The Casual Blog

Category: books

December 18, 2010

Lost and found

It is such a bummer to find after you’ve checked out of a hotel that you’ve left something significant behind. Earlier this week when I was in New York I left my copy of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart at the hotel. I liked his book Absurdistan, and I liked this one even better. It’s funny as well as sad. A fortyish hipster falls absurdly in love with a twentyish college grad in a not-far-in-the-future-world where corporations have pretty much taken over governmental functions, people are tightly tethered to their electronic devices, and reading literature is a sign of decrepitude.

I had about 60 pages of Shteyngart’s book left, which I’d planned to finish on the flight home. It doesn’t make sense to buy a new copy. I can live without the ending — I think. Still, after being deep in Shteyngart’s dystopia, I’ve got this sensation of interruptus.

I heard from Gabe that a lot of snow is falling in Telluride, which is vital news, since I’ll be skiing there in a couple of weeks. It will be my first chance to meet his girlfriend, who has gotten rave reviews. They recently decided to move in together, so things are moving along. It could be serious.

Relationships are always changing, though they do so at widely varying speeds. How they work is mostly invisible, which is one of the reasons we still need good fiction: it sometimes brings that hidden interpersonal world to light. I feel so lucky to have a really good marriage, but for a variety of reasons I am not inclined to delve into the details. I think the need for privacy is often exaggerated, but there are some things that lose their essential nature if they aren’t kept safely out of sight. And a strong, loving relationship is the most valuable thing in the world.

There was a really interesting essay last Sunday in the NY Times style section about what happens when one spouse cheats on another. http://tiny.cc/bquj8 The essay by Wendy Plump posits that misery will be created in a highly predictable way. The cheating spouse will be pulled back and forth between two worlds, of responsibility and pleasure, in a way that causes him or her extreme stress and discontentment in both worlds. The other spouse will eventually find out and feel traumatized. The cheating spouse will make true-but-hackneyed excuses (about needs not being met, losing the spark, and the like). The net is a destruction of trust and quite possibly the end of a relationship. The predictability of this course of events is hard to prove, but the essay gives personal examples that resonate.

The importance of honesty and commitment in relationships is something everybody knows, but the same may be said of the importance of eating healthy food. We all know a good deal about what’s healthy and not, but just knowing is not enough to affect our behavior. We need the ideas to become more concrete and vivid. I think I’d arrived at most of the ideas in Wendy Plump’s essay, but I’m glad she organized it in an interesting, touching way and made me keep thinking about them.

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December 5, 2010

Winter’s Bone, a beautiful, powerful meth movie

Some years back I developed the view that the age of written fiction was almost over and being replaced by the age of cinema fiction. Would people continue to take on the hard work of reading a book if they could have same experience without so much effort? The experiences aren’t perfect substitutes, of course, but there’s overlap. I’m not so worried now about written fiction, which is diminished as a cultural force but still around. But it does worry me that cinema seems less vital and ambitious in recent times. Could the age of cinema be ending? What comes next? The age of YouTube? At any rate, I haven’t been tempted to go out to many movies this year, and haven’t seen many new ones that I really cared about on the small screen.

Winter’s Bone is a notable exception. We saw it on DVD Friday night, and it was great. The subject matter didn’t sound particularly promising — hardscrabble life in rural Missouri — but the movie manages to combine gritty realism with a dreamlike quality. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is an understated tour de force. She plays Ree, a 17-year-old whose father has disappeared, whose mother has advanced dementia, and whose younger brother and sister are completely dependent on her. Then she is informed that their cabin will be foreclosed on because her father jumped bail, and sets out to find him.

The land and culture reminded me of my own ancestral roots in southern Appalachia. Just as in southwestern Virginia, along with the poverty, there were aspects of the Ozarks countryside that were beautiful and touching. The scene where working people gathered in a home to make traditional music with guitars, fiddle and banjo reminded me of sounds I heard in bits and pieces as a child when we visited grandparents. The music reaffirmed that the possibility of community still exists.

But a central part of the story of Winter’s Bone is about the breakdown of community and the tragic social effects of methamphetamine. Ree’s father was a cooker, and everyone connected with him is also connected directly or indirectly to the meth business. Most of them are angry, paranoid, depressed, violent people. Their family lives are unhappy, and their communities are fractured. But they have not lost all dignity.

