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This long-march of a blog draws on material I had hoped to see into print a decade ago— China Makeover , the perspective of a design professional then working in China. As classmate Jim Fallows has written, China’s vastness warrants many takeaways. Here is mine, on the buildup to the era of Xi-jinping. The Chinese Revolution in 1911 at long last ended thousands of years of dynastic rule going back to 2000 BC. Delegates meeting in Nanjing elected Sun Yatsen as provisional president of the Republic of China. Dr. Sun is still fondly remembered as the Father of Modern China. Educated in Hawaii, having visited Chicago, and discovered Lincoln, Sun modeled his Three Principles of the People of the new Constitution—nationalism, democracy, livelihood—on Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address—of the people, by the people, for the people. I love that connection. I was amazed that my great aunt, artist and photographer Helen Paine Kimball, had stood within a few feet of the newly elected president tipping his hat to a crowd of Western-well-wishers in Shanghai in 1912. Unifying and modernizing China—vast in size, varied in dialects and ethnicities—continued to pose almost insurmountable challenges. Warlord infighting met Japanese occupation of Manchuria and points south. In World War Two, the Americans assisted the Nationalist government by basing Flying Tigers in central China. Four years after Japanese surrender ended their occupation came the Liberation, the proud work of the Communists’ Peoples Liberation Army, ending not just decades of civil war, but what the Chinese called “a century of humiliation” by foreigners, be they Europeans, Americans, or Japanese. As of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled the mainland, henceforth to be known as the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), while the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, an island 100 miles off the coast, to maintain their Republic of China (ROC) government in exile. For the next four decades, while the U.S. and most other countries recognized the ROC, the PRC did not permit Americans to visit “Mainland China.” Though the PRC remained terra incognita to Americans , most weren’t buying the hype of various Western apologists. In fact, the place seemed primitive, ill clad, ill fed. If the thirty-hour train ride from Beijing to Shanghai only offered toilets only in the form of a squat toilet exposed to all, this was progress. But who were we to judge? No one suspected that CCP Chairman Mao’s big push from 1957-62, the Great Leap Forward, mimicking Stalin’s back in the day, was so bungled that it caused the Great Famine, with a death toll probably twice as large as the officially acknowledged astronomical thirty-five millions, while the Chinese people were being told that the people starving in capitalist countries were the ones who really had something to complain about. The difficulties were described as three years of natural calamities, but were mostly man-induced, from the demolition of thirty to forty percent of all housing to the deforestation of much of eastern China, and brutally enforced collectivization of peasants. The student unrest that started to unfold in the West in 1966 was no match for the virulence of young people’s unrest that Mao fomented in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that same year, in his bid to consolidate his power that was once again being challenged in the wake of his recent failings. The Cultural Revolution focused on eradicating old ways of thinking, indeed thinking itself. Intellectuals were reviled as “the stinking ninth category.” The people were going after “landlords,” although the State had owned all the land since 1949. While I was a college student majoring in visual and environmental studies and for good measure taking John K. Fairbanks’ and Edwin O. Reischauer’s celebrated survey history course on China, Korea and Japan, kids my age in China were becoming sworn enemies of everything for which we stood, denouncing teachers and parents alike, and losing face by self-criticism. The teenage and twenty-something children of Chinese professionals were fast becoming Red Guards and helping Mao “beat down the Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas. Out of fashion were tolerance for religions like Christianity and pride in the glory of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History that would be touted a few decades later. Beijing’s Ming Dynasty city walls had to go, forty kilometers of them. Tactically, the Gang of Four, which included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was calling the shots as much as Mao, outmaneuvering the voice of reason in Premier Zhou Enlai, whipping up a frenzy of destruction and “class struggle” against “class enemies,” exacting confessions from “capitalist running dogs,” indeed punishing anyone who dared to own property or have an attitude. Two “olds” that did not make the short list were relationship ( guanxi ) networks and saving face ( ai mianzi ). At all levels in the hierarchy, these two olds played pivotal roles in the control of the group (“do it because you owe me”), the goals they set for themselves, and the impossible demands they made of their subordinates. The Red Guards were on a rampage so out of control that they were in essence the prime example of what social unrest would later mean for the CCP. Once central to the glory of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History, Confucianism was now so dead, and the Cult of Mao so strong, that the young obediently denounced their own parents and teachers as “counter-revolutionaries” and “revisionists,” meting out “yin-yang haircuts” and “jet plane rides”—arms held behind the back like wings to inflict humiliation and even excruciating pain. Universities, so recently restructured in the 1950s and now viewed with suspicion as fostering elites of no use to the masses, were being closed. Everyone recited endless quotations from Chairman Mao’s infallible Little Red Book, sold by the billions. All other book learning was replaced by book burning, all but obliterating the domestic record of the alleged glories of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History. The cultural elite were beaten down, beaten up, tortured, and killed. One million died. Losing face in the public ritual of self-criticism replaced saving face. This not-so-great Revolution itself would later be denounced, though extolled by some Chinese for giving the Chinese the gift of free speech for the first time. But group-speech denouncing the group’s superiors was a far cry from the individual right of free speech. That right remained unrealized into the era of Xi Jinping. And above all, the CCP would allow no freedom of the press. That would create social unrest. In 1971 the Chinese ping pong team invited the U.S. ping pong team to the PRC, ushering in the era of ping pong diplomacy. A year later, Nixon traveled to Beijing to shake Mao’s hand, a gesture China compared to waving the white flag. Our sense of face lost and gained in such ritualistic moments did not align with theirs. Suddenly, studying English in China went from being illegal to being indispensable to getting ahead. Foreign books, no longer condemned, opened eyes again. The universities, shuttered since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, started to reopen. But signals remained mixed as long as the Cultural Revolution continued. Though Americans then thought of it as our Bicentennial Year, for the Chinese 1976 was the Year of the Dragon, ordinarily the most auspicious of years in the twelve-year Chinese zodiac. But not this time. In China, 1976 became known as the Year of the Curse. In January came the death of Zhou Enlai, the beloved and urbane first Premier, the PRC leader whom the U.S. considered the voice of reason and who had personally greeted Nixon deplaning in Beijing in 1972. When Tiananmen Square attracted a huge outpouring of mourners for their “Beloved Premier” in April, the attempts by the anti-Zhou Gang of Four to suppress the mourning precipitated rioting. The year 1976 was also the year I went to Asia for the first time, to work as a landscape architect in Taiwan. In the spring my wife Lynn was selected as one of fifteen profoundly lucky young Americans to become a Luce Scholar. Named for the China-born son of missionaries who had founded Time-Life, the Henry Luce Foundation wisely sought to remedy the ignorance about Asia among the best and the brightest by sending young Americans to work for a year in Asia. Then in its third year, the program operated in East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and the ROC in Taiwan—but unfortunately not “the real China,” since the U.S. and China had gone without diplomatic relations for a quarter-century, nor Vietnam, Myanmar or Cambodia. After all, the U.S. was winding down a disastrous war against Communism in Vietnam in which the best and the brightest in their arrogance had made miscalculations based on faulty assumptions about the Asian world in every dimension. Through the Asia Foundation, which had offices in most Asian countries, the Henry Luce Foundation found work placements for scholars and their spouses in their chosen fields. Since the PRC was off limits to Americans, Lynn and I decided to go to Taiwan. Though it had lost its seat in the U.N. to the PRC in 1971, and only a quarter of its trading partners still recognized the Taiwan government’s claim to represent all China, Taiwan continued to flourish, with the second highest GDP growth rate in the world. Taiwan was one of the Four Asian Tigers. A year in Taiwan in 1976-7 proved to be the ideal preparation for a year in China three decades later. Days after we arrived in Hong Kong en route to Taiwan, Chairman Mao died. In our hotel room we took in the stunning news as black and white televised images lingered on mourners wailing over the Great Helmsman’s remains, with an emotional English-language voiceover. This was the biggest news yet in 1976. It was truly the end of an era. Although it would be months before we knew, the Cultural Revolution was finally over, and the healing after its decade of destruction could slowly begin, with the arrest of the Gang of Four in October. The Revolution had failed miserably to stamp out CCP corruption. Mao’s legacy fell woefully short of the idealism of the rhetoric, yet his image facing Tiananmen Square in Beijing, ground zero, remains to this day. We arrived in Taiwan to be greeted by “Recover the Mainland” billboards. Portraits of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen were paired in all public buildings. The big story was that while Taiwan may have been under martial law and under one-party rule led by refugees from the mainland, they had not taken over the economy or land ownership: the native Taiwanese continued to dominate both—and the Nationalists, perhaps chastened by the mess they had made on the mainland, had used their power wisely to develop the country’s export economy and its infrastructure in the Ten Major Projects, including rail and superhighways. They welcomed U.S. consultants, and cooperated closely with the U.S. on land reform and agricultural best practices through the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), founded in 1948 on the mainland and then still alive on Taiwan. In its accomplishments, the ROC leapt twenty years ahead of the PRC. Taiwan was called the Economic Miracle, while the PRC remained a shambles. Unlike the PRC, Taiwan celebrated traditional Chinese culture, despite ever-increasing trade, exchange, and communication with the West. If baseball was the national sport, Taiwan lovingly celebrated Teachers Day on Confucius’ birthday, as I came to appreciate after I attended a moving ceremony at the historic Confucian temple in the heart of Taipei, whereas Confucius was still on the outs with the PRC. Double Ten Day (October 10) celebrating the founding of the Republic of China culminated in the most stunning display of fireworks I had ever seen. I studied traditional Chinese ink brush painting—cherry blossoms, bamboo, pavilions hovering over mountain waterfalls, and leaned to inscribe my Chinese name in calligraphy. Every weeknight, a tutor came to our apartment and drilled us in our spoken Chinese. I worked in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau, in its Technical Services Division, alongside well-educated colleagues my age who spoke good English. I was responsible for the design of facilities at a network of Special Scenic Areas that attracted international as well as local tourists. Off limits was scenic Green Island, where political prisoners were jailed. Seeking independence for Taiwan from Nationalist rule was considered as punishable as supporting PRC claims to Taiwan. On matters of political sensitivity, the heavy-handedness of the two Chinas was still comparable. Had there been no Taiwan for me in 1976-77, there would have been no China for me later. I knew enough spoken Chinese to make many friends, I knew how to accept cultural differences, and I knew how to go with the flow . But it went deeper: I felt a strong spiritual connection to a Taoist-Buddhist sensibility that had its local historical counterpart in New England Transcendentalism. I would be back in 1984, in 1988, and yet again in 2005. Each time I went back to Taiwan, I could see that the liberalization continued—“opening-up” by another name, long before the “Reform and Opening up” of which the PRC made such a fuss. If the ROC on Taiwan originally liberalized to score points with the West against the PRC, it hardly looked back longingly for a less prosperous or more disorderly time anymore. Taiwan functioned as an independent nation claimed by China as part of its nation, but could not officially declare as much. What it lacked in diplomatic recognition due to its uniquely ambiguous political state it more than made up for in its unambiguous economic state as an export powerhouse from plastics to computer chips. Meanwhile, Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng was doubling down on Mao in his soon to be infamous Two Whatevers: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” Resolute was never forever. In late 1978, after China adopted its third Constitution in as many decades, CCP paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the Four Modernizations campaign focusing on agriculture, national defense, science, and technology. Deng remarked that Mao had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong. The West was thrilled to hear about the Democracy Wall, where at long last ordinary Chinese could post suggestions, and where political dissident Wei Jingsheng proposed the “fifth modernization,” democracy. They had a year to delude themselves, before Deng Xiaoping had the Wall removed, foreshadowing his behavior in Tiananmen Square a decade later. Deng Xiaoping became the first CCP leader to visit the U. S. Along with millions of others that January 1979, I watched the telecast from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in which singer John Denver entertained Deng by greeting him with “Mr. Vice-Premier, it is with great joy that we welcome you to our country, and it is with true love that we extend our very best wishes to you and your people, on your ‘New Long March Toward Modernization In This Century,’” and then singing Rocky Mountain High . Deng instituted the counter-revolutionary Four Moderns and “Reform and Opening up” granting Americans access to China for the first time in three decades. Deng also announced “One Country, Two Systems,” in effect acknowledging that the system in the PRC was hardly the same truly open system of Hong Kong and Taiwan. By 1981 he could proclaim that the Cultural Revolution, in which a million people had died, was an official “catastrophe.” In 1984 Deng rebranded the economic opening-up begun in 1979 as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The phrase was catchy. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics was an inability to eradicate a culture of rampant corruption—punctuated by the occasional show trial—that a longtime expat Communist and CCP member like American Sidney Rittenberg bemoaned finding on all sides when the CCP finally released him from wrongful imprisonment. In 1987 Deng acknowledged that central economic planning no longer drove the Chinese economy, while Taiwan ended thirty-seven years of one-party rule in 1986, lifted martial law in 1987, and began to allow its citizens to visit China. China in 1988 was full of the hope of economic growth and democratization—delivering the full promise of a Chinese society that had opened up. Only a year after the PRC opened up to Taiwanese visitors, in 1988 Lynn and I finally got to visit mainland China, at least Beijing, with the Henry Luce Foundation. I may have missed the wall-encircled version of Beijing and the original smaller Tiananmen Square that survived intact until the 1950s, but at least I got to see the fabled city before the skyline was upended with inane high-rises, the sky polluted to a pulp, the hutong neighborhoods eviscerated, and the roads clogged with cars, all of which would happen in the next two decades. If the airport roof had solar panels, the road from the airport was a mere two lanes wide ride, through open country. If there were already cars, there were still millions of bicyclists, and no second and third ring roads. Foreigners were required to use foreign exchange certificates to make purchases. The big Henry Luce Foundation event was meeting one of the Eight Elders of the CCP, Li Xiannian, at the Great Hall of the People. Recently made Chair of People’s Political Consultative Conference, the veteran of Mao’s Long March had risen to prominence after Mao’s death to become one of the most influential architects of China’s economic policy after the Cultural Revolution and become President of the PRC from 1983-1988. At a banquet on that visit I was seated next to Hou Renzhi, a retired Peking University professor of geography and urban history. Born in 1911, the year of the birth of Modern China, he gained exposure to the Western field of historical geography while earning his PhD at Liverpool, in time to return to the New China in 1949, ran marathons, was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, became renowned as a pioneer in the field of historical geography and lived to be 100. When I met him he was a lean and vigorous seventy-seven. Prof. Hou told me how he had been one of those who were shouted down during the Cultural Revolution as he tried to save from the Red Guards, whose slogan was “smashing of the Four Olds,” what was left of Beijing’s magnificent city walls already largely demolished for a subway line and air raid shelters, only to have one of those who had shouted him down apologize years later, telling him that he had been right all along. They were now friends. Nowadays, if you wanted to experience an elevated people’s greenway, you had to walk the walls of Xian or Nanjing. What a difference a year made. In the spring of 1989, Prof. Hou was leading a tour of Beijing’s city wall remnants along the second ring road when events in the heart of the city took a dramatic turn. Soon after the death of beloved pro-democracy reformer Hu Yaobang, students gathered in Tiananmen Square both to mourn him and to demand democracy of their government. Though cellphones had not yet been invented, word spread rapidly by fax machine. Intellectuals, students, workers, even some peasants from the countryside gathered in the center of the capital city, indeed gathered in scores of other cities as well. For the first time in Chinese history, coming from all walks of life, to use Mao’s phrase uttered here in 1949, the people had stood up to express frustration at rising inequality, rampant official corruption, and the lack of democratic freedoms. In Tiananmen Square, exercising their right of free speech, students read aloud both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address in translation. They hardly expected a repeat of what happened there after Zhou Enlai’s death twelve years before. Though the demonstrators committed not one act of violence, the government imagined huge risks to the country. Seeing its legitimacy threatened and the nation’s existence imperiled by social unrest, spreading like a contagion since the fall of the Soviet Union and political reform in Eastern Europe, and now to 80 cities across China, the frightened government reacted in a harsh crackdown in Beijing that was forever etched on the minds of Chinese participants and observers and millions of Westerners who were riveted by the television coverage and subsequent eyewitness accounts. The most enduring images were the highly symbolic clone of the Statue of Liberty erected in the Square and Tank Man, a lone figure standing in the middle of Chang’an Road, gesturing with his two shopping bags, halting a line of tanks sent in to enforce the will of the state. After the tanks shut off their engines, the man climbed onto the turret to talk to the human being hidden within. It was a gesture of nonviolent resistance in the heroic tradition of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. His fate remains a mystery. Eyewitnesses reported seeing pro-democracy demonstrators crushed by tanks, and soldiers bayoneting mothers and children. Deng had cracked down on the Democracy Wall a decade before, and now was implicated again. But which army leader was really to blame for the brutal tactics of the People’s Liberation Army that resulted in the death of 300 to 1000 unarmed democracy-denied civilians? And some commanders in the People’s Liberation Army had been opposed to violence against the People. The opportunity costs were enormous. The perceived brutality in the crackdown cost the PRC dearly in the public relations tug of war with Taiwan, and in international investment for a while. What the West called the Tiananmen Massacre remained a taboo topic in China, which wanted to avoid social unrest at all costs. The abrupt turn away from the people’s consensus as if none could be had, only chaos, placed China squarely and defensively on the sidelines of global democratization. By 2023, as electoral democracies benefited 45 percent of the world’s population, China was working overtime to assert the superiority of its system of government for the people and churn out “democracy has failed” screeds. In 2023 one might think they are winning. Don’t bet on it, any more than investing in its real estate. Given what China has been through with nearly two centuries of foreign powers cutting up China “like a watermelon,” dynastic decline, warlords, a brutal Japanese invasion, and civil war, how can we in the West really blame them or begin to feel their pain? Self-inflicted wounds come with a history. Doubling down on official Tiananmen amnesia, China chose to rebuild its way out of the 1989 crisis. Indeed, in 1993 it became a net importer of oil for the first time, and Beijing was already trying to rein in the real estate bubble before the economy and social unrest spun out of control. The phenomenon of empty blocks replacing farmland, and landless ex-farmers forced to live in otherwise barren blocks could trace its origins back that far. As long as the nation grew and the standard of living improved for the masses, the people would choose stability over social unrest, economic growth over stagnation, leaving for another day the luxury of human rights and justice before the law, or so the state reasoned, and postponing the day of reckoning with the ever-ballooning real estate bubble. One thing that was off the table was another famine. Chinese citizens could now talk to foreigners and not get arrested; with the danger gone, there was a sense of risk-free and optimistic adventure in the air. But still the riots broke out in far-off ethnically non-Han Chinese strongholds like Xinjiang and Tibet, where with irony that escaped the CCP, they dealt with the locals precisely the way the much-hated Japanese had with Manchuria back in the day. And still the official voice of the state was shrill; nuanced discussion was an oxymoron. The persistent state-stoked narrative of national humiliation promoted by Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, and Sun Yat-sen before them—victimhood at the hands of colonial powers whether European or Japanese— wuwang guochi , “Never forget our national humiliation,” would in fact soon be forgotten a lot of the time, although trotted out whenever the state felt its power eroding. That, and protesting when something “hurt the feelings of the Chinese People.” Meanwhile, on the political front, Taiwan kept up the pressure on the PRC by the force of its counterexample. In 1989 Taiwan had embraced legislative reform, culminating in the retirement of the old Nationalist representatives of Mainland provinces, and not a moment too soon. In 1991 Taiwan held its first national elections, and newly elected President Lee Teng-hui formally recognized the PRC government, as if to say the ROC enjoyed the status to do such a thing. Henceforth, the ROC would no longer claim to represent all of China; it had been some time since that old rhetoric had seemed credible. President Lee’s reforms extended to inviting free discussion of sensitive political issues of Taiwan’s past, an opening-up of thought. Taiwan was occasionally in the news as forever living under the threat of a PRC takeover, given the PRC’s prickly insistence on preserving the “Motherland” and intolerance for “splittists.” When Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996, the PRC’s attempt to intimidate the Taiwanese electorate by staging war games in the Taiwan Strait backfired into yet another public relations gaffe. The U.S. dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region. By the 2010s the naval intimidation became habitual. In electing Democratic Progressive Party candidates Chen Shui-bian as President and Annette Lu as Vice-President of Taiwan in 1996, a Chinese people had freely voted for the peaceful transition of power for the first time in Chinese history. Ordinary Taiwanese people had voted, and not for reunification. In 1997, Hong Kong reverted to China with the assumption that it would be able to keep its democratic system for the next fifty years, much to the relief of an apprehensive world. From the vantage point of 2023, we can see how shortsighted that sense of relief was to be. After the death of Deng, China stayed the course of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” rather like capitalism in socialist clothing, under the new PRC leader Jiang Zemin, the former mayor of Shanghai, and as liberal and pro-Western a leader as we could hope for. In October 1997, Jiang visited Washington and with president Bill Clinton agreed to establish a regular consultation mechanism for defense. Jiang then spoke at Harvard, in halting English, about our common destiny. In 1999 Premier Zhu Rongji signed a joint statement with Clinton on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), promising reforms to increase transparency and protect intellectual property, and unleashing Chinese industrial might beyond anything the world had ever seen. Foreign direct investment exploded. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics had taken root. Even as I paid attention to all these momentous events, I had been assuming that a new generation was in charge in Taiwan and in no need of advice from Americans, much less Americans of the previous generation. I assumed the same about China, whose reputation had been sullied by Tiananmen. But I was wrong on both counts. The PRC and Taiwan were becoming more interlocked economically: now their peoples could even travel back and forth to sightsee or visit relatives. Between the PRC and Taiwan, the days of antagonistic clashing over ideology seemed, until the Xi Jinping era, to be behind them. In 2001 Taiwan joined China in the World Trade Organization. And both the PRC and Taiwan still looked overseas for design advice. I was about to put everything I had ever learned to work in Taiwan once more. And it would take me across the Taiwan Strait to the China that had been closed to me when I had first gone to Taiwan in 1976 and that I had barely seen in 1988. In 2005 an old Tourism Bureau colleague from 1977 and now the Bureau’s Director General invited me back to consult on 23 special scenic area construction projects over a three week period. When I was back, I was amazed at the power of democracy. Taiwan was moving on from trying to suppress dark moments in its own past to finding ways to acknowledge them and mourn the victims. In downtown Taipei, it had created the 2-28 Peace Memorial Park, two blocks from the Presidential Palace, to honor the victims of the “228 Incident” of Nationalist Party brutality against native Taiwanese that occurred on February 28, 1947, a forbidden topic when I had been in Taiwan before. Of all the sites I consulted on, the most profoundly moving was Green Island. Off limits in 1977 when it still housed political prisoners, totaling anywhere between 30,000 and 70,000 from 1951 to 1989, Green Island was now a vacation destination attracting 349,000 visitors annually. Its mix of spectacular unspoiled scenery, the only seafront hot springs in Asia, its Human Rights Monument, and prison museum showcasing human rights progress had the power to win many friends for Taiwan. What Robben Island and its political prisoner Nelson Mandela meant to South Africa, Green Island and its political prisoners meant to Taiwan. American land artist Maya Lin would recognize the big design idea of the Green Island Human Rights Memorial, also known as the White Terror Memorial Park: an inscription wall descending into the earth, with hundreds of names inscribed in the sandstone. No, these were not the kind of heroes who had gone off to Asia to fight a war against Communist revolutionaries and for whom decent records were kept, as with Maya Lin’s celebrated Vietnam Veterans Memorial. These were a different kind of hero, the names of Taiwanese imprisoned for simply voicing dissent, when the Nationalist government did not recognize the right of free speech, or even the right to a decent record. Some of the inscriptions were ringed by a dark grey oval, burnished by the tender touch of adoring hands, for these were the names of people who were now leading Taiwan to greatness. Heading the list were Taiwan’s top two leaders, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu, perhaps the highest ranking Chinese woman anywhere, a graduate of both Green Island Prison and Harvard Law School. Lu had been one of the Kaohsiung Eight, arrested for a pro-democracy demonstration on Human Rights Day in that city in 1979 when Taiwan was still a one-party state. Among other famous prisoners was Cai Ruei-yue, Taiwan’s first lady of modern dance, who had never breathed a word of it to my wife 29 years earlier when Ms. Cai taught her traditional Chinese dance. The Memorial spoke to me not for its design but for the fact of its existence, what it represented, and what that meant. It represented the triumph of democracy and human rights for the largest predominantly ethnic Chinese population outside China. And that meant Taiwan had gained enormously in good will and world admiration. As I could personally attest over the last thirty years, Taiwan had a great story to tell, one of incredible economic and political progress, a fabulous success story in so many spheres. In Taiwan, innovation goes hand in hand with a deep respect for tradition, the environment, and human rights. Now that our three children were out the door, with Lynn’s encouragement I looked for opportunities in China in late 2006. Little did we know how perfect the timing was: the year of 2007 proved to be the banner year for China’s GDP growth, 14.2%, almost double the 8% target, itself far ahead of any other economy. Record numbers of development projects needed to be designed. Alongside just about any other profession one could name, in China landscape architects were in as much demand as the world had ever seen. When I moved to Shanghai I hardly knew what to expect. As director of design at a Chinese landscape architecture and urban planning firm, and the lone American, I wondered how well I would assimilate. I needn’t have worried. Traveling all over China to meet with clients, I discovered that the Chinese people had a healthy appetite for almost all things American. Once banned under Chairman Mao’s dictatorial rule, American pop culture was everywhere . But it was not just pop culture that interested them. I was amazed that in school many had read American classics such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . At a conference on visionary urban planning, where I was the only non-Chinese, the big red banner behind the stage was emblazoned with a huge image of Abraham Lincoln, patterned on the famous Daniel Chester French statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. I asked several attendees how Lincoln was relevant to an urban planning conference in China. “Because he represents good government ,” they said, gently implying that that should be obvious. Projects that would take years to get off the drawing board in the U.S. got built in months here; orders were given, people were moved, and, presto, a half billion square meters of new residential and commercial space were built every year. The Great Leap Forward these days was the real deal. Though the CCP still proudly displayed the official portrait of Mao overlooking Tiananmen Square, no one talked anymore about “class enemies.” Only curio shops were selling the Little Red Book . If the scars of that age of suspicion and denunciation ran deep, no one was admitting it now. The Chinese did not yet have the vote for their own top leaders but they voted for the leading facets of Western life in countless ways. Whereas they made no secret of their visceral hatred of the Japanese that not even apologies for the Rape of Nanjing and the like could ever cure, they held no such visceral hatred for us. Au contraire. The U. S. was the ambitious Chinese student’s destination of choice for studying abroad. Pregnant mothers seeking a stateside birth to confer US citizenship were voting for American stability, freedom, and educational opportunity over what they had back home. We took for granted that of course their business attire was Western; they could have continued with local garb even as Arabs and Africans did theirs but wisely chose not to. Long gone were Mao suits, the opposite number of leisure suits in the U.S. back in the benighted day. Recently Paramount Leader Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, former low-level Red Guards, wore Western attire and parted their jet-black medium-length hair to look like Westerners, not like their buzzed Communist parents. Regular people wore jeans with abandon, even baseball caps, including the Red Sox, and flaunted iPhones. The armed forces and police wore uniforms whose antecedents were hardly Asian, and sometimes a tad fascistic with the jackboots. On airlines, in mostly School of Boeing aircraft, the utensils of choice for all meals were not chopsticks. As to the second language of business here, the Chinese had voted with their commercial signs, traffic signs, and road signs, subway ticket machines and ATMs which proudly displayed not French or Japanese or Russian, but their best English. The street signage symbol for parking was P. They taught English as a second language and it began in primary school now; we had not yet begun to reciprocate, although we should: it would be a strategic national investment. They used “OK” more than we would ever use “ haode, ” and routinely signed off with “Bye bye” on the phone, and punctuate Chinese texts with Western exclamation points and question marks. Coffee drinking had taken the land of tea by storm; Starbucks was in every major city and had attracted many clones, pirates, imitators, coffeecats, none of which could resist using a logo that was round and ringed with white letters, everything but the mermaid. Coke had long been popular, and at the 2008 Shanghai World Expo it was the most popular exhibit in the consumer brands area. Fast food chains like KFC were ubiquitous. In the English class that I gave in the Shanghai and Beijing offices, I once chose as our subject what American movies my colleagues liked, and why, and what they disliked. The guys loved the action and fantasy flicks like Spiderman , the women chick flicks and TV shows like Sex and the City, just as in the West. Some had seen older classics like Gone with the Wind, and newer ones like The English Patient . The people adored not just our movies but our music in ways Westerners did not reciprocate. They sang our Happy Birthday song with Chinese words. Cell phone jingles I’d heard included Oh Susannah , Singin’ in the Rain, and the Eagles’ Hotel California . Hotel electronic muzak included Simon and Garfunkel’s’ The Sounds of Silence . The schoolyard behind my Shanghai office regularly blared Western and only Western music, Bolero and Pachobel’s Canon . Department store floors decorated with huge posters of Western models sold with sentimental fare like As Time Goes By , The Way We Were , and Bridge over Troubled Waters , all covers, no doubt royalty-free. I had caught people in the firm and taxi drivers whistling Ode to Joy or Silent Night (I concede these are not English) and Jingle Bells , the latter a little bit of New England in Shanghai (James Pierpont, Boston, 1857). Another taxi driver was humming along with everything on a Western classical music station. Indeed, I had heard so little Chinese music in China, classical or pop, that the vote seemed to be overwhelming. But it had been no overnight phenom. Western classical instruments and orchestration had amplified the cause of socialist revolution since the beginning in China, and with the opening-up, the familiar instrumentation and borrowed soundscape could hardly be expected to diminish. Chinese virtuoso violinists and cellists vastly outnumbered Western virtuoso performers on the guzhang . Western appreciation of sounds Chinese was not keeping up. We needed to be directed to the Chinese Beethoven, or even Pachobel. Surely with five thousand years of civilization, there was a vast musical repertory waiting for Westerners to hum along with. We Western barbarians needed to be properly schooled, was all. They and everyone else voted for perhaps the most far-reaching of all American inventions, the internet, the personal computer and the cellphone. Across China, the new generation, unlike their parents, were computer-literate early, facile with the keyboard’s indispensable Western alphabet, often as preschoolers. As soon as in primary school, people were voting for the Western alphabet as indispensable to computer literacy. The number symbols used in Chinese computers, texts, and traffic countdown signals were in Arabic, like ours, not their own cumbersome number characters. They went along with the Western calendar (Chinese New Years falls many weeks after ours), and dividing a day into twenty-four hours, systems invented long after they had come up with their own. I am profoundly grateful for their vote for American software, from operating systems to Excel spreadsheets to PowerPoint, which was called “PPT,” and above all for Google, whose maps and satellite images made far off places seem very near. For years Chinese urbanization happily borrowed many great inventions and innovations from the West—elevators and escalators; trains, planes, and automobiles; train stations, airports, and superhighways; high-rises and underground parking; tunnels and subways; large public parks, hydroelectric dams, and the power grid. TV newscasts, milk cartons and soda cans, business cards, telephones, gas stations, cars and even the legions of concrete trucks all looked all-American. The military and airline uniforms were Western knockoffs. Their nautical and aeronautical charts were virtually identical to ours. Even the party elite, whose parents had worn Mao jackets, sung the Ode to the Motherland and read the Little Red Book , took up golf as the ultimate status symbol. They played American-invented sports like baseball and basketball. One hundred universities offered baseball studies. The votes for American leisurely pursuits and technology across all fields could fill a book. It was just easier to adopt than to start a parallel universe from scratch. Very little was left that was pure Chinese except local foodstuffs, household products, crafts, and sundries. The voting went back even before the CCP era. Even the realm of pre-CCP memorial architecture owed something to the West. Did the architect Henry Bacon and the sculptor Daniel Chester French who together designed the sublime Lincoln Memorial have any idea how that idea would take wing and end up in China? And yet both China and Taiwan boast memorials to revered leaders whose exterior architecture may not look classical, but whose interior sanctuary focuses on a monumental statue of the hero, neither standing nor lying in state, but seated. Dr. Sun Yat-sen was so honored in Nanjing in the 1920s, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei in the 1980s. Now we in the West may take all this homage for granted, but we really ought to be profoundly grateful. In 2010, having led the world out of recession, China’s economy surpassed Japan’s to become the world’s second largest, 90-times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free-market reforms in 1978. If China ever becomes our Overlord, I seriously doubt that they will flip this all into a neo-Sino culture makeover with Chinese language at the helm. We may well remain the overlords of innovation for a while yet. After I opened the Shanghai-based design firm’s first overseas office in Boston, indeed the first bona-fide office of any Chinese design firm in the U.S., I found myself drawn to the idea of writing a book on urban public space best practices. I wanted nothing important to get lost in translation, so my vision for Cities with Heart included the original English text and the Chinese translation side by side. The company had hired Ran Weiming, a young Shanghai-based bilingual communications specialist who not only understood my English, but educated me by Skype on the differences in exposition between our two languages, both as to logic and to clarity. When I finally met her on a company trip to Shanghai World Expo in 2010, she mentioned that she had been captivated with Thoreau’s Walden since she was a fifteen-year-old high schoolgirl living in a mountain village a few hours outside Qongqing. I was stunned that she had found Thoreau in such a place. She loved Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Fuller. If this global connectivity was where our world was heading, it was a good place. It was my pleasure to make sure she saw Walden, birthplace of the modern environmentalism movement. On the first day that she had ever spent outside China, a jet-lagged Ran knelt before the pile of pebbles brought by pilgrims from all over the world to Thoreau’s cabin site, and added her own offering with these words for Henry: “My name is Ran, and you may not know me, but I knew you when I was a fifteen-year-old.” Henry surely smiled. Sadly, the Xi Jinping-Covid era has chilled the warmth of those days. There is blame on both sides. China looks at our current state as if it confirms the superiority of its system of government, even as ominous economic signs hover over the Chinese mainland. Indeed, even before those signs began to appear, Xi Jinping’s ponderous tome The Governance of China (2014) included this admission: "Actually, how to govern a socialist society, a completely new socialist society, has not been clearly addressed by world socialism so far." In Taiwan, democracy soldiers on, while across the Taiwan Strait, far from having anything close to a majority, the CCP that rules the Peoples Republic of China counts less than 7% of those people as CCP members.

