Mirrors of the Unseen

Mirrors of the Unseen:  Journeys in Iran

© 2006 Jason Elliot

432 pages

Readers uninterested in the origins and history of Islamic art, metaphysics, or pigeons, should skip to the next chapter, here.

In the late nineties, before Afghanistan was rendered more chaotic and dangerous than usual, Jason Elliot visited the country and was moved by it. Building on the success of that trip,  he looked over the border to Iran, a nation derided by the Afganis as full of sandwich-eating women, and decided to travel throughout it, as well. Mirrors of the Unseen collects the experiences of several trips made by Elliot throughout Iran, visiting it again and again as the seasons changed. What did not change was the ready willingness of Iranians to receive him  -- and ply him a surprising amount of spirits.    Elliot's interest in Iran is more cultural and historical than political, and as time passes he transforms from interviewing tourist to a man on pilgrimage, one with Iran's architectural wonders as its goal, working in historical recaps along the way, telling of the rise and fall of empires as he gazes at their ruins and proud reminders. He is particularly struck by the  predominant role of gardens in Persian culture and art, one that predates views of Heaven as a paradisaical garden. (Not by accident is the German title of this book Persia: God's Forgotten Garden.)   Elliot is sensitive about architecture in that it seems to affect him deeply, taking over his mind. Discussions with friends and discourses on Sassanian history fade into the background when Elliot takes in the fullness of a bazaar or mosque and begins to wax lyrical about plazas and windows.  He is self-conscious about some of his obsessions -- several chapters see him poring over historic maps and making measurements to figure out why a particular building isn't lined up the way symmetry  suggests it should -- to the point that he includes at least one disclaimer.    Of more general interest are Elliot's many conversations with Iranians of various ethnic groups; he never fails to find a friendly host wherever he travels, and those who do not have concealed stocks of ardent spirits have opium pipes.  (Similarly,  no one Elliot meets observes the laws against foreign television stations, but it's possible that the people most eager to host an Englishman were the most dubious about the currently-reigning politics.)   The Iranians featured here range from poor cab drivers to horse ranchers,   and unless they're selling something  they're extremely generous with their time and resources. 

Although the aesthetic tangents might throw some readers off, I personally enjoyed this curious mix of travel memoir, history, and architectural commentary. 

A Burglar's Guide to the City

A Burglar's Guide to the City
© 2016 Geoff Manaugh
304 pages

There's really no resisting a title like that, is there?  Mind, it's not accurate;  this isn't a guide to how burglars read architecture, a catalog of vulnerabilities that homeowners and businesses can use to check their own weak spots.  The core message of the book, expressed repeatedly with great effusion, is that burglars see and use buildings differently from other people.  Manaugh goes into slight details, but his background as an art historian shows: he's more interested in the idea of burglars interpreting architecture than the details. Consequently, readers are given a great deal of entertainment as he delves into various cases, and even tries to learn skills himself (including lockpicking, from a cop),  but not much in the way of practical security information.

Burglary as defined requires architecture;   breaking and entering isn't possible with something to break into.   But burglars are connected to architecture at a deeper level, writes Manaugh; they are like the characters of The Matrix, who can read the lines of flowing green code and interpret vulnerabilties. They  are plugged into the Matrix of physical form and can manipulate it  at will -- and they do, using buildings in unexpected ways.  They will shimmy up rain gutters to access ledges, shove themselves through ventilation ducts,  take sliding doors off rails, or even carve through drywall to out-flank security alarms.  Some architectural manipulation can be quite elaborate, using the urban form itself.  Consider a case from Los Angeles in the 1980s: a group of  burglars with possible Public Works connections used that city's massive storm drainage system to tunnel into a bank and empty its vaults.   Few burglaries are so thought out, however; most are hasty and opportunistic. Even then, they can use buildings in ways they weren't intended: a massive oak door might be breached simply by breaking the glass windows framing it, then reaching in and opening the door.  Roofs hold back water; no one expects them to provide an entry for an thief.

A Burglar's Guide to the City abounds in interesting cases and general information. I had no idea that Los Angeles operates full time air patrols, for instance: I assumed police helicopters are so expensive by the hour that they're dispatched only in extreme situations, the kind that call for SWAT teams.  Easily the most interesting case for me was the story of Roofman, who used his study of McDonalds' basic building plan and operational policies to invade  and rob several dozen franchises. After being imprisoned, he escaped and took refuge in a Toys R Us, where he built a hiding place and carved into the empty building next door.   From there, surrounded by toys, he used stolen baby monitors from Toys R Us itself to observe employees and plan a  full heist. Fortunately for them, the random dropping-by of a sheriff's deputy foiled the Candy from a Baby stickup.


