Indian Wells 2014

South Entrance

The Masters 1000 tennis tournament at Indian Wells this year was all about Stadium 2, the new 8,000 seat concrete stadium built since the tournament was played last year and, although I was a skeptic about the project, I have to admit they did a fabulous job with it. The General Admission seats in the 2^nd tier provide an excellent view of the action, and they are real seats, with armrests and, most importantly, backs, a vast improvement over the bleacher planks of the previous Stadium 2 and the lesser courts. Not only that, but due to the cantilever construction of the upper tier, half of them are shaded during at least part of the day and, given the power of the sun in that desert environment, shade is a big plus and something none of the other stadiums offer. On top of all this, concessions and plenty of restrooms are right in the building, so everything you need is close to hand. Even when the stadium was packed it was rare to encounter the restroom lines that were once common.

Stadium 2

The downside of all this is that once you have established yourself in some excellent shady seats you are extremely hesitant to give them up.  All the incentives are to stay put, because you know there is no chance you will be as comfortable anywhere else.  Hence, you miss out on the fun of wandering the grounds and taking in the beautiful landscaping, the rugged mountain vistas, and scrambling for seats in different stadiums to see the precise matches you want to see.  This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that we came into the tournament later than usual this year.  We have been attending this 2-week tournament annually for over a decade and usually we arrive on Wednesday or Thursday of the 1^st week and fly home on Monday of the 2^nd.  (We really can’t take more than 3-4 days of this madness.)  But this year, because we made our reservations late, we were unable to get a room for Friday night, so we flew down on Saturday and started the tournament on Sunday.  Because we were deeper into the tournament at this point, there were fewer matches going on.  Out of 9 match courts, only 4 were being used on Monday and Tuesday, and the best matches, for the most part, were being played on Stadium 1 or 2, and our tickets were only good for nosebleed seats in Stadium 1.

Isner/Querrey inside Stadium 2

We were, of course, quite curious about the new stadium and so when we arrived on Sunday morning we headed directly over there to check it out.  We found wonderfully shady seats on the east side that made a dull opening match tolerable, but after a couple hours the sun found us, and the longer we sat there the hotter it got.  The night before at Ralph’s in Palm Desert I’d spotted Nikolay Davydenko in the produce section with his wife and child.  He reached #3 in the world back in 2006 but is on the downside of his career now.  He played John Isner in the 2^nd match and by the time Isner had beaten him in straight sets, we felt like we were being barbecued.  The temp was pushing 90 and the sun felt like it was going to set our clothes on fire.  We had to abandon our seats, we simply couldn’t endure it any more, and Frieda, who is an accomplished seat spotter, uncovered 2 excellent ones on the shady west side.  From there we watched 4 more matches that gradually got better as the afternoon wore into evening, leading to Grigor Dimitrov, and then, under the lights, the best match of the day, Isner/Querrey playing doubles against the French team of Chardy/Simon.  