We live in an age of arrogance, and cognitive bias Covid.  Take, for example, 20/20 hindsight. A lot has been written about the hindsight bias. Here’s my take. Merriam Webster defines 20/20 hindsight as “the full knowledge and complete understanding that one has about an event only after it has happened.” Sure, just a little Monday-morning quarterbacking and second-guessing. What could possibly go wrong? What Merriam-Webster meant to say is “the full knowledge and complete understanding that one believes they have” about the past event. The Monday-morning quarterbacks are utterly confident that they can explain the essential causal sequence that unfolded in the game, whether football or politics or worse. They are second-guessing, and likely guessing wrong. The pundits and pols are utterly confident that they know enough to fault people, other than themselves, for having acted without knowing what allegedly smart, well-informed people now know about their predecessor’s actions. The pundits might expound that what happened was so inevitable, or so avoidable. They may even go so far as to blame past wrongdoers for failing to know what we know, or believe what we believe, and judge them by our standard—in other words, for failing to adhere to a norm that only became a norm subsequently. They believe that they can confidently judge long-dead perpetrators who conveniently are no longer around to defend themselves. Their hubris allows them to expound what they believe without the disclaimer that of course the future will deliver more nuanced, fairer, and truer insights that may prove them to have been shortsighted, perhaps as much in their own ways as their predecessors were in theirs.  Our current understanding is nothing more than that—current, not future. And it is swayed by too many “known knowns”— the “availability heuristic.” The more garbage is out there, the more it confirms itself. As if all this were not enough, we have the slippery slope of language itself—how it morphs from one meaning to another. I was struck by this at the Massachusetts Historical Society while talking to a Native American who quoted a 17thc. document’s allusion to “reducing” her forebears. For her, the meaning was obvious: reducing the numbers of her people was nothing short of genocide.  I nodded, but later confirmed that 17th c. texts often use the word “reduce” to mean something closer to its literal original meaning, “lead back.” That is, the Anglos who had come into the indigenous people’s world uninvited hoped to convert them to Christianity and improve their lives by leading them back from ignorance—as if the white man’s ways were less ignorant than theirs. Not great in hindsight, but not genocide. Again, we must do our best to understand the norms of previous times, and that includes the norms of language in their day. Most irksome to me is mixing the fad of textualism aka originalism in reading our Constitution with a non-original interpretation of the language in that document. No example is more flagrant than the interpretation of the Second Amendment’s phrase “well-regulated militia” to allow unregulated ownership of weapons with lethal firepower the framers of the Constitution could not possibly anticipate.  If the framers were wary of poorly regulated militias in their day, what would they make of our weaponized world now?  This judicial hindsight is the wishful thinking of the gun lobby. But really, how does the 20/20 hindsight bias not intrude on legal outcomes?  For example, lawsuits against boards for not knowing what later became known and therefore failing to do the right thing, as defined in hindsight?  We know the outcome, bad or good; they could not. We should not make the bias mistake of blaming some people for their role in a bad outcome and crediting others for their role in a good outcome. Nor should we overzealously apply our notions of good and bad to former times when evil and injustice were far more prevalent than in our own worrisome era. The judgmental question ought to be simply this: was the person then acting decently according to the norms of their times? And how well do we understand those norms? So when opium made its way into the China Trade, an era when everyone was doing it but some were beginning to question it, we might be overly judgmental in our hindsight. We might call them drug dealers, even drug cartels. So might the Chinese. But their moral superiority, at the societal level, vanishes once the Chinese are trading opium internally in the early 20th century, and trafficking in synthetic opioids supplying American addicts. Time to call it a draw? Claiming the wisdom of hindsight while remaining ignorant of extenuating circumstances, some Western scholars might fault the Chinese, inventors of paper, printing, and the compass, for not having long ago put these inventions to good use in precisely documenting their vast territorial claims, instead of relying, even recently, on a vague dashed line surrounding unoccupied islets in the South China, islets far closer to other nations than to the claimant. Sorry, that fault-finding is 20/20 hindsight. What a misnomer! Likewise, future generations will judge ours for failing to do enough to stop global warming. Will that be entirely fair?  So easy for them to formulate the logic, or biologic, that should have guided society, somehow collectively, where it most mattered, to do the right thing. Easier said than done, and then some. So a word of caution to pontificators, me included.  Judge not that ye be not judged. If only the world were truly binary, black and white, male and female, young and old, even past and present. But boundaries are usually blurry. When that reality is a good thing, enjoy the frisson. When it is dangerous, tread lightly. And what is the boundary between good and dangerous?  Between blindsight and insight?  Knowing how blurry the boundary can be is a start. And that applies to the length of time between reality-checks. Accurate hindsight hinges on accurate memory for one’s personal history, and accurate information for preceding eras. But even our recollection of personal events may be inaccurate. Our brains fill in the blanks of our memory with what we think happened, because we are susceptible to what has been called false memory syndrome, or the confirmation bias, or good old-fashioned rationalization, or wishful thinking. Wishful thinking snares us with the sunk-cost fallacy. We may hold onto a loser investment too long, even doubling down on the bet, and end up losing even more by doing so. Let’s hope that by 2025 a little humility, humanity, and self-awareness will help get us all closer to 20/15 vision.

Ever since a life-changing year spent in Taiwan in 1976-7, I have been drawn to Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of compassion. I wonder how she is doing these days.  And how she is feeling these days.  Here is what I imagine, using AI on Shutterstock. Nothing should matter more than the fact that, as José Mariá Figueres put it in the World Economic Forum in 2003, there is no Planet B.  Colonizing Mars is a joke, and sending flights there just fuels the energy crisis, and Elon’s Musky Ego. What does the Bible say? When I was four or five, Dad used to read to me at bedtime not the Bible, but The Story of Noah’s Ark, illustrated by E. Boyd Smith, the first book he had ever owned, dating from 1905. I remember one illustration particularly (below). As Noah is focused on constructing the ark, some onlookers are jeering at him. What a fool Noah is to them, to make such a dire prediction about a stupid flood and prepare for it with such overkill. Though I did not know what to call them at the time, I can now call them antediluvian nay-sayers, deniers, skeptics. Noah, of course, was prophetic. There is a second coming in store, of a not very rapturous kind. Being prepared for sea level rise is a safer bet than denial, yet denial is alive and shrill among us. Some of today’s climate change skeptics may not take their Old Testament literally, and others might do just that, but neither group of skeptics is taking to heart the second coming of the Ark that now needs to be constructed. For that is what our low-lying coastlines will have to become, by other means, to cope with high seas—more frequent, more violent storms on top of sea level rise. Now in the age of AI generated imagery, the sky is the limit.  Much of it will be put to nefarious use, to inflame hatred, and incite violence, so we must be wary. But there will always be a welcome place for such imagery to instill empathy and spread motivation to take action against truly existential threats that affect us all, believers and non believers alike.

mostly written over two decades ago, mostly still ringing true I am a sentimentalist. I am not afraid to be influenced by emotional feelings—“gut feel” of a different kind than intuition. By that I also mean, I am good for a good laugh and a good cry, or at least a few tears. I am with Australia-based tech consultant Mehmet Yidiz’s observation that “Laughter and tears offer us avenues for emotional release, self-expression, and connection with others.” As Readers Digest used to point out, laughter is the best medicine. Humor is tonic. There is little controversy surrounding that notion. To quote HelpGuide.org, “Laughter strengthens your immune system, boosts mood, diminishes pain, and protects you from the damaging effects of stress. Nothing works faster or more dependably to bring your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh. Humor lightens your burdens, inspires hope, connects you to others, and keeps you grounded, focused, and alert. It also helps you release anger and forgive sooner.” More succinctly: Humor breaks the ice, launches speeches, even saves relationships. Seen on a high school blackboard a while back: She who laughs lasts.  Go for the jocular vein.  Jest for the health of it. Laughter aside, I see sentimentality as mostly the realm of “aww” and tears of joy. As I indicated in my post “What Matters is What Moves Us,” I am moved by stories of reunion, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation. So what if the movie story line is a manipulative tearjerker—let the tears flow! They are healthy. Like the internet says, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins—chemicals that make people feel good and may also ease both physical and emotional pain. (Oxytocin, not OxyContin) In co-authoring my college twenty-fifth reunion survey, I went so far as to insert this question: “Do you find yourself crying out of joy, empathy or poignancy more now than as a recent college grad?” Over half of the 487 respondents agreed.  Of the several hundred questions on the survey covering all aspects of our lives, this one stood out.  When people praised the survey, they cited this question. Perhaps I was onto something. Only later did I discover that anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1981 had argued that we suppress weeping at our peril. Humans must socialize, and weeping shows we care. One of the many unexpected pleasures of getting older is that tears flow more freely from moments of feeling connectedness and empathy, across generations, even across time. These feelings wash over me while flying and listening to music, or walking in sublime nature—a perfect early spring day walk around the pond in Wellesley. Above all, having grandchildren, such an unexpected pleasure of empathy and delight—a deeper connection to feeling one’s own humanity, imperfect though mine surely is. Kindred spirits indeed. Every holiday season, watching Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, when druggist Mr. Gower boxes the ears of his young helper George Bailey for not having delivered a prescription that a distraught Gower mistakenly made out of poison, I well up. Even thinking about it gets to me. “Capracorn” for sure, but bring it on. Then there is Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). Albert Einstein showed up at the premier. Good for him. In the movie, after many comedic scenes, the audience may wonder how this movie filled with Charlie Chaplin’s humor is to end. Chaplin’s tramp, his pockets empty, but pretending to be rich, has befriended a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) on a street corner.  He may be a bum, but he has a heart of gold.  Even more so the heart of the flower girl.  Never having seen her own beauty, she embodies modesty, innocence, and vulnerability. Through selling her flowers, she supports her grandmother with whom she lives in a simple apartment.  When she gets sick, they cannot pay the rent, and the landlord threatens to evict them.  Despite many setbacks, the bum with pluck gets the flower girl the money for the rent—and for an eye operation, before being thrown in jail. Her sight regained, the flower girl is running a bustling flower shop, searching the face of every well-heeled customer for her secret benefactor. Out of jail but down on his luck again, a shabby Chaplin wanders by the flower shop. When some street-smart boys hit him with a peashooter, he scolds them pathetically, but when he bends over to pick up a flower swept into the gutter, they yank on his ripped pants, and he chases them off.  The flower girl and her grandmother are laughing as the bum blows his nose on a rag.  He is just raising the flower to his nose when he turns and sees the girl sitting in the flower shop.  He is dumbfounded, for it is the blind girl who can now see, and then he breaks out into a broad smile.  But what is she to make of the smile of this hunched bum in tatters clutching a pathetic flower?  She laughs. “I have made a conquest,” she tells her grandmother.  Look, she points out to him, your petals are dropping, but he only beams at her.  Still sitting, she offers him a new flower, but he just stands there smiling, and she adds some change, but when she gets up, he turns to go, by now embarrassed that she can see how little he resembles the benefactor of her dreams.  She gets up to go after him, urging the change and flower on him, and he turns, smiles at her again.  He reaches for the flower, not the change.  With a gesture like “here, take it”, she steps toward him with the coin.  As her hand presses the coin into his, and her eyes fix on his quizzically, and she touches his hand, his arm, his shoulder, her touch knows before her eyes do.  She is eyeing him now, really seeing him in this moment for the first time.  “You?” she asks, her hand palming his.  Speechless, with the flower in his mouth, he nods, and she presses her hand to her bosom in disbelief.  “You can see now?” he asks.  At last the realization of who this wretched man is sweeps through her, and she is crying, and the camera fades on Chaplin, smiling, flower in his mouth. The ending of City Lights is one of the unsurpassed icons of sentimentalism.  