Author: Roy Lotz

English teacher, traveler, book nerd.

Letters from Spain #7: A Walk Through Spanish History

Letters from Spain #7: A Walk Through Spanish History

Here is the seventh episode of my podcast about life in Spain:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-spain-7-a-walk-through-spanish-history/id1469809686?i=1000458091403

For the transcript, see below:

Hello.

I have to begin this letter on a somber note. This Monday, November 25, was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This issue is a big concern in Spain. It seems like there is always a story on the news about a woman who was murdered by a partner, or about men who have sexually abused women without facing consequences. So far this year, 52 women have been killed by their partners, and only 11 of them had filed any kind of police report beforehand. I am sometimes asked by Spaniards if we in America have such a big violence against women problem. Though I am inclined to say yes, it strikes me that in America we do not discuss domestic violence nearly as often as they do here in Spain.

So I decided to see if I could find some figures that I could compare between the two countries. In the United States, in 2005, 1,181 women were killed by an intimate partner. For that same year in Spain, 63 women were killed by partners or ex-partners. Keeping in mind that the population of Spain is about one-seventh the population of the United States, the American figure is still much bigger. So it seems that we in America have a much worse domestic violence problem than they have here in Spain. Though it is sad news, to me it is not very surprising. The easy access to guns in America makes all forms of violence more common, or at least more deadly. The reason we don’t talk about domestic violence as much in America as in Spain, I think, is that in America all of our conversations about violence end up being arguments about guns. In Spain, the issue is normally framed more as a cultural problem—the culture of machismo. 

As tempting as it would be now to launch into a rant about American gun violence or machista culture, this episode is focused on a slightly more peaceful topic (well, maybe not): the history of Spain. This past weekend, I finally took the time to revisit one of the great museums in Madrid: the Museo de Arqueología Nacional (the National Archaeology Museum). It is a bit out of the way for most tourists, though not much. The museum is housed in the same enormous building as the National Library, which is also worth a visit, if only to see the ornate façade complete with sculptures of iconic Spanish writers (like Lope de Vega or Cervantes). The Archaeology Museum is huge, and fascinating, and very cheap: only three euros, and free on Saturday afternoons.

The museum goes through the prehistory and history of Spain from the earliest times to the early modern period (about the 1700s). Human ancestors have been in the Iberian peninsula for at least one million years. Quite a long time. One of the most famous early-hominid sites in Spain is Atapuerca, near the city of Burgos. (Researchers are still debating what species to assign to the fossils found there.) Around 200,000 years ago, the Neanderthals set up shop in Iberia, and began making all sorts of little sharp stone tools. There were probably homo sapiens, too, and it is possible the two species interbred. They at least influenced one another’s technology. By far the most famous artifact left by the prehistoric humans of Iberia are the cave paintings in Altamira, which were made around 36,000 years ago. The archaeology museum has a beautiful replica of these caves near the entrance, made using traditional methods. If we can judge by these cave paintings, two things have occupied the Spanish for a very, very long time: painting and bulls.

Soon enough in the museum’s collection we get to the development of agriculture, permanent settlements, pottery, metallurgy, and all of the other dubious developments of sedentary life. Sometime around 500 BCE, the Celts came into Spain. (And I bet a lot of people didn’t know that the Celts were in Spain.) You can still see traces of their culture in the northwest corner of the country, Galicia. Meanwhile, the Phonecians (from northern Africa) began to colonize the south of the peninsula. The city of Cádiz has been inhabited since around 1,000 BCE, making it the oldest city in Spain. A bit later, the Greeks started landing on the East coast, establishing the city of Empúries, which is in modern-day Catalonia. They did this around 600 BCE.

Under the influence of the Greeks and the Phoenecians, a new indigenous culture eventually emerged in the East Peninsula, which is now called simply the Iberian culture. The museum has quite a few beautiful examples of Iberian sculpture, such as the so-called Lady of Elche—an imposing woman with Princess Leia hair. In general, Iberian sculpture is distinguished from the typical Greek style by its abstract stylization. Its rediscovery in the early 20th century influenced Picasso. But the culture was not to last, since the Iberian Peninsula eventually was the site of the Punic wars—the clash between Ancient Rome and Hannibal’s Carthage. Rome won, of course, and then incorporated Iberia into the ever-growing Roman Empire. Iberia then became Hispania, and its culture became roman. 

You don’t need to go to the archaeology museum to see evidence of Rome’s influence. There are Roman ruins in Segovia, Mérida, and Tarragona, to pick just three examples. But you don’t even need to look that far: the whole Spanish language evolved from Latin. The museum has some wonderful examples of metal sheets on which Roman laws were published. I like to imagine a Roman lawyer doing his research on a rainy day, standing in his toga outside in the plaza, bent over, reading these laws. In any case, the Romans really Romanized Spain: they built aqueducts, temples, fortresses, bath houses, dams, lighthouses, roads, theaters, amphitheaters—tons of stuff. Talk about a colonial mindset. But at least they had a sense of style. The archaeology museum in Madrid has some beautiful samples of Roman floor and wall mosaics, which in my opinion are in better taste than any of our interior decoration.

Rome lasted a long, long time. Spain was controlled by the Romans for about 700 years, which left an indelible mark on the country. But eventually Rome declined and fell. This left a huge power vacuum, which allowed the Visigoths to move in from the north of Europe. The museum has a few interesting artifacts from this period, but really it was not a time that left a huge archaeological footprint. After all, these were the Dark Ages. The Visigoths only enjoyed their time on top for about 200 years, until they were crushed by the invading Muslims, who came in from across the Strait of Gibraltar.

This was the beginning of Al-Andalus, or Moorish Spain. (The word moro in Spanish is considered slightly offensive, but in English “Moorish” is standard.) This was actually another cultural high point in the history of the peninsula. While most of Europe was still slowly crawling its way back from the Dark Ages, Moorish Spain was an advanced place. New crops and agricultural techniques were introduced, major philosophers like Averroes and Moses Maimonides lived and wrote, and beautiful buildings were constructed, like the Great Mosque of Cordoba or the Alhambra in Granada. The Archaeology Museum has some amazing examples of Moorish art and architecture, as well as some works made by Christians in a Moorish style (which is called mudéjar). The Moors left a sizable linguistic heritage, too, as thousands of Spanish words come from Arabic.

Eventually the power of the Moors fractured, and the power of the Christians in the north grew and consolidated. After many centuries of battles, shifting alliances, and gradual conquest, the Christians pushed south until the last Moorish kingdom—Granada—fell in 1492, and modern Spain was born. Soon the country entered its Golden Age as the pre-eminent global superpower, with colonies all around the world (thanks partly to Columbus), and most of Europe under its thumb. But this was not to last. By the 1700s, Spain was a decidedly second-rate power in Europe, even if it still managed to hang on to its colonies. The museum has some lovely objects from the Enlightenment in Spain, but it must be said that the Age of Reason was a tame affair here compared with, say, France or England. 

This is when the museum’s collection ends. You must go elsewhere if you want to trace Spain’s history to the present day. Even so, I think this brief story gives a taste of why travelling in Spain is so fascinating. So many different cultures shared this relatively small bit of land, and they are all piled up on top of each other. In a single day, you can go from a gothic cathedral, to a Roman bridge, to a Moorish mosque. The cave paintings of Altamira, for example, are situated right next to a beautiful medieval village. This is something that we just don’t have in America, mostly because European colonization so completely wiped out the indigenous cultures. 

