How I Spent My Fourth of July

My favorite line from Robert Frost, or at least the one that comes to mind most often, is "way leads on to way." This is undoubtedly because I am often delighted by unexpected discoveries that it has been my good fortune to make due to entirely random occurrences.

A case in point: I read one or two emails a day sent to me by the New York Times, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Scientific American, the Guardian, the Economist, or some other such source of information. A week or so ago I read a piece by an Algerian woman who for many years has lived in Paris, in which she recommends books to be read by anyone who plans to visit that city. I was surprised to see the novelist Annie Arnaux on the list. I have some of her books somewhere, I said to myself. But they're so OLD. 

The book that came to mind was A Woman's Life, but the one I found in the basement was A Man's World, in which Arnaux describes her father in a series of matter-of-fact but also strangely tender vignettes that underscore the sad but inevitable break that occurs when a bright young working-class girl goes to school, wins a scholarship, marries a middle class white-collar guy, and becomes both "literary" and bourgeois.

The focus of the book is not, however, on the "break." The focus is on the mundane life of the author's father, who had neither time for nor interest in culture, though he was deeply aware of his linguistic shortcomings and concerned to use language properly so as to appear respectable in the eyes of his "betters." Arnaux also describes in some detail the social classes and levels that become obvious to anyone who, like her parents, earns their living running a shop. It's a Balzacian portrait, but far more brief and dispassionate.

While I was down in the basement looking for A Woman's Life, I came upon two other volumes that I brought upstairs. One was The Dean & Deluca Cookbook and the other was a collection of essays carrying the somewhat ponderous title The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. Opening the book to the table of contents, I selected an essay called "Between Being and Emptiness: Toward an Eco-ontology of Inhabitation," and began to read. The author, one Thomas A. Alexander, a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, begins by taking his professional colleagues to task for focusing too exclusively on arid epistemological peccadilloes (he calls this habit "philepistemy") while neglecting to examine the more serious issue that philosophers are supposed to address, namely, how we should live our lives. The emphasis he places on wisdom traditions and fields of context, including those that are broadly social and ecological, is entirely apt. At one point he writes:

The ideal of wisdom we need must endeavor to comprehend and respond to the ecological aspect of nature and to facilitate communication among the diversity of the world’s cultures that must cooperate and live together now as close neighbors rather than as exotically distant lands. In this context, the conflation of the idea of “philepistemy” with philosophy becomes an extravagant luxury. Wisdom, as noted, involves a deep awareness of human life and the world in which it exists so that the way of life is a realization of human existence as an expression of nature. The present moment calls for reconstruction at the ontological level. Philosophy is concerned with the basic ways human experience and nature interexist. What sort of wisdom is called forth by the crisis of modernity? One that facilitates awareness of how human existence is interconnected. The quest for wisdom needs an eco-ontology.

It's true. Yet Alexander, like most academic philosophers, feels it important to pursue this ideal by negotiating, dissecting, and interpreting  the thought of other philosophers—especially John Dewey, in this case—rather than spelling out his own views directly. Sure, I'd like to find out more someday about Dewey's thought ...but not now. Rather, it seemed appropriate to actually EMBODY the theories Alexander was advancing by an act of "interexistence."

Hilary and I had been down at the farmer's market a few days earlier, and we still had a bag of red potatoes sitting on the shelf. Yesterday morning, following my basement explorations, as we were biking the stretch of trail from Lake Nokomis to Lake Harriet and back, pausing at some length on the wooden bridge under Lyndale Avenue to watch the creek flow by, the one thing on my mind was not eco-ontology but salade Niçoise. Potatoes, green beans, red onion, olives, eggs, anchovies (the key ingredient), several kinds of lettuce: by chance, we had it all on hand, just waiting to be cooked up and assembled into a wonderful mélange.    

Morning yoga at Lake Harriet

I hadn't made a salade Niçoise in months, if not years; lucky for me the Dean & Deluca Cookbook was now sitting right there on the kitchen counter. It's a chatty book dating to 1996. (We had never used it much, though we visited the flagship store in Soho back in its heydey.) In the entry for salade Niçoise the authors highlight three points of controversy regarding this dish: a) cooked or raw vegetables? b) greens or no greens? c) ingredients tossed together or presented separately?  They endorse cooked vegetables, greens, and mixed ingredients in the final presentation, though they suggest you can arrange a few slices of egg or tomato in a row around the rim for effect.

That's the way we've always made it. But it doesn't hurt to check.