In short, this book was more fun than informative, but worth the time.

Related:
If you are interested in understanding your home from a security standpoint, I would suggest an ebook I read last year called "Kick Ass" Home Security, written by a retired police sergeant.  It's purely functional reading, like an instructional manual, but I found it helpful.  The essential lesson I remember, beyond any technical information, is that most burglaries are crimes of opportunity -- the less inviting you make your home to casual intrusion, the less likely you are to be burgled.

Infrastructure: A Field Guide

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
© 1999, 2014 Brian Hayes
544 pages

Here at last is a book for those of us who constantly gaze out the car window at the fixtures on utility poles, or drums mounted in the sky above the telephone building, and wonder: what are those and what do they do?  Chris Hayes offers in his introduction that there are many books for understanding the various kinds of trees and birds we see around us; his hope is to help readers understand the built environment which can be beautiful in own right. Hayes'  field guide is not a dry catalog of pipes and antennae, organized alphabetically. Instead, he offers a narrative laced with humor that explores the built world, system by system -- beginning with mining raw resources and ending with waste disposal.  In between are covered farming, waterworks, power production, the power grid, telecommunications, roads, bridges, railroads,  aviation, and shipping.  Hayes' writing combines history and description,  allowing the reader to understand not only how things work,  but how they got that way. Photographs abound, most of which were taken by the author himself and include unusual shots.

The fact that this book has gone through three editions indicates it has been a success with readers, and I'm not surprised.  We live in the midst of and are sustained by systems built with human hands, but which few understand. There's enormous appeal in opening the hood on modernity  and gaining even a little knowledge as to how it all works, especially when systems link together. Although this is a guide to the 'industrial landscape',  Hayes' writing brings a strong humanistic touch. The book is about the world humans have created for ourselves, for our needs;  reading the built landscape  is an act not just of technical analysis, but of human interest.   Admittedly,  there are topics in the book harder to appreciate; mining, for instance, usually happens far from where we live.  The majority of this book, however, is the stuff of everyday: traffic lights, radio towers,  food, and highways.  Although I've  done a good bit of reading on infrastructure, Hayes' book was full of interesting facts and stories. For instance,  in the early 1980s a network of eight radio towers were set up to aide in global navigation: one of the stations was maintained by the US Coast Guard in the middle of Nevada. The system only lasted ten years before being supplanted  totally by GPS.

I referred to Kate Asher's The Works as a dream of a book, and I can only repeat the statement here:  it's a gorgeous and helpful piece of work.

Hey, look, it's the Very Large Array!

Related:
The Works: Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work, Scott Huler
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
The Grid: A Journey to the Heart of Our Electrified World, Phillip Schewe
Divided Highways: Building the Interstates, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis

American Independence Wrapup & On the Horizon

Well, gentle readers,  July's halfway marks the conclusion of my American Independence series, at least for another year. What ground did I cover this year?

• Revolutionary Summer, Joseph Ellis;  a history of the summer of 1776,  in which the States declared their independence, and the British fleet arrived to squash the rebellion.
• Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet, Bill Kauffman;  a biography of Luther Martin which is principally about the Constitutional debates. Martin was the most prominent republican ('anti-federalist") in attendance
• The Lost Continent:  Bill Bryson travels the United States to revisit childhood trips through small-town America, regaling the reader with memories and reflections. Though Bryson pines for an image of small-town America, whenever he arrives in a small town he complains about the lack of restaurants and the presence of locals.
• A Place in Time, Wendell Berry. Stories about the Port William membership, a ready remembrance of the America that was.
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck; a family epic set in the Salinas Valley of California that revisits the story of Cain and Abel.
• Passionate Sage, Joseph Ellis; on the character and beliefs of John Adams.
• Unsettled America, Wendell Berry.  Berry's first and most famous defense of agrarian America, doubling as a condemnation of the thing that replaced it.

I'd also been reading Founding Federalist, on the life of Oliver Ellsworth, but halfway in realized I am very tired of reading about the Constitutional convention.  It's time to move along, and resume this year's study series: the Discovery of Asia. I've eased myself back into the waters with Japan: A Cultural History, which is presumably dated given its early-1980s publication,but contains some outstanding photography.  The author takes readers briefly through a sketch of Japanese history that mostly serves to provide context for the art that is commented on;  the era of the pre-Shogunate civil wars is covered in the chapter on castles, for instance.  Architecture is the chief focus here, but there are also sections on laquerware and prints.  A favorite of mine features two Japanese women and a bicycle.

This isn't the print...I am still scouring the web for any digital reproduction of the one I saw.

