Overnight in SF



Hotel Kabuki



Winter’s a good time to visit San Francisco insofar as hotel rates drop as much as 50% from their summer levels, despite the fact that there’s rarely any of the chilly fog that plagues the summer months.  Of course it may be cold or rainy, but sometimes you get these brilliant sunny days when the air is so clear you can see Point Reyes 20 miles away, an ultra-high-def day.  We had one of those on a recent Saturday. 

We arrived at the Hotel Kabuki, in Japantown, around 3 Friday afternoon, check-in time, and parked in the garage beneath, where we found an ideal slot for R2 right by the elevators.  Our room on the 9^th floor boasted views to the north and east and we savored them briefly before descending to the street, walking Post to Fillmore and turning uphill.  In the other direction (south) the neighborhood gets a little rougher, high-end shops giving way to jazz clubs like The Boom Boom Room, Rasselas, and Yoshi’s, not to mention the famous Fillmore, although the recent arrival of a pricey restaurant called State Bird Provisions may signal an upgrade trend creeping south.  It’s a popular place and we considered trying it but the menu didn’t grab us and we already have a favorite restaurant in the area.  . 



Tom Papa



The weather was overcast with a cold wind gusting into our faces, so we ducked into a shoe store called Paolo.  Frieda is a shoe nut and, to be honest, I have a weakness for them myself.  A pair of green eel skin lace-ups sang to me but I resisted their siren call.  We escaped the place with our wallets unscathed and poked our noses into a few other shops before heading back to the hotel.  After changing, we caught a cab to Cobb’s Comedy Club on Columbus, near Lombard (the valet at the hotel discouraged us from driving due to the shortage of parking in North Beach on a Friday night).  We had tickets to see Tom Papa, whom we’d discovered on a Comedy Central special.  We were about an hour early for the 8 o’clock show and had our choice of seats.  I picked a table in the second row; the front row’s a little too close for comfort in a comedy show.  Seeing as how there was a 2 drink minimum, I ordered a bottle of Firestone Gewurztraminer (We visited the Firestone Winery on our trip to the Santa Inez valley in October 2011: see post “The Santa Inez Valley”) plus a burger with fries and a salad.  People slowly filed in while we ate and by show time the floor was filled. 

Things kicked off with a mediocre comic from Sacramento followed by one from LA who was better, but not good enough to inspire full surrender.   Papa, even though we didn’t always agree with his perspectives (closing the Post Office), and even though much of his material had no personal resonance for us (parenting), was just as funny as we recalled from our previous exposure.  He had us laughing until our stomachs hurt.  It’s not just what he says, of course, but his gestures, his grimaces, his timing, the whole package.  After the show we ambled up Columbus to Café Greco for some dessert and espresso, and then caught a cab back to the hotel.  These days it seems nearly as easy to find a taxi in San Francisco as in Manhattan.  The cabbie returning knew the city better, so the fare was about a third less than the fare going had been. 

As I mentioned, the next day dawned pellucid.  We drove out to the Richmond, an area sometimes referred to as New Chinatown despite the plethora of Russian establishments, for brunch at Tan Kiang, a place with locally famous dim sum, and then headed over to Land’s End in Lincoln Park to take advantage of the clarity.  From there the Golden Gate was etched in acid on a ceramic blue sky.  When you consider gateways, there is no other in America with as much iconic power as this bridge.  It’s like the vagina of America.  But while we were walking around there I noticed my Tsubos were cutting into my Achilles tendon, despite the fact that I’d had them for years, so we took R2 back to Japantown, parked it in the garage, and walked over to the Safeway on Geary to pick up some Band-Aids to shield my sore heels. 

Problem fixed, we nabbed a cab to Union and Franklin.  Union is another good shopping street and Frieda was after boots.  She found some brown Steve Maddens she liked so I bought them for her.  Then we crossed the street to La Boulange for a couple lattes, plopping ourselves outside to enjoy the warm sun and ogle the fashionistas.  When we’d had our fill of that we meandered on down to Fillmore and turned up the hill.  Fillmore is so steep here that for a couple blocks the sidewalk turns into stairs.  When you get to the top (Broadway) and turn around the Marina spreads out beneath you, with the bay beyond and then the Marin headlands.  It’s one of the great views in the city.  Over the rooftops to your left you can see the northern half of the Golden Gate.  Facing south it’s a gentle descent from here and we meandered into various shops, just killing time until SPQR, the restaurant we were stalking, opened at 5:30.  We had no reservations but got seats at the bar and ordered a carafe of a very nice white from Umbria, a salmon starter, black ink chitarra, and Arctic char, plus, for dessert, a chocolate assortment with hazelnuts.  We were on the road for home by 7:45.  It was a nice little getaway. 

