Sarah Kaufman

The Art of the World Series

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There are analysts and columnists and strategists galore, but leave it to musical theater to pronounce the truth about the sport that’s holding us spellbound.

“This game of baseball is only half skill,” the coach in “Damn Yankees” tells his gloomy players. “The other half is something else. Something bigger!” 

He sings out the rest, half belting, half purring one of the great philosophies of winning:

You gotta have hearrrrt/ 

All you really need is hearrrrt …. 

The fact that the coach in that 1955 Broadway musical was singing to his Washington Senators team (the American League’s real-life last-place finishers that year) is interesting in this context, but it’s beside the point. The point is that while the song doesn’t come near explaining how you win ballgames, it perfectly captures how you win fans. 

It crystallizes why we’re in such thrall to this World Series between the underdog Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros.

[Why Roger Federer is the most graceful athlete of our time]

I’m not going to lie: as a lifelong Washingtonian, I’ve lost my heart to the Nats. And like anyone in this town who wasn’t around in 1933–the last year a D.C. ballclub was in the World Series–I’m glorying in the unusual feeling of rooting for my own home team this year. But I suspect that even without the Nats’ first two wins, the odds are that the underestimated Nats would still be fan favorites. As history’s great artists and storytellers know–lyricists, playwrights and novelists–you hook your audience through feelings: with compelling characters who take us on an emotional journey as they plunge into a high-stakes conflict. The Nats have aced that. 

Theirs is a dream team of characters with pointed emotional appeal. Even the leadership has laid bare its soft side, though no one would wish it this way. Manager Dave Martinez’s cardiac scare last month exposed the vulnerability of a hardened leader, who now talks of how the team has healed him. 

Candy hearts — outfielder Gerardo Parra’s “Baby Shark” walk-up song, and the joyful dugout dances — exist alongside great, big hearts, like indomitable, unruffle-able pitcher Stephen Strasburg in Game 2. And the grunting Max Scherzer, muscling through an arduous night in Game 1 on the pitcher’s mound, without an ounce of surrender. 

Pitch after pitch, Scherzer’s big body flew apart, like a rubber doll wrenched by a maniac’s hands: torso snapped in half, right leg kicking out to third base, left knee horribly torqued. But those eyes locked forward, watching his sliders, and sometimes watching his hopes die. The star simply got back to business. Scherzer gathered his exploded joints back together and set up for the next ordeal. 

He doesn’t have the cool composure of the Astros’s Gerritt Cole. But Scherzer is achingly human, a workhorse who can fail and fail and still find a way to sort through the mess. As my husband put it, his walk-up music ought to be Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” 

[Muhammad Ali’s grace broke the mold of a heavyweight champion]

As for heartbreakers? Let’s agree: We’re all in love with the impossible Juan Soto, who wasn’t of legal age to drink the champagne and Budweiser the team was surely drowning in during a charmed postseason. He turned 21 the day of Game 3. A large part of baseball’s appeal is nostalgic — memories of fathers and sons (and daughters) tossing balls in the backyard. Soto, with his cocksure youth and that fluffy, adorably boyish hairdo, embodies this. He’s everybody’s kid. 

He reminded us of this in a lovely story about his father, telling reporters, “My dad told me when I was 10 years old, that you’re gonna play baseball on your birthday. You’re gonna play in the World Series.” 

A natural entertainer, Soto thrives in the spotlight. He can be cheeky, for sure, but he stops short of arrogance. Even his “Soto Shuffle,” a quick pitcher-taunting routine of foot-scuffing and a laser stare, is somehow not insufferable because he doesn’t overuse it.

The World Series has become an immensely watchable TV series, no matter if we’re die-hard baseball fans or if we’ve just tuned in to the drama unfolding live before our eyes. Each four-hour marathon so far has the settle-in-with-popcorn-and-blankets feel of a binge.

There are moments of soaring grace. Third baseman Anthony Rendon skims lightly across the dirt, unencumbered by gravity or physics, to spoon up the ball and in the same spiraling motion flick it across an oceanic expanse into Ryan Zimmerman’s glove. It’s grand and Herculaic. But I also love Zimmerman’s small action, the devastating downward swipe of his glove on the ankle of an Astro. 