The depiction of meth culture seemed realistic and unsensational, and consistent with a book I read a few months back, Nick Reding’s Methland, a non-fiction account of the effects of meth in small town America. Reding makes the case that meth has devastated parts of rural and small town America. He does a good job tying together the sociology with the biology, history, and economics, and tells some good, and sad, stories. Although the successive waves of official and popular drug scare stories (such as the dangers of marijuana, which never killed anyone) might make one skeptical that meth is exceptionally dangerous, Reding has evidence that it is, both to individual addicts and to communities.

Winter’s Bone tends to confirm that view, but it isn’t making an argument. It’s like other great fiction, in that it reveals a side of life that we couldn’t learn about through any other medium, and one that changes, at least a little, how we look at the world around us.

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October 2, 2010

Freedom and private matters

I finished Franzen’s Freedom on the flight back from Dallas earlier this week. Although the last half of the book was not as surgically precise and constantly surprising as the first, it was still very fine, and I was glad I read it. It passed my test for a novel that is in every sense worthwhile: it explored questions and won insights that just can’t be got at through any medium other than a novel. The subject matter involves some of the big issues of our time, such as global warming, overpopulation, environmental irresponsibility, and species extinction. But just as in other great novels, most of the interesting revelations relate to private matters — interior lives and intimate relationships.

Writing about things that are generally considered private is a risky business. Even with the license of a novelist, it takes a degree of courage close to recklessness to be direct and truthful about intimate aspects of our lives. For all the things Freud got wrong, he was surely right that civilization depends on a degree of repression of our basic urges. By the same token, our social lives would be unsustainable if we lifted all self-censorship. It’s true, as Jack Nicholson once violently asserted: we can’t handle the truth! At any rate, we can’t uncritically expose all of our feelings and our emotional lives without causing outrage and social havoc. But this is part of the gift of the great novelist: to guide us into and through these hidden things in a way that enriches rather than injures.

I’m constantly struggling, when I write for the Casual Blog, with the question of what is too private for public exposure. Where one draws the line plainly depends on what kind of person one is, which in turn depends on every other social variable — personal history, family, community, customs, laws, etc. And the line may also vary according to the subject involved. And the best answer for today may not be the best in the future. Pushing the line may actually change the kind of person one is or is perceived to be, either for better or worse. My current model involves trying to be conscious of the line and to get close to it without going over it. But it’s always a judgment call made in the fog of complexity. Mistakes are sure to happen. In such cases, I have to hope the parties affected will forgive and eventually forget.

I’ve wondered whether it crosses the line to explore the implications of Jocelyn’s latest adventure — free form travelling in South America. This is not all happy stuff. As a dad, I’m in a fugue state: full of admiration for her spirit and courage, full of pride, but also full of worry. As I told her very bluntly, she is throwing herself in front of some existential risks without understanding them very well. She did not appreciate this criticism, and just as bluntly told me so. She is highly confident of her ability to deal with the unexpected, which is impressive, yet worrisome. Does she have any idea how vulnerable she could be? Is it better if she doesn’t? At any rate, I’m sufficiently on edge and preoccupied with such risks as kidnapping that I will refrain from discussing her itinerary. But I should also say, according to her emails, she’s having a fantastic time.

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September 18, 2010

Freedom, my Provo novel, and TCI diving

I used to think of reading novels as a basic necessity, like food, water, and shelter. Novels were also my friends. Some were fun, some were wise. Reading novels was necessary, I thought, to build a conscious mind.

Beginning in my mid-teens, I took on, in no particular order, a lot of big classics, including Russians (viz Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), Brits (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Elliot, Hardy, Joyce, Woolf), French (Proust), Germans (Mann), and Americans (Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, James, Wolfe, Faulkner, Salinger). In the seventies and eighties, I read many great books of the previous or current generation, including Nabokov, Roth, Updike, Heller, Cheever, Naipaul, Pynchon, Bellow, Vonnegut, Stone, DeLillo, Gardner, Kennedy, Davies,and Millhauser. At times I had enthusiasms for genres, including espionage (Le Carre), hard boiled (Chandler), mysteries (Christie), sci fi (LeGuin), historical (P. O’Brien), and horror (King). And on and on.