The pathos has won out over the comedy. For all the distance between us and this silent flick, beguiling in its simplicity and tenderness of gesture, its silence and dancelike pantomime as powerful as allegory, we are moved each time we see it. I am not surprised that Martin Brest, director of Scent of a Woman, considers it the most glorious moment in movies, and that every time he thinks about it, it brings him to tears.  Me, too, I swear.  Yes, it is a fairy tale, a parable—they deserve our gratitude. But heaven forfend if tears ever become obligatory.  It is perfectly okay to be moved, uplifted, brimming with empathy and yet not shed a tear.  What better example does one need than the enduring power of Casablanca?  With careful modulation of mood, it studiously avoids tear-jerk moments yet keeps us enthralled.  Eighty years after the movie’s release, every other midlife love story is still compared to it and usually found wanting.  Bogey’s tough-guy Rick, café owner in Free French Morocco, enjoys wide popular and even critical appeal.  To Claude Rains’ corrupt Prefect of Police Louis Renault goes the immortal line, “Under that cynical shell of yours, you’re at heart a sentimentalist”—a charge that the closeted sentimentalist hardly denies, and fully reaffirms when the flame of his Paris days Ilsa Lund walks into his café with freedom fighter Viktor Laszlo. Sam reluctantly plays As Time Goes By for Ilsa, then for Rick:  “If you can play it for her you can play it for me,” Rick growls.  Suddenly the isolationist who has announced, “I stick my neck out for no one” is lost in reverie recalling “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and recoups his lost idealism first by advising a young refugee couple gambling for their lives to place their chips on number 22, and ultimately sending the refugee couple that is Ilsa and Laszlo on their way as well.  The agent of change in Rick is Laszlo, the shining white-knight idealist, who welcomes Rick back to the fight even though it means that Ilsa and Bogey will always have Paris, but nothing more.  Before we are done, Renault has called Rick a sentimentalist on four occasions. Casablanca’s appeal suggests one kind of thing that can move us in this world.  The appeal is not just that this is a tale of lost love, the eternal triangle; the appeal is certainly not merely the exotic backdrop of war-weary Morocco and the villains of choice in Hollywood, Nazi thugs.  It is not just the appeal of a superb cast rich in personality types.  It is in the play of isolationism versus idealism, personal and national. Above all it is in the dominant mood created by the masterful play of cynicism softened by sentimentalism, sentimentalism reined in by cynicism.  The one plays off against the other, and restores to sentimentalism the power it has lost as generations have wearied of excessive expression of emotion. As time goes by, Bogey’s affective, idealistic core hidden beneath a world-weary facade, his self-sacrifice as commendable as Chaplin’s, have lost little of their power. Laughter and tears aside, these are perilous times for sentimentalists, and something ought to be done about it. Deeply embedded in the cultural discourse is the common assumption that sentimentalists suffer from an affliction. They name us sentimentalists but to dismiss us: “Sentimentalists, get real.” It is time to stop oppressing sentimentalists, free them from persecution! What’s in a name like sentimentalism, really? Sentimentalism supposedly implies unwarranted optimism. To be afflicted with a sunny disposition is to be delusional, in denial, living in a fool’s paradise, cynics say.  The optimist never met a scumbag (their word not ours) he did not like. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the cynic is Scrooge, the sentimentalist his nephew, whom I confess I played in my first-ever role on stage, in the fourth grade... More than optimism, sentimentalism suggests emotionalism: feeling some things to excess, and other things not enough. And having such feelings an excessive amount of the time. The question is, who says?  Whose “excess”?  And who says being emotional is another name for not thinking clearly, as if clarity requires the repression of emotion. I have nothing against clear thinking, but are not feelings also thoughts? Is thought pure logic and nothing more? And must logic studiously avoid feelings as illogical? Is the “pure unvarnished truth”, often “coldly” spelled out, really an emotion-free zone? And is not the “cold truth” informed by some emotion, though not one that leads to feelings of warmth? To exclude emotions from a seat at the table is a bit like a corporate board being dominated by shareholders denying other kinds of stakeholders a chance to be heard. Cynically, the critics dismiss good things and big ideas with belittling and put-down epithets.  This is the old trick of substituting for a complimentary epithet a parallel but dismissive one: the dramatic is dismissed as theatrical.  To a cynical beholder, the beautiful is pretty, meaning insubstantial, unmoving, the ultimate in faint praise. Countering every sympathetic term like heartwarming or poignant are knee-jerk put-downs to suit every kind of critic: for the laconic there are romanticized, quaint, maudlin, mawkish, insipid, smarmy; for the verbose, tugging at the heartstrings, pulling out all stops, seen through rose-tinted glasses; for the food-fixated, saccharine, sappy, syrupy, treacly, gooey, cloying, sugar-coated, confection, or corn.  These critics suffer from the bane of the mixed metaphor, or what the British delightfully call a muddle: sweetness of one kind unfairly used to implicate sweetness of another. The critics who accuse others of a taste for bromides ought to wash out their own mouths. The critics who deplore everyone else’s whining had better stop their own whining first. Put another way, in life’s struggle to approach ever nearer to objective truth and proper conduct, sentimentalism is usually considered an obstruction.  But it just might be the path. Even to acknowledge the reality of a thing called proper conduct is a highly uncynical act, a highly optimistic one, a decidedly idealistic one.  I’ll take the tag “idealist” over “cynic” on my epitaph any day, and who wouldn’t?  Sentimentalism is second nature to an idealist, if not first. But not according to the self-described realists, who indulge in blind cynicism and short-sighted suspension of disbelief.  Again, like Dickens’ Scrooge. Even worse, realists rail against sentimentalists for being self-absorbed. It is the sentimentalists who deceive themselves, they say.  Who are naïve bleeding-heart liberals.  Who indulge in fantasy.  Are escapist.  Fond of lost causes.  After all, reality is not so clean-cut, and never was.  Reality is all that counts, they say. Life is all film noir and sad endings. Sentimentalists claim to feel others’ pain and shed wet tears, but those who do the real suffering, if they cry at all, cry dry tears. They hold back their tears, while sentimentalists, suffering from a low pain threshold, cry all the more.  They are wimps.  If not less than zero, they are less than they ought to be, being “reduced to tears.” Even when not weeping, sentimentalists are found guilty of a certain irresponsible vagueness. They are not in charge of reality, let alone their emotions, and react inappropriately. Allegedly lacking a precise world-view, sentimentalists are considered incapable of emotion suited to the occasion. To some ears, their feelings ring a false note. When they are accused of “false sentiment,” they are left to wonder when sentiment is unarguably “true.” Probably many more often than we realize, I would say, which the gainsayers would dismiss as “wishful thinking.” At least, in our age of female ascendancy and male vulnerability, and outing of gender stereotyping, we hear less of anyone being dissed as a doe-eyed do-gooder, all happy-talk and fluff, a Mary Poppins, a Goody Two Shoes, or a Pollyanna. Worse than vagueness may be the anti-sentimentalist’s perception of emptiness and smugness on the part of anyone who could wear a smiley-face lapel button or use a bumper sticker urging us to “Visualize world peace” or cautioning us with “I brake for animals.” So I readily admit the possibility, even prevalence, of false sentimentalism covering something else. There may be fellow travelers using the language of sentiment, and abusing it, guilty of one too many “tenderly” or “bitterly” adverbs cloying the style of gushy mushiness.  Novelist Graham Greene is said to have closed a book the instant he read the term “tenderly.” Fellow Brits Digby Anderson and Peter Mullen’s 1998 Faking It: the Sentimentalisation of Modern Society rails against a creeping sentimentality “Does this tide of sentimentality matter?  Yes, because it is essentially escapist. It involves the substitution of appearance for reality, of wishes for facts, of self-indulgence for restraint, and of victimhood for personal responsibility.” Ouch. These are perilous times for sentimentalists even without the tears because these are, indeed, perilous times for all of us. It has been decades since the era of MGM musicals, those feel-good song-and-dance extravaganzas, Shirley Temple movies or the sentimental realism of Noman Rockwell, a truly gifted artist who modestly called himself an illustrator. His skill was as fully realized as an Old Master’s.  His facility with facial expression and love of humor and gentle irony guided his hand to follow his heart in hundreds of magazine covers, calendars, and ads whose collective nostalgia is instantly recognizable. The Four Freedoms, presidential portraits, Lincoln snapshots, and civil rights works are as solid and full of gravitas and evocation of what truly makes America great as the sculpture of his Stockbridge MA neighbor Daniel Chester French.  But lately we seem to find ourselves living in an age of envy redux, of empathy in chains. Religious intolerance multiplies fruitlessly over the face of the earth. The wealthy wannabes dream of pursuing their own playthings and indulging their appetites, but not improving their character. Then there are the unseductive perils of violence and violation of the human spirit.  Violent crime may be down slightly one moment, but never down to something our grandparents could understand.  Given our abundant overexposure to human misery in all its virulent forms, we have become at once jaded and gluttons for punishment.  The drive-by shootings, ethnic hate crimes, marital beatings: the bad has us in thrall, and we are too thick-skinned to feel the pain. Perhaps, consistent with our depleted reserves of aid domestic and foreign, and with our reduced philanthropic zeal, we simply do not have enough emotional energy in reserve to spread compassion in kind. Leading the worldwide assault on sentimentalism and decency alike are the terrorists and over-armed extremists in our midst.  None of us can feel secure in our hope that the dark side of human nature will someday be in remission. Though American may strike other peoples as not only the last best hope of mankind, but also the last bastion of opportunity, the American Spirit seems to be faltering, as distrust takes root everywhere among us. We need to remember that empathy, optimism, and sentimentalism are the things the terrorists lack, not the things we must shed.  It was our arrogance and hypocrisy, not the better angels of our nature, that triggered this anti-American onslaught. After the Boston Massacre bombing of 2013, Boston emerged stronger than ever—the better angels of our nature were not undone, they were unleashed. If we succeed in putting the latest terrorist act out of our minds, placid life still seems far removed from the good old days. We have no time for joining the organizations and institutions our parents nurtured, like the PTA, the clubs, the church and synagogue, in all of which participation has fallen dramatically over recent decades. We are too busy with our careening careers, too seduced by our cells and virtual-reality isolation to participate in real-time gathering. In the progression from local community to global community, the neighborliness of basic face-to-face interaction has eroded. People get extremely exercised about the mores of people they have no wish to know personally and understand. On the plus side, I do notice that on my walks, much more than I recall in pro-Covid days, strangers walking in the other direction say hi, wave and smile. I turn to nostalgia, the elephant in the room.  Consider the Civil War reenactor movement.  At Gettysburg, in the battlefields of Northern Virginia and elsewhere, reenactors convene by the thousands, accurately attired performers in camp and in battle formation. Their commitment must owe something to a sentimental bond with our nation’s most cataclysmic moment. But getting sentimental over a false understanding of the past is worrisome.  In the hands of demagogues, it is dangerous. like Putin’s nostalgia for Russian’s alleged golden age.  Demagogues love to evoke motherlands (sorry, ladies, the guys did this) and brush off crimes against humanity. I refuse to let them give sentimentality a bad name. Healthy nostalgia acknowledges the progress of human decency, dignity, and justice that have redefined circumstances that were once considered normal as something no longer to be tolerated.  The arc of the moral universe continues to bend toward justice.  That hope is what good sentimentalism rallies around. So let’s take a nostalgic look at sentimentalism in the nineteenth century, a subject near and dear to my heart, saith the sentimentalist.  Today’s sentimentalists can put themselves in their critic’s shoes by trying to imagine what possessed their own ideological forebears of 200 years ago, when the Romantic era was born. The joy of sorrow was all the rage then, and has fallen from grace ever since. Tears once fell as uncontrollably as peony petals. A sensitivity for the pathetic, once so common, so normal, now seems absurd even to sentimentalists, and the sense in it must now be conjecturally restored by social archaeologists.  How quickly we forget that pathetic once conjured up something that was moving in its tenderness (there’s that word again) and sorrow.  But joy it was, a joy expressed freely with tears.  What is moving to us, over such a span of time, is a moving target.  Tastes change. Hard to imagine what the joy of sorrow was once like. It has been a long time since a sentimental novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin could so publicly dominate our culture. The pages she devotes to the death of angelic Little Eva must go on and on until she has dispensed locks of her hair to all bedside visitors.  