Speaking of European colonization, I should also mention Thanksgiving before I end this podcast. Of course, Thanksgiving in Spain means precisely: nothing. Thursday is a work day just like any other. Well, my brother got the day off somehow, but in my case I’ll spend Thanksgiving giving presentations about Thanksgiving to Spanish children who must go through this every year. But I do think that Thanksgiving encapsulates America like no other holiday can. What do we do? We eat until we’re sick, we watch men tackling each other on television, or we watch giant floating cartoons, or we argue about politics, and then the next day we all go shopping for things we don’t need. It is America in a nutshell. My own Thanksgiving celebrations will have to wait until Friday. There is no way a whole turkey is going to fit inside my little tabletop oven. Well, I’ll figure it out.

For now, I’m thankful to be here.

Review: Maya to Aztec

Review: Maya to Aztec
Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed

Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed by Edwin Barnhart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here is another excellent lecture series by Edwin Barnhart. Just earlier this year I listened to, and greatly enjoyed, his series on the civilizations of North America. Now he is on his home turf, for Barnhart is a specialist in Maya archaeology. Surprisingly, however, I thought that the lecture series got off to something of a rough start. He jumps right into the Olmecs without enough framing or background. But soon enough I got my bearings, and the rest was a delightful trip through Meso-American archaeology.

Although I was somewhat more familiar with the basics of the Mayans and the Aztecs than with the ancient peoples of North Americans, I was still astounded at the depths of my own ignorance. It is frankly incredible that you can go through the American educational system and learn infinitely more about the Babylonians, Egyptians, and the Greeks than about the Mayans and the Aztecs. Granted, much of what we know about these civilizations was discovered fairly recently. The Mayan script was only deciphered in the 1970s; and as Barnhart points out, there is so much left to be discovered, including whole cities. Barnhart himself discovered a city (Maax Na).

The pyramids, pictoral script, and ancient date of these civilizations naturally bring up associations of Egypt. Yet the comparison is somewhat misleading, since the peoples of Meso-America consisted of a patchwork of cultures, sharing obvious similarities but equally important differences, whose fortunes waxed and waned through the centuries. Egypt, by contrast, was a singularly homogenous culture. Mesopotamia is likely a better comparison in this regard. But, of course, the Meso-American cultures have many distinct features.

One of the most important is the elaborate calendar system. Barnhart, an expert on paleo-archaeology, goes into great detail in explaining the Mayan numeral and calendrical systems. What is striking is not only the great complexity of the system, but also the cultural importance of the calendar. It was used by the entire region; and its keepers—who were religious men—communicated with one another even while their own states were at war. The calendar was filled with significance and omens, and was always consulted before important tasks. Barnhart speculates that the cyclical nature of the calendar also explains why cities were periodically abandoned.

Another peculiar feature is the Meso-American ball game, which was played across the region. This ball game was not just a sport, but a kind of living metaphor for Meso-American cosmology. I am not familiar of any other examples from the ancient world of a sport being so culturally central. And, of course, there is the human sacrifice—especially among the Aztecs. It is difficult to hear about these practices nowadays; though I do wonder which area had more religion-inspired killings during this time: Meso-America or Europe?

Barnhart ends the lecture series by narrating the first European contact and the eventual destruction of the Aztec Empire by Hernán Cortés and his men. (There is a new series on Amazon about Cortés, which was made to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán, which happened in 1521.) It is an exciting and a depressing story, as the work of centuries is burned or buried. But Barnhart ends on a positive note, observing the many ways that these cultures have survived, and expressing hope that the modern descendants of the Maya, the Aztecs, and the many other cultures will take control of their heritage. For my part, now I really want to go to Mexico.



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Review: Bullshit Jobs

Review: Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.


Reading this was cathartic. Like so many people, I, too, have experienced the suffering that is a useless job—a job that not only lacks any real benefit to society, but which also does not even benefit the company. (Lucky for me, I am now a teacher, which, for all its unpleasant aspects, almost never feels useless.) Even though I got a lot of reading and writing done on the job, the feeling of total futility eventually drove me half-crazy. So it felt liberating to read an entire book about this phenomenon.

But let me take a step back and explain the book. In 2013 Graeber published an article in STRIKE! magazine (a fairly obscure publication) about bullshit jobs, and it immediately went viral. This book is basically an articulation, elaboration, and defense of the points in that short article. Graeber notes that Keynes predicted the rise of automation to cause a startling reduction in the work-week. Yet this has not occurred. Many economists explain this by pointing to the rise of the so-called “service” industry. But this would seem to imply that we have switched from factory-work to making lattes for one another, or giving each other massages. As Graeber shows, this is hardly the case: the number of people in such jobs has remained fairly constant. What has grown, rather, is a vast edifice of managerial and administrative work.

Anyone familiar with the academic world will instantly recognize this. Universities have come to be dominated by a top-heavy administrative structure, and faculty have been forced to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on bureaucratic nonsense. The same is true in the medical field, or so I hear. Really, the story is the same everywhere: an increasingly arcane hierarchy of administrators, leading to byzantine networks of paperwork—all of it ostensibly for improving quality, and yet manifestly distracting from the real work. This kind of ritualistic box-ticking is only one of the types of bullshit jobs that Graeber investigates. Also included are flunkies (subordinates whose only role is to make superiors feel important), goons (jobs which arise from a kind of arms race, such as marketing agents or corporate lawyers), and duct tapers (who are hired to patch over an easily-fixed problem).

Obviously, one could argue all day about the typology of useless jobs. One could also argue about which jobs, if any, are useless. It must be said that Graeber’s reliance on subjective experience of his informants does introduce a worrisome element of capricious judgment. Besides this, some might say that the free market can never give rise to useless jobs, since such things would be obviously detrimental to a company’s profits. But one need only read through the many testimonies collected by Graeber to be convinced that, yes, some jobs really ought not to exist. According to surveys, around 40% of workers report that they believe their own jobs to be useless—so useless that they could vanish tomorrow without anyone minding. To pick just one of Graeber’s examples: a man works for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a contractor for the German military, whose job is to fill out the paperwork necessary to allow somebody to move their desk from one room to another room. I do not think this is necessary.

But this raises the obvious question: If so many jobs are really useless, why do they exist? One might understand this happening in the government, but this is precisely the sort of thing that the private sector should be immune from. Well, Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and so his explanations are social and cultural. He cites several factors. There is a huge amount of political pressure, from the left and the right, to create more jobs. This is natural, since being out of work means being poor, or worse. More than that, we have culturally internalized the institution of “work” to the extent that our jobs are the primary source of meaning in many people’s lives, even if they ultimately are disagreeable. Indeed, Graeber believes it is just the unpleasantness of work that makes it a source of value in our culture, as it becomes a type of ennobling suffering.