Such routine dramas, big and small, have inspired countless artists to muse about the mystical side of baseball. Think of the mythic poetry in Bernard Malamud’s novel “The Natural,” and the wishful fantasy of the film “Field of Dreams.” There’s a charming bit of magic realism in a current TV commercial featuring astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who confesses that he went to the moon to retrieve a World Series ball, hit out of the park in his boyhood. It’s not too difficult to imagine such a thing. Every home run disappearing into the upper decks of Minute Maid Park seemed bound for the stars.

Then there’s the poignancy of imperfections. At one point in Game 2, the camera zoomed in on shortstop Trea Turner’s swollen right index finger, just before he tucked it into his belt loop. It looked like a raw, lumpy sausage. He broke it in the spring; it hasn’t fully healed because he came back to the game too soon. He’s had to teach himself how to throw differently; he bats and fields with nine fingers.

Well, one moment Turner is a miracle-maker, sucking a grounder into his glove with his eyes closed, pirouetting with a dancer’s finesse and making a play. 

And the next moment, because this is life, not art, the Astros’s José Altuve guns a line drive in Turner’s general direction. Turner pounces, a beautiful, full-bodied extension in midair — and belly flops into the dirt. 

Miles and miles and miles of heart.

Read more by Sarah L. Kaufman:

The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life

Janet Jackson hired her as a backup dancer. Instagram made her a star.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke dances like no one’s watching — and it’s a beauty to behold

Nicole Fosse opens up about her Broadway parents




The grace of Frank Deford

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You didn’t have to be a sports insider to love the work of sportswriter Frank Deford. You only had to appreciate drama and the human heart and expert storytelling. I’ve been thinking about him with a mix of sadness and profound gratitude since he died on May 28. Back when I was in college (ahem, decades ago) I started listening to his penetrating essays for NPR on the deeper meaning of athletics; moving meditations not only on great achievement but on great struggles. Such compassion came through in his voice and his words.

I saw another side of his extraordinary generosity when he gave me two of the greatest gifts an author can receive: early support, and a blurb.

Since it was clear that Mr. Deford had an eye for elegance of motion and for the inspiring grace that humans can achieve, I had hoped he might enjoy my book, “The Art of Grace,” especially given my focus on athletes. I wrote to him to ask if he would take a look at the manuscript.

Joy of joys, he quickly agreed, making my heart leap, and a short while after receiving the manuscript he followed up with my editor at W.W. Norton to say that he was “thoroughly taken” with it.  

“It’s not the sort of work that I’m usually sent,” he wrote in an email, “and I’m delighted to have had the chance to read it.” And he included the following endorsement:  
 
“So that’s it.  It takes only a short while in reading ‘The Art of Grace’ to realize that Sarah Kaufman has nailed it, that she has detected precisely what it is that has changed us so for the worse.  We are suffering what she calls, simply, a “grace gap” –– and it is not just that Cary Grant, her hero, has gone, with few enough Roger Federers left to remind us of that easy elegance.  Rather, grace in all its manifestations has given way to coarseness and impatience, and, for all our vaunted technology, she shows us to be a more diminished species. Ms. Kaufman’s book is itself most graceful, ever knowing.
 
Best,
Frank Deford”

Mr. Deford also suggested that he be identified on the book jacket not only as a sportswriter but as the author of “Alex: The Life of a Child,” the memoir he wrote in 1983 about his daughter Alexandra, who struggled with cystic fibrosis and died at age 8. Of the many books he’d written, he explained, this was the one that dealt with grace. The book is almost unbearably beautiful: the composure of a wise innocent, the helplessness of love, and the grace that endures. It’s no wonder he was so generous with others. I’ll always feel fortunate and so very grateful to have briefly crossed his path, and to have felt the lasting grace of his great heart.

For a good account of Mr. Deford’s life and a passage from “Alex: The Life of a Child,” read The Washington Post’s obituary.