Nathaniel P. Willis, who champions American scenery in the 1840s, reveals the tenacity of such a notion when he declares trees in autumn to be more beautiful than summer, just “as woman in her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life she leaned.” Given the high rate of morbidity (when the disease they called consumption was truly all-consuming), mourning and the celebration of the dead were a kind of cult, as was the need to snatch precious memory from the jaws of oblivion, whether locks of hair or a daguerreotype of a deceased child. The interest in classics, narrative history, orations, elegies, and garden cemeteries was at its zenith.  Even then, sweet was less affecting than bittersweet. Of course, it is a small leap from such pleasant sorrow for loved ones to nostalgia, the cult of wistfulness, of yearning, of longing. Places were familiar haunts, redolent with memories, associations with an imagined halcyon or golden age, a time of peace and plenty in an arcadian landscape, the stuff of pre-Civil War lithographs by Currier and Ives down to early twentieth century tinted photographs of New England byways by Wallace Nutting. Real places were compared to idealized images from the brush of landscape painters like Claude Lorraine, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt. We assume now that these early instances of nostalgia were less self-consciously delusional and escapist than their descendants.  But even they were chided for their Claude glasses, the progenitor of rose-tinted glasses, through which they viewed the real world, and romantics were immediately parodied. So laughter, too, had its say. By 1815 the comic character Dr. Syntax in search of the picturesque landscape swoons with “Vale!  O vale!”  Early nineteenth century critics already delighted in parodying the trances, heaving bosoms, gasps, fainting, and groans as exceeding a realistic canon of delicacy of feeling.  Still less can we expect nowadays to convey emotional sensitivity and vulnerability in trembling or a heaving bosom. Today non-sentimentalists may unwittingly use once-sentimental terms, but the meaning has been largely transformed.  Commonplace is the hyperbolic usage of terms like spellbinding or hypnotic or magical to describe a thing, but never to describe a person.  The Victorian writers could more safely than our own acknowledge an emotional vulnerability in terms like enchant, bewitch, enthrall.  Awe has descended into “great respect”, if not lost all dignity.  Nothing is really awful, frightful or terrible anymore, because nothing is sublime.  As the romantic temperament has withered away, reverie has been supplanted by systems of eastern meditation, and rapture and ecstasy, then so often elicited by the sublime, are now largely orgasmic or religious, take your pick. The soul itself has descended from heaven.  Feminine traits like purity, delicacy, gentleness have all but disappeared; nurturing survives. Gaiety, once suggestive of innocent joy (“to be young and gay”), has moved on to pursue other interests.  What remains of sentimental usage is now reserved for greeting cards and terms of endearment like honey and sweetie. Beneath these survivors, the archeologists of sentimentalism will unearth an entire language lost to us, the liberal use of a vocabulary of sentiment, adjectives like salutary, soothing, melancholy, mournful, blithe, blissful, felicitous, mystical, woeful, lamentable, forlorn, lachrymose. Dear to Victorians, such language is now often described as constitutionally precious and overwrought.  If their language is sometimes described as florid, sentimentalism once literally concerned itself with pretty things like flowers, and with nature. Oliver Wendell Holmes, no shrinking sentimentalist he, gave his sister-in-law a copy of Catherine Waterman’s “Flora’s Lexicon, an interpretation of the language and sentiment of flowers” published in 1841.  In it we learn that the violet symbolizes modesty because it has “the bashful timidity of the nymph.”  And on and on. Such poetic association begins with the plant-names themselves, wildflowers like Queen Anne’s Lace or Virgin’s Bower or Maidenhair or Lady Slipper.  Likewise, even recently introduced exotic daylilies with subtle colors and petal contours may be given names like Winsome Passion or Summer Reverie. Confirming the age-old feminization of flora, many girls’ given names themselves are floral.  We have to remind ourselves that this is so for names like Cherry, Dahlia, Daisy, Fern, Ginger, Hazel, Heather, Holly, Iris, Ivy, Jasmine, Laurel, Lily, Myrtle, Olive, Rose, Rosemary, and Violet.  Why these flora and no others, like Gardenia, Hibiscus, and Orchid, who can say. The words once used to describe the natural landscape seem quaintly antique now: rill, nook, dell, dale, meadow, dingle, glade, knoll, hollow, rill, sylvan vale, copse, grove, grotto, lagoon, strand, haven, isle, greenwood, even scenery.  Most suggest an inviting spatial intimacy that seems at the core of the sensibility, and owes much to the texture of England. The romance of place-naming was once epidemic, adorning picturesque scenery. The renowned park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, whose landscapes evoked the picturesque, was fond of place-names like the Ramble, the Playstead, the Fens, the Arborway, Ellicottdale, Fellsmere, Nethermead, Lullwater, Ambergill Falls, and Greensward. Squam Lake in New Hampshire inspired camp names like Rockywold and Deephaven.  Everglades, if we stop and think about it, conveys the same magic. We are not infrequently reminded that people once named their houses, not just grand estates, with poetic names, like Tanglewood, Glendale, and Stonehurst. Mark Twain’s Hartford address was Nook Farm, a nook being a bend in the river there. In England, the spatially intricate Lakes District, whose romantic tradition of place-names has charmed legions of tourists on the trail of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter beguiles us with names like Ullswater, Langdale, Bow Fell, Grasmere, Ambleside, Windermere. So we may think it all began in England, and spread to America as it did to places like Bermuda, but I suspect other cultures share the zeitgeist. Perhaps earlier, in China a house that was more compound than pond might still be called Willow Pond Garden.  In both Taiwan and America, you can find a Whispering Pines Inn. And of course, boat names bring out all kinds of tastes, romantic among them. A tour-boat at Niagara is still called Maid of the Mists. Other place-words once suggested something more sinister: beetling cliff, bald pate, blasted crag, howling wilderness, barren waste. Place-names like Purgatory Chasm or Devil’s Den or Norman’s Woe lack power now to remind us that all was not sweetness and light in the hardscrabble world of yore.  We forget the canon of romanticism whereby rural landscape beauty was either picturesque or sublime but not both.  A mountain waterfall or a vine-clad bower were picturesque, but a limpid pool, a sheet of water on a still lake or a rainbow were sublime.  The distinction was far from perfect.  In our blasé times sublime seems overwrought, and we in our infinite correctness assert that everyone then was on the lookout for sublimity in both the awesome power of nature’s untamed wild side and the serene repose of nature’s placid side.  Of course, the commercialization of some sights, like Niagara, may have something to do with our distrust of sublimity; even sights like the Grand Canyon saved in national parks must be seen alone at dawn to avoid the crowding out of sublimity. In less ravaged times, sights spoke more eloquently to listeners who were better schooled.  On a romantic ramble, an observer well-read in classical mythology and ancient history, say in Ovid, or at least Shakespeare and poets ever since, could once upon a time imagine Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake at Squam in New Hampshire, druidical oaks at Beaver Brook Reservation, and the haunts of wood nymphs, dryads, and naiads among fern-clad rocks, mossy cushions, and hoary beech groves in the White Mountains. It has been a long while since anyone in these parts has named a ledge the Old Man of the Mountain or a boulder Squaw Rock. But out West Steamboat Spring’s Elk Mountain goes by the name of the Sleeping Giant.  The metaphorical cross-linkage of landscape and human beings is a meaning that is largely lost in the mist in our un-nostalgic lives. Though we still have the metaphor earth mother, lesser personifications of individual land and water features have long since become truisms.  To describe places, we unthinkingly use terms like head, brow, mouth, tongue, neck, shoulder, arm, elbow, finger, leg, foot, or toe, and barely resonate to the ghost of a metaphor.  When we describe a person as willowy long-limbed, or when we hear the loaded word crotch, we no longer think of trees. Much more has faded away since poet Robert Frost compares the snow-clad suppleness of white birches to “girls on hands and knees that throw their hair over their heads to dry in the sun.” Metaphors provide a bond between different realms, another source for feeling connected, for expressing empathy, perhaps compassion. We ought to resist the temptation to assume that metaphors rely on common cultural conventions, that in a world where cultural diversity is on the ascendancy, metaphors are necessarily the early casualties.  If Yale literary critic Harold Bloom was profoundly pessimistic about the future of literature, much of his concern was that the death of metaphor is not metaphorical. Back in the day, places at a certain moment or in a certain season were once invested with human moods, and inferentially what were once thought of as strictly female moods at that, stereotypical though the traits may have been, like capricious, charming, sweet.  Sweet Auburn was the earlier name for the soft-contoured landscape that would later become a much-revered garden cemetery, Mount Auburn. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace in Atlanta is in another Sweet Auburn. A place could be also be described as happy or sad, smiling or frowning, laughing or weeping, inviting or forbidding, soothing or oppressive. “Earth laughs in flowers,” writes Emerson.  For Timothy Dwight, at Crawford Notch “the hoary cliffs rising with proud supremacy frowned artfully on the world below.” A scene could blush; there could be a flush of autumnal color.  A river could be capricious, a stream jocund, a plain delicate, a hillock dainty.  A rain could be gentle.  A valley could be inhabited by a noble forest, an oak or elm could be stately or wizened, a hornbeam trunk could writhe and twist, and firs and hemlocks frowning and somber.  Clouds of the happiest forms could dance overhead. Plots were once reinforced, we would say marred, by storms outside mirroring inner turmoil, forebear of today’s cinematic cliché of tears streaming down a man’s face seen through rain streaming down a windshield. But ascribing human behavior to place is, after all, bald-faced projection, as psychologists call it, or what Victorian literary critic John Ruskin calls the “pathetic fallacy” (their usage of pathetic, not ours). Still, I will side with poets Wordsworth, Shelly, and Tennyson and poetic artist-illustrator Arthur Rackham any day. Rackham’s gnarled tree trunks sometimes seem goblinesque in their eyeholes, nose-branches, and gaping mouths, a trick that translated well into forest scenes in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz and Walt Disney’s Snow White. Rackham’s American fellow traveler, N. C. Wyeth is secure enough in his athletic manliness and passion to admit to literally embracing nature: “I feel so moved sometimes toward nature that I could almost throw myself face down into a ploughed furrow‑ ploughed furrow understand! I love it so.”  Look at his language closely and you find his mistress: “To paint a landscape wherever one is endeavoring to represent with passionate emotion the hot molten gold of sunlight, the heavy sultry distances and the burning breath of soft breezes, one returns home in the evening proud and happily sympathetic in sweaty clothes and burned arms and back.  To feel thus completes one’s sense of identification and unity with nature.” And clearly his prodigy son Andrew, reverential in his fifteen-year homage to Helga, subtly fuses her form with nature in a common brush technique to render the fur and the hair that adorn her, and the fronds and grass that adorn the earth. Likewise, people could take on traits from the natural world: a disposition could be sunny or misty, a mood stormy, a brow furrowed, an imagination barren, sympathy could gush, tears flow, a body could be ripe or withering away.  A blushing cheek could be a field of roses. A promising man could be felled or cut down in his prime.  Even now we cling to a cliché like rugged individualist.  Conversely, if there was such a thing as virgin forest, the land could also be violated.  In an age that was acutely aware that the ravages of man were fast overtaking those of nature, Paradise Lost haunted the romantic temperament.  A hillside could be described as denuded, a landscape pockmarked or bruised.  A New Deal artist painted a dustbowl landscape, the contours taking on the form of a raped woman with slashed throat.  By now we call a landscape raped without a trace of shock value. The idealized male form once had something of a foothold on the language of landscape.  The sensibility found in geological truth anatomical truth as well: if fertile soil was a skin, ledges were sinews and lineaments. Medford, Massachusetts, historian Charles Brooks asserts in 1855, “The earth looks best with its beard.” Beech trunks could be described as muscular, geysers, cascades and pinnacles thought of as phallic. A wave could caress a beach, and the sea or an island could be vexed. Springs were thought of as female. In less strident times, it was the ordered, reposeful landscape that gave rise to a sensual aesthetic of female form, a comparison of the soft contours and secret places of both that betrayed a sensibility that was romantic and reverential, possibly light-hearted as well. A “dimpled stream” is of course not overtly sexist, but Milton in Comus is probably thinking female. Knowing something about landscape mysticism, transcendentalists could observe that what the eye is to the face, open water is to the landscape: limpid, wet, reflective, blue, brown, green. Thoreau says as much in Walden: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.” Nathaniel Willis rhapsodizes over “the pellucid bosom” of Lake George.  No match for Willis’ delicacy, early explorers called a jagged mountain range in Wyoming Les Grands Tetons, and buttock-like protuberances buttes, Native Americans called Mount Rainier the “Fountain Breast of Milk White Waters.”  