Graeber also notes the usefulness of useless jobs to the upper classes. For one, they keep people endlessly busy; and, what is more, well-paying, white-collar jobs—even useless ones—make their holders identify with the interests of the upper class. The economy then becomes a kind of engine for distributing favors and resources down an elaborate chain of command. Graeber coins the term “managerial feudalism” for this arrangement: the return of the medieval obsession with ranks mirrored by the modern penchant for inflated job titles. Now, my brief summary does not do justice to Graeber’s writing. Nevertheless, it is here where one wishes most for an economist to contribute to the argument. For even if there are forces countervailing the pressures of profit, the economy is still running on manifestly capitalist lines. So how could a sort of inefficient feudalism exist in this context?

Another point that Graeber examines is the relative pay of people with useful and useless employment. The obvious trend is that jobs which have undeniable social value—like nurses and teachers—are paid less, while jobs that have questionable or even negative social value—such as “creative vice presidents” and corporate lobbyists—are richly rewarded. Now, I do not think you need to be an idealist to see this situation as undesirable. Graeber explains this tendency by analyzing the culture of work (specifically, that useful employment is supposed to be its own reward, while useless employment requires incentives), but again one craves an economic explanation. (This, by the way, is one of the frustrations of social science: that the different disciplines operate with incompatibly different premises and methodologies.)

For my part, my own experience, combined with the many testimonies and statistics in this book, is enough to convince me that some jobs are really bullshit—even from the limited standpoint of a company’s profit. And I think that Graeber may be correct in searching for a cultural and political, rather than a strictly “economic,” explanation. After all, we humans are not exactly renowned for our rational economies. But for my part, I think he may have underestimated the role that corporate mergers have played in vastly reducing competition—and, thus, the pressure to eliminate useless jobs.

While all of this deserves analysis and debate, I think that this book is valuable if only for raising serious questions about the institution of work itself. The more that I read about history, the more I have come to see our modern ritual of work as strange and aberrant. The idea that we would all go to work five days a week, eight hours a day, year after year—regardless of whether we are making cars or filling out forms, and regardless of how much work there is on any given day—would have struck people in nearly any other place and time as bizarre.

To me, it just seems backwards to use a cookie-cutter schedule for every task (from lawyer to salesman), and then expect every member of society to adopt this basic template or risk abject poverty. Considering that the economy requires a certain level of employment to function, and that the current social safety net could not support a large number of unemployed people anyway, perhaps it should come as no surprise that we are plagued by dummy jobs. And if you think about it, it would be an amazing coincidence if the economy—through all the structural and technological changes of the previous century—always needed between 90 to 95 percent of the working population at any given time.

Graeber’s proposed solution to this problem is Universal Basic Income—providing every person with a regular paycheck, sufficient to cover the necessities of life. Personally I think that this is a wonderful idea, and one which could greatly alleviate many of our social ills. Unfortunately, in the United States, at least, UBI seems just as likely as paid maternity leave. But whatever the means, I think it is high time to change our attitude towards work. We spend enormous amounts of time doing things we do not want to do, and, what is worse, things which often do not need to be done. What fuels this is a kind of masochistic work ethic, defining our worth by our ability to do things that we do not want to do. This ethic has so pervaded our culture that, in America at least, we take it for granted that everything from health care to our self-respect should depend on our jobs.

One of Graeber’s most interesting points is that the phenomenon of useless jobs may reveal that we are using a flawed conception of human nature. One would think that being paid to do little or nothing would be the height of happiness. But most people in useless jobs report profound feelings of unease and distress. Again, my own experience testifies to this. Though I had little work, and was paid decently, I often found myself miserable, even beside myself with a strange mixture of boredom and anxiety. Graeber has a long section on this, but basically it comes down to the way that useless work undermines our sense of agency in the world. There is a reason the gods punished Sisyphus that way. As Dostoyevsky said, having humans perform an unpleasant, uninteresting, and totally worthless task might be the most profound form of torture. In my own case, it gave me a very unsettling feeling of dissociation, as if I really could not control my own actions.

So if we build our economy on the assumption that humans, left to themselves, will choose to get the maximum reward for the least benefit, we may be building on false premises. I think that Graeber is right, and that people generally prefer feeling like they are doing something useful. This is why I think we ought not to fear that Universal Basic Income, or a drastic reduction in working hours, would lead to a society of lazy idlers. In any case, people bored at home may do something more worthwhile than people bored at work, who mostly seem to go on social media. (Graeber notes that the rise in social media use coincides with the rise of useless employment. Certainly it was true in my case, that useless employment led naturally to spending huge amounts of time on Facebook.)

This summary does not do justice to the full contents of the book. Graeber is a sharp writer and an agile thinker. Not only is he the first to really hone in on this strange aspect of the modern world, but he does so within a wide perspective. To give just a few more examples, he connects the rise of bullshit jobs with the slowdown in scientific progress and the decline in quality of Hollywood movies. Perhaps Graeber’s political identity as an anarchist helps him to avoid the basic narratives of both the left and the right, and to develop strikingly original opinions about social problems. While I am not anarchist myself, I think the institution of work deserves far more questioning and criticism. We have accepted work as the bedrock of society and the foundations of our lives’ meanings, and yet most of us do not particularly like it. If I could wax utopian for a moment, I would imagine a movement devoted to the creation of a society of leisure. I would even work for it.



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Letters from Spain #6: Spanish Time and Spanish Space

Letters from Spain #6: Spanish Time and Spanish Space

Here is the sixth episode of my podcast about life in Spain:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-spain-6-spanish-time-and-spanish-space/id1469809686?i=1000457406871

For the transcript, see below:

Well, this past week has been fairly unremarkable. Really, the only podcast-worthy thing that happened was yet another bad experience with Spanish banks. Basically, I went to a bank during my lunch break to try to pay some government fees for my visa. But I was turned away by no fewer than three banks. You see, it is common, not only for banks to be open during quite restricted hours (which is why I had to go during my lunch break), but also to have even more ludicrously restricted hours when they allow you to actually do things, like pay a government fee. It all reminds me of a book I am reading about useless employment.

But I cannot let myself get sucked into another rant about Spanish banks, as gratifying as it would be. Today, I want to talk about something different: the Spanish sense of time and space.

The phrase “Spanish time” is familiar to every American who lives in Spain. The idea is basically that everything is always late: people arrive late, nothing starts on time, and so on. Now, I actually think that this is an unfair stereotype. The vast majority of the people I’ve worked with have been very punctual. In fact, I catch myself being late more often than my Spanish coworkers. Obviously these things vary a lot from person to person. But I’d be willing to bet that, if some kind of study were performed, it would be found that Spaniards are, on the whole, just as likely to show up on time for an engagement as an American.

But I am not suggesting that there is no such thing as “Spanish time.” Punctuality is only a tiny aspect of a culture’s sense of time. In some ways Spain is indeed extremely anomalous. This is most notable when it comes to meal times. Spaniards eat lunch and dinner quite late, even compared to their Mediterranean counterparts. Lunch at three is not unusual, and neither is dinner at ten. In fact, many tourists are annoyed to find that they cannot even keep to their American schedules, since it is common for the kitchens in Spanish restaurants not to open until around 1:00, and to close between, say, 4:30 and 8:00. So no lunches at noon or six-o’-clock dinners in Spain.