For more about Alex and her father, read this Washington Post feature from 1986.

My Mother’s Lesson in Grace

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My mom, Catharine, with her day-old grandson Asa.

For Mother’s Day, and in honor of my mother, whose kindness and eye for beauty inspire me every single day, I’m posting an edited-down excerpt about her from “The Art of Grace.” Her lesson in acceptance and inclusion marked me deeply as a child; it taught me something profound about considering other people’s feelings, and the rewards that flow from that:

When I turned six, my mother told me I could have ponies at my birthday party—a little girl’s dream—if I invited everyone in my first-grade class.

Fine by me!

Everyone, she continued. Including Dennis. (Not his real name.)

Dennis, the boy whose pale skin and hair made him look transparent, barely there. The kid I was very sure had the worst sort of cooties. This I knew, though I didn’t know much else about him. Dennis was given to nosebleeds and a kind of spastic jitteriness, and like the other kids in the class, I did my best to avoid him.

I think I shed some tears over the ultimatum, but I really wanted those ponies, so Dennis was in….

And on the appointed Saturday of my party, a horse trailer pulled up the alley; three squat, lethargic, darling animals were saddled up by our gate, and an excited line of children formed for turns around the backyard. I remember hopping up and down a lot. I remember going first. I remember what everything looked like from high atop my pony as I traveled grandly past the dirt patch where I made mud pies, past my little playhouse, past the other children, past Dennis, his pale face flashing even paler in the afternoon sun. He was clapping his hands, hopping up and down, as jazzed up as everyone else.

And I remember gazing over to our gnarled, solitary apricot tree, newly in bloom and magnificent, where my mother stood chatting pleasantly with Dennis’s mother. His mom was older, grandmotherly, and the white pinned-up coil of her hair almost disappeared against the blossoms. As I watched them, his mother and my mother together—the surprise of it still electrifies this memory—it registered that my mother was taking care of her guest with the same calm, sensitive attention with which she treated, well, everyone. She was looking after Dennis’s mom, making sure she had someone to talk to, delivering the unspoken message to her that her son, so often alone at school, was welcome at our house….

It took a while to grasp, but as I put together the view from my pony on that beautiful day in my backyard, I came to understand something as startling as it was liberating, heart-opening: everyone should have a good time at my party, and I wasn’t the most important person at it.

Dennis had seemed so alien to me. He might as well have been a helium balloon, fragile, not quite of this world, barely connected to the rest of us. But I learned three things about him that afternoon that anchored him, pulling him back down to earth. I learned that he liked ponies, just as I did; that he had a mother, just as I did; and most of all, that his feelings, and her feelings, mattered as much as anybody else’s. My mother taught me that, by her own graceful example.

It was a good party. And a great birthday, where I felt myself grow up a little.

–from “The Art of Grace,” by Sarah L. Kaufman. All rights reserved.

Grace and “The Little Mermaid”

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While preparing to review a ballet inspired by “The Little Mermaid,” I came across a subtle but profound message about grace that Hans Christian Andersen weaves through his famous fairytale.

First of all, let’s clear away the Disney version of “The Little Mermaid,” which takes Andersen’s dark tale and turns it into a standard princess story about winning the prince and living happily ever after. Contrast this with Andersen’s mermaid, who suffers excruciating pain and disfigurement, never has a chance with the man she loves, and loses him to another woman.

Great children’s story, right? Well, there is a happy ending, but it’s not what you’d expect. The mermaid ends up realizing she doesn’t need a man to be happy. This is in 1836! Yes, this young woman of character has everything she needs within herself–because of her graceful nature–and she joins a community of like-hearted females, neither mortal nor mermaid, but floaty, unseen creatures of pure spirit.

Remember how Andersen always sides with the outsider (“The Ugly Duckling,” “The Little Match Girl,” and more)? True to form, his little mermaid, youngest of seven sisters, is a misfit in her watery world. No one understands her restless spirit, lack of vanity and yearning for love. I believe he’s drawing a distinction between this virtuous creature and the historical depiction of mermaids as deceitful sexual predators, singing sailors to their deaths.