The Concourse

We had noticed that the seats on the south side of the stadium were shady all day, so on Monday we arrived a little earlier and headed directly over there, but other folk had obviously figured this out as well and occupied them, so we returned to where we’d sat the day before and suffered through the sun for a couple of hours until the shade crept slowly over us.  1^st we saw Andy Murray; then one of Frieda’s favorites, Gael Monfils from France; then Stanislaus Wawrinka from Switzerland, who has come into his own in the past year or so, displacing Federer as the #1 Swiss player and reaching #3 in the world.  But after that we hit some dull matches and Frieda got antsy, because her favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov from Ukraine, was vying with Nadal in Stadium 1.  She very much wanted to see it but our tickets were only good for 1 section of the nosebleed seats, so far away that you could barely see the ball or recognize who was playing, and even those were probably full.  So she disappeared for awhile as I watched the birds flying around the stadium and then tried unsuccessfully to take a nap sitting up.  She returned all excited because she had been watching the match on a TV out in the hall and Dolgopolov had taken the 2^nd set and was up a break in the 3^rd.  She insisted I should go watch some of it, so I went out to the hallway to have a look.  At first I was disappointed because Nadal got the break back and it looked like he was going to turn it around, so I wandered out of the stadium into the concourse where all the walkways converge and soaked in the nighttime atmosphere, the people milling around, the accent lighted palm trees with their fronds standing up like punk hairdos, and then strolled over to the Tommy Bahama bar under a soaring white canopy underlit with lavender lights where the match was being shown on a jumbotron.  By the time I got there Dolgopolov had broken Nadal again and was serving for the match at 5-3.  If Dolgopolov was actually going to pull off the upset, I knew Frieda would want to see it, but I couldn’t believe he would.  Surely he would choke and Nadal would do what he always does: win.  I sat down in an aluminum chair to watch and sure enough, Nadal proceeded to win 8 straight points, breaking Dolgololov at love and then holding serve to level the set at 5 all.  Dolgopolov was choking so badly that I felt embarrassed for him and I didn’t think Frieda would want to see it.  I thought he must feel utterly humiliated in front of all those people.  Nevertheless he managed to hold it together enough to get into a tiebreak and kept it close until he got a match point, whereupon he hit an unbelievable blistering backhand down the line.  The place went crazy, everyone jumping up and down and clapping and screaming.  But then Nadal challenged the call and on the replay it was clear that the shot had gone out.  Dolgopolov served again and this time Nadal’s return went wide.  As the crowd went nuts again the camera showed Dolgopolov standing there with a dazed look, like he couldn’t believe he’d actually done it, he’d actually beaten Nadal.  I went back to Stadium 2 and Frieda was in a dark funk: the most exciting match of the tournament, involving her favorite player pulling the upset of his career, and she had missed it.  She was inconsolable.  Even the last match of the day, an excellent doubles contest between Federer/Wawrinka and Gulbis/Raonic could not lift her mood.  

Tommy Bahama

Tuesday we got to the venue even earlier, waited in line for the gates to open, ran to Stadium 2, waited in line there for the doors to open, and then split up, Frieda heading to the south side to see if she could get us seats in the perpetually shady section while I ran for the section we’d been in the day before, trying to get seats in the front row, which I did.  After a few minutes Frieda showed up saying she had found nothing but that the seats I had were perfect.  Being in the front row meant it would take longer for the shade to work its way down to us, but there was a high haze filtering the sun and moderating its effects, so it was tolerable.  The 1^st 2 matches of the day, the Canadian up-and-comer Eugenie Bouchard followed by Gasquet vs. Verdasco, went pretty fast.  By the time we got to the 3^rd match, a good one between Grigor Dimitrov and Ernests Gulbis, which Gulbis won in 3 sets, we were well in the shade.  Then we had to sit through a couple of dull matches to get to the finale, the Bryan brothers playing doubles, which was superb, but by then Frieda was too exhausted to stay for the whole thing.  After 3 days of 10-12 hours of tennis, both of us had pretty much had it.  Attendance this year reached approximately 430,000, about the same as the French Open last year, so this tournament continues to grow. 

Extinction

We’ve been having a heat wave in California, and the worst drought in recorded history. Normally around November 1 I put the hardtop on the roadster and pack it away for the winter, but not this year.  With no rain and highs in the 80s, I’m still driving it.  On TV I saw the Australian Open also had record triple digit temperatures.  Meanwhile, something dubbed the Polar Vortex, an unusual subsidence of the jet stream, brought record cold to the Midwest and Northeast.  The weather, in short, is screwed up, and we’re the reason.  By dumping increasing volumes of greenhouse gases (CO2 and methane) into the atmosphere we’re raising average global surface temperature and changing global climate dynamics.  The surface temperature of the earth has increased 1.4° over the past century.  That may not seem like much, but 2/3 of the increase occurred in the past 30 years, so the rate of increase is accelerating.  In addition, recent research on cloud formation suggests the rate of warming may be more rapid than previously estimated.  CO2 in the atmosphere recently passed 400 parts per million, a concentration not seen since 4.5 million years ago, an era long before the advent of humanity when sea levels were 50 feet higher than they are today.  Unless we put the brakes on emissions the concentration could reach 1000 ppm by 2100, and CO2 has a lifetime of a century or more.  The climate is a complicated system, too complicated for us to be able to model exactly what the detailed results of such a change will be, but that much CO2 in the atmosphere could cause global surface temperatures to surge 7° by 2050, 14° by 2100.  Warming of that magnitude will produce a catastrophic rise in sea levels, inundating coastal areas.  The increased heat energy in the climate system will produce extreme weather events of a magnitude hardly dreamed of today.  Subtropical deserts will expand and crop yields will fall substantially, bringing about widespread famine.  Ocean acidification will kill coral and shellfish.  Unmitigated climate change on this scale could exceed our capacity to adapt.  To search for more fossil fuels under these circumstances is a fool’s errand.  If the fossil fuel already available were burned the planet would be rendered unlivable.  Burning it would be suicidal, yet the energy companies are still searching for more.  