Spanish time is strange in another respect. Though Spain occupies around the same latitude as England, it is one hour later in Spain than in England. This means that the sun rises and sets quite late in Spain. Right now, for example, the sun rises at about 8 and sets at about six. (In the west of Spain it’s obviously a bit later.) Meanwhile, the sun rises at around 6:45 in New York, and sets at around 4:30. Now, the reason for this difference dates back to the Franco era, when he apparently switched his time zone to coincide with Germany’s, apparently in a gesture of goodwill towards Hitler. England, apparently, switched its timezone to central European time, too, right before the Second World War. But after the war, England switched back, but Spain stayed.

Maybe it’s partly as a consequence of this off-kilter time zone that things tend to happen a bit later in Spain. For example, even though Spaniards have a reputation for laziness, it is common for Spanish people to work until eight o’clock at night! Even workaholic Americans would not accept such hours as normal. Granted, Spaniards do often have a significant break in the middle of the day for lunch, at least an hour. This, of course, is the famous Spanish “siesta.” Now, there’s a lot to say about the siesta. For one, sleeping in the middle of the day makes a lot of sense if you live in the south of the country, where afternoon temperatures can make any activity impossible.

But the more important point is that, for the vast majority of Spaniards, the siesta does not exist. Honestly I wish it did. If I was given time to go home and nap for a bit every day, I am sure I would feel a lot better in general. But the midday break is simply not long enough for most Spanish people to leave the office, go home, eat lunch, sleep, and then make it back to the office. I salute the lucky few who can, since I think it is a healthier and saner way to live. But the siesta is an important cultural institution nonetheless, even if it doesn’t usually involve sleeping. This is because lots of things in Spain—shops, offices, and even churches—close around lunch time. It takes a lot of getting used to, really, since this is normally the perfect time to do things.

On the subject of Spanish time, we also must mention the schedule of Spanish partying. Just as Spaniards eat lunch and dinner late, they go out late. Just the other day, I happened to be chatting with a bunch of Spaniards are they prepared to hit the town for Halloween. The clock had struck midnight before they left the apartment. As you can imagine, if they only start at midnight, they don’t stop until the wee hours of the morning. Partying all night in Spain is not only common, but the norm. I really have no idea how they do it, or why they want to. But if you want to have a good time with a group of Spanish people, make sure you don’t have anything important to do the next morning.

As you can see, Spanish time is in some ways quite different from American time. But I think that the Spanish version of space is, if anything, even more different than how we Americans think of space.

The most obvious example of this is in the realm of personal space. Americans typically want a lot more of it than Spaniards do. It is a common experience for Americans to find themselves backing away while speaking to Spaniards, since for us Americans it can feel like Spanish people get way too close. I still have trouble with it, sometimes. I just can’t get used to talking with someone when their face is only a few centimeters from mine. But, you do slowly adapt. I remember one time, when I went back to America for the summer, I was told by the person in the post office than I should back away. When you’re talking to someone behind a desk in Spain, you typically lean in.

Related to personal space is the issue of touching. In Spain it is far more acceptable to casually touch somebody. This can take a thousand forms, but it can really make Americans uncomfortable. In America, if a stranger is touching you, you are either very happy or in immediate danger. In other words, touching between strangers in America is rarely casual. For whatever reason, people in Spain have much less fear of sexual harassment—either being the victim of it, or being accused of it—which is such a huge cloud hanging over American interpersonal relations. When I first came to Spain, I thought that every man was dating every woman, since they all touched each other in ways that struck me as extremely flirtatious. But I was wrong. To pick another example, primary school teachers in Spain have no issues hugging, kissing, or pinching the cheeks of their students, while in America this is a fearful taboo. 

So personal space can be very different in Spain. But there is another difference, which I think is quite a bit more interesting. This has to do with the difference between public and private space. In Spain, I think this contrast is far more sharp than in America, and I say this for a few reasons. For one, it is very common—even the norm—in the United States to invite friends over or to be invited over. In my case, I spend the vast majority of my time with American friends in someone’s house. We go to a bar or a restaurant maybe a few times a month.

But in Spain this is a totally different story. Most friends, even good friends, meet outside the home, in a neutral space. Whenever I ask my high school kids what they did over the weekend, they always say they “went to the street,” meaning they walked around or hung out in a park, doing God knows what. Likewise, adult friends are more likely to meet in a bar or a restaurant than in someone’s living room.

Part of this is a simple preference. Compared to Americans—who are lovers of their own property—Spanish people love to be in public, surrounded by people. Again, while an American might feel overwhelmed by an intensely crowded bar, many Spaniards seem to think this is a good thing. The street, the bar, the café, the square—this is where life happens in Spain. And for this reason Spain can be such a vibrant, energetic place to be. The people aren’t in their homes, but outside, socializing in large numbers. You can even see this preference reflected if you see portions of the Spanish countryside from the air. Rather than a bunch of isolated farms scattered about, the people live all bunched together, with miles and miles of uninhabited land all around them. 

I also think, as I said, that Spanish people also have a stronger sense of the divide between public and private than Americans do. For Spanish people, the home is just not a place to have a party. That’s for a public space. To illustrate this point, I think it is enlightening to think about Spanish and American homes. My home back in NY, for example, has a front lawn entirely open to the street. Most of the front windows can be easily seen from the outside. By contrast, most of the houses I see in Spain have a wall entirely encircling the property, making it difficult to see anything going on within. To me, this has much more to do with the Spanish idea of a home as an isolated space, than any functional purpose associated with the wall. 

To sum up, for a European country, Spain presents some striking contrasts to the United States. Why these differences arose is an interesting question, but one which would take serious historical research to answer. For now, I am content with just pointing out the differences.

Thank you.

Letters from Spain #5: Elections and Opera

Letters from Spain #5: Elections and Opera

Here is episode five of my podcast about life in Spain:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-spain-5-elections-and-opera/id1469809686?i=1000456741892

For the full transcript, see below:

Winter is in the air here in Madrid. It’s not just the cold that lets you know, but the smell. The churro trucks have now taken their positions in the city, selling that most wonderful of Spanish junk foods. I was surprised, when I first came to Spain, to learn that churros, by themselves, are not particularly sweet. In fact, if anything they’re a little salty. The secret is chocolate. Spaniards dip their churros in a thick liquid chocolate. And when they’re done with the churro, they drink the chocolate. At first I could not understand how old women managed to chug down such a viscous, heavy drink. The first time I tried it, I thought I would choke—the chocolate is nothing like our American hot chocolate, which is so milky. But, now I can happily have two or three of those chocolates.

The other staple of Spanish streets in wintertime are the chestnuts. Vendors roast chestnuts on charcoal grills, creating a wonderful aroma that spreads everywhere. It’s fantastic.

Well, another week has rolled around. And it has been an eventful one. Most notably, this last Sunday, the tenth of November, Spain has had its elections. Now, there is nothing that makes me feel quite so much like a foreigner as when there are elections. Of course, not being a Spanish citizen, I cannot vote. And even though I live in Spain, I don’t have very much to gain or to lose by the results of the elections. So I feel very left out. Besides all that, like many Americans I have had trouble understanding how a foreign country’s government—Spain’s government—works.

I will try not to bore you with the details—which I don’t even know anyways—but here’s what I have learned so far. Spain’s democracy is quite young, since it only began in 1978 with the death of Franco. The country has had literally dozens of constitutions throughout its history, beginning with the Napoleonic invasions, but the current constitution is only the second fully democratic one. (The first one, of 1931, lasted only five years until the Spanish Civil War and ended when Franco took power.) Before his death, Franco groomed the prince of Spain, Juan Carlos, to be his dictatorial heir. But the young monarch surprised everyone after Franco died by moving resolutely in the direction of democracy. And so, to make a long story short, the current government was born.

