Life

When, in my late twenties, I returned home as a self-dramatizing repatriate to wreak my unspeakable visions of the individual upon a world that never asked for them, I determined to meet the men who were my ancestors (even if they were blissfully unaware of this avuncular connection). Upstate New York has a fine literary tradition, stretching from Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Harold Frederic through Edmund Wilson, Carl Carmer and Frederick Exley. From the due-date stamps I could tell that I was the first person in decades to take out Philander Deming or Josephine Young Case. If the stars of the generation then passing burned less brightly in the firmament, well, then it was up to me to illuminate them.

If this were a normal January, free from the specter of COVID-19, Davos would be bracing itself for an invasion by several thousand of the world’s most self-important people: pompous politicians, slick CEOs and — worst of all — freeloading journalists. Normally this pretty Alpine town is the venue for the World Economic Forum in the last week in January, but this year that annual schmoozefest is safely confined to the internet. ‘Key global leaders will share their views on the state of the world in 2021,’ forewarns the WEF website but, for the first time in the WEF’s 50-year history, they’ll be doing it remotely. Due to the pandemic, Davos rests in peace.

New York Hello friends, and a merry Christmas to you all. I suspect we are all eager to see the back of this year. But the season brings on my sentimentality, and I wonder what waits on the other side of this particular solar circumnavigation. We will welcome spring and, hopefully, with it, the lifting of lockdown. Walking around the dreary streets of the city, I worry what we’ll leave behind us in this annus horribilis. Crowds are thin, sidewalks spare. Eyes are downcast. Has the virus won the War on Christmas? I pray not. When I was a boy, Christmas in the Dent household was a New York affair. The city was near its nadir, yet the Yuletide charm brought out its best, and ours.

Single at the holidays: an infamous drag, and this year worse than others. Singles got especially hosed during the COVID pandemic. Sure, uncoupled millennials are generally not grappling with remote learning, limited childcare or the actual virus, but dating is no walk in the park — except, I guess, when walking in the park is the only permissible date. Take me. I’ve just crossed that Rubicon where well-meaning friends and family have changed their tune about my romantic prospects. It used to be that no one was good enough for me; now, the refrain is ‘No one’s perfect!’ And no one is. After my ’rona- related evacuation from New York, I decided to explore the options near my parents’ home in Pennsylvania.

Virginia  Christmas will be different this year. Our refrigerator’s death was like Socrates’s: it began at the bottom and moved gradually upward, eventually yielding up its Freon eide to the empyrean, or at least the ozone hole. Such a death in early November raises big questions about holiday-making, or would most years, with Thanksgiving upon us and Christmas not far behind. But with COVID rampant, we’re admonished to stay home, and will, which dovetails conveniently with the fact that because of the virus, supply chains are banjaxed and we won’t get our new fridge till Boxing Day. (And refrigerator boxes are the best boxes, so there’s the grandchildren’s Christmas taken care of.

Laramie, Wyoming Nearly all the famous artistic controversies in the aesthetic history of the western world — the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in France and the contest between the rococo and neoclassical schools across Europe in the middle of the 18th century; the subsequent rivalry between the Classicists and the Romantics and the contretemps in the late-19th century between the Realists and the Impressionists — are as dead, irrelevant and forgotten today as the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

Batavia, New York To think I almost let 2020 slip by without recognizing the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote in all (then) 48 states of the union. Shame on me! This is a matter of Upstate New York regional pride — and confusion — on several counts. The 1848 ‘Declaration of Rights and Sentiments’, a rewrite of the Declaration of Independence along feminist lines, was drafted in Seneca Falls (the village generally thought to be the model for Bedford Falls in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). The suffragist avatar Susan B. Anthony spent her adulthood in Rochester.

Toward the end of my latest YouTube livestream, I casually invited my subscribers to email me for a free life-enrichment consultation, subject to a moderate monthly donation to my PayPal account. Subsequently, my inbox has been literally inundated with more than several emails beseeching my guidance on every progressive topic under the sun. I’ve therefore decided it is my duty to reply to these poor souls, and simultaneously share my seemingly endless bounty of knowledge and wisdom with the readership of this publication. So without further ado, dear reader, let us delve into your humble Woke Life correspondent’s mailbox to discover who is fortuitous enough to receive my progressive instruction. From Devastated of ClevelandQ.

