Sarah Kaufman

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 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.