, we wake up but maintain that relationship to our experience, which continues uninterrupted as the train of our waking life. It’s not that dreams aren’t real and waking life is real; it’s just that we relate to the experiences differently, even though they’re both just the manifestation of mind.

And speaking of manifestations of undirected trains of thought, I’ve joined Facebook. If you have too, spray paint something on my wall.

Until last week, when the BBC’s In Our Time did a program (or programme) on “The Waste Land and Modernity.” I picked the poem up again, and read quickly through it. Except for the section alluding to Dante’s Inferno, which reminded me of nothing so much as The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” and the opening images of the comforts of winter and the pains of spring, which I suspected were meant more ironically than I took them, I couldn’t make much of it. So I consulted Harold Bloom as I often do on these matters. He first has this to say of Eliot:

I set aside Eliot’s verse plays, which are scarcely stageable or readable, and his criticism, despite its historical importance. As for what would now be called his cultural criticism, I grimace and pass by. There remains his anti-Semitism, which is very winning, if you happen to be an anti-Semite; if not, not.

Having disposed of so much of Eliot’s oeuvre, he makes the helpful suggestion that Eliot’s poetry might be most profitably read as anxiously influenced by Whitman, with “The Waste Land” being particularly influenced by “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I read the Whitman poem, re-read “The Waste Land,” and I’m now listening to the BBC program (which two-thirds of the way through, hasn’t yet mentioned Whitman), and I suggest that you do the same. ‘Tis a profitable expenditure of an hour or two, and it’s all free.