For Victorians landscape could have a bosom or dimple as much as a fetching miss in risqué literature could have a rosebud, a bush, a sacred grove, a secret bower, or a perfumed garden.  Colette calls the lush upper lip of a courtesan her Cupid’s bow.  In Poros, Greece, my Greek host once offered me a room with a view of the Sleeping Woman, the sunset silhouette of the mountains near Epidaurus that formed a reclining woman from chin to bosom to abdomen to knees and shins.  Mother Earth or earthy mother, both can be said to undulate in soft supple contours.  Indeed, for lovers locked in embrace and lost in passion, the outside world ceases to exist, and their bodies are the four corners of their shared world. But much survives to legitimize the power of sentiment-based rhetoric.  Lincoln used such language poetically and sparingly in such phrases as mystic chords of memory and better angels of our nature. Much of the Gettysburg Address imparts the emotion so dear to sentimentalists without their verbal excesses. For them, the Address itself is hallowed ground.  We have lost the taste for the sentiment and classical excesses of the main speaker of the day, Edward Everett. Much was made of allegory, of symbolism. Coincidence is a perceptual invention of our own scientific era. For allegory and symbolism, we must turn to political cartoons where the shorthand stock imagery of elephants, donkeys, and peace pipes still works.  We cry touché, critics cry cliché. Alert readers of Shakespeare will recognize the selfsame mirroring of universe and protagonist in Macbeth, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The phenomenon in other cultures like the Chinese is the principle of correspondence.  Elements which we would find disparate their true believers considered to be related, ordered in universal harmony.  Woman and man, yin and yang, hot and cold, sea and mountain...sound familiar? Plots were also marred by the author’s facile reliance on melodrama, fatalism, and doom, forebear of today’s supernaturalism. The protagonists in the early nineteenth-century sentimental novels were wooden, good or evil, the heroine full of the milk of human kindness, the cad ruined forever. Lovers’ emotions sprang from the breast rather than the gut, people were made for each other, but not for our real world or our escapist one either.  If a woman wept, her interlocutor who of course worshipped her would track her tear’s fall from cheek to bosom; even, in what must surely be subliminally erotic, kiss the tears off the weeper like pearly dew drops on the rose.  The excess of such patently unrealistic detail may have created an exquisite fantasy world of delicacy of feeling that readers longed to linger in, but reality it could never claim to be. Were Dickens alive today, serious critics would dismiss A Tale of Two Cities as mush, its plot as contrived.  It has been a long time since Sydney Carton offered himself up to the guillotine for his look-alike saying, “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.  It is a far, far better place I go to than I have ever been.”  Yet the emotional and story-line equivalent is alive and well in Harlequin Books.  Radical feminists do not read romantic novels for pleasure, but those novels fly off the shelf, and their readers have heard about liberation, taken from the movement whatever makes sense for them, and still willingly escape to the world of sentimentalism.  Though forbidden the vocabulary of sentimentalism, millions read romantic novels and enjoy three-hanky movies, and not all of them are women. Some of the writers are men writing under a female pseudonym. It is not the rosy scenarios and happy endings, but the compassion along the way, that must never be forgotten. Having said that, I admit I still like happy endings. As a landscape architect, I am moved by the vision of immersion in an intimate dell where one comes upon a manifestation of compassion that inspires one to take heart and take action, for environmental and social justice. (C) Thomas M. Paine 2024

Our backstories began generations before us, and however much of that tale we think we know, there is more fascination lying in wait. We all have unsolved mysteries waiting to be rediscovered. Alex Haley was onto something with his seminal book Roots, The Saga of an American Family (1976), revealing his long forgotten African forebear, Kunta Kinte, sold into slavery at age seventeen in the Gambia. Nowadays, on PBS’ Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates surprises celebrity guests by revealing their unexpected forebears. On one episode Actor Ted Danson learns that he is descended from seventeenth century feminist and reformer Anne Hutchinson. Genealogy is on a tear right now. Ancestry.com is a $1.4 billion company with 20 million people in its DNA network, testing their DNA and 3.5 million subscribers building their family trees online. But then what? Genealogy can take you pretty far back, but, in another sense, how far does it take you? It almost teases you—giving you the bare bones but not fleshing out the person in the round. It may be replete with information, but the genealogical template hardly makes for an easy read, let alone a page turner.  For one thing, the raw data of dates occupies a different part of the brain than the emotional affect of the underlying stories. And that is where we all want to be. Genealogy has come a long way, but still, for some reason, the documenting of one’s family roots is called a family tree, though a tree metaphor seems more apt to describe the branches of the descendants that spring from those roots. No biggie. I caught the family history bug early, in my elementary school years. I’ll admit, Dad had made it easy—when I was eight, he gave each of his four children a copy of a family history, Paine Ancestry, written in 1912, in which he had inserted numerous illustrations of forebears. He had generously done the same for my aunts and uncles. The illustrations—sometimes of portraits that this extended family was lucky to have, some from the seventeenth century—brought these men and women to life.  But they remained mute.  The question I have been asking myself of late is, If I could invite them over for dinner, what stories would they tell? In that ponderous tome of family history, I learned that an ancestor had been on the Mayflower. For a fifth-grade Thanksgiving event, I helped paint a mural of Pilgrims and Indians and modestly mentioned I had a Pilgrim ancestor named Stephen Hopkins. Not every kid had that, and who was I to boast about something, especially because, I have since come to realize over time, it was something I had nothing to do with. Now I have begun to feel that forebears with uplifting stories to tell are to be shared. If they are hard for non-descendants to think of as family, think of them as family friends. Those whose example deeply moves us belong to all of us. They can inspire us. In my tribe the womenfolk seemed to outlast the men. They deserved to, no doubt, back in a world that denied them equal stature. My grandfathers died before I was four. I loved family visits with my widowed grandmothers and great aunts. One great aunt pointed out how the gaze of her grandmother in the portrait on the wall seemed to follow you around the room. By the time I was in my teens, whenever I was in the presence of a grandmother or great aunt or a nonagenarian who had known my long departed great grandfather, I found myself asking questions, almost interviewing the poor soul. I would immediately write down what I had heard on notepaper and store the sheets in a folder, for what use I had yet to conceptualize. In those notes, my role as family archivist began. Still, I needed the framework that genealogy provides. Already in my teens, I was beating a path to legendary Goodspeed’s Bookshop in Boston, where I bought their ancestral fan-chart, a 2 by 3 foot roll on which you could fill in ten generations of grandparents. For the earliest generations there was only room to fill in the name and the year of birth and death, and that was it. It was hardly the room they deserved. Then along came Goodspeed’s folio sized books labeled “ancestral record” on the spine, allowing a four lined box per person. I had room to note their occupation or civic participation or military service. I could add information about any surviving image of the person, or of a place where they lived, or note if there was an image of the person, or whether their homeplace still survived.  There was room outside the box to record extras. Mum’s side of the family tree was hard to fill in, and not just because she lacked a big Nash ancestry book. She had been dutifully charting her tree on notepaper, painstakingly copied from a relative’s notes, since photocopying had yet to emerge. Mum’s tree posed a problem.  Her great grandmother, wife of James Nash, was known merely as Elizabeth, and no dates of birth and death were given. His parents were known, but why not his wife? That left a huge blank going back from the early nineteenth century, unlike any of Mum’s other ancestral lines. To try to fill in such gaps, I made visits to the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, the premier such group in the country, now known online as American Ancestors.org.  New Englanders, especially Bostonians, have been more obsessed with family history than just about anyone else except the Mormons, but for secular reasons. The New England Historic Genealogical Register had been publishing family genealogies for over a century. They would start with some progenitor, and track all the descendants, using numerical system to keep generations straight. Typically the records delved into essentials—full dates, children, place of residence, profession, military service, other marriages, but left me tantalized for more. Meanwhile I was compiling images of the houses where forebears had lived. I even collected nineteenth-century stereographs of landscapes and townscapes known to them.   I collected copies of seventeenth ancestral signatures as these came available online. Pure gold was to find that a forebear had been published—in a book or periodical—and find a copy on ebay. Their words told a lot more about themselves than some dates or some formal portrait or photograph. Old movies from the 1920s-40s revealed my grandparents enjoying leisure times in exotic places, alas with no soundtrack. Sometimes, from the era when talkies were being developed, recordings were made of the actual voice of a public figure—like Teddy Roosevelt. My many times great uncle Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s delicious voice survives online.  No offspring for him; he belongs to us all. As for pre-1935 recordings for our regular relatives, forget it. What I would not give to hear Lincoln’s voice. Photographs have at least haiku stories to share. I was charmed to find that two of Lynn’s great grandparents William Draffin Sharp and Alice Sutherland, growing up in rural Kentucky, had been photographed as a pair at least three times—as newlyweds, in middle age, and old age, always sitting side by side—arm in arm in 1870, elbows touching in 1890s, and separated by the framed photo of a lost grown son in 1905. I wondered why such a human thing as a married couple should be so rare in Boston images of that era. Were they trend- setters in Kentucky?  I wonder why smiles were so rare in the poses back then as well. When I found an 1861 carte de visite photograph of my great great grandmother Hannah Farnham Lee smiling across the ages, at age eighty, I sensed another haiku story. I once hopped in a cab in Boston and asked the driver if he minded me asking where he was from, and he said, not at all, he was from Haiti, so I volunteered that my great great great grandmother (Hannah with the smile) had written a biography of a man from Haiti who had come to New York as a slave 1800, supported his now destitute masters until the day they died and as a free man and thriving hairdresser became a leader in New York’s Black community. Pierre Toussaint was his name. At which point the driver said, my name is Albert Toussaint, and my grandfather in Chicago has a copy of that old book! Me and my big mouth. Toussaint, one of the leading Blacks in early 19th c.  New York City, is up for canonization. Indeed, Hannah’s brother in law had written, “I have known Christians who were not gentlemen or gentlemen who were not Christians—but one man I know who is both—and that man is Black.” Years after I had learned that Stephen Hopkins was a Mayflower Pilgrim, I learned that he was actually not one of the “saints” seeking religious freedom, but was a “stranger” offering his practical skills to the religious community, and sometimes got into trouble for selling liquor on the sabbath. When I discovered that Stephen Hopkins had a much more colorful story to tell—if only through other people’s words—I was hooked.  He was the only Mayflower passenger who had lived in the New World previously. On his way to Jamestown in 1609, he had been shipwrecked in Bermuda! During the colonists’ months there building a new ship, he had advocated self-government on the island and been court martialed for mutiny and nearly executed, only to be pardoned. In Jamestown he got to know Powhatan, and see John Rolfe, his fellow Bermuda survivor, fall in love with Pocahontas. Meanwhile news of the shipwreck inspired Shakespeare’s immortal last play, The Tempest. The Mayflower Compact which Hopkins signed arose because of circumstances similar to what he had experienced in Bermuda. None of that was known to the author of the Paine Ancestry. After first cousins, my son and I were separately DNA tested by 23andme. When we shared results, I noted evidence that may have explained the gap in the Nash family tree—that the elusive Elizabeth was possibly of native American descent. Suddenly the features I had taken for granted in her portrait jumped out at me as very Native American, as did the features of two of her grandchildren from photos taken in the 1880s. Here was a potential family story, embarrassing no more, that begged further investigation. I once wrote a novel about an adopted Asian American in search of her roots in Taiwan. Her stories were there, waiting to be discovered.  And if they were poignant stories, she would feel a kind of cross-generational, even multi-ethnic empathy. I was channeling some deep-seated impulse we probably all share more than we know, to feel connected to those that came before us, and share our stories, and discover the surprising ways that they intersect.  And ultimately discover that we are all family. In all the ways I have illustrated here, your backstory awaits your exploration. Don’t put it off too long, or you may never get to pure gold. The search is the thing. And there will always be room for more nuggets shedding light on what Henry Louis Gates calls “the DNA of American culture.”