One night, the little mermaid falls in love with a mortal man whom she rescues from drowning. She vows to somehow become human and join him on land; to do this she visits the sea witch, who cuts out her tongue to use in a potion that will turn her tail into legs. “But if you take away my voice, what is left for me?” the mermaid asks, before the tongue is taken.

“Your beautiful form, your graceful walk, and your expressive eyes; surely with these you can enchain a man’s heart,” replies the witch. She is ruthless, but she is right: Grace remains, even after the mermaid has lost her ability to speak and sing.

Forever silenced, and in constant pain from her new limbs, the girl remains devoted to her prince. Despite what she’s lost, she retains her true heart, her loving nature, and–Andersen is very clear about this–her grace. Grace is what buoys her in the dry, unfamiliar land in which she now moves.

“All who saw her wondered at her graceful-swaying movements,” Andersen tells us. Yet the mermaid is new to walking on land, and her steps are painful, so how could this be? I believe he means for us to understand that grace is in her spirit, her hopeful attitude, her perspective. Unlike her beautiful singing voice, it is something no one can take away. Her pain was terrible, “but she bore it willingly, and stepped as lightly by the prince’s side as a soap-bubble.” This grace of movement is a reflection of her love. It is a spiritual force infusing her movements from the inside out.

Still, she doesn’t win over the prince, who’s stuck on another woman and plans to marry her. This, according to the sea witch’s spell, will mean death for the little mermaid. Andersen compares her terrible failed sacrifice with that of her sisters, who come to her with a plan. They’ve given up their hair for an enchanted knife; once their little sister kills the prince with it, she’ll revert back to mermaidhood. But their act of love is tainted; their sister’s homecoming rests on blood.

Of course, the little mermaid refuses them. She nobly leaves her prince to his new wife and throws herself into the sea, expecting to die. And yet! “Hundreds of transparent beautiful beings” surround her, lift her up; she has become like them, lighter than air, floating out of the foam towards the clouds. She is now “among the daughters of the air.”

Now Andersen shows us how the little mermaid can acquire the true treasure–an immortal soul. But he also has a broader and quite practical point about the actions that we take, and how our behaviors can take on a spiritual, even angelic quality. This is something his young readers (and older ones) can carry out in their lives. It echoes what threads through “The Art of Grace,” in the wisdom I gleaned from my interviews and research into ideas going back to the ancients: Grace is about giving, loving, and thinking of others. And so it turns out that our little mermaid is in an even better place than if she’d won the prince’s heart. These “daughters of the air” have adopted her because she is like them–generous, kind and helpful. And there’s more:

“A mermaid has not an immortal soul, nor can she obtain one unless she wins the love of a human being,” one of these creatures tells her. “On the power of another hangs her eternal destiny.” But no matter: The daughters of the air can get themselves their own immortal soul ”by their good deeds.” They are independent women!

What kinds of good deeds, you may ask? “We fly to warm countries, and cool the sultry air that destroys mankind with pestilence. We carry the perfume of the flowers to spread health and restoration.” After 300 years of doing such environmental works (Andersen was quite the progressive), and “giving all the good in our power,” they are able to receive an immortal soul. And they tell her: “You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart to do as we are doing, you have suffered and endured and raised yourself to the spirit-world by your good deeds.”

In other words, she became one of these exquisite celestial beings because of her grace–her loving, generous, compassionate nature and actions. This, I find, is a beautiful message.

It’s a message that must have comforted the author himself, a lifelong outsider who never married and had unrequited affections for men and women. Some researchers have noted that “The Little Mermaid” may have been inspired by an ill-fated romance with a male friend who decided to get married. This could explain the mermaid’s loss of voice and the dramatic descriptions of her pain–allusions, perhaps, to being silenced and heartbroken at a time when Andersen could not be open about his feelings. This only makes the story more poignant, and Andersen’s notion of grace all the more exceptional, and powerful.