Earlier in the week I also finished India: A New History, so the Discovery is on the move!

The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead
© 1943 Ayn Rand
753 pages

"Howard Roark laughed."   This epic novel opens with the roar of its main character, leading the reader to wonder what is to come. Is he laughing in triumph? In fatalistic glee, like a Spartan before the Persian hordes?   The Fountainhead is his story, his triumph over those who would crush or control him. It is an eight hundred page tale, featuring only five principle characters, all of whom grapple with one another.  Written consciously as a heroic epic for a world in need of  a fire lit under its bottom,  it is an confrontational story, targeting the reader,  that deserves its reputation. In the end it is not a book about economics, or politics; at its heart, this is a novel that forces each character and the reader to answer the question: What are you living for?   Is it for your own convictions, or for the approval and at the whim of others?

First and foremost, The Fountainhead is a novel about integrity. The main character, Howard Roark, wants to be an architect -- but for him, designing buildings isn't just an occupation. It is an expression of his soul, something he pours his everything into.  Roark designs and builds according to his belief that form follows function, that the site and materials of a building should spur its design. Not for him are the fake Greek pillars of Beaux-Arts, standing pretty but adding no functional support. (He would not be a fan of McMansions, brimming over with random and functionless elements, from fake shutters to mismatched windows).  If Roark can't design according to his guiding principles, he simply won't;  he's content to work in a quarry if no one wants his kind of building.    He encounters occasional interest, however, and develops a practice in New York -- and through that practice, establishes a certain reputation for obstinacy.  He won't design a building that he doesn't believe in, and those who are accustomed to wheedling, manipulating, etc, gaze at him with disdain and indignation. Who does this man think he is, refusing work and scorning compromise? Maybe he should be taken down a peg or two...

The book remains controversial because its main character lives out a creed that the author, Ayn Rand, championed as 'the virtue of selfishness'.   On the face of it, this is a slap in the face to every belief system -- religious, political, moral-philosophic -- on the planet.  Even the beasts of the field, to use language Rand would despise,  engage in mutual aid. As I progressed through the novel, it seems to me that Rand/Roark had something altogether different in mind than the usual understanding of selfish. The main character is self-possessed, self-driven -- but he does not use others for his own private gain.  Roark does not dismiss self-sacrifice; he tells one character he would die for her, and at one point when waxing on the beauty of the New York City skyline -- the will of man made visible,  creativity rendered corporeal --  he declares he would fling himself bodily on these buildings to protect them from war.  But it is the act of will that is important;  Roark cannot be satisfied if he is not the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.  His convictions are such that he cannot allow anyone to think for him, to manipulate him into doing anything he does not believe in doing, to force him to sacrifice his time and creativity against his will.  He is like the woman in Fahrenheit 451 who sets the match to her own house and to her own person rather than surrender them; like  Henry David Thoreau, who chose to be thrown into prison rather than give money to pay for an unjust war.  Even like Gandhi, who maintained* if he were imprisoned the British would have his body -- but not his obedience.

We see why Roark lives as he does, through  other characters who act as foils.  Most prominent among these are his sometimes-colleague, Peter Keating. Unlike Roark, Keating doesn't have the courage of his convictions; he constantly seeks the approval of others, even when designing products of his own. He sinks hours and hours of his life in socializing with people he doesn't actually like,  diligently making connections so he can get bigger jobs, better commissions, and more influence. By novel's end, none of this has made him happier. He is old before his time, and he isn't even proud of his work, because so little of it is actually his.  Hank Williams said it best:  wealth won't save your poor wicked soul.  Another minor character of note is Peter's jilted finance, a relationship he let lapse because another woman offered better connections, even though he loved the jiltee genuinely.     All of the principle characters seemed strange to me, save Peter Keating,  but as the novel reached its height -- the second trial of Howard Roark,  accused of blowing up his own building rather than allow other designers to mar it --  I found him admirable in his constancy. The rest are either deceitful manipulators who keep their actions and motives in the dark, or pliable creatures whose actions move with the wind, like Keating and another. Howard, for all his strangeness, is constant.

While I still regard a worldview centered around individualism as problematically simplistic, in the limited context of The Fountainhead there is no difficulty at all in appreciating Roark's stand. This novel champions integrity and creativity, and while it calls its champion selfish, the men who act in in the way we truly understand as selfish are the bad guys. They are the would-be dictator who uses a political platform of equality-first to manipulate unions,  or people who marry others not to love them  but to seek advancement.  But ironically, by Roark's understanding, their selfishness is Other-driven: they are obsessed with power over Others, with reputation in the eyes of Others,  with things that Others will admire. Their actual selves are shallow, empty creatures, like the  pathetic, shriveled thing that was Voldemort in the aftermath of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Early on Roark meets a woman who wants him to design a house with a historical look. When he asks her why -- why she came to him for this kind of work, which he did not do, and why she wanted that kind of house in the first place --   Roark receives nothing but vague answers and references to her friends.