Like many countries around the world, Spain has a parliamentary system. This is confusing for Americans. In America we vote separately for the legislature—our representatives and senators—and for the president. In Spain, on the other hand, the president is not directly chosen by the people (or even the electoral college), but instead by the legislature. So basically, if one party achieves a majority in the parliament, the leader of that party will become the president. This means that you can’t have the president be of one party and then the congress controlled by the opposing party, which so often happens in America. For this reason, parliamentary systems are often more decisive than the American model, since there aren’t so many checks and balances between the legislature and executive, and the two are much more closely involved.

Now, the situation is more complicated if no single party achieves a majority. This is what happened in the recent elections. Then, the government must be run by a coalition, which usually means that the party with the most votes needs to cut a deal with a smaller party (or two…) in order to achieve the necessary majority. To be specific, the country’s socialist party, PSOE, won the most votes this last election, but not enough to have an absolute majority. To achieve a majority, they teamed up with a party called Podemos, a left-wing populist party. Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the socialists, is therefore now the president, and the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesías, is the vice president. So Spain, unlike many European countries nowadays, has a leftist government. But to maintain power these two parties not only need to work with each other—which has been difficult for them recently—but to work with several smaller, regional parties, most notably those Catalonian parties that favor independence. We’ll see if they can work it out.

I should mention another curious aspect of parliamentary systems, at least from the perspective of an American. In Spain, there is no fixed timing for elections. The Spanish don’t, like us, automatically vote every four years, even though politicians do have term limits. Rather, elections happen when there are special circumstances. For example, a government may call a snap election in the hopes of bolstering its majority—this is what happened this past April, which was the last election. (So the last election was just a few months ago.) Or elections may be held if the current parliament fails to form a working majority or coalition, maybe because one party is holding out in the hopes of better election results. This is what recently happened. (It didn’t pan out for the socialists.)

Oh, and I should mention that Spain is still technically a monarchy, even though the king does not have any real power. King Felipe VI is the head of state in Spain. From what I can tell, though lots of Spaniards don’t like having a monarchy, and though some Spaniards are die-hard monarchists, most people don’t seem to pay the monarchy much mind. It’s not like England, where the royal family are tabloid celebrities.

Anyways, anyways, I don’t want to bore you with a treatise on Spanish government. Even Spanish people don’t talk that much about Spanish politics, at least compared to how much we Americans talk about American politics. Ironically, however, the voter turnout in Spain is higher than it is in America! This can be hard for us Americans to believe, since we like to think we invented democracy, and in any case we spend so much energy on politics. But most of Europe has us beat in that regard. Maybe it helps that elections in Spain are on Sundays, and not Tuesdays.

The funny thing about the recent elections is that, from what I can tell, most Spaniards aren’t talking about who won, but rather but who lost. During the rise of Trump and the whole Brexit fiasco—not to mention similar right-wing populist movements in Europe—many commentators noted Spain’s seeming immunity from this phenomenon. Commentators said, “Oh, they remember Franco.” But that is no longer the case. A new, far-right party, Vox, surprised everyone by winning more seats in congress than either Podemos or Ciudadanos (a centrist party that used to be a major player), making it the third-largest party in the country, after the socialists and the old conservative party. Vox conforms to many of the far-right stereotypes: anti-European Union, anti-Islam, anti-femminist, anti-LGBT, and so on. One would have hoped that this strain of Spanish politics had died with Franco. But history is never so tidy.

Well, I’ve given you this whole spiel about the Spanish government, and yet this was not the most interesting part of my weekend. Not by a long-shot. I recently discovered that Madrid’s opera house, the royal theater—a massive building right next to the royal palace—offers discount tickets for people under thirty. This, for the moment, includes me! So this last Sunday I went to the box office two hours before the show, and got myself a good seat for only nineteen euros. Keep in mind that this could have cost me five times as much if I were older. The opera was L’elisir d’Amore, by Donizetti—a kind of farcical Romantic comedy. Let me tell you, I have seldom felt both so fancy and so shabby as when I went to see an opera in a red t-shirt.

Opera is only the tip of the performance iceberg in Madrid. Largely thanks to my girlfriend—who is a theater maniac—I have discovered that Madrid is extremely rich in theater of every kind. To name just a few of the city’s excellent theaters, there is the Teatro Lara, the Teatro del Canal, the Teatro de la Comedia, the Teatro Español, and so on. Dozens and dozens of theaters, some of them small holes in the wall, and some of them elaborately decorated spaces. I have seen Shakespeare’s Othello performed as a sado-masochistic dystopian work, and I have seen classic plays from the Spanish Golden Age performed with perfect correctness. Besides being simply fun, visiting the theater is a wonderful way to practice my Spanish and to immerse myself in Spanish culture.

Like the Opera, many theaters—particularly the fancier ones—offer generous discounts to young people. This is common all over Europe. If you are 26 or under (unfortunately not me, at the moment), you can visit many of Europe’s famous monuments for cheap or even for free. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is free if you are under 27. You can even get discounts on public transportation. Up until the age of 26, you can get a transit pass that includes all of the trains, metros, and buses in the entire Madrid metropolitan area—going all the way to Toledo—for only twenty euros a month. Although I am obviously biased, I think this is a wonderful idea. It certainly helps to encourage young people to take advantage of all of the available cultural experiences they can. My girlfriend, for example, could never have developed such a terrible addiction to the theater if it weren’t so cheap for her. 

The idea of a “youth discount” is one of the many small ways that life in Europe can seem so much more accessible and accommodating than life in the United States. It is certainly difficult to imagine the New York Subway letting you ride the entire network for only 20 bucks a month. And imagine if the Metropolitan Opera offered 19 dollar tickets to anyone under thirty! Now that I’ve discovered these youth tickets, maybe I’ll take the opportunity to become an opera addict. It’s certainly better than being addicted to politics.

Letters from Spain #4: Spanish Banks

Letters from Spain #4: Spanish Banks

Here is episode four of my podcast on life in Spain:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-spain-4-spanish-banks/id1469809686?i=1000456144590

For the transcript, see below:

This week I wanted to concentrate on what I have discovered to be one of the greatest differences between Spain and the United States: Banks. It is a telling contrast, as I hope to show. Most Americans, after opening bank accounts here, are astounded to learn how limited are the hours in which the banks remain open. My local bank back in NY, for example, is open until six o’clock Monday through Friday, and until two in the afternoon on Saturdays. A typical Spanish bank schedule is to be open until two in the afternoon Monday through Friday, and possibly later on Thursdays. Nothing on weekends.

You realize, of course, that this means there is no time that a person with a normal working schedule can visit the bank. Consequently, half the time I visit a bank, most of the clients inside are retired. This is certainly an odd situation. Normally, the limited hours of banks are not really a problem, I admit, since I just need an ATM. But there are times when it is desperately necessary. All government fees, for example, cannot be paid in the government office itself, but must be paid in a bank—don’t ask me why. So if, like me, you need to visit government offices to do the paperwork for your visa, or even if you want to sign up for language classes at the government schools, then you need to figure out when you can visit an open bank.