As bad as climate change is, it’s only part of the picture, one aspect of the great extinction we are engineering.  Humans have been having an impact on the ecosystem we inhabit for at least 10,000 years.  Killing off megafauna like the mammoths and mastodons was just the beginning.  Now we’re in the midst of an extinction that’s shaping up to be even larger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs, only this time the asteroid is us.  10,000 years ago humans and their domesticated animals represented .1% of the vertebrate life on earth.  Today we represent 95%.  We are displacing all other species.  As our numbers continue to explode, we move into every available nook and cranny of the world carrying species of plants and animals with us that replace the native flora and fauna.  Weed species, like rats and cockroaches, proliferate.  We plow native grasses under to plant row crops, separate what were once contiguous forests into isolated groves.  We modify or destroy vast tracts of land and river systems in order to meet human ends.  15% of the earth’s surface has been converted to industrial uses or row-crops, with another 8% being used for pasture, ruining local ecosystems.  The oceans are over-fished, millions of tons of by-catch are simply discarded.  We are depleting natural resources at a prodigious rate.  Through habitat encroachment, destruction or fragmentation, hunting, pollution, climate change, the spread of disease, and the introduction of nonnative species we are exterminating animal and plant life on earth at a rate 100 times greater than any massive extinction event of the past, and the rate is accelerating.  It’s estimated that by 2050 30% of the species currently inhabiting our planet will be extinct.  50% of current higher life forms will be extinct by 2100.  Biodiversity is declining rapidly.  Whole lines of phyla are being lost.  And we are the cause.  

The greatest extinction event we know of, dubbed “The Great Dying,” occurred 252 million years ago.  On that occasion CO2 levels got so high that the surface ocean temperature reached 104° and the ocean became anoxic, killing nearly all higher sea life.  The oxygen depletion allowed sulfate-producing bacteria to thrive, producing hydrogen sulfide that belched into the atmosphere, poisoning land animals and plants and weakening the ozone layer so that any land life that remained was exposed to fatal levels of UV radiation.  Of course, extinction, even a massive extinction like this one, is part of the evolutionary process.  Mass extinctions eliminate the dominant species to allow newcomers to proliferate and flourish.  If the dinosaurs hadn’t been eliminated, there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for mammals, for us.  But when we are the dominant species that may be eliminated it puts a different light on it.  As a human, I don’t want us replaced.  And, in the short run, the loss of all the other species that we have, as it were, grown up with, impoverishes our existence. 

 

Human population growth is the fundamental cause of the potential catastrophe we are facing.  We are overrunning the planet and destroying everything in our path, not just animals but plants as well.  The earth does not have the capacity to absorb our wastes.  If we do not reduce our population, widespread famine and starvation will do it for us.  And yet economists, bizarrely, continue to speak of growth, infinite growth. 

We are currently doing far more to endanger ourselves than we are to ensure our survival.  Sooner or later, and it’s looking more and more like sooner, we will face a global cataclysm in which our survival will be at stake.  If we want to continue as a species, we need to limit the damage we are doing as much as possible, as soon as possible, wean ourselves from finite resources, sharply limit emissions of greenhouse gases, and, most importantly, strive for Zero Population Growth or, better yet, Less Than Zero.  Nothing would do as much to heal the planet as reducing the number of humans.  If we would just stop breeding like rabbits, slow down to 1 child per woman, the planet could begin to recover.  But, of course, that’s not going to happen.  

Just Doubt It

Nietzsche at about 30

Nietzsche, as is perhaps inevitable for anyone attempting a radical critique of modernity, particularly someone who slays sacred cows so wantonly, is controversial and aimed to be.  A lonely man, he craved attention, and wanted to show off his talent, his daring, his outrageousness.  Startlingly original, he shared few of the common prejudices of his time.  His willingness to shatter taboos (“philosophizing with a hammer” as he called it) is a big part of his fascination.  His thought, like that of Socrates, whom he both admired and criticized, could be seen as a training in doubt, and he hoped to be remembered even longer than this mentor.  He so clearly yearned to transcend his time and place that I feel embarrassed for him whenever he shows himself too much a product of it (so German, so 19^th century). 