Traveling in Myanmar, it’s hard not to think of Rudyard Kipling’s immortal lines: ‘On the road to Mandalay,/ Where the flying fishes play.’ These days both Kipling and Myanmar (or Burma, as we still think of it) are out of favor. The mere mention of a visit elicits raised eyebrows and hisses of disbelief, though it seems that travelers can visit China, which is just as repressive, with impunity. But despite the disapproval, Myanmar retains its allure. Even the names are magical. Who wouldn’t want to take the road to Mandalay or sail the Irrawaddy? There were no flying fishes the day I arrived in Mandalay.

November 7, 2020 To my dear parents, Victory. Uttering the word feels strange after four long years of battle. But we persisted. After our devastating ‘loss’ in 2016, I ordered my pink-knit pussy hat from Etsy and answered the call to arms. I remember learning of the atrocities suffered under other dictators whose statues we’ve toppled, such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. But after the horrors I’ve witnessed online, I would trade places with them in an instant. It’s hard to describe daily life when you’re living in a war. For four years I’ve woken up in my Brooklyn apartment, heart heavy with the knowledge that I am living under the tyrannical rule of a madman. Is this how Anne Frank felt?

Laramie, Wyoming The refuge of a scoundrel is always the profession — in spades — of whatever a particular society prizes above everything else. In the United States from 1776 until the 1960s, that was patriotism. Since then it has been racial equality, succeeded in recent decades by crude and unapologetic racism of the anti-white variety whose virulence appears to contradict Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is why the death of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department last May was accepted by the left as proof that race relations in America have worsened in recent years to attain critical mass.

The moment lockdown restrictions eased, my wife Anna booked up trips to Europe, to visit houses and villages I thought I’d never see again, such were the initial predictions about the zombie apocalypse. I’d not been to Barenton, Normandy, for example, since last autumn, but that hadn’t stopped the plumber and the builder from sending me regular bills. It is in this decaying granite villa, stretching over four floors, that the accumulated junk from the Herefordshire Balkans has been shoved — thousands of books, crates of manuscripts and letters, the children’s toys, even the children. Oscar, the middle son, spent time here, depleting the cellar after he broke up with a girlfriend. He ran back to England terrified when a mouse leapt out of an oven glove.

Back in March, around 4,000 years ago, the world was ending. Plague swept in from the east like a horde. Clam-tight lockdowns, unthinkable even days before, were announced everywhere. Who could save us? On March 18 our prayers were answered. An honor roll of Hollywood bluebloods took action. Assembled by Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, they created a video montage cover of John Lennon’s masterpiece — yes! — ‘Imagine’, which she posted — thank goodness! — on Instagram. ‘We’re all in this together,’ said Gadot’s expensive oval face, and, in a sense, she was right. Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo, Sia and Zoë Kravitz, Norah Jones and Amy Adams: they were all in this big wet bathful of tears together.

My grandfather Werner von Biel was born in a huge white house on the Baltic coast of eastern Germany, a few years before World War One. I never met him. He died when I was a child. My grandmother didn’t like to talk about him. She’d left him for an English soldier at the end of World War Two. Growing up in England during the Cold War, I often wondered what had become of his Junker family, the Schloss (castle) they lived in and the land they farmed. When the Berlin Wall came down I went east, in search of the fatherland my grandmother had forsaken. Thirty years later, I’m still searching. I’ve found a few curios along the way. The Schloss is still there, though my grandfather’s family no longer owns it (the Communists turned it into a school).

Batavia, New York I’m scribbling this on the porch as I stare at the chain-sawed remains of our massive and ancient (by American standards, which are the only standards I know) front-yard maple tree, which split in a windstorm and crushed my car. I had hoped to be a good custodian and pass along these sylvan sentinels intact to those who come after, but like America...well, I won’t go for a cheap and inexact analogy. Oh, 2020, you most annus horribilis. But I am an inveterate looker-on-the-bright-side, and among the reasons for hope in this darksome time is the potential for new, or renewed, growth on the branches of the learning tree. (If I may borrow a line from the Jackson 5.

Thailand is famous for many things, some of which are unmentionable in these pages. It has long been considered the perfect location for ‘winter sun’, if you are the type of person to whom a piña colada on a white sandy beach appeals. In recent years, it has become a hotspot for hypochondriacs requiring non-essential medical care and hysterics after a nip-and-tuck (pre-COVID, the health-tourism industry was thought to be growing at 14 percent a year). Home to the orchid, pad thai, the Monkey Buffet festival (what it says on the tin), the Siamese cat and the bumblebee bat, Thailand’s gentle and healing culture has earned it a reputation as a cleaner, greener land.