But the differences between Spanish and American banking cultures goes far deeper. To illustrate this difference, here are two anecdotes.

The first anecdote is about my brother. Upon arriving to Spain and opening a bank account—I won’t say the bank’s name—he transferred money from his American to his Spanish account, in order to withdraw it without fees. Something went wrong with this transfer, though, and he received three times the amount of money he had sent. You can imagine he was very happy. That is, until the bank automatically froze his account.

Now here’s another curious thing about the way banks are set up here. If you have any serious administrative issue to resolve, you can’t just go to any office of your bank. You need to go to the office where you opened your account. So my brother couldn’t go to the bank around the corner. He had to travel half an hour in the metro.

When he arrived, the interaction went something like this.

“There’s a problem with my account,” he said. “Let me see…, no, it’s fine,” the clerk said. “But it’s not working at all.” “There’s no problem with your account.” “My ATM card doesn’t work and there’s too much money in my account.” “Let me see…” At this point the bank clerk got up from his desk and accompanied my brother to the ATM outside, to see for himself that the card didn’t work. Then, after witnessing it, he went back to his chair. “Ah, I see now,” the clerk said. “Your account is frozen.” “Yes,” my brother said. “How do I fix it?” “We’ll take care of it,” the clerk said. “It will be fine in a couple of days.”

This sounds reassuring. But this exact conversation replayed itself four times before the problem could be properly addressed. My brother arrived for several weeks in a row, and each time the clerks would insist that nothing was wrong with his account. Then, they would insist that the problem would be taken care of. The solution, it turned out, was rather complicated. Somehow my brother ended up with money from a Lithuanian bank, and he had to send it back.

What was striking for us Americans was the behavior of the bank staff. How could it be that their computer system did not clearly indicate that there was a problem? Why was it so difficult to figure out how to fix it? And why were the clerks so keen on insisting that there was no problem, or that it would be taken care of very soon? 

As you contemplate these questions, let me tell you an anecdote of my own.

I know that I’ve been in Spain for quite a while, since my debit card, the one that I had gotten during my first weeks in the country, was about to expire. Foreseeing an issue, I went to my local bank a month before its expiration. Trying to avoid any delay, I requested that the card be sent to this office, which is around the corner from my house. That way it would be easy to pick up. The clerk assured me that he had put a notice into the system and it would be there before my old card stopped working. All well and good.

The month rolled around, and I got a text message saying that my new card had been sent. But there was a problem: it had been sent, not to the office near my apartment, but to the original bank where I opened my account. To add to the annoyance, the message sent to me told me the street where the bank was located (I hadn’t been there in years) but not the number. As I learned from Google, there are two of my banks on the same street.

I proceeded to call both banks. After I figured out which was the right one, I asked if they had my card. Two people looked, and told me no. So now I was lost. Was the card sent to my local office after all? The next chance I could, I went to my local office, and I asked the same man if they had my card. “No, it’ll be at the office where you opened your account,” he said. “I called,” I replied, “and it’s not there. Can they send it here?” “It’s better to just go there and get it,” he said. “Well, the problem is that I have a job,” I said, “and I don’t work anywhere near this bank.” “What do you want us to do?” the clerk said, adopting the typical Spanish strategy of throwing the guilt back on you. “You should’ve had the card sent to your apartment.” “Ok,” I said, becoming impatient. “But what should I do now?” “Find a way to go to that bank,” he said.

To emphasize, this bank office closes most days at 2 p.m., and I work until 4:30 p.m. over an horu away. The only chance I had was to go on a Thursday, when the bank closes at 6. If I went straight there from work, I could just barely make it in time. I should also mention that, despite my calling twice and having two separate people check for my card, the office really did have it. The problem was that they filed the card under A, for my middle name Andrew. In Spain people have two last names, you see (one from their father and one from their mother), and no middle names, so the bank staff confused my middle name for one of my last names.

Ok, so my card was going to expire soon. Thursday came around. I had to rush from my job to the office. I left work and walked to the train station. A train was waiting. Perfect. I got on board and began to read. But there was a problem: the train sat for a long time without moving. When it finally did begin to move, it went slowly, and spent a long time parked at each stop. What was going on? It took us fifteen minutes to go three stations, which normally takes less than five minutes. At the next stop the train stopped completely. It was packed with people desperate, like me, to get into Madrid. Nobody knew why the train was stopped, or when the next train would be. Even the security guards in the station had no idea.

Another train pulled up across from us, and then, obeying a herd mentality, everyone switched to the new train. Then the original train began to move. We switched back—hundreds of people rushing across the platform. By this point I gave up and sat down on a bench. The train was too packed to get on, anyway. As I contemplated my next move, the other train, the one without anyone on it, closed its doors and left the station. The crowd erupted in anger. A man began to shriek in a falsetto at the security guards, blaming them for telling everyone to switch trains.

Eventually the security guard began to shout back, and a hilarious screeching contest ensued. I was too amused to feel very worried. Then, without any warning, the doors of the original train—the one with people one it—closed, and the train left the station. Now, this has nothing to do with banks, but I was dumbstruck that the people driving the trains did not simply announce over their PA systems which train was going to leave. Such an absurd situation would never have occurred on the Metro North, where I live in New York. Then again, I later learned that the delay was caused by a strike, which is another thing that seldom happens in my country.

Anyways, I wait for the next train, which slowly makes its way to Madrid. By the time it arrived in Atocha, I only had about twenty minutes. I ran into a cab and told the driver to take me to the bank on X street. In the few minutes of the ride, I asked the driver about her job. She works over twelve hours a day, with hardly a break for meals. And they say Spanish people are lazy! Undoubtedly this gruelling schedule is partly a result of the new competition from other services like Uber. But that’s another story.

The cab pulled up to the bank, I paid and got out. Here at last! I marched into the bank and asked for my card. The man searched for my name in the computer. “Hmmm,” he says. “Your card isn’t here. It’s at the other bank on X street, about eight minutes away.” Of course! I had forgotten that there are two of these banks on the same street! I rushed out of the office, running like mad to the other bank. I got there about seven minutes before they close.

The only clerk at the desk was occupied with somebody. It looked like a rather complicated issue they were resolving. I began to panic. All this for nothing! Yet just when I was on the point of giving in to self-pity, a woman came walking in, talking on her phone. “Ah, sorry,” she said, seeing me. “Ok dad, I’ll call you back.” This, by the way, was another perfect little moment of Spanish culture: a bank clerk happily strolling in after going outside to chat with her dad. To add to this absurd impression, the clerk actually took a call from a friend in the middle of giving me my card. They are a social people, the Spanish.

Well, after going on for such a long, long time about the inconvenience of Spanish banking, I ought to add that I managed to lose this debit card within two weeks of this ordeal. Thus the circle of incompetence is completed. This time, I asked for my replacement card to be sent to me in the mail. It arrived in three days. The banks, as usual, have the last laugh.

Review: The Red and the Black

Review: The Red and the Black
The Red and the Black

The Red and the Black by Stendhal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Good heavens! Is being happy, is being loved no more than that?