Durrell and Miller



Lawrence Durrell



There was a time, many years ago, when Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller were my favorite fiction writers.  Much of the Alexandria Quartet I read aloud to my first wife.  In those days many, including professors of mine in both college and grad school, considered Durrell to be among the top 5 novelists of the 20^th century, but now, barely more than a decade after its close, he seems largely forgotten.  Both writers reflect the desire, evident over the past couple of centuries, to escape ordinary, mundane, everyday reality for some form of hyper-reality, an uber-reality.

 Durrell and Miller were friends.  The climax of their extensive correspondence came when, after reading Sexus, which went beyond the casual obscenity of the Tropics trilogy to outright pornography, Durrell sent Miller a telegram calling it “disgracefully bad,” and insisting that he must withdraw it at once, before it did irreparable damage to his reputation.  As a young man Durrell had decried British prudery, but at this point his own reawakened.  It’s ironic, given his concern for Miller’s reputation, that it would be his own that was sullied by factors beyond his control, such as the suicide of his daughter and subsequent unsubstantiated rumors that he had molested her, while Miller, who treated the matter of his reputation with blithe, cavalier disregard, and who could certainly be accused of gross neglect of his own children, has skated free. 

Henry Miller



Most people think Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s best and I think a solid case may be made for that, but it is the Rosy Crucifixion, of which Sexus is the first volume, that tells the central story of his life, the saga of his escape from a life of drudgery to one of self-realization and some measure of fulfillment, and the price he had to pay for it.  It comes across as more of what Miller essentially is: not a traditional novelist so much as a raconteur who button-holes you in a bar and starts bending your ear. In between the sexual bouts are rants about living on the edge economically, emotionally, and existentially, an approach he believes makes for the fullest, most intense life, because more than just a writer he is the advocate of a mode of living.  It’s a life style few have the courage for, and even he can only manage it with the crutch of a mystical faith that he is “protected,” for to live so nakedly would be too terrifying in a universe of sheer randomness.  He was like everyone else in this respect: he believed what he needed to believe in order to live as he was predisposed to live.

What strikes me most in revisiting these enthusiasms of my youth in the current context of commercial fiction is how original they seem.  Tropic of Cancer and Justine are like no other books before or since; they are sui generis.   In the decades since their release the processes of commercialization, homogenization, and institutionalization, prominent features of the industrial world, have proceeded apace, so that contemporary novels are far more like one another.  For a time art, and literature as art, took the place of religion as a vehicle of would-be transcendence, but now it is just a commodity like any other.  Writers have lost the revolutionary, shamanistic mystique they had in Miller’s youth and been reduced to craftsmen, priests of the system, celebrants of the Mass of consumerism.  This is not so much the result of any imposition from above as it is due to the corruption of the artists themselves: where once they pursued immortality, the veneration of posterity, now they are satisfied with celebrity.  This diminution of aspiration is due to the fact that we no longer believe in posterity; we are living in the moment, amidst the processes of rapid irrelevance.  The only future we can imagine is dystopia. 

The best contemporary work is the best on account of the sheer beauty of the sentences from which it is constructed, not because of any revolutionary ideas it communicates about how we might strive to reach over and beyond the confines of contemporary society or any big insights about the nature of ultimate reality.  Contemporary literary novels are enjoyed for the sheer play of language, not for any meaning they contain.  They are, as it were, gorgeously wrapped empty packages.  The fun is in the unwrapping, not in what is found inside.  Durrell and Miller followed Joyce in the language play line (Miller once said that he hoped one day to write sheer nonsense and some would say he achieved that goal on more than one occasion), but they still had one foot in the old novel-of-ideas camp.  With them it was language and the big idea, language and meaning.  Now it’s just the language. 

Wine and Art



Ladera landscape

Fall usually finds us in Europe, but this year, on account of the car and the deck expense, we economized and instead hosted a bevy of visits from distant family: Frida’s youngest nephew from New York, 22, that age when you know everything except what to do with your life; her 92-year-old mother from New Jersey, growing frailer but still in love with life; her oldest nephew and his girlfriend; my insurance executive niece from Wisconsin; and finally my recently retired sister and her less recently retired husband from Iowa. With Frieda’s oldest nephew and his live-in girlfriend, we ventured up to the Napa Valley and the city.