"He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends. the picture post cards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.”

Whatever the limitations of Rand's philosophy as a whole, The Fountainhead is a call to life.  One can -- without knowing anything of Objectivism, let alone embracing it --  appreciate Roark's stand. Without being a Stoic, a person can monitor their thoughts from time to time and ask: why am I dwelling on this? What good is it doing?  Likewise, without adopting Rand's philosophy in full, a person can monitor their thoughts and actions and ask: why am I doing this? Am I doing it because I want to, or am I merely following the path of least resistance?   We needn't be self-obsessed, but we can at least maintain a level of self-possession, to be present and active in our lives. These are the questions that have made hippies, that have sent people to Quaker communities and on other journeys -- questions that sent Thoreau to Walden Pond.  Having climbed Mount  Roark with this novel,  I think Rand deserves more thoughtful consideration than outright dismissal.

Architectural Addendum: 
Architecture is important to the Fountainhead, being Roark's reason for living. His attempt to maintain his own integrity and the buildings are linked. as I'd expected to dislike Roark's architecture on principle, because very little of the 20th century's building designs appeal to me. They are all bizarre forms that are  building-size art projects, or dismal inhuman hulks, like the cattle pens for proletarians the Soviets called apartments.  Roark's architecture is not bizaare; it follows a certain logic. And it is not inhuman: Roark's designs are explicitly humanistic, designed for perfect and comfortable use rather than public approval. (Unlike the works of the starchitects!)  He builds to the human scale, with grace and proportion-- his designs are nothing like those featured on something like Jim Kunstler's 'Eyesore of the Month"  series.

*Well, sort of. It's a line given to him in the Ben Kingsley performance of Gandhi.  It's a belief completely consistent with his character, so far as I know it from reading books like The Story of My Experiments With  Truth.

Related:
A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe. Another epic novel about two men sloughing off banal expectations and learning to stand and live with steel in their soul.

Beautiful Genius

After leaving the Castillo, I began exploring the streets of a city which had come alive.  Already, the wide sea-front avenue and the narrow alleys of the ‘old town’ proper were filled with the smell of food, from grilled fish to gelato.  Buskers were beginning to claim their respective spots, and I made my first donation to a man doing an acoustic version of “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger.  The other major building I wanted to see in the town was the Basilica of St. Augustine, and so I made my way blindly, moving forward only at glimpses of the spires.

The basilica doors were closed for a funeral, so I milled around the plaza for a bit. After escaping a confrontational man in his cups who claimed to be a tour guide who could get me onto an island ordinarily restricted to federal employees (what, Rikers?),  I admired the general scenery until the sound of bagpipes drew my attention. What proved to be a funeral service at the basilica had ended.  

After waiting twenty minutes or so for the bereaved to leave and the doors to be reopened to the public, I entered the basilica very quietly and sat in a chapel for a moment to gauge the situation. If nothing else, I could sit and soak in the atmosphere.  More tourists came in behind me, and they weren’t shy about roaming around taking photos, so I  took a few of my own and beat a respectful retreat.

Although I would spend over twelve hours downtown the first day -- strolling, sitting, cruising --  the day’s biggest surprise came early, around noon, when I laid eyes on Flagler College.

Established as the Ponce de Leon, a luxury hotel in a time when people wintered in St. Augustine, Flagler College now bears the name of its architect, Henry Flagler. This man also contributed several other buildings to downtown St. Augustine, but he wasn’t just a local architect. He helped found Standard Oil and developed one of the first major railways in Florida.  By the time I finished touring the gallery and dining hall of the college, I was completely awed by the man.

Even an unpracticed eye like mine couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming amount of detail. The Ponce de Leon rvivaled even the two basilicas I’ve been in for architectural grandeur. Even the water tower was a visual feast.   To the learned eye, there were even more surprises.

For instance, this fountain? Not just a fountain. It’s the central point of a cruciform courtyard, but also presents an image of sword stuck planted in the ground -- a sword of triumph and conquest.  It’s also ringed by twelve frogs, one for each month, and four turtles, one for each season.

The inside is similarly divine. Much of the interior is painted in gold leaf, and replete with mythic imagery.  The gallery floor is a mosaic with minute imperfections that were sewn in intentionally, so as not to rival Creation in their perfection. And the dining hall --  Dios mío!   Decorated with colorful panels memorializing Spain’s empire,  it was lit brilliantly by sun and chandlier. My camera didn’t do justice to the amount of golden light in the room. It was awe-some in the truer, older sense of the word.