Few books have so totally engrossed me as this French novel written nearly two hundred years ago. Stendhal has aged very well. The novel is just fun to read: with short chapters, simple prose, and a plot that keeps the reader constantly wondering. That the novel was not widely appreciated during Stendhal’s own lifetime shows how much literary taste has changed. Whether this change has been for the better is difficult to say. But at least we can now appreciate Stendhal’s masterpiece.

For me, Stendhal’s signature effect is the interplay of Romantic idealism and deflating realism. Like his contemporary Balzac, Stendhal catches the world in his net. Every character, scene, and situation is carefully realistic. Though hardly a political novel, Stendhal succeeds in painting a subtle and compelling portrait of his age—the dynamic between the provinces and Paris, the political clashes between liberals and royalists, the relationship between the peasants, the clergy, and the old aristocracy. His characters, while individual, are also recognizable types, which he uses to dissect and analyze the social realities of his age.

Yet acting as a great counterweight to the ballast of detail is Stendhal’s famous psychological acuteness. This turns what would potentially be a dated social study into a gripping story of universal import. For his protagonist, Stendhal creates Julien Sorel—passionate, brilliant, stubborn, naïve, calculating, ambitious, and manifestly unfit for his social station.

Stendhal, a liberal himself, could easily have written a kind of morality tale about what happens when a man of great gifts is born in the lower ranks of society, with hardly any legitimate way of advancing. This is indeed Julien Sorel’s position. This morality tale would show us a good-hearted man, doing his best to be recognized for his genius, but overcome by circumstances. Yet Julien is infinitely more interesting for being both flawed and devious. Stendhal does not only show us how society makes his lot difficult, but, far more subtly, shows us how society deforms his psyche.

Deprived of any external encouragement, Julien’s motivation must come from worldly ambition and an egoistic pride. Since his only path to advancement is through people he despises—the clergy and the aristocracy—Julien must be dishonest, hypocritical, and ever-cautious. Forced to suppress his own emotions so constantly, and forced so frequently to act against his inclinations, whenever Julien is given a taste of kindness, love, or happiness, he loses control and threatens to undo all that his calculating subtlety had accomplished.

This psychological portrait is so perfectly realized that we both sympathize with, root for, and yet see through Julien Sorel. He is extraordinary, and yet painfully limited by his surroundings. His tragedy is that circumstances deprived the world of what he could have been had he been born in a different time and place. That Stendhal could create, at the same time, a universal morality tale, a realistic sketch of society, a vivid psychological study, and a thrilling novel—complete with a burning love story—all in the simplest prose, is a testament to the author’s high art.



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Review: The Myth of Sisyphus

Review: The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I still vividly remember my writing class in my first semester of college. Our professor was a lover of paradoxes. She had us read Kafka and Borges, whom none of us could understand. And she had a habit of asking impossible questions—such as “What does it mean to be infinitely finite?”—and savoring the uncomfortable silences that followed. Once, she even scared us half to death by asking one of these questions, and than yelping like a banshee half a minute later. Quite a good professor.

The final section of this iconic essay was among the readings she had us read. Of course I did not understand a word of it. I was no where near mature enough to wrap my mind around the idea of absurdism. The “meaning of life” was not a problem for me at that time. Surrounded as I was by thousands of potential friends and girlfriends—free for the first time in my life to do as I pleased—such a confrontation with nihilism was beyond the horizons of my mental life.

This was not the case four years later, when I graduated college with thousands of dollars in debt, confronted with the possibility of deciding “Who I Wanted to Be.” Probably I should have read this book at that time, when I could so keenly feel the weight of life’s pointlessness. Or maybe I should have read it a year later, when I was working in an office job. Humankind has seldom plunged deeper into the void than in entry-level positions.

I mention this biographical background because I think this book should likely not be read during a time of relative stability and contentedness, such as I am in now. We seldom pause to ponder the “meaning of life” when we are enjoying ourselves. The problem of “philosophical suicide” is not a problem at all on beautiful summer days. It is only a problem on cold, rainy Tuesday nights, in the few minutes of mental calm between work, chores, sleep, and work the next day. Unfortunately, such Tuesdays come all too often in this world of ours.

My point is simply that I would have enjoyed this essay far more under more propitious circumstances. Albert Camus’s style is well-calculated to please: a winsome mixture of anecdote, philosophy, literary criticism, and poetry. Certainly it is a relief after dragging my way through Sartre’s tortured syntax and cumbersome verbiage. Camus, by contrast, is concise and stylish. My only reservation is that, for all his accessibility, Camus is not perfectly clear. I say this from the perspective of somebody trying to read his essay as a philosophical work. All philosophy consists in argument; and in order to accept or reject an argument, one must use clearly defined terms. With Camus, however, I was never quite sure what his criteria were for considering something absurd or meaningful—his two central categories.

This is perhaps the wrong way to read Camus. What he was trying to create was arguably more in the tradition of wisdom literature than formal philosophy. From this perspective, the essay is somewhat more satisfying. However, here too I found Camus somewhat lacking. One extracts more piquant lessons in the art of life from Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld than from Camus. Where Camus excels these authors is not in wisdom per se, but in capturing a certain mood, a mood peculiar to modern times: being intellectually and spiritually adrift. After all of the traditional systems belief which underpinned life have crumbled, it is the crushing realization that one is unable to justify anything, even life itself. In this peculiar vein, Camus is difficult to beat.

Even so, I wonder if this iconic essay adds anything essential to that famous remark of Pascal: “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” Camus’s Sisyphus is the twin brother of Pascal’s thinking reed—the plaything of an indifferent universe, and yet dignified by his consciousness. In his more despairing moments, Pascal may have been quite as horrified by the vast spectacle of an indifferent cosmos as Camus: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” The essential difference between these two men is not their realization of humanity’s insignificance, but their reactions. Pascal seeks to escape this conclusion any way he can, bolstering his faith with every fallacious argument under the sun. Camus was innovative in his insistence that we must calmly accept this situation, taking it as a starting point and not as a depressing conclusion.

My main criticism with this essay is that, if life has no inherent meaning, and the universe is nothing but a cold expanse, this throws the question of the “meaning of life” back upon each individual. Answering that question definitively, for every person, becomes de facto impossible. But, again, perhaps Camus is not trying to prove anything universal. Rather, his essay is a sort of invitation to abandon the traditional justifications of life, and to focus, as Camus himself did, on the smaller joys—sunlight, the sea, travel. The rest of the essays in this collection may be seen in that light, as enlarging upon Camus’s omnivorous curiosity for his surroundings.

What bothers me is that I do not agree with Camus’s opening assertion: I do not think the most pressing question is whether we should all just commit suicide. To the contrary, once this question is decided in the negative, it opens up a world of far more interesting issues.



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Letters from Spain #3: Halloween and History

Letters from Spain #3: Halloween and History

Here is episode three of my podcast on life in Spain:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-spain-3-halloween-and-history/id1469809686?i=1000455436075

For the transcript, see below:

It has been quite an eventful past week.

Most obviously, and least importantly, Halloween is coming up. Though the origins of Halloween are properly European—hailing from the Celtic ‘Samhain,’ or summer’s end, and related to the Catholic All Saints’ Day—the holiday nowadays is quite justly considered to be an American invention. Geniuses of marketing that we Americans are, we have turned Halloween into a commercial extravaganza. And when money is to be made, people quickly follow suit.