I wonder if the rules of the visual game might be changing. Just as the experience of the eyes has always crowded out that of the other senses, increasingly 2-D experience is crowding out 3-D experience, and may well dominate human experience from here on out. We are deluged in paper, and locked onto cellphone screens, computer screens, TV screens, and movie screens. Even in galleries, the experience of art is rarely sculptural, and in theaters, unless you have a seat within a few rows of the stage, the experience is almost as flat. The thousands of 2-D images and words that our eyes now absorb daily make up much of our active daily experience and much of what we know. But is this really knowing? How much does 3-D matter? We seem to lack much of a vocabulary to talk about depth with a depth of feeling or understanding. Are we missing something? 1: Depiction People only became aware of 3-D in the early nineteenth century with the investigation, or call it discovery, of bifocalism, the year before the invention of photography in 1839. The notion of depth perception was born. Photography and stereo converged and stayed linked, if not exactly equal cultural forces, ever after. Within fifteen years, mass stereo photography—pairs of photographs, one for each eye—allowed the three dimensionality of space to be depicted and thereby experienced vicariously for the first time by non-professionals. A view over a mountainside could suggest plunging depth. A vista down a corridor hit you with the force of a train barreling through a tunnel. If depth added vividness and vitality to the perception of the subject, then perception of depth became an enjoyable end in itself. All it took was a viewer in hand, something like opera glasses, and presto, you were there, in the thick of it. From the next 150 years, if you wanted into the stereo world, you had to pass through the looking glass of viewer/goggles. And that gateway getaway has always limited the 3-D experience to being a fad instead of a second-nature cultural cornerstone like photography, or stereo sound. The journey of stereo depiction has been jolted with fits and starts, from the first craze in the 1850s, through the waves of popularity in the monochromatic and sometimes colorized era over the next eight decades, the eclipse by cinema despite occasional 3-D productions in the 1950s, the modest revival through Viewmaster and Realist color slides, to the more recent revival of goggle-wearing 3-D moviegoers and IMAX. Now we have the latest 3-D fad, auto-stereo. Train your eyes, and they will see the stereo where only viewers helped before. Full disclosure: experiencing 3-D without a viewer is only a little easier than speaking in a foreign accent on the first go. While color and form theorists and art and movie critics abound, depth theorists and 3-D critics are hopelessly outgunned. Nothing in 3-D history exactly suggests a deep-seated biological imperative to exercise our 3-D muscles lest they atrophy. However, looking at stereo was once relegated to eye therapy, until even that proved to be a fad. 3-D has been a parlor craze, a fad, a curiosity, but only for some unregenerate souls, an obsession. For them, it is so obvious why they love 3-D that they may not mind that they lack the words to convey the reasons for their enthusiasm, and that is too bad. My own obsession has shown fits and starts. I first became a fan of stereo photography the moment I put a twin lens Viewmaster viewer up to my eyes at age ten in the late 1950s. I was transfixed, smitten, you name it, by the sense of space hiding in snippets of emulsion, seven pairs to a reel, of Japanese tea plantations, Dutch windmills, butterflies on flowers, and locomotives. Soon “lenticular” (washboard) cards turned up in cereal boxes and as postcards allowing 3-D or animation but not both, and never elevated to an art form. Colored slides (1938-2008) of blessed memory could not compete with digital imagery in the limited 2-D imagery world, It was not until 1967 that I began taking stereographic slides.. Harvard architecture student Randolph Langenbach introduced me to taking slide pairs from two vantage points an eye-pair apart. Unless I used a camera capable of simultaneous exposure, I had to avoid moving objects of all kinds, for movement would mar the effect. The old New England mills Ranny and I were looking at served well enough, and the movement of foliage and water was quaint in its own way. Ranny told me that combining polarized lenses and lenticular screens allowed for group experience through projection, but I contented myself with two hand-held single slide viewers. Soon I experimented with a 200-millimeter telephoto lens, moving five feet apart between shots. I did not hear the term for what I had discovered for myself—hyperstereo—for 25 years. In Europe I discovered the pleasures of Gothic vaulted ceilings, domed Hagia Sofia, shafts of light through space. If the reality of stereo seemed ideal for recording the experience of outstanding architectural space, I also began to understand that the hyper-reality of stereo created its own longing of a more intense and personal kind. Stereo was sensual. I confess that I first noticed these special powers in Bernini's sculpture, the Rape of Persephone. No merely flat photograph could show how deeply his rough hands press into the soft flesh of her thigh. That vividness is what arouses our empathy for the victim. Over time I came to appreciate that only stereo can record the experience of perceiving the contours of soft surfaces, so essential to our sensory experience, so elusive in mere two-dimensional transcription. In 1969 John Tatlock, a cousin who happened to be a collector of Victoriana, introduced me to stereopticons and antique stereographs. The following summer, when I was working in Washington D.C., I came across my first stereograph cards in an antique store window in Georgetown. Uncannily, one was of Weston, Mass., my hometown, another of the Crystal Palace, a favorite landmark in architectural history. So I bought them, and from then on stayed on the lookout for more at antique shops or flea markets. Stereographs were cheap, at prices as low as under a dime each, and offered the most vivid window on the exciting decades preceding the cinematic-color photo era, but selection in the antique and used book shops I visited was limited. Few of my early stereographs were in mint condition. Soon I owned a stereoscope or two as well. Initially I focused on views of New England landscapes and townscapes. For example, on the front, two unprepossessing clumps of trees as close as identical twins, and like them visibly different only in small ways, but through the viewer they combine to reveal, in their midst, the bowl of a glacial kettle hole. It is a masterpiece of composition in depth. On the back, the card reads, Hiram D. Adams, View Artist. Exactly so. I bought it early, and unlike lesser stereo snapshots it stands the test of time. The exotic image also had its appeal; perhaps my first is of a sitar player beside the Lake of Kashmir. Simultaneously, training as a landscape architect, I acquired first-hand experience in a purely utilitarian use of stereo in aerial photographic interpretation, in which a pair of high-altitude black and white photos are viewed through lenses, and terrain stands out in bold relief—canyons, fingers of ledge, smooth drumlins, a mosaic of evergreen and deciduous forest cover. Here was hyperstereo yielding information not even available from the airplane window itself. In two extended work-stays in England with side trips to continental Europe in the early seventies, I took hundreds of slide pairs. Why I am not sure, but after that I gradually put aside stereo slide photography. I was mimicking the cyclicality that had always been inherent in stereo. My big photo-op of the 1970s was a year in Asia, but I shot just a few stereographs. Shame on me! All those Chinese and Japanese gardens! I should have asked countless Asians in Taiwan and Bali to indulge me. Nevertheless I did keep collecting stereographs in a steady trickle over the years. Only in the nineties did I learn about antiquarian-photogaphica shows and started attending. For the first time I was face-to-face with actual dealers in stereograph cards by the hundreds, thousands. And Viewmasters and Realist 3-D slides. I stayed with the older cards. I was in love with the you-are-there window not on, but into, the exotic world, distant in both time and place, of the nineteenth century. True, the prices were now five to ten times higher than two decades earlier, averaging three dollars per view, good ones ten times that. The trickle grew into a seasonal torrent. Becoming more systematic, I collected stereographs of foreign architecture, landscapes, sculpture and figures, including Asian, and could get fussy about the condition. I had my wish list of favorite world-class sites, but always came away most pleased with the totally unexpected surprises. Someday maybe the long-sought views of Petra or Rodin sculpture would surprise me. When I resumed taking stereo slide pairs, I focused on the nearest and dearest: gardens of my design and transformative landscapes, evanescent effects of light, the people in my life. I discovered that doing the cha-cha, or using a single lens camera to take a pair of slides in sequence, provided stereo magic that two-lens stereo cameras could not: a sense of fractured time, a blur that infused otherwise still images with a sense of animation. My timing coincided with the latest craze, autostereo: computer images of one thing that hid 3-D images of something entirely different, discernable to the naked eye. Gone were the goggles. Suddenly, there were fantasy images, and the only gateway was 3-D. I finally got to see 3-D projection indoors; these were still images. I wore the polarized goggles, and felt slightly queasy even with the softness of dissolve transitions. Some images were evocative, others merely a good opportunity spoiled. I sat far back, and learned for the first time that the farther away you are, the more depth is drawn out to you. All the while, I was wondering where our 2-D world was heading. 2: Decline As I say, ever since the world was discovered to be round, our eyes have been going flat. Most of us spend hours of our waking days reading, working on the computer, going to movies, watching TV, seeing vicariously, hardly tapping our bifocal intelligence. It is as if one eye were a spare for the other. We seem to spend energy converting (or correcting) 3-D images into flat ones, just as when we go to the movies and sit way to one side we convert the distorted oblique rectangle into the memory of a proper rectangle. In the real world we take 3-D for granted. Bifocal vision may have been born of necessity—a space perception tool for orienting us in a hostile world—and the tool is still useful that way in the real world, I should say merely useful, so little do we take note of it in everything we do as we navigate through our chores, even when we go for a walk, or play tennis. For most of us real-world 3-D is held in less esteem than the wonder of 2-D’s vicarious pleasures. Something about the planarity of 2-D delights us. It is a form of simplification of reality, even of abstraction. A perfectly toned photograph of a paper bag in all its glorious sfumato shadow and highlights delights us with its virtuosity as the bag itself could never hope to. Since the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux, we humans have marched steadily down a path of trying to understand our universe by translating what we see in the round onto flat surfaces. The space that we so vividly experience in the stereo of binocular vision, by necessity loses something in translation onto rock walls, clay tablets, papyrus, silk, paper, whatever the latest two-dimensional medium may be. For all our addiction to them, these 2-D depictions are mere shadows of 3-D reality. And yet without the invention—or perhaps discovery (in some accidental camera obscura of a cave opening) of 2-D representation, perhaps 3-D representation would never have emerged, for it was all about a field of vision—rectangle or circle or whatever shape—containing a view. And of course language is a poor proxy for spatial experience. For starters, languages are universally symbolized in 2-D systems of symbols like this alphabet. The great discoveries of graphic expression, alphabets and symbols, are so embedded in human experience that we cannot imagine life without its 2-D aids. 2-D is certainly workable; some would say its invention was a revolutionary achievement for human progress. But things kept “progressing” until at some point, to some of us, they seem to have gotten out of hand, and now our experience is becoming just a bit flat because of them. And that goes double for our recall: close your eyes and imagine a 3-D image. You may have trouble, although I have to imagine that we humans once found this to be effortless, second nature. Eyes closed, you finally come up with a 3-D memory for