Trying to capture some of the light in the dining hall, and not doing it justice.

Across the street is another hotel that Flagler designed, which is now home to City Hall and the Lightner Museum.  Initially named the Alcazar Hotel, it was less exclusive. 

Another hotel Flagler owned, but did not design, was the Casa Monica.  Check out those balconies! 

My university library has a biography of Flagler, so next month I'm looking forward to learning more about him.  His were not the only beautiful buildings in St. Augustine, however!

The Road Taken

The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure
336 pages
© 2016 Henry Petroski

What, exactly, is The Road Taken?   Its title declares it a history, which is mostly true. It does have a bounty of historic sketches on the creation of paved roads and interstates in the United States, along with material on the evolution of traffic lights, curbs, and sidewalks. But there are loving tributes to bridges in New York and San Francisco here, with much chatter about cantilever versus suspension. There's even a chapter or two with a focus on finance, which is quite brave indeed -- there's a reason Jim Kunstler titled his own chapter on property taxes in Home from Nowhere, "A Mercifully Brief Chapter On A Frightening, Tedious, But Important Subject". The ending chapter looks to the future of infrastructure, but with the exception of cement mixtures that heal themselves (cracks open and expose bacteria to water, bacteria produce limestone), that's really more about the future of cars than roads.   It's all interesting, but the further along the reader gets the more miscellaneous  it all seems. The author obviously believes that interstates and bridges are a good thing and produce jobs, but the book itself isn't an argument.  He doesn't try to make any connections between infrastructure and economic growth; the jobs mentioned are always in building interstates.

I'd say this is for people who want to read a chapter about the history of interstates instead of a whole book. It's right between the chapter on asphalt and the chapter on stop signs.

Related:
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton;  Divided Highways, Tom Lewis

Civilisation: A Personal View

Civilisation: A Personal View
© 1959 Sir Kenneth Clark
359 pages

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion -- poetry, beauty,  romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. (John Keating, Dead Poet's Society) 

In the mid-20th century, in the wake of a war that destroyed much of Europe and created a new tension between the capitalist West and the collectivist East that threatened to put paid to the rest of the world, Sir Kenneth Clark wondered: we are facing a new dark age?  Having posed the question, he returned to study the aftermath of the last dark age, Europe after the collapse of western Rome in hopes that it might offer an answer. Civilisations, he writes, compose political histories of themselves -- but it is the unofficial histories, the evidence they leave behind them, that really speaks. So to study the revival of Europe, to ascertain whether the 20th century west has again lost its vigor, Clark studies the book of art. Civilisation: A Personal View is a sweeping history of western art, primarily visual with a musical interlude.  A political history reveals the ambitions of its author, or patron; but the arts sweep across the human spectrum.  Lavishly illustrated with scores of full-page color photographs, most of the subjects Clark addresses are glorious sights that strike Awe into the heart of the viewer. They are churches, town palaces, sweeping vistas -- but there are the humbly but artfully-built homes, and the scenes of humbler life, too.  Although Clark comments on the evolving technical aspects of art -- the growing skillfulness at depicting man through the middle ages, for instance, from rudimentary figures with helpful "Image of a Man" labels, to the stunning life-like portraiture of the Renaissance -- he is more concerned with the spiritual import of the art. This means more than scenes of religious devotion; Clark believes that civilizations perish because they are exhausted, as though they were tired of being living things. Great art -- art that looks toward the future, that is intended as a lasting monument -- is one sign of life. For Clark, truth, beauty, and goodness are intermingled, though great monuments are not in themselves evidence of moral greatness.  After a lingering look at Byzantine glory, Clark addresses mostly north-western Europe: Britain, France, and Germany.  There is no discounting the book's richly satisfying content, however, for want of geographic range.

Religion for Atheists

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
© 2012 Alain de Botton
320 pages

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? [...] Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?   (The Parable of the Madman, F. Nietzsche)

Three years ago, former Baptist minister and now-agnostic Biblical scholar Robert M. Price posed a question to his audience of skeptics on Point of Inquiry: is the Bible  Mein Kampf?*  He asked the question to prompt religious critics to consider their animosity toward the Bible, which though flawed or offensive to them in part, still contained in it  beautiful stories and reflective wisdom; to reject the Bible because it had become the tool of fundamentalists to harp and rule over everyone else was folly, Price said; a loss to human art. It would be as if we were to spurn The Iliad because Achilles was a brute and the gods were fickle tyrants.  In the same spirit,  here agnostic Alain de Botton offers an appraising look at religion, and suggests that abandoning it entirely because we no longer believe its creeds is likewise folly, the willful abandonment of cultural adaptions humans created for their own benefit. In Religion for Atheists, he examines why religion worked for us for so long, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, then suggests ways in which skeptics, humanists, and so on can recover the strengths of the old permanent things without the witch-burnings. It is a profoundly thoughtful and wise book, which will no doubt annoy both the orthodox religious and anti-religious,  but offer  more moderate souls in and out of belief new ways to appreciate religion, and think about it seriously.

