Otto Von Bismark and other Biographies

I was in Berlin the other week and realized that, aside from World War II, I really knew very little about German history, I knew the name Bismark and that it had some importance but I really had no idea who or why he was important, So in the airport on the way home I picked up a biography of the eponymous Bismark.

I enjoy reading biographies, I’ve read a few of Winston Churchill among others and this particular biography has not disappointed me. However, as I am reading this biography I have become distinctly aware of the process of creating biography. Much of what we know about Bismark, aside from the reported events, comes from the letters that he wrote, others wrote to him, and those that others wrote at the time. In the age before cell phones and internet people wrote letters. I remember that when I was young and went to live in France for a year I used to write letters home and to my friends. There was a weekly ritual whereby I went to the post and mailed a number of letters to my connections near and wide. I don’t think I’ve written a letter since 1995.

On one hand I have made the point with this blog about the permanence of what is posted on line (see post) and also about the fabrication of self (See post), but now without talking out of both sides of my mouth, there is also an alarming impermanence to communication today.  I have no doubt that every email I have ever written has already been deleted by the receivers or that they will be deleted in my lifetime, they are unlikely to be printed and stored in box to be discovered at some future date.

Now I don’t pretend that my life will ever be deemed worthy of a biography so the ephemeral nature of my correspondence is unlikely to seem that alarming and like thousands of other extras my life will be but a drop in the giant world bucket, but consider for a minute how sparse the biography of Otto would have been without access to his correspondence, or the fact that 100 years after his death a stack of letters were discovered and added to the collection of what we know. What would have happened if Otto only corresponded by email? Or even less permanent by text? We know and understand the intimate details of his thinking today because of what he wrote in letters. How will future generations make sense of the past when the only record will be that which has been allowed to be officially recorded and any and all personal correspondence or off the record emailing and texting is deleted.

There is a premise here that biography has value for it’s own sake. Perhaps that is the ultimate pretension; maybe biography is really just a form of entertainment and will be easily replaced by other forms of amusement.  I have always struggled with the value of history, since we rarely really learn from it, and no two events are really identical enough that taking the same course of action will lead to the same result. The march of history is not so rational as to be predictable. Is it interesting? Is it entertaining? Does it help us understand how we got where we are, yes, and that may be valuable itself.

But one of the most enjoyable things about reading biographies is at risk. What comes out in the letters and papers of a lot of these great men and women are their fallibilities. Otto was a hypochondriac, Winston drank a lot, and both were megalomaniacs. I have found great comfort in their imperfections, as much is in how they shaped and responded to the great events of history. How much of this will be lost in the digital age, when we are dependent on the media’s interpretation of their characters.

Perhaps even more pertinent is how much will the characters of public personas be shaped by the media and not a reflection of their true inner journey; if Winston lived today would he have drank so much knowing that the media was documenting every sip, would Otto have lapsed into fits of illness to control the King and the German parliament, if it would have been recorded for posterity. And yet these personal idiosyncrasies made them who they were and in part shape the history of their nations and the world.  While you can argue about whether their impacts were good or bad, the reality is they had significant impacts.

That said every generation has reinterpreted biography and history and the history we know of previous periods was sorely limited by the lack of recorded history and it can be difficult to discern the difference between fact and fiction. We really know very little about the character of Alexander the Great for example, other than what a few dubious sources have told us about him. Historians can’t even agree on his sexuality (although we do know he didn’t speak with an Irish accent except in the head of Oliver Stone). How much more we know about him if he had written a letter or two and then stuffed them in a shoebox.

The digital age has changed the way we view history not only our own story; but the story of our species and our civilization. We are stuck in this bizarre vortex of permanence and impermanence that will shape how the history and the lives of great men and women of the contemporary era and future eras are interpreted and understood. 

Lunching at the Savoy

I was in London a few weeks ago and I very pretentiously opted to lunch at the Savoy. It felt like a very posh thing to do, and like something Winston Churchill would have done in his day, and as a devotee of WC, it felt like the a propos thing to do. Besides all of that it is a Gordon Ramsay restaurant so the food was apt to be delicious, and it was.

As I was sitting there and lunching (not having lunch, I can’t imagine having lunch at the Savoy, when one is at the Savoy “lunch” is definitely a verb) and marveling at my grand surroundings I was contemplating of all things inequality. While the cost of my lunch was not outrageous, it is not something I or about 99% of the human race could afford to do on a daily basis, I was in it for the experience and I was on holiday so splurging felt appropriate, I may even make a habit when I am in London of Lunching at the Savoy, just so that I can say, “ oh pshaw, I always lunch at the Savoy”.