 

Cabernet vines

In their 30s, with political views congruent to ours, they’re as fun for us to hang out with as friends.  They live in Manhattan, near Lincoln Center, and although the nephew has visited several times before, this was the girlfriend’s first gander at northern California.  They flew in on a Tuesday night.  The nephew has a friend-of-a-friend connection at the Ladera winery in the hills east of St. Helena so Wednesday we headed up there for a VIP tour.  Our tour was scheduled for 2 PM but, because it took a bit longer to get there than anticipated, we had no time to stop for lunch, and consequently started drinking on empty stomachs.  The weather was spectacular for wandering around a vineyard and sampling the tiny Cabernet grapes; not a cloud in the sky, the hills still corduroyed with lush green vines.  They had a gravity process on 2 floors of a 19^th century building that would fit right into rural France.  We ended up in a cool adjunct of the cellar where welcome cold cuts and cheeses were served along with a Cabernet that went for $90/bottle.  Normally I’m not a big fan of Cabernet, but this stuff was smooth as silk and so naturally we all got a tad sloshed, and had to take it slowly down crowded highway 29 to our B&B in Yountville, the Oleander House. 

Yountville, though so small you can easily walk from one end to the other in less than 30 minutes, has at least 4 highly-rated restaurants: French Laundry (3 Michelin Stars), Ad Hoc, Bouchon, and Bottega.  All are owned by the famous chef Thomas Keller, except for Bottega, which is Michael Chiarello’s.  French Laundry, designated best restaurant in the world 2 years running by Restaurant Magazine, is pricey ($270/person); Ad Hoc is more affordable.  It serves a single 4-course meal on any given night for a prix fixe of around $60.  We were eager to try it but learned to our disappointment that it was closed on Wednesday nights.  The last time Frieda and I stayed overnight in Yountville we’d visited Bouchon, so we decided to try Bottega this time.  Keller’s inspiration is French cuisine, whereas Chiarello’s is Italian, and generally I prefer Italian to French, although it’s been too long since we ate at Bouchon for me to make a direct comparison.  But it was delightful sipping drinks out on the veranda in front of the fireplace at Bottega and the food was worth the wait.     

In the morning, after a distinctive breakfast at the Oleander House that included tapioca pie, and then a stop at Domaine Chandon to pick up some champagne, we took the girlfriend down to San Francisco for a quick tour.  Although the day started off sunny, it began to cloud up as we drove south through Marin and was completely overcast by the time we reached Sausalito.  After a stroll along the strand to savor the sight of the San Francisco skyline across the bay, we swung across the Golden Gate and circled around to Fort Point for a dramatic view of the southern tower looming into the drifting fog.  From there we cruised through the emerald velvet hills of the Presidio and down to the Marina, passing all the white yachts moored in the basin before heading up Fillmore to Pacific Heights, where we parked and ambled down to Roam Artisan Burgers for some lunch.  The last few times we’ve spent the night in the city we’ve stayed in Japantown, so we’re pretty familiar with the Fillmore neighborhood.  San Francisco is a spectacular city, the most beautiful in America, for my money: half New York, half Honolulu; the Paris of the Pacific.

China Beach

After lunch we dropped them at Union Square to catch a cable car, because there’s nothing quite like the vistas that open up from side to side as you roll along Hyde oblivious to the traffic.  We picked them up at Lombard.  After nosing down it, we found parking on Columbus and wandered through Little Italy to Chinatown where we ogled the oddities of the street vendors.  When we’d had our fill of that we cruised back across town to Sea Cliff, on the far side of the Presidio, the ritziest residential area in the city, and descended the stairs to China Beach to take in the fog-smeared views of the Golden Gate from outside the bay.  We’d planned on staying for dinner (we had reservations at both SPQR and Delfina, our 2 favorite restaurants in the city) but the weather had continued to deteriorate and by now rain was coming in, so we decided to cut our visit short and head out of town via the Great Highway.