He was an amateur who made no more off his writing than Van Gogh did off his painting. Now, I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the work of professional writers now and then, but their motives are mixed, after all, their integrity is compromised.  To put it crudely, they’re whores.  Not to say you can’t have a wild and wonderful night with them on occasion, but it’s the amateurs, the ones who do it for love, that I return to again and again.  Nietzsche considered the corruption of culture by money to be far more pernicious than the like corruption of politics, because culture is more important than politics.  

After his breakdown

There’s a great deal of provocative material in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, he challenges your presuppositions, makes you think.  But the core of his interest is the Death of God, his melodramatic, even hysterical, metaphor for the spiritual impact of the Scientific Revolution on Western civilization, our migration from a metaphysical to an empirical worldview.  He believes this to be such a momentous event (“the great noon”) that it will inevitably result in the breakdown of society into chaos and anarchy, because the destruction of the foundation of all our values must inevitably lead to nihilism.  There’s no way to avoid this, according to him, because it’s an event that’s already occurred, even though many may not yet realize it.  He seems to fear that the knowledge of this event, our murder of God, will suddenly break over humanity like a massive wave and sweep everything before it.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that it could, instead, gradually percolate into human consciousness over a long period of time, and that those who recognize it do so because they are ready.  Some may succumb to nihilism, but their numbers may never be large enough to swamp society.  Others, lacking the acute metaphysical need he felt, may accommodate the news without such an extreme reaction.  After all, in terms of metaphysical beliefs, non-believers are already the third largest group, globally, after Christians and Muslims.  There are more secular humanists than Buddhists, Jews, and a number of other religious persuasions thrown together and, given the number of human societies that, over the millennia, have managed to survive without the Christian God (including some nominally Christian ones), the idea that we can’t seems, well, a bit parochial.  In fact, human societies have always determined their own values, invented them ex nihilo.   It was just a common delusion that a god had done it.  And anyway, few ponder the philosophical underpinnings of their lives with the same obsessive rigor and seriousness that Nietzsche did, most just believe whatever some authority tells them, so it’s a little difficult to credit his hysteria about this.   

Science derives from the Greeks.  Not just the line of Democritus and Epicurus, but also from Socrates: the Socratic Method is the forerunner of the Scientific Method.  While admiring the ascetic devotion of science to truth, Nietzsche, a classical philologist by training, criticizes its innate optimism, which is based on faith in the explicability of nature and belief in knowledge as a panacea, and these it derived, ultimately, from Socrates.  The innate optimism of science, Nietzsche believed, results in a delusion of limitless power.  In his own philosophical practice he eschews scientific method, preferring the poetic approach of aphorism.  (He refers to himself as a “Dionysian Pessimist.”)  Given his ambivalence toward science and his view that it has led to a crisis in human affairs, you might imagine he would have some sympathy with beleaguered Christianity, the main victim of science’s corrosive, anti-metaphysical effects, but in fact he attacks it mercilessly, holding it to be bankrupt and, in any case, dishonest and nihilistic in nuce.  (He is a champion of honesty, the “youngest virtue.”)

In the end Nietzsche’s perspective is, overall, too strident, stringent, stern, too strenuous and strepitous for my taste; and too male-adolescent: he wants to attack and destroy everything, and takes a little too much glee in wreaking havoc.  The various eras of our lives foster different perspectives, each with its own set of assets and liabilities, and each of these outlooks has an equal right to exist.  Nietzsche’s is a youthful perspective, rash and impulsive, full of itself.  I enjoyed it more when I was younger.  Like Mishima, his youth partisanship painted him into a corner from which he could not easily exit into middle-age.  His over-valuation of youth would have caused him, as it did Mishima, unbearable self-contempt at its loss.  So, like Mishima, he had to die (at least mentally) at 44, in the last glow of life’s summer. 