After enough glasses of wine, even the most antagonistic of atheists might admit that religion has a few redeeming virtues, mostly in the creative realm -- music, architecture, and art. Who would deny the beauty of the Sistine Chapel or the Parthenon? de Botton incorporates discussion of these into his work (with the astonishing absence of music), but his appreciation of them is linked to greater moral concerns. What does art do for us?  In de Botton's view, art should be not viewed as mere decor, as distracting prettiness: his view of art is one fully grounded in higher meaning,and he advocates using art in ways to provoke thought about the human condition. He practices this himself,  skillfully employing pictures throughout the text to truly illustrate his meaning: one plate shows a father at the end of his youth, beginning to bald as he enters his thirties, holding his toddling son and gazing upon a portrait of an elderly man in diapers:  a reflection on the realities of age.

de Botton's more broad appreciation for religion stems from the fact that life is difficult, and living a meaningful and moral life within it ever moreso. The actual beliefs of religion are irrelevant to the fact that as institutions, they provide places for people to escape from societal norms and find community among other people who have taken time to recognize that they, too, are troubled;  these same institutions constantly remind  and push their adherents to practice compassion and strive for moral excellence while giving them a broad sense of cosmic perspective. We need those reminders and encouragement, de Botton writes, because we are forgetful. Even if modernity wasn't actively pushing us into behaviors which are detrimental to our happiness and general well-being, our very nature incites us to wrath against those we love, our minds constantly bedevil us with worries that we then fixate on.  Although philosophy is an able guide and ally, as de Botton' own writings have demonstrated (see The Consolations of Philosophy, for instance),  we are at root social creatures, and find our best strength among one another: there is a reason Epicurus included companionship as part of his holy trinity of happiness (along with economic self-reliance/independence and mindfulness).

de Botton's goal is not to make extant religions attractive to nonbelievers, however much he may admire Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism. Instead, after divining out what makes them so successful and useful, he suggests ways for the nonreligious to capture its advantages.  This means changing existing ways secular progressives have sought to improve the human condition, art and education, by taking a note from religion and making them more meaningful, and thus more effective at communication.  Instead of organizing the study of art or literature by historicity or methods, why not arrange them by emotional theme; he inserts the layout of an existing London museum which exhibits have been reorganized into Galleries of Love,  Self-Knowledge, and Suffering, among others. University curriculums, too, could do with some priority-adjustment, as academics spend their lives studying increasingly esoteric questions, and devote no attention at all to figuring out what attitudes and practices best serve human relationships, or how to teach people to deal with the reality of Death.  From there de Botton's ideas broader support: he suggests temples to human virtues like Tenderness. Some of the ideas are fanciful, like a yearly recreation of the Feast of Fools, in which people are free to indulge with great abandon every passion and impulse of the flesh. (The illustration provided shows wanton public sex in the Agape Restaurant, which in a prior chapter had been the setting for relaxed conversations between people who were otherwise strangers, encouraged to talk about their lives and intimate hopes and fears.)  According to de Botton, this was an old medieval tradition, but it reminds me of nothing so much as a Star Trek episode, "The Return of the Archons", in which Kirk and co find themselves in a society filled with dour zombies who, once a week, go absolutely mad.

Most of the author's gentle suggestions would take a great deal of popular support and concern to institute, and so I imagine the book is more useful to skeptics trying to understand the power of religion than to humanist communities trying to create a more structured way of cultivating values and meaning. Those who attack religion should realize that it is these strengths they are attacking, not a simple, fervent belief in childhood credos. True or not, the great religions of the world deliver something of value to the world. To attack them is not only threaten people by going after sources of comfort and strength, but perhaps to succeed in doing so, and leave a vacuum to be filled with malignant consumerism or worse. Even if nonbelievers succeed in spreading the gospel of irreligion, those with any regard for humanity ought to be cognizant of the consequences, and go in knowing that we must give back more than we destroy.

Religion for Atheists is the best de Botton I've read in a long time, and a definite recommendation.