The nephew with Dali

An event called Open Studios was going on that weekend in Santa Cruz and since the girlfriend was starting a jewelry business we took her around to see what the local jewelry makers were doing.  The Thursday storm had passed through by then and the sun had returned.  We started with Beth Gripenstraw, whom some friends had recommended.  Jewelry wasn’t her main thing, she’s primarily known as a ceramicist, but it was her recent watercolors that really caught our eyes.  The décor theme was Paris in the 20s and around her dining table she had set up life-sized figures of Dali, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Gauguin, Diego Rivera, Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Monet, all seemingly about to dine off plates she had created inspired by each artist’s work, while friends of hers attired in 20s outfits cruised the scene and French cabaret music appropriate for the Lapin Agile played on an antique phonograph.  Refreshments were set up out on the front porch that overlooked downtown.  On the side was a yard enclosed with bamboo, utterly private where, last year, apparently, she’d set up a safari camp with life-sized papier-mâché animals.  A tiger remained from that event to greet visitors at the door this year. 

Aldo's

 The subsequent studios weren’t as much fun, nor was the jewelry that enticing, until we came to Ann Wasserman, who had a little workshop in the courtyard of her condo in the Seabright neighborhood.  She took the girlfriend into her workshop and gave her some pointers on her processes.  Both women were impressed by her work, so the nephew generously bought each a ring.  From there it was a short hop to Aldo’s for lunch on the deck overlooking the mouth of the yacht harbor, where we could watch the boats come and go in the dazzling sunshine. 

All in all I think it was a nice break for them from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. 

Bourgeois Concerns 2

When I was in college and in rebellion against the social class I grew up in, I believed the only important thing was to think big thoughts and that such trifling concerns as those discussed in my previous post were insufferably bourgeois.   But given the current state of income inequality in the US, affiliation with the middle class has come to seem something of a badge of honor.  The rich like to imagine they are the engine of the economy but they’re not, the middle class is.  A large and thriving middle class is the one social stratum an advanced industrial economy cannot do without, because without it, there would be no market, no demand for the goods such an economy produces.  The poor and the rich don’t consume at a high enough rate.  The larger the middle class is, the more stable the society is, and the more equitably the wealth is distributed.  The middle class is the glue that holds modern societies together, it’s the most law-abiding class.  The more polarized a society becomes, the more split into rich and poor, the more unstable it becomes, and the more likely it is that centrifugal forces will pull it apart.  Ideally, nearly everyone would be middle class, with just enough poor and rich to keep things interesting, enough for a soupçon of instability, if you will. 

But since the Reagan years the extremes have been expanding at the expense of the middle.  This phenomenon has become known as the Great Divergence.  While the number of poor has increased, the rich have gotten a whole lot richer.  Since 1979 the income of the top 1% has gained over 275%.  The United States now has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any of the high income nations.  At the same time the share of total income going to the middle class has declined from 62% in 1970 to 45% in 2010, while the share of the rich has gone from 29% to 46%.  The middle class has shrunk; its median income and median net worth have both fallen over the past decade.  Too many rich or, as in our case, a few too rich, is a drag on the economy, sucking the blood of demand from it, making it anemic. Extremes like this are a social distortion that cannot be sustained. 

The Republicans do not want to reverse this trend, far from it.  To raise taxes on the middle class in order to give the rich yet another tax cut, when the latter’s tax rates are already at historic lows, as Romney proposes to do, would be economic suicide.  Romney may actually believe in such voodoo economics (after all, he believes in all sorts of other nonsense), despite its having been proven decisively wrong over the past 40 years, but I think it’s actually more of a class loyalty thing.  He just wants to make himself and his rich cronies even richer, and to hell with the rest of us. 

It’s been said that Romney wants to return to the Gilded Age, the era over a century ago when super-rich industrialists and financiers rode roughshod across the economic landscape and lowly workers were grateful for any crumbs tossed their way. (Besides the abysmal business ethics, this was also an era of rampant political corruption.)  Ryan, his sidekick, gets his economic notions from sophomoric fantasy novels and wants to wind the clock back 2 centuries and reinstate the gold standard (which, btw, is a terrible idea).  But to me it seems that the Republicans really, in their heart of hearts, would like to turn back the clock 500 years to an era before the middle class even arose, an era when women were chattel and did as they were told, an era before science when religion and an hereditary aristocracy held sway and were supported by the sweat of a vast peasantry who didn’t ask troublesome questions of their betters because they knew their place as inferior beings.  That is the lost paradise the Republicans long to reinstate, with themselves as the aristocrats, of course.  They would like nothing better than to do away with modernity and all its trappings, and replace it with a new feudalism, a capitalistic feudalism.  They want to get rid of the state because the state is like the king in those old days, a check on their oligarchic power, which they wish to be as absolute as possible, and beyond the reach of the masses and their annoying vote.     