Related story: My review of Hamburg Ballet’s ‘Little Mermaid’: Adrift in a Sea of Despair

The arts & our empathy problem

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Vice President-elect Mike Pence got a talking-to by the cast of the Broadway show “Hamilton,” when Pence was in the audience last Friday. “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who played Aaron Burr. He spoke from the stage after the performance, reading remarks written by the cast–a cast which is multicultural and multiracial. “But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

These statements became front-page news, as President-elect Donald Trump tweeted an angry command to the “Hamilton” cast to “apologize!” But even more important than what the cast of “Hamilton” thinks of Mike Pence is this: What does Pence think of “Hamilton”? What’s his reaction to the show, in which the contributions of immigrants are celebrated as central to the nation’s founding? Did it cause him to feel even a tiny bit differently about immigration, and about the people that his campaign has targeted?

[Here’s the Washington Post story on what “Hamilton’s” cast said to Mike Pence.]

I’ve been thinking about the arts and their power to elicit empathy ever since I attended a panel on Islamophobia a few weeks ago, organized by the Atlantic Council. The event was titled “Overcoming Myths and Engaging in a Better Conversation.” It was a timely discussion, with Europe facing a flood of refugees from the Middle East and Trump calling for a ban on Muslims, and for “extreme vetting.” Academics, journalists and diplomats shared views on the damaging and ill-informed ways that Muslims are perceived and treated in Europe and America.

One of my favorite authors, the brilliant religious scholar Karen Armstrong, made cogent points on the commonalities and false divisions among faiths, and the fatal consequences of misperceptions. Others stressed the importance of recognizing that Muslims are not a monolithic group, but are a diverse community with many different worldviews.

I had been invited by Vuslat Dogan Sabanci, who chaired the panel. She is the publisher and CEO of Hurriyet, a daily newspaper in Turkey, and she graciously reached out to me after reading my book. Grace, in fact, figured prominently in her opening remarks. What’s most important in starting the better conversation that she hoped for, she said, is to listen.

“I first mean good listening, which is listening with the goal of understanding the other side,” Dogan Sabanci said. “So the other side can talk fearlessly in the field of respect–and grace.”

At the lunch that followed, a reporter from Al Jazeera spoke up. “We’ve done a good job of reporting on Islamophobia,” he said. “But how do we create empathy?”

That is the most important question, isn’t it? Front pages are filled with reports of fleeing refugees and violence and cruelties, but does this news arouse fellow feeling, or does it stoke fears that further divide us? Will even more panels and commissions and community dialogues start to warm our hearts?

I suggest we turn to the arts. The arts stimulate our sympathies, because in viewing art we can feel something of another person’s experience. The artist leaves palpable traces of his or her emotions, sensations and imagination in the artwork. And in our response, we feel some measure of these sensations in our own bodies. We’re not feeling exactly the same thing that the artist felt, but there is a bridging of artist and viewer. Our immediate, visceral reaction mingles with our imagination in a world of more feeling than intellect, of pure human connection.

“What brings fellow-feeling into being is the imagination,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in an op-ed in Washington Post. He goes on to quote Adam Smith, in his Theory on Moral Sentiments: “Sympathy, as Smith observed, is produced ‘by changing places in fancy with the sufferer.'”

I’m privileged to have this experience many nights in any given month, through my work as the Washington Post’s dance critic. This past summer offered up an especially powerful example. I had been invited to give a talk at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, in Becket, Mass., and while there, I saw a transcendent performance by Compagnie Herve Koubi, a troupe of 17 men from Algeria and Burkina Faso. Koubi had grown up in France, and in his twenties he discovered, to his astonishment, that his parents were Algerian, a fact that they had concealed from him. Disoriented and unmoored, Koubi finally traveled to that country seeking his tribe. He found it among the urban street dancers. Many of them became members of his company, and they are exquisite: athletic and musical and deeply sensitive. The work they performed at Jacob’s Pillow was titled “Ce que le jour doit a la nuit” (“What the day owes the night”). The music included Bach and traditional Sufi chants. The dancers tumbled, twisted, plunged and soared in a fearless blend of martial arts, capoeira and modern dance, communicating aching vulnerability, ineffable yearning and the strength of brotherhood. Watching them, you fell in love with these beautiful young men who were so elegantly and courageously opening their souls on the stage.