 How shall we comfort ourselves [...]?  What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?  (Ibid)

Related:

• The Evolution of God, Robert Wright
• Good Without God, Greg Epstein

* Price now hosts 'The Human Bible', which examines the Bible as literature, history, and philosophy, his intention being to coax skeptics, freethinkers, and co into appreciating it for its own human merits, instead of recoiling from it as the tool of dogma.  The show is on temporary hiatus while a new producer is found, but Price also independently creates The Bible Geek, in which he fields questions about biblical and religious history.
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/robert_m_price_is_the_bible_mein_kampf/
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/biblegeek.php
http://www.thehumanbible.net/

Railroad Stations

Railroad Stations: the Buildings that Linked the Nation
© 2012 ed. David Naylor
336 pages

For the past couple of weeks I've been slowly enjoying Railroad Stations: the Buildings that Linked the Nation, a collection of photographs of the United States' wide variety of railroad stations, from humble one-room shacks in the desert to astounding works of art that must rival even the cathedrals of Europe with their grandeur. It was released just last year, and appropriately timed given that Grand Central Station in New York is celebrating a hundred years of service.  The book is a feast for architectural admirers and railfans alike: after an opening section that gives a history of rail in the United States, and stations' role in public and economic life, a tour of the US's depots, stations, and terminals follows.  The photos range from the beginnings of rail days to the early 1980s, and while the majority portray the stations at their best (with crowds, families included, waiting to go on a trip, dressed in their Sunday best...including straw boaters for the men), a few in the southwest section offer a sad look at roundhouses and tracks overgrown by weeds.  Aside from the southwest and Alaska, though, the buildings are magnificent, and often connected to other forms of transit. In New York, for instance, a train station also had ferry landings, and quite a few were visibly part of a trolley ("light rail") network. The photos included often cover a given site from multiple angles, building plans, and offer views of fine details, like a GC mongram emblazoned on the  doorknobs at the Grand Canyon station.  The editor sources the photos as well, so those curious can look for the original collections.

The four-page treatment of Union Station in Montgomery especially delighted me. I only discovered that the station was still standing a few weeks ago, and immediately took a trip there.

Click to enlarge.

Far more humble is the Old Depot, like Union Station part of the Louisville & Nashville line. I took this photo several years ago on an overcast day. 

Walkable Cities

Walkable Cities: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
© 2012 Jeff Speck
312 pages

  For most of human history, cities were limited to the area that people could cover on foot within a day, but the advent of railed transportation and later cars expanded our range, and cities grew enormously, far beyond pedestrian access. In the United States, where most cities were young or as-yet unformed, the automobile effectively created them in its image, to its scale, resulting in vast urban, decentralized urban areas wherin auto transport was assumed to be the norm -- and was, in fact, the only viable means of transportation.But those were the days of cheap energy, of abundant petroleum being used by a minority of the world.  While the 1970s oil crisis prompted European cities to retreat from auto-dependency, supporting instead cycling and passenger rail, the United States was 'lucky' enough to find new reserves...and dig itself a deeper hole.  But today, the prices at the pump aren’t being inflated by a cartel: they’re being driven, instead, by the world's ever-burgeoning thirst for oil, and its ever-real scarcity. The 'changing energy reality' of the 21st century demands a response. For Jeff Speck, city planner and architectual designer, the best adaption is the restoration of the walkable city, and in his first solo release (Walkable City), he timidly explains why walkability is important before more boldly laying out a ten-step path to human-scaled communities.

Although Walkable City eventually proves a work with muscle, it doesn't start out that way.  Speck introduces the book by explaining that it's not the next great piece of urban criticism. The arguments have already been made, he writes: what Americans lack is application. Perhaps for that reason, the section on the why of walkability lacks teeth; instead of championing as the path to municipal solvency (or better yet, dependable prosperity), a solid approach given how concerned Americans are with financial strain, he lists three reasons: walkable cities are green, good for your health, and hip.  He borrows from David Owen's The Green Metropolis for the section on cities' environmental advantages, of course, and that's a superior read for the why of walkability. Speck shines in execution, though.

How do you make a city walkable? First, check the forces that destroy it -- rein in the cars, promote mixed-used development, and for the love of all that is holy, stop building so many parking lots.  These set the stage: they are the foundation from which everything else can spring, although Speck doesn't stress the importance of mixed-used development nearly as much as I'd expect from someone who coauthored Suburban Nation; that section is positively anemic. Speck then stresses that incorporating other modes of transportation, like transit, are crucial. The section on the integration of trolleys into the urban fabric is one of the best in the book, in my option, because Speck doesn't see them as an magic if-you-build-it-they-will-come creator of walkability, but a fertilizer that allows downtown areas to flourish.  Some of his steps are less material, and more aesthetic  like making streets "Places". That will sound familiar to anyone who has read Jim Kunstler, or even The Great Good Place, but aesthetics also have material values. Streets lined with trees,  for instance, not only look appealing, but the trees make the street safer by calming traffic and provide pedestrians relief from the heat,  although they do expose them to the occasional peril of nut-throwing squirrels.  Chuck Marohn opined in Building Strong Towns that in certain instances, solutions to our cities' fiscal problems weren't possible: nothing can be done to save some places completely. What we have are opportunities for rational responses, and Speck takes this view as well,  advocating for urban triage, picking winners and letting some areas wither away.