Nietzsche created a mythos that elevated him to super-shaman and psychopomp of this transition and tried to impress it on the world.  That was his ultimate will to power.  He claimed to be writing the history of the next 2 centuries, but 125 years since he penned his last jottings and lapsed into mental torpor, the calamity he prophesized has yet to arrive, so the jury is still out on him.  If he turns out to be right and the Death of God does bring on a massive crisis in human affairs, a major nervous breakdown, then he will be seen as a towering figure, the greatest Old-Testament-style prophet since Isaiah.  If, on the other hand, humanity manages to swallow the Death of God with little more than some mild indigestion, he will be seen more as an hysterical kook, a megalomaniacal Chicken Little with some crazy ideas, who, nevertheless, wrote some interesting commentary and philosophical poetry, embraced his inner lunacy, and will likely retain a modest measure of immortality as a master of the bon mot, the pithy epigram, and an inspiration and road map for readers longing to become who they are.  

Cadaqués

Carcassone

Mid-afternoon we arrived in the medieval fortress city of Carcasonne.  Our hotel, a fifteen-minute walk outside the old, double-walled cité, was a walkup with lumpy, rolling, funhouse floors, but it was clean, cheap, and well-located, and the owners were congenial, offering us one of their 2 free parking spaces.  Crossing L’Aude on the Pont Vieux we could see the massive crenellated walls stretching out to the right and left and imagine knights jousting before them.  It’s wonderful how, in Europe, you can travel in time as well as in space.  The vista mixed the romance of Sleeping Beauty castles with a reminder of how brutal life once was.  The rest of the day we wandered the streets and battlements, buying tee shirts for friends and a leather handbag for Frieda.  After dark, spooky torch-like lighting gave the place an eerie atmosphere, towering walls loomed out of black shadows.  We had a cassoulet for dinner, the local specialty, and then got lost trying to find our way out, stumbling into half-playful moments of trepidation as we imagined some knave or varlet lurking in the opaque shadows between the splashes of yellow light.    

 

It was a bright blue morning as we set off toward Perpignon, eventually exiting the toll highway at La Boubou and making our way on 2-lane roads through rolling vineyards toward Collioure, a resort on the coast once a hangout of the Fauve artists.  From there, we drove south.  The scenery was stunning but I had to keep my eyes on the narrow, twisty road.  Frieda was navigating and told me to stop in Banyuls Sur Mer, a seaside town about 10k. north of the Spanish border, where we had crepes at a place on the beach.  

A couple hours later we pulled into Cadaqués, a whitewashed town built into jagged black rocks and surrounded by mountains that, for me, carries a flavor of Greece.  I first visited it, briefly, in 1998 when Frieda, whose parents were born in Spain, was giving me the Grand Tour.   Her father was from Figueres, a town about 35k. inland that was also the birthplace of Dalí.  Her grandfather was Dalí’s drawing teacher, and her father and Dalí were childhood chums.  Much later, when she was a child, her family visited and Dalí, who was living in Cadaqués at the time, (or, more precisely, in Port Lligat, a kilometer away) sent a car to bring them to his house.  She still remembers how frightened she was by the huge (to an 8-year-old) stuffed bear looming just inside the front door, and her unease about the very odd man who was giving her a tour of his unusual home.  We returned in 2000 for a longer visit, exploring Dalí’s museum in Figueres (the definitive Dalí experience), as well as Gala’s Castle in Pubol.  We stayed in Cadaqués for 2 weeks on that trip, also exploring the little towns south to Tossa de Mar.  We even toyed with the idea of buying a pied-à-terre there.  Spain was still on the peseta then and everything was cheap.  But in the end we decided against it because we would’ve felt obligated to return every year and there were too many other places we wanted to go.  So instead we picked up a print of Dalí’s 1924 painting of a beach in Cadaqués, “Port Alguer,” and put it over our mantle. 

Port Alguer, 1924

We soon discovered that, aside from a favorite gelateria, everything we remembered was still there. In those days we had stayed at Playa Sol, and every morning after breakfast had gone for a swim from the little beach right in front of it. After drying in the sun, we’d walk down to the main town beach for beer and anchovy-stuffed olives and some chatting and people watching. When the olives couldn’t stave off hunger any longer, we’d walk back along the shore to our favorite restaurant, Ix!, for some paella, mussels in red sauce, or some other delectable comestible, before returning to the hotel for siesta. Toward evening we’d go for a stroll around town, maybe pausing for espressos, eventually stopping somewhere for tapas. All our favored haunts were still there. The only difference was more people; the town didn’t seem as laid back and sleepy as it once was. This impression was reinforced at a tapas place near the main beach where the road in front of the outdoor patio, unlike the old days, now swarmed with people. I tried the delicious navajas, a long, narrow clam, for the first time, and we also had some old favorites, like pimientos del patron, sardines, and bacala fritters.