“These are the people Donald Trump wants to keep out of our country?” I heard someone in the audience ask rhetorically, and incredulously, afterward. The kind of understanding that happens through art hits hard, and goes deep. It’s not a cliche to say that boundaries dissolve through the arts and their realm of feeling. I’d like to see more investment in exporting art across borders, bringing Muslim artists into contact with non-Muslims, whether through live dance and theater, or film (“Desert Dancer,” about a dance company launched in Iran, where dancing was banned, was poignant and eye-opening), or exhibits such as the Smithsonian’s “Art of the Qu’ran.” I’d like to see embassies help bring artists overseas, with funding help from organizations that might otherwise host panels and policy meetings. Talk is fine, but hearts are opened not in lectures but through the workings of the imagination. This is the landscape of vulnerability, and the birthplace of openness, understanding and, finally, empathy.

Related story: Leon Wieseltier’s essay, “How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason–and brought us Donald Trump”

The campaign was nasty. Hillary Clinton’s concession speech was graceful.

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Here’s my Washington Post essay on a bittersweet moment of grace:

This was the presidential campaign where grace got lost.

Bear with me while I recap just a few ungraceful low points: Donald Trump admitted on tape that he enjoyed sexually assaulting and sexually pressuring women. He mocked physical disabilities and women’s appearances, all for laughs on the campaign trail. He proved to be quick to anger and established a pattern of insulting, interrupting and badgering Hillary Clinton in live televised debates.

Grace was talked about quite a bit before the polls opened, as in: Will Trump have the grace to concede defeat and let the nation move on from this long, hideous root canal of an election we’ve suffered through?

As it turned out, it was indeed out of defeat that we witnessed the rise of grace; the pundits simply had the wrong person. In a singularly elegant and consoling concession speech, Clinton delivered the warmth to draw us close, the gratitude to make us feel noticed and significant, and the uplifting call to action to prod us out of our shock, anxiety and dispiriting numbness.

It’s an example of grace from start to finish, an example of how to rise above the fray, how to connect deeply with people, how to ease worries with a polished demeanor and a message of hope, delivered with calm command. Most of all, she kept her eye on the big picture: assuring that the democratic process would continue unimpeded, urging the nation to come together, saying that we will need compassion and have work to do.

“I love you all too,” she began, speaking to friends and supporters at Manhattan’s New Yorker Hotel.

From there, she addressed the process: She had already congratulated Trump, she said, and offered to work with him “on behalf of our country.”

“I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans,” she said, without a trace of bitterness, of the man who had threatened to imprison her, who made fun of her collapse from the flu, who attacked her in alarmingly personal ways.

She continued by expressing her gratitude to her supporters, lavishing praise on her audience. She reminded us of the great goal: Her campaign “was about the country we love and about building an America that’s hopeful, inclusive and bighearted.”

Bighearted. That is the key, right there, to moving forward. Clinton urged us to move together, rather than apart. To heal the divisiveness of the election by opening our big hearts to those around us and across the country and in those communities we may never step into. Being human can hurt, as we have discovered through countless tragedies both close at hand and far away, when seeing others in pain can make our hearts fall to the floor. But it is through those hearts, that empathy, that what divides us can vanish: “If we stand together and work together with respect for our differences, strength in our convictions and love for this nation, our best days are still ahead of us.”

Read the rest of this essay here.

“The Art of Grace” Inspires a Dance

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dancer

I got the news in a tweet:

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With the huge debt of gratitude I owe the dancers and choreographers who have inspired me over the years, this is gorgeous icing on an already decadent cake. Here’s how choreographer Cherylyn Lavagnino, who created the piece, describes it: “‘Veiled,’ (2016), a new work for a female cast of seven, explores the idea of preserving physical and internal grace in the face of oppression of any kind. While Martin Bresnick’s ‘Prayers Remain Forever’ inspired the choreography, ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ by Azar Nafisi and ‘The Art of Grace’ by Sarah L. Kaufman provided the initial creative research. Our daily process as dancers is centered around a quest for grace of movement and emotion.”