Thus the so-called “Chinese” shops fill up with Halloween paraphernalia: costumes, masks, plastic weapons, and grisly makeup. (These shops, by the way, are somewhat similar to American dollar stores, and are often owned by Chinese immigrants—thus the name.) Pumpkins and witches can be spotted in the windows of bakeries and cafés, and the supermarket is selling giant tubs of gummies in the shapes of spiders and skeletons.

In a way, Halloween is a more sensible holiday in Spain than in the United States, since the following day, November 1st or All Saints’ Day, is always a holiday. (Most of the holidays in Spain are still Catholic.) But for most Spaniards, Halloween is totally unremarkable. College students don’t go to costume parties, adults don’t watch scary movies, and few people buy candy for trick or treaters. Indeed, Halloween’s main importance is in primary schools, where the holiday is embraced as a way of teaching American culture, not to mention giving teachers and students a fun event. 

I dutifully went myself to the shop this past weekend and bought a costume for school, as I prepared myself for the rush of Halloween activities that this week will bring.

But, to repeat, Halloween is probably the least important event in Spain during these past weeks. In fact, I was amused the other day to see a sign in my local supermarket saying that “Christmas is finally here.” In America, we have Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday to slow down the approach of Christmas season; but in Spain, Christmas is already in the air in late October. Much to my delight, they are already selling the typical Spanish Christmas sweets. I love turrón with chocolate. 

The most important event from this last week has to do with Spain’s past. The government made history this last Thursday by exhuming the remains of dictator Francisco Franco from his burial place in the Valley of the Fallen. As you may recall, after winning the Spanich Civil War in 1939, Francisco Franco ruled Spain for 36 years until his death in 1975—a dictator of a repressive, reactionary regime. The Valley of the Fallen is a tourist destination for many foreigners, but for Spaniards it remains deeply controversial. The place is undeniably impressive. Situated in the pine-covered mountains north of Madrid, it is a basilica built into the base of a granite outcropping, topped with a 150 m (or nearly 500 ft) tall cross. 

The Valley of the Fallen was ostensibly built as a place of reconciliation after the Civil War. But it is difficult to accept it as a truly neutral monument. For one, part of the labor that went into building it was performed by prisoners of war. Moreover, a great many of the over 33,000 fallen soldiers buried in the crypt of the basilica were moved there without the families’ permission. They lie entombed in an enormous vault, unmarked and inaccessible to visitors. The only two marked graves in the Valley belong to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a leader of the proto-fascist Falangist party whose murder helped to trigger the Civil War, and Francisco Franco himself.

The exhumation was the fruit of a long and bitter legal struggle between the socialist government and Franco’s family. When the courts finally decided in the government’s favor, the exhumation was quickly scheduled to proceed. The authorities were wisely afraid of sparking a violent protest—Spain has had enough of that in recent weeks, with the riots in Barcelona—and so took pains to make the event as quiet as possible. The body, housed in a coffin draped with a cloth and crowned with a wreath, was born by his relatives to a hearse waiting at the foot of the stairs. A priest sprinkled holy water on the remains, before the car drove a short distance to a helicopter waiting nearby. This mode of transport was thought convenient, so as to avoid and disturbances along the way. It flew the dictator’s bones to a cemetery north of Madrid, where Franco was re-interred next to his wife in a private ceremony. 

All things considered, the event was surprisingly calm. About 500 Franco supporters appeared outside of the gates of the basilica, but there was no violence. The Civil War is still quite a touchy subject in Spain. It is very much an open wound in the country’s psyche, since naturally people are divided on the topic. Virtually every Spaniard alive has relatives who fought and died on one side or another, and the conclusion that Franco was an evil man is far from universally accepted. 

As an American, I can sympathize with this situation. Our own Civil War, almost one hundred years older than Spain’s, is still the cause of political tension in our country. And the removal of Franco’s body from the basilica is very much akin to our own removal of Confederate flags and statues of Southern generals from our public spaces. Now, it is easy to be jaded about this. After all, such symbolic victories are good publicity for politicians—cheap, easy, and ultimately involving no real change for living people. Franco’s bones were not hurting anyone. That being said, I do think that the heroes a country chooses to honor constitute a tacit statement of values. If we publically honor men who fought for slavery, or men who trampled democracy underfoot, we condone these actions.

A sophist might respond that Jefferson owned slaves, and that king Philip II of Spain was also against democracy. So where do we draw the line? First, it is worth noting that the answer to that question is always: somewhere. The necessity of making a decision is not an argument against decisions. Where we collectively choose to draw this line will inevitably be a matter of debate for every generation to come. But I hope that we can agree not to publicly honor men who deliberately fought against their own country with the aim of limiting human freedom. That statement applies just as readily to General Custer as it does to the Generalisimo Franco.

Thanks to its Civil War, and the deep code of silence which followed, Spain remains (after Cambodia) the country with the most mass graves in the world. The Valley of the Fallen is the largest mass grave of them all. The country has a long way to go in dealing with this legacy, and this basilica is at the epicenter of this question. My own vote is to deconsecrate the place and to preserve it as a museum. But if that ever happens, it is many years off. For now, the exhumation is a historical step in the right direction, painful as it may have been.

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Review: Coriolanus

Review: Coriolanus

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In my review of Plutarch’s Lives, I noted the stark difference between that ancient author’s conception of personality, and our own. For Plutarch, character was static and definable—an essence that is manifested in every decision and remark of a given person. Compare this with Montaigne’s or Shakespeare’s portrayal of personality: fluctuating, contradictory, infinitely deep, and ever fugitive. To borrow a metaphor from Oswald Spengler, the Plutarchian self is statuesque, while the Shakespearian self is more like a work of music. The first is a self-contained whole, while the second is abstract, fleeting, and morphs through time.

It is fascinating, therefore, to see Shakespeare handle a story right out of Plutarch. Shakespeare adapts his art to the subject-matter, and creates a character in Caius Marcius Coriolanus that is remarkably opaque. I say “remarkably” because Shakespeare had just finished with his five greatest tragedies, each of which has a character notable for its depth. Caius Marcius, by contrast, is a man almost in the Plutarchian mode: with a enumerable list of vices and virtues, who acts and speaks predictably, with little self-reflection. Next to Hamlet, Iago, or Macbeth, the Roman general seems almost childlike in his restriction.

Like Julius Caesar, this play is interesting for a certain amount of moral ambiguity. It is difficult to side with any of the major players. The plebeians of Rome are certainly not a mindless rabble, but they are somewhat vain and narrow-minded, not to mention easily influenced by empty words. Coriolanus himself is a superb soldier but ill-suited to anything else, whose capital vice is not exactly pride, but a certain smallness of mind. His mother, Volumnia, is scarcely less warlike than her son. Even if her counsels are good, it is difficult to see the mother-son relationship as perfectly healthy. She comes across, rather, as a kind of Roman helicopter mom, bringing up her son to be a killing machine for the glory of the state.

For me, the tragedy was not quite successful, simply because Coriolanus was such an unsympathetic protagonist—belligerent, scornful, reactionary, and often a great fool. It is a testament to Shakespeare’s art that he is not altogether hateful. As Harold Bloom says, this play is technically brilliant: in its pacing, language, and plotting. Shakespeare was certainly a professional. But if you come to Shakespeare seeking grand personalities, the work is a barren field.



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