Port Alguer, 2013

In the morning we picked up our old routine, heading for the beach nearest our hotel, which happened to be Port Alguer.  The beaches in Cadaqués are dark and pebbly, and the water is a dark, emerald green, but clear.  At first cold, it soon felt refreshing, and I was thrilled to swim in the Mediterranean again, a sea so full of history, the sea of Homer and Odysseus, the birthplace, cradle, and playpen of Western Civilization.  We dried in the sun before heading to the main beach for beer and olives, and on to Ix!.  The next day we varied the routine with a stroll over to Dali’s house after lunch.  It was closed so we couldn’t retour it, but the enchanted walk through the olive groves charmed us and reminded me again of Greece.  After siesta I bought Frieda a black leather vest.  

The following morning we took off for Barcelona via the main highway.  Frieda did an amazing job of navigating, better than a GPS, weaving through the city to our hotel at the top of La Rambla without a hitch.  I parked in a red zone while she registered and sent the bellhop out to take our luggage, and then she directed me to the Avis office near the Avenida Diagonal through a bewilderment of one-way streets.  We pulled into their garage at 12:59 and they slammed the door behind us for siesta.  From there we walked down Paseo de Gracia toward our hotel.  I marched past Casa Milá, but it jumped out of my peripheral vision.  That and Casa Batlló, a little farther along, are hard to miss, they’re both so startlingly unique.  We’d toured the first and seen the other Gaudí sights in 2000, when we were in Barcelona for nearly a week.  At the hotel we sampled the 24-hour buffet, taking the booty up to our room to eat on the balcony over La Rambla and watch the hordes of people swarming for Fiesta de la Merce.  

 

Cadaqués

 

We’d already noticed that people on La Rambla looked shabbier than they had on our last visit and on the way to dinner at Els Quatre Gats we noted homeless folk sleeping on door sills.  These were the first symptoms of the recession we’d seen; we hadn’t noticed it in Basque country.  Our waiter at the restaurant, who was Chilean, told us Spain hadn’t lived up to his hopes and he was thinking of going home.  Nevertheless, the restaurant, not cheap, was jammed, with no vacant tables. 

In the dim morning light we caught a bus at La Plaza de Catalunya and watched Barcelona slowly unpeel from its windows as it shuttled us out to Terminal 1.  It was hard to believe that in about 18 hours we would be 6,000 miles away and these buildings, these streets, indeed all that we had seen on this trip, would be just a dream.   

Basque Country

Maman

Getting to Europe from California has always been a trial, but lately the ordeal of the journey has begun to outweigh the pleasure of the arrival for me.  I’ve seen the sights I really wanted to see, sometimes more than once, so at this stage I either return to someplace I liked before or visit someplace new in which I have only a middling interest.  For the first trip to Europe since our wintery sojourn in Venice last year we decided to do both: return to Spain, a country we hadn’t visited since 2000, to go back to a little town on the Costa Brava called Cadaqués that’s particularly dear to us, and for something new add the Basque Country, a part of Spain that lies north of Madrid, on the Atlantic (the Bay of Biscay), which I had only a modest interest in seeing.  To get there we first had to endure a 10 hour flight to London, a 3 and a half hour flight to Madrid, plus another hour flight to Bilbao and all the airport residence making the connections.  By the time we arrived on a gloomy, drizzly Monday evening, we had been awake for 30 hours and were fried, but we still had to catch a bus to the Guggenheim museum and drag our luggage through the drizzle across the Nervion River to our hotel on the opposite side, near the Calatrava pedestrian bridge.  