But getting back to inequality, what I struggle with is the two-sided coin that is inequality. On one hand I am a defender of equality to the point that I would take up arms to defend it and believe that it is the foundation for a just society.  On the other I can’t help but recognize that all of the beautiful things that are man-made that I love to visit and see were the result of gross inequality including in part the Savoy. It is all enabled by a great disparity in wealth. All of the palaces, castles, churches were built during a time of extraordinary inequality, most of the great art was the result of royal and wealthy patrons, most writers prior to the 20^th century were attached in some way to the aristocracy. It was only when freed from the quotidian tasks of survival does human culture reach its pinnacle.

Equality, at least of the economic kind that I am referring to here, is inherently utilitarian; functional and barren, it lacks flourish.  A king can build a castle, an emperor a palace, a bishop a cathedral, but a politician must build a concrete block with windows. It is hard to imagine building the palace of Versailles today; the outrage would bring down the best of intentions. We do tolerate the über-rich building mansions of epic proportions but they are monuments to our worship of the self more than they are contributions to collective culture. 

The flip side to this inequality; however, is that is not sustainable, eventually the people rebelled against the ostentation of the aristocracy. In spite of the belief by the noble classes that they were chosen by God to be better than others the people could only tolerate so much inequality. Now I know I am painting with a broad brush the period of revolution and there were many caused beyond inequality that caused the peasantry to rise up (there are probably a 1000 books on all the various causes) but there is still something to be said for that fact that the revolutions occurred at a time when income and wealth disparity was at its greatest. That is until the modern time.

At risk of quoting Aristotle it seems to me that there must be somewhere in the middle where there is enough inequality that there is incentive for great works but not so much that people are compelled to rise up. I still wonder if  the cultural greatness of the renaissance is compatible with a commitment to equality. I have not resolved this conundrum only to say that it is there, and while lunching at the Savoy I am quite enamored by the delights that inequality has brought me, but on the way out, while I stop at the toilet, I am reminded that we all shit the same.

Oh, and if you do lunch at the Savoy have the pumpkin soup with toasted hazelnuts and the braised lamb shank, it was superb.

What I am most Proud of

I got asked today what I am most proud of and I wasn’t able to give a great answer on the spot. What I said was that I am proud of my ability to build relationships. I was told that my answer was too corporate and not personal enough. So I came home and I did some thinking and this is what I came up with:

I am most proud of the fact that I do not have a bucket list. I choose to treat every experience in my life as an opportunity to achieve deeper connections with humanity and the world. To truly relate one must be fully open to be changed and altered by experience. When we live according to a list we are more concerned with checking things off the list than we are with being open to the change that the experience causes within us. In failing to relate the world becomes a giant fun fair where the candy floss has more air than substance.

I have a friend who has listed, “living with a family in India” on his bucket list; one thing that he needs to accomplish before he dies. People are not tourist attractions. If you live with people and relate to them profoundly it will change you! Everything on your list might change if you are open to the experiences that life throws at you. You might fall in love in India, you might decide to stay, you might never want to go back, but as long as it is something to endure to achieve a glorious checkmark on your list you will fail to experience what it means to live and connect with people.

If you saw the movie “The Bucket List” what you might remember is that for the main character it was easier to jump out of airplanes, hunt tigers and drive motorcycles than it was to walk up to his estranged daughter’s front door, ring the doorbell and say “I’m sorry”.

I’m most proud of the fact that I have rung that doorbell more times than I care to remember and had my heart broken too many times to count but I choose to connect profoundly with people and I choose to face the shadow side of my relationships with others and myself. It is better to mend a broken heart than it is to polish a perfect stone. Relating is hard work for me, possibly for everyone, but I only have my own experience to judge that.

I have jumped out of airplanes and climbed mountains and I have found that it is harder to face the reality of relating than it is to run a marathon. Life, for me, is not an endurance test.

This doesn’t stop me from having fun. I love to ski, to hike, to play classical guitar, listen to Opera, to play pirates with my nieces and nephews, deep intellectual debates and reading Russian novels. I love to travel and see new places but these are not the aims of my life. If I go nowhere else, if I never hear or play music again, or read another book, it will be enough to have risked loving and risked being loved.

So perhaps my answer is still too corporate, but I am most proud of my ability to build and maintain relationship and, for me, that is a deeply personal answer.