And then it was over. I didn’t suddenly stop reading, but at some point it was no longer necessary for me to have a novel near to hand. No, it was worse than that: I lost my faith in novels. I was no longer sure they were a good investment. Perhaps it was because of new circumstances in my life (too busy? but I was always busy), or maybe the change reflected a shift in the larger culture. Could the era of literature be ending? I’m not sure. But in bookshops, when I looked at the fiction shelves, instead of seeing endless exciting possibilities, as I used to do, I was struck by the opposite — masses of books that, I felt, would probably do nothing for me.

I shifted my non-professional reading diet to mostly history, biography, science, and journalism, along with poetry. I began applying a tough filter for taking on fiction: only books that I thought might be transformative or unforgettable make the cut. I continued to find such ones from time to time (McEwan, T. Wolfe, M. Amis, Spencer, Roth, Eugenides, Shteyngart, Yates). But not every day — or week, or month.

A couple of weeks ago I found another. For Labor Day weekend, Sally and I took a diving trip to Providenciales, Turks and Caicos. I’d just read the first rapturous reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and decided to pick it up in an airport bookshop. On the trip down, it was nowhere to be found (though it was in the front of all airport bookstores by the following weekend). Therefore, I went to Plan B. As soon as we got to Provo, I downloaded it onto the iPad — my first contemporary enovel.

It is a great book for a long sandy beach with palm trees, blue skies, and turquoise water, but also a great book for a long plane trip, or extended insomnia. It contains multiple lives, with problems you know well (like painful family relationships, loneliness, global environmental disasters), in settings you know well (various American cities) but have never seen from these angles. It requires no conscious effort, though you pause now and again to note the incredible craftsmanship (no visible strings or joints). Reading it is like living a different life. And when you emerge, it makes you grateful to have your own life.

On our diving days in Provo we left the Royal West Indies hotel at 8:00 a.m. and returned around 3:00, after two dives and a good number of nautical miles. Then, exhausted, we’d sit on the beach or by the pool and read for long periods. From time to time, we’d take a dip to cool off or have a rum drink. It was sweet.

Of course, not perfect. My new reading technology, the iPad, did not work in direct sunlight, so I read some paper books as well. I also had to address some diving technology glitches. On day two, I decided to try to perfect my weighting, which required obtaining more lead from the boat, which required swimming against the current, which led to falling behind the group and working to catch up, which led to over exertion, overuse of oxygen, mild narcosis at 100 feet, problems reading gauges, an out-of-air emergency, sharing air with Sal, and, back on the boat, loss of all stomach contents. On another dive my octo malfunctioned and started rapidly dumping air. We had to abbreviate that dive, but had some good sightings.

We had close and rewarding encounters with several reef sharks, sea turtles, barracuda, and countless luminous small fish. Unfortunately, we saw many lion fish, which are spectacular looking but poisonous and horribly destructive of the reef ecosystem. In areas, the coral was dead, a ghostly white. But there were large, healthy areas, with bizarre shapes and bright colors of otherworldly beauty.

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August 29, 2010

Ebooks and charity ideas

This week I went to Dallas and back twice. I will not complain, except to note that long periods confined in small seats do not get easier as the hours pass. I sat next to a fifteen year old kid on the way back, who, by the end of the flight, was writhing in discomfort, and I remembered how this was even tougher when I was younger.

I spent some of the seat time reading my first ebooks on my iPad. As a confirmed bibliophile, I doubted I would really like ebooks, but my compulsion to have handy several books when I travel has created problems with weight limits, and pushed me towards trying this lightweight solution. Using the Kindle software, it took me just a few minutes to fall in love with the format. I like the typeface and type size, the ability to highlight and annotate, and the light weight.

My first ebook was Against Intellectual Monopoly, by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, an against-the-grain discussion of the problems with our patent and copyright systems. I was gratified to see a discussion of Red Hat as a primary example of why patents don’t achieve anything close to their intended purpose in the software area.

It’s interesting how ideas can seem particularly interesting during cross-country flights, and how frequently new ones pop up. I found myself thinking about an NPR story from last week about individuals who commission new pieces of music or plays. The point of the story was that the cost could be shared with others and spread over time, so that being a patron and bringing a new piece of art into the world could be more affordable than you’d think.