The Matter of Time

In the morning we walked farther down, away from the museum, to the Casca Viejo, the old town, ducking into a café for some Spanish ham with coffee when the drizzle turned to rain.  When it let up, we headed back toward the museum, crossing over the soaring auto bridge and climbing down the catwalks.  Fog was rolling across the shallow pond at the rear of Frank Gehry’s fantastic building and under the high arches of the legs of “Maman,” Louis Bourgeois’ Spider sculpture, as we approached.  We lingered in the atrium, where Frieda wanted to savor the complex intersecting curves of the interior, before entering the gallery containing Richard Serra’s monumental steel plate constructions collectively referred to as “The Matter of Time,” though “The Matter of Space” felt more appropriate as, walking through them, I felt the physical space around me pulling and stretching and twisting like taffy.   Nothing else measured up to them, although Frieda was fond of Jeff Koons “Puppy” out front, which is certainly playful in the mode of Dali.  For convenience we had lunch in the cafeteria upstairs.  We couldn’t pick up our rental car until 4 o’clock as Avis was closed for siesta.  When we got there we discovered we would not get the Audi A3 we’d been promised, but instead a Fiat 500L 1.3 liter diesel.  I was rather disappointed, but half the cars on the road in Europe are diesels now.  Diesel fuel is cheaper than gas there and they get better mileage than gas cars.  Between the cost of fuel ($7/gal. for gas and $6/gal. for diesel) and the many toll roads, it’s expensive to drive in Europe.  I declined the GPS at $15/day extra yet we somehow made it back across town to pick up our luggage at the hotel and hit the road to San Sebastian.   

The front of the museum with Puppy

San Sebastian, Donostia in Basque, was a retreat for Spanish royalty in the 19^th century.  It boasts a spectacular crescent beach called La Concha fronted with mansions reminiscent of the palazzos lining the Grand Canal in Venice and Atlantic waves suitable for surfing (which Spanish royalty, alas, did not do).  The waves and the water temperature make it less suitable for swimming than the Mediterranean, not that we were tempted, given the continuing inclement weather that closely resembled that in Bilbao.  The Basque Country is the wettest, greenest part of Spain, otherwise a pretty dry land.  It’s also famous for its food, and the old town of San Sebastian is full of pintxos bars where the art of Spanish tapas is taken to the highest level.  Every inch of the bar surface is covered with plates of different snacks in colorful profusion.  You order short beers called cañas, or wine poured from a height so as to aerate it, called txakoli, and then grab what you want, wiping your mouth with a paper napkin that you drop on the floor.  It’s all run on an honor system where, before you leave, you tell the barkeep what you had and pay up.  You’re supposed to remember it all so it’s best to move on before having too many different items.    

San Sebastian from our hotel balcony

The morning dawned still drizzly, so we took the car north, into France, to see Biarritz, an elegant little town where French royalty used to summer back in the 19^th century, and then worked our way south through St Jean de Luz and Hondarribia, on and off drizzle all the way.  We had sandwiches from a street vendor in the former for lunch, and then strolled the sturdy seawall that protects the heart of the town from oceanic incursions.  In the latter we ascended to the upper town for some wine and cheese in Charles V’s castle, now an expensive parador.  From there we took a scenic road, a narrow country lane where we first encountered wild horses grazing alongside, then a herd of sheep meandering across it, before emerging onto a more substantial highway.  Back in San Sebastian we returned to Parte Vieja.  This time we had a list of bars recommended by Rick Steves, but discovered they were all filled with Americans and no better, in some cases not as good, as the bars we had chosen by whim the night before.  When we emerged from the last it was pouring rain so we took a taxi back to the hotel. 

Biarritz

Our last day in San Sebastian we explored the Gros district, meandered down to Zurriola Beach, the prime surfer hangout, and ate churros from a street vendor.  In the evening we made our way back to Parte Vieja and bar hopped to the tune of our own whims again, leaning toward the places full of locals.  This time we ordered the hot pintxos from the chalkboard menus posted.  As everything was listed in Basque, we had no idea what we were eating.  Frieda suspected one dish featured bull testicles, but they all tasted great.  To finish we returned to a place we’d discovered the first night called La Viña and had some amazing cheesecake, their specialty. 

   

By morning the rumor that the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain had been dispelled: it falls mainly along the Atlantic coast, where we were. So we headed north, into France, and east, toward the Mediterranean. Although it was still drizzling slightly when we set off, we gradually drove out of it. As patches of blue began to break through the cloud cover while we blew across southern France at 140 kph on a wonderfully open toll road, the Black Keys’ “El Camino” blasting on the stereo, a sense of exhilaration and freedom overtook me, the kind of feeling that started to make the trip seem worth it.