Walkable Cities is a book to remember. The slow beginning is disappointing: this is a good book that could have been great. It could have been what Speck claimed from the start it wasn't, the next great book on American cities. As it is, Walkable Cities is a solid hit, distilling a lot of literature into one short and punchy work. (Among the books cited: the Holy Bible of urbanism, Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking; Jeff Mape's Pedaling Revolution; and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic). Just as Suburban Nation was a fundamental book for understanding the problems of American urbanism, Walkable City is its complement, a comprehensive citizen's guide for advocacy,  giving people an idea of what measures they can work to effect on the local scale. Bit by bit, neighborhood after neighborhood, Americans can restore their urban fabric and create a nation of strong towns.

Related:

• Suburban Nation, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck
• The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
• Building Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn
• The Green Metropolis, David Owen
• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay

Home from Nowhere

Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
© 1998 James Howard Kunstler
320 pages

"History doesn't believe anybody's advertising." (p.1)

James Howard Kunstler penned The Geography of Nowhere in an attempt to answer the question: why is America so obscenely ugly? His answer came in the form of a cultural history of the United States, one that introduced lay readers to urban planning and enticed them with its relevance to their lives, not to mention Kunstler's playfully vicious style. As much ground as it covered though, and as hilariously as Kunstler excoriated suburban sprawl and modernist building, he offered no solutions to the problems he detailed, except for the hope that oil would peak and destroy the entire rotten system. Home from Nowhere follows in Geography’s footsteps,  demonstrating how communities can be restored and are being restored– and elaborating on why he is hopeful for our future.

Home from Nowhere is less a book in its own right, and more a continuation, or a fulfillment, of The Geography of Nowhere. It begins by repeating Kunstler’s basic criticisms of the unraveling of America’s urban fabric, detailing his beef with the suburban sprawl which replaced traditional cities.  Kunstler’s perspective is different than that of Chuck Marohn (Strong Towns) or Andres Duany (Suburban Nation). While those authors focus on sprawl as a financial loser, Kunstler examines planning from a more humanistic perspective, probing into how traditional and planning both effect us, as people. Crucial to Kunstler's view of urbanism is a sense of "place". Traditional neighborhoods and cities have this sense of place: they have clear centers and edges. They can be defined. Sprawl, however, is a seemingly endless  and stultifyingly homogenous expanse of asphalt and neon -- a desert of concrete that engenders feelings of lostness and despair in those trapped in it.

Home builds on Geography first in providing ample illustrations -- not photographs,but attractive and elegant sketches which demonstrate architectural or planning concepts (like symmetry and proportion) or by depicting streetscapes and homes which can be emulate. Some chapters elaborate on the problems which inhibit the restoration of American urbanism, like real estate taxing policies ("A Mercifully Brief Chapter on a Frightening, Tedious, but Important Subject") that discourage the erection of fine buildings and promote instead the conversion of downtown into parking lots. The remaining third of the book is dedicated to covering the travails and triumphs of not only new urbanist planners like Andrues Duany and Peter Calthorpe designing communities, but concerned citizen-politicians who have been laboring to effect changes in their own cities, restoring traditional neighborhood development. Part of Home is a response to the criticism of new urbanist projects that most of them have consisted of greenfield development -- new development far from city cores, in effect creating much better suburbs but suburbs all the same.  Working within existing cities means constantly struggling with minds locked into old thinking. This argument is dated now, of course: since the bubble burst in late 2007, the new urbanists have been focusing on infill, on reactivating dead spaces inside cities. The wind is blowing in the direction of urban restoration, and Home from Nowhere chronicles its beginning.

Although the recap of The Geography of Nowhere means that Home could be read by itself,  Kunstler argued so well before that the first third seems watered down in comparison. The encouraging work he reports on is a welcome addition to the jeremiad-like Geography, though, and recommends itself to those concerned about the shape of America's cities. Kunstler's own personality imbues the narrative with strength: he's an interesting man, pining for a lost world of decorum, virtue, and grace and wanting to see it restored -- first through the built environment.