I really liked the idea of contributing in a direct and immediate way to new art. If I can’t be a composer, perhaps I could help in the creation of music by funding one. So, how about a web site to allow composers, choreographers, or others to propose commission-worthy projects, and donors likewise to seek suitable artists? Sort of an arts-funding Craigslist. Sure, it could be there’s just not sufficient interest, but then, not so long ago Craigslist sounded like a fantasy.

The web today is a big part of my life, and of the lives of most people I know. In almost no time it’s gone from a novelty to a utility, and now I take it for granted much like the interstate highway system. Yet we may have just begun to scratch the surface of what it can do — things that go way beyond shopping and entertainment. Facebook and Twitter haven’t really inspired me, but they point in the direction of more immediate and wide-ranging connections that have more human meaning. It could reduce the barriers to charitable giving by making needs and resources easier to see and connect.

For example, it’s hard for me to visualize the enormous suffering from the current flooding in Pakistan, and hard to feel like there’s much I can personally do about it. But if I could connect with a person who’s lost everything and understand their story using web multimedia, it could help me, and I suspect others to open their hearts and wallets. People who’ve lost everything can’t easily get online, of course, but the tools that could get them there already exist. It would take some thought and energy. This could be an open source project.

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August 19, 2010

Robert Frost and my new iPad

I’ve finally managed to memorize The Wood Pile, by Robert Frost. http://tiny.cc/zlasu It’s a strange, bleak poem, about walking through a frozen swamp and not seeing very much, except snow, trees, a bird and a decaying wood pile. Just as the narrator doesn’t really know why he keeps walking deeper into a frozen swamp, I’m hard put to explain why I went to the considerable trouble of memorizing this poem. It’s difficult to picture an ordinary situation in which anyone would voluntarily listen to a recitation with pleasure. But memorizing it entailed many many readings with close examination of every word, and through that process the poem gradually revealed a stark startling beauty.

At the end of the poem, the narrator wonders at the isolated decaying wood pile, and remarks that the person who made it must be “someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks” so as to “forget his handiwork on which he spent himself, the labor of his ax.” It may be that the laboriously created, carefully measured, woodpile is one of Frost’s poems, and that Frost is pointing up the minor tragedy of art that fails to reach its audience. He also seems to be saying that remembering can be harder than creating. It isn’t hard to see that we all constantly live in eagerly turning to fresh tasks and also, without realizing it, forgetting other valuable things.

Yesterday I turned to the fresh task of learning how to work my new iPad. It is a very pleasing little device both in form and function — light, sleek, quick, uncomplicated, but sophisticated. I got it mainly to use as a reader and a web surfer, though it may turn out that other functions, like the video viewer or some game, will turn out to be useful to me. To get started, I put some of my favorite poetry on the Kindle reader, including W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Frost, thinking it would be a comfort to have them along in my travels. I also felt it would be worthwhile to always have handy some Proust, and downloaded Swann’s Way.

Within a few minutes I’d figured out how to make the Kindle reader application do some interesting things, like go to the table of contents, jump to a given page, highlight text, make a note on the text, and change the typeface of the work. This was mainly a matter of touching the screen in various ways, some of which were not immediately obvious. Experimenting with it was fun.

It’s remarkable how learning how to work new devices (sometimes hardware, but most often software) is now a constant feature of modern high tech life. In days gone by, a new device might come into my life every few months, but now it’s more like every few hours. The concept of the iPhone, and probably the iPad, includes encouraging the constant addition of more and more apps. Each app has at least a small learning curve, which consumes some amount of human energy.

Other than causing fatigue, do the apps do anything? The best thing they do is speed up information gathering. Whether the subject is world politics, scientific research, movies, or restaurants, it’s possible to get information faster. This could lead to better decisions. The problem is that our brains can only go so fast and only hold so much. Like John Henry racing to put down rails against the steam hammer, we can’t possibly keep up with the pace of our powerful computers.

So we have to figure out when to say, basta! On any given day, we have to be careful about turning to too many fresh tasks and forgetting what is really valuable. We have to quit downloading apps all the time and read something beautiful and profound, like Frost or Proust. Small, slow, and error-prone as our brains are, we need to protect and care for them and nourish them well.