 

Unamuno

As a young man

Frieda had an assignment in a class she’s taking to translate a poem of Miguel de Unamuno, so we got into a conversation about him.  Perusing the bookcase I spotted a copy of his magnum opus: The Tragic Sense of Life.  It was one of those books that I didn’t recall where I’d picked up but kept around thinking well, maybe I’ll read that some day.  Inside the cover was the name “Tanya,” the sister of a girlfriend I had back in the early 80s. 

Unamuno was a Spanish writer who lived from 1864 to 1936.  In addition to poetry, he wrote plays and fiction, but The Tragic Sense of Life is his philosophical testament.  He was raised a devout Catholic, but in college discovered science, and this set up a lifelong conflict for him, because the knowledge of science lacked the promise of personal immortality that had so comforted him as a boy.  Unamuno really, really did not want to die, a sentiment with which I have some empathy.  He considered the longing for immortality to be the essence of human striving, as illustrated by our positing, across cultures, immortality as the core of divinity, the basic quality of godhood.  He felt it was the primary secret that our thirst for knowledge ultimately seeks.  But, although he was dissatisfied with science due to its failure to unearth this secret, he also knew he couldn’t go back to the simple faith of his childhood, and this was the root of the tragic sense referred to in the title.  

Middle-aged

His thoughts document an early-20^th century Spanish variation on a long phase of Western intellectual development through which we are still passing, albeit in a later stage, the struggle between reason and faith brought on by the Scientific Revolution.  Ever since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution Western thought has concerned itself with the collision of the new perspective with the old religious one.  The new perspective, I would argue, really goes back to the Greeks, their idea of the individual thinking for himself.  Toward the end of the Roman Empire an alien, Levantine mysticism bled into Europe, an intoxicating ideological drug known as Christianity that called, in exchange for the promise of immortality, for submission to authority (all monotheistic religions are, by nature, authoritarian and thus hostile to democracy), and the West fell into a narcotic trance for a thousand years.  In the Renaissance Greek thinking, the individual, reawakened, and science grew out of this uniquely European perspective.  Consequently this is really a struggle between our native inclinations as Westerners, as the heirs of Greek civilization, and a foreign ideology that has overlain them.  But Unamuno didn’t look that far back.  For him, Catholicism felt like his Spanish nature. 

Part of Unamuno realizes that there is no going back to childish beliefs, to superstition and fairy tales; that religion is part of the childhood of our species, a childhood we have outgrown.  Yet his emotional longing for immortality will not allow him to completely let go of it.  At times his desperation is so great he seems to imagine that immortality is something he can just conjure out of thin air, as if wishing for it would make it so, rather than something that must be clawed from nature bit by bit. 

 

Old

While longing for immortality, he nevertheless recognized that the Christian vision of it is absurd.  What would we do in Heaven: would there be TV and sports teams, film and music, food and relationships—sexual relationships?  Would there be anything at all of what we know and love about life?  Or would we just sit on a cloud strumming a harp for eternity?  There is nothing plausible about the Christian promise of immortality.  Doctrinally, virtually everything about Christianity is, by turns, outlandish, preposterous, or ridiculous.  It’s a relic of an earlier age; ultimately, a con.  Nevertheless, like many today, he couldn’t shake it off.  He was caught between reason and faith, unable to commit to either.  The book is a self-contradictory, rambling record, rife with rhetorical questions, of his attempt to wrestle these incompatible perspectives into some sort of reconciliation. 

It was a hopeless endeavor, of course.  Despite mighty efforts, he could not definitively shake off Catholicism because it was such a deep part of his personal and national identity as a Spaniard, and he was unable to rise above the latter to become a fully fledged European thinker.  Ironically, had he been able to manage this he would have secured a greater degree of literary immortality, because he would have been seen by later generations as having been ahead of his time, rather than of a piece with it.  In the end he fell back on one of the great resources of Spanish culture, the figure of Don Quixote, as a symbol of his own impractical pursuit of an unreachable goal. 

What makes life tragic for Unamuno as well as the rest of us is, of course, that we all must die, and cannot go on learning and growing.  No one is going to be saved no matter who they submit to.  Unamuno went through enormous mental contortions to try to circumvent that conclusion, but they were to no avail.  A blood clot in his overworked brain laid him low at the age of 72.  Alas, all we can do about this is to grant him a posthumous shadow of life by reading him.

So, anyone want a copy of The Tragic Sense of Life?  Tanya?