The other great thrill here, of course, is to be linked in this very cool way with Azar Nafisi’s beautiful book “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance premiered the new work in June and reprised it today at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Lavagnino teaches. Too bad I couldn’t make it!

There’s a piece on it in the Village Voice. And in Broadway World.

Photo credit: Australian dancer Irene Vera Young, from the collection of the State Library of New South Wales.

Practicing Grace Online

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cdtblogpostphotoRecently I had the great pleasure of speaking with Brian Wesolowski of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that works to preserve Internet openness and freedom of expression. He’d read “The Art of Grace” and wanted to interview me on how to bring grace into our plugged-in lives online. A fantastic CDT Tech Talk podcast resulted; click here to listen.

Brian also wrote a terrific post expanding on what we spoke about to include more ways to bring grace into the digital age. Here’s an excerpt:

“How many times a day do you check your email or messaging apps? How often do you try to cram in a call while you are walking somewhere? Does your calendar have you booked in 15-minute increments? These are all byproducts of technology supposedly making our lives easier and more efficient, but has also made our lives more stressful and complex.

“So how can we slow down in our increasingly digital world and still embrace the technology so many of us love?”

What follows are Brian’s smart and thoughtful ways to bring ease into our tech activities, like this one: Lose the headphones on your commute. (I love this advice…walking around outside with my headphones on definitely makes me feel disconnected and weirdly vulnerable.)

What are your tips on better online living?

Photo: 1911 stenographer, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“The Peace of Wild Things”

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nighsky

My friend Rose sent me a poem titled “The Peace of Wild Things,” which was given to her by a bereavement counselor. The poet is Wendell Berry, a beautiful and prolific writer with deep ties to the land. Born in 1934, he has worked his Kentucky farm for most of his life. I love this poem’s meditation on the stillness and acceptance of the natural world. As Rose pointed out, the line about nature’s creatures “not being taxed by forethought of grief” reminds us that instead of worrying about what’s to come, we can enjoy the present moment instead. I find these words so consoling, especially the ending, that sense of a great soft power simply waiting, waiting, patiently watching as time and pain wash over us, and wash past. I’ve excerpted just a few lines below out of respect for his copyright, but you can read the full poem here:

From “The Peace of Wild Things”
BY WENDELL BERRY

“I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. …
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Flickr Commons photo, from the book “In God’s out-of-doors” (1902) by William A. Quayle.

Cary Grant & Bobby Kennedy: Two Gentlemen of the Junkyard

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Cary Grant and Robert F. Kennedy. © 1963, Bob Burchette/The Washington Post. Used with permission
Cary Grant and Robert F. Kennedy. ©1963, Bob Burchette/The Washington Post. Used with permission

A beautiful spread in the British Harper’s Bazaar about THE ART OF GRACE is very dear to me, and not only for its wonderfully kind descriptions (“delightful,” “elegant,” “always with a light touch…” oh, I could go on!). The writer, Literary Editor Erica Wagner, also takes note of one of the photos in the book, and she highlights its meaning.

It happens to be one of my favorite photos of the book, depicting the actor Cary Grant and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy standing together in an impound lot. In her review, Wagner notes Grant’s “considerate charm and physical carriage,” and also this extra dimension of his caring nature: “Sure, we’re used to seeing him staring into Katharine Hepburn’s eyes in ‘The Philadelphia Story’–but perhaps the image of him standing in a junkyard with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963, as the two men consider what turning it into a playground might do for the children of Washington, DC, is less familiar.”

I found the photo in question hidden in the archives at The Washington Post, unseen for decades, its edges curling, and my heart gave a little leap, for it perfectly illustrates an altogether different, off-screen view of Grant. It underscores why the debonair actor is a guiding spirit in my book.

The Harper’s review (please click on it to enlarge):

The Art of Grace, Harper's Bazaar, December 2015