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August 4, 2010

Benjamin Franklin, my hero

Benjamin Franklin is my favorite founding father.  There are chapters in the lives of others that I admire — Washington’s bravery, Jefferson’s eloquence, Madison’s political vision — but even these giants had glaring flaws and failures.  But Franklin’s life as a whole is extraordinary, with many varied chapters — printer, author, scientist, inventor, politician, revolutionary, diplomat.  He was, truly, a Renaissance man.

I’ve been reading, or re-reading, his Autobiography.  I have a memory of reading it as a sixth grader, but the book must have been a simplified and expurgated children’s version.  Franklin’s writing is mostly plain and direct, not much concerned with literary effect.  His writing hurries toward his main objective, which is to tell what he has learned about how to live.  He believes unequivocally in the virtue of hard work, honesty, frugality, and temperance.  He very much wants to communicate the value of these habits and attitudes.  But he does not appear dour or gloomy.  Rather, he seems mostly cheerful.  He strikes me as lively and always curious, a person who enjoyed both people and ideas, who had fun.

How did he manage to be so accomplished and productive?  I think a large part of it was due to the old-fashioned virtues he promotes, like diligence and honesty.  The man worked very hard and mostly kept to the straight and narrow.  But another quality, which he does not (at least so far as I’ve read) discuss, was also important: unselfish caring.  Franklin cared about other people, both as individuals and as communities, and dedicated much of his life to helping them.  He was generous with his gifts.  That generous spirit made him a happy, productive person.

In the Autobiography, Franklin does not conceal his moments of weakness and mistakes.  He’s human — but a really remarkable human.  I’ve been realizing how much his example impressed me as a child and influenced my development.  For a role model, one could do much worse.

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June 26, 2010

Supreme Court connections to gifted people

This week I signed a letter in support of the nomination of Elena Kagan that was written by Peter Keisler and Harry Litman and signed by most of the Supreme Court clerks from the year (OT ’86) our group worked for the Court.  I always liked and respected Elena.  She was bright and friendly, and I was happy to guard her in our clerk basketball games, where I was fortunate to have a meaningful height advantage (she could shoot).   I find it reassuring that in a world where Tea Party whack jobs are sometimes taken seriously that Elena with such old-fashioned and relatively unexciting qualities as intelligence, balance, and decency has quietly risen to the apex of the legal profession.

I made another Supreme Court connection this week when I caught up with Larry Lessig.  Lessig clerked for Justice Scalia a few years after I did.  Now a law professor at Harvard, he’s distinguished himself as a constitutional and intellectual property law scholar and reformer.  His work on copyright law, including Free Culture and Remix, challenges the received wisdom that more copyright protection promotes greater creativity and shows that the opposite may be the result.  In this area, he’s a true rock star.

Lessig’s current project is focusing on the corrosive role of money in our political system.  On Tuesday Mel Chernoff and I attended the talk he gave at Campbell Law School promoting public financing of elections.  He’s well known for his extraordinary slide shows, which use super quick cuts to press points, and this was a good one.  We’d corresponded by email previously, and it was good to make a face-to-face connection after the event.  In addition to being brilliant, he seemed like a warm and sincere guy.

When I have personal encounters with really gifted people, I generally find it unsettling.  It’s inspiring, and I find myself thinking so much more is possible, but also being more-than-usually aware of my personal limits.  As John McPhee once noted in the context of great tennis players, there are many levels of the game.   It’s a privilege to play with higher level players, and rewarding. If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.  But it does not promote calm and tranquility.

It is

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June 6, 2010

Our anniversary

Sally and I celebrated our anniversary on Saturday, the same day of the week as our marriage in New York 28 years ago.  We had quickly agreed last week that we needed to mark the occasion with a special meal, and gave consideration to several fine area restaurants.  We settled on Piedmont in Durham, a place we’d been meaning to try for a while.

As usual, we did not do anniversary presents.  Sally is fundamentally unacquisitive — not deeply interested in expensive jewelry, clothes, or other consumables —  and so holidays at which presents are integral, such as Christmas and birthdays, are challenging for me.  She likes books and practical things.  For her birthday last week, she wanted a special type of binoculars strap, which I found, and I also got her a hardcover called The Ballet Companion.  Plus flowers, a card, and cupcakes.  She seemed happy.  For the anniversary, she got me a sweet card, and I, after a difficult search, found her a humorous card that at least wasn’t dumb or tasteless.