But surely, you say, they could never imagine this is a viable program.  Well of course, not if they were sane.  The trouble is, while their grip on reality wasn’t sure before, after a Black man was elected president the Republicans well and truly lost their minds.  The party was hijacked by its lunatic fringe and has now become the party of ignorance and superstition, the anti-science party.  Composed of people who imagine facts can be whatever they wish them to be, it has become utterly disconnected from reality.  Republicans have abandoned facts, evidence, and pragmatism, in favor of ideology, blind beliefs, and wild assertions.  Also, Romney and his cronies are contemptuous of anyone who’s not rich and convinced that such people are easily duped.  And, unfortunately, if the polls are accurate, they’ve managed to dupe a whole lot of them already. 

For the rich the Romney/Ryan ticket represents over-reach.  The rich have done exceedingly well over the past 4 decades, far better than everyone else.  But that’s not enough for them, of course.  Greed is their defining characteristic.  If, through a combination of misdirection, lies, voter suppression, fraud, and dirty tricks, they accomplish their coup of the few, and then proceed to carry out their program to push income inequality ever further, to unprecedented levels, the result won’t be good for anyone who values economic or political stability. 

Bourgeois Concerns



Before

During the transition from spring to summer we were taken up with a section of our back yard we refer to as “the trellis.”  It’s a pergola-like structure along about a third of the back fence with a canopy of redwood 2x2s that covered a hot tub and a koi pond.  For the past year or so it had been slowly collapsing beneath the weight of a massive wisteria.  Every month the supporting 4x4s took on more of an angle.  The contractors we spoke to about the problem all said the wisteria would have to come down, so we asked our gardener if he could cut it back off the structure so the latter could be rebuilt and he said yes, he could, and it would survive, but 2 or 3 years would be required for it to recover and get back to where it was.  Then, scratching his chin, he offered that he could rebuild the trellis without harming the wisteria.  Now, up to that point I had had no direct knowledge of his carpentry skills, so by way of a preliminary test I gave him a little repair job on the opposite corner of the front yard, where the fence had gone wobbly, and he did a fine job with it, so we decided to let him have a go at the trellis. 

When we first moved into this house, many years ago, we were excited about having a hot tub and a koi pond, even though the previous owner had taken the koi with her.  But 2 weeks after we took up residence the pump quit.  As there were no koi and we had, as it were, other fish to fry, given that the deck was collapsing, we just drained it and got on with the more important project.  Over the years we’ve had some people look at it but they all wanted many thousands of dollars to get it operational again and it just wasn’t that important to us.  As for the hot tub, a relic of the 80s big enough for at least 3 couples, we noticed the first winter that keeping it hot was giving a hefty boost to our power bill.  We also noticed that we didn’t use it that much, so the second winter we elected to shut it down.  In the spring we opened it and found wads of slugs and worms, so we had to drain it, scrub it out, and refill it.  We used it that summer, but less than the summer before, because we had begun to realize we didn’t actually enjoy feeling like a cannibal’s dinner all that much.  When fall came we shut it down again and in the spring we scrubbed it out again, but that summer used it even less.  The following spring we just left it. 



After

So now, under the trellis, we had a cold tub chock full of disgusting critters and their even more disgusting excrement and a koi pond with nothing but soggy, decaying leaves in the bottom. Although it sounded nice to say you had a hot tub and a koi pond in your back yard, we weren’t actually getting any use or value out of either of them. They were just taking up space. So we decided to seize the opportunity presented by rebuilding the trellis to get rid of both of them. That would give us room to build a lower level onto the deck where we could put a table for outdoor dining and a gas grill. It’s surprising how many decisions this sort of thing entails. One thing leads to another and pretty soon a $3,000 project has become an $8,000 project. We already had electricity out there, a 120 volt line for a flood light on the koi pond and a 240 volt line to run the hot tub, so we figured we might as well put some more atmospheric lighting on the 120 line and an electric heater on the 240 line for chilly nights. So now we’ve got 3 lantern lights, 3 spots, and a hanging overhead light plus a fixture for another, all on dimmers, plus the heater and a plug for another, plus 4 outlets. I think we kind of overdid it, to tell the truth. The electrician was here for more than 2 full days putting all the lines in conduit.