Piedmont is on Foster Street near the Armory, where we used to do swing dancing, in a block of short commercial buildings.  The decor is post-modern Euro bistro, evocative of a lot of things, some warm, some cool.  The menu is interesting —  modern Italian, with locally grown organic ingredients.  It is vegetarian friendly, which I define as having more than one plant-based entrée.  I had zucchini mint soup, which was lovely, with just a hint of mint, and ricotta ravioli with olives and tomatoes, which was acceptable.  Service was the one disappointment — too slow.  For dessert, we split a rich chocolate torte with chili ice cream and chocolate sauce.  The chili idea created a certain risk, and it was rich and rewarding.

We talked about food, music, dance, science, and travel.  We’re thinking of another scuba trip to the Caribbean and considering the Bahamas, but the horrendous ongoing Gulf Coast oil disaster, with vast quantities of oil moving into the Gulf Stream, is an issue.  We continued our discussion of making a larger donation to the Carolina Ballet, which we love.  As I was reminded recently in reading Dee Brown’s book about the settlement of the American West, the performing arts spread and survived because of patrons, not because of ticket sales.  We started our married life with no assets other than cheap furniture and clothes to wear, and the experience was formative.  I never imagined when we married that one day we’d be giving thought to the right way to handle charitable giving.  We’re very lucky.

This morning the Times had an interesting take on the breakup of Al and Tipper Gore after 40 years of marriage.  http://tiny.cc/lve8n  We were sad to hear of their split, and of course, curious about the cause.  And as Tara Parker-Pope notes in the Times, there’s just no way to know the root cause.  But it’s a reminder that marriages change, and they require nourishing.  Apparently couples who do new and different things together are happier.  Certainly, it’s good to try new restaurants.

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May 30, 2010

A beach trip, with a note on failure

For Memorial Day, we took Clara on her first road trip out to Jane and Keith’s beach place.  I enjoyed the drive.  We came over the bridge towards Nags Head just as the sun was setting.  The Outer Banks are not Monte Carlo.  It’s not about glamor.  But the area can induce serenity and happiness.  Traffic on the island moved slowly, and we sampled the local radio stations — a fundamentalist preacher, 80s rock, country, and my favorite, hip hop.  It was good at last to see Corolla again.

Keith is a grill chef extraordinaire, and for our benefit volunteered to go all vegetarian for the weekend.  Having recently mastered gluten-free cooking, he seemed to appreciate the challenge, like a high jumper who wants to go higher.  He made waffles with fruit and honey whip cream for breakfast.  Delicious!  A tomato cucumber soup with hot cheese pie for lunch.  Scrumptious!  Stuffed peppers and corn flan. Extraordinary!  He tried a rich chocolate torte, which he judged too dry and threw out.  The second effort was a great success.

We went to the beach in the afternoon,  Sally donned a wet suit and swam with my niece Kylie and nephew David.  I piloted a kite for a bit before it crashed, and I reread a bit of Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, the incredible story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica, which was a failure in terms of its original mission, but a success in terms of its plan B — survival.  It’s nice to a frigid, desperate story and a sunny beach.

David, 10, is mad for lacrosse, and insisted while we were on the beach I learn something about it.  He let me use the shorter stick.  Under his intense coaching, I managed to make some catches and throws, and was pleased.  I also missed some catches and made some bad throws, which was less fun.  But I persisted for a while, even with little expectation of ever being any good, partly to humor David, and partly to continue road testing my theory of failure.

It’s this:  greater acceptance of failure increases the possibilities for happiness.  Part of the reason is that we learn from failure.  In any new endeavor, we start out incompetent, so we make mistakes, and if we persist we gradually work out how to make fewer mistakes.  Every significant accomplishment (apart from the occasional stroke of pure luck) is the result of many failures.

But there’s a broader reason for greater tolerance for failure.  Clearly, failure does not always lead to success.  Most of the things we could try will not turn out well, because no one can be good at everything. But if we decline to accept our own failure, we narrow our range of experience.  I might have missed lacrosse, or skiing, or Liszt.  If we give ourselves permission to fail, we can try new things, and be happier.

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