At night



The cost of this project has insured that we won’t be getting back to Europe this year.  We’d been toying with the idea of a trip to the Costa Brava, our favorite part of Spain, where we haven’t been in a dozen years, combined with a stop in Mallorca, something new.  Or, alternatively, a trip back to Sicily to see at least a couple of the Aeolian Islands, plus Sardinia, and maybe even Apulia, the heel of the boot of Italy.  But now these hypothetical trips will have to be put off because of our friend the trellis and what lay beneath its shadow of shame. 

Epicurus

Epicurus

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) anticipated much of the scientific worldview 3 centuries before Christ.  Following his teacher Democritus (460-370 BC), he was a materialist and an atomist, believing the world to be composed of tiny, invisible, indivisible particles in constant motion, combining in various ways to form all substances.  With astonishing intuitive insight in the face of scant evidence, he concluded that all things come to be through random deviation, and that living beings had evolved through a long process of trial and error.  The universe was not created for humans, he concluded.  Rather, we are just another creature of the world different from the others only in degree, not in kind. 

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve tells the story of how the philosophy of Epicurus managed to cross the sea of time to impregnate the modern world.  Like so many important events, it was an unlikely fluke.  The vehicle of the voyage was a long poem called De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by the Roman Epicurean Lucretius (99-55 BC) which, in a 9^th century copy, happened to wash up in a German monastery where it chanced to be discovered in 1417 by a Florentine book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini.  Recognizing it as a rare find, Poggio, an exceptionally talented scribe, immediately copied the manuscript and sent it back to Florence where it was recopied and began to circulate among the leading humanists of the day. 



Lucretius



The survival of Lucretius’ poem was a miracle in the 1^st place because, given the chaos of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the attendant rampages of illiterate barbarians, it is miraculous that any literature of the ancient world survived.  But then came the rampages of a Christian orthodoxy bent upon rooting out and destroying any nonconforming text, and De Rerum Natura was not merely nonconforming, it was heretical down to its bones, because it posited pleasure as the highest good, whereas for the Church the highest good was suffering and pain.  There was no place in De Rerum Natura for notions of Christian Providence, no place for a creator or designer.  Instead it held that human society began in a brutal struggle for survival.  The soul died along with the body; there was no afterlife.  Organized religions were superstitious delusions.  There were no angels, demons, or ghosts.  Such fallacies were considered the greatest obstacles to happiness, which was the goal of Epicurus’ philosophy.



Poggio Bracciolini



Recognizing the threat, Christianity attempted to stamp out Epicureanism, yet somehow Lucretius’ manuscript survived.  Perhaps the elegance and grace of his Latin had something to do with it, or maybe it was just pure chance, but not long after it was rediscovered Gutenberg came along with the printing press (1440) and then there was no stopping it.  Soon there were just too many copies for the Christian thought police to find and destroy them all.  In the centuries since their rediscovery these ideas informed the Enlightenment and shaped the modern world.  Isaac Newton, Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi tried to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, but later figures of the Enlightenment (Diderot, et al.) realized the two were antipodal and came down on the Epicurean side, because it had been validated by science and passed the test of Occam’s Razor.  Subsequently Thomas Jefferson seeded the founding document of our country with the Epicurean concept of the pursuit of happiness. 

Today people are still loath to give up the ideas of divinity and the afterlife, but otherwise in practical terms they increasingly live their lives as Epicureans, pursuing happiness, seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  When you consider the amazing insights Epicurus had so long ago, it’s difficult to avoid feeling that in the form of Christianity a Levantine mysticism overwhelmed Grecian clarity and clouded the collective consciousness of the West for 1500 years, and the result was a long, dark, and fruitless detour in our intellectual history.  You have to wonder where we might have been by now had we not taken that fateful turn into darkness and superstition. 

Melinda Gates

Apparently Melinda Gates read my last post (ha!).  I say that because after I suggested there that we needed a billionaire to come on board for the cause, I saw that she has stepped forward and begun a $5 billion campaign to disseminate birth control information and the tools of contraception to women globally.  She, a Catholic, is bravely taking on the Vatican.  We’ll see if they have the cheek to excommunicate her (or send the Inquisition to arrest her). 

Now, compare that to Larry Ellison buying Lanai.  Melinda is using some of the Gates’ billions to benefit humanity, to risk herself in a courageous crusade to make a better future.  She deserves our admiration and gratitude.  Larry is just wallowing in self-indulgence.  Living proof that wealth, in and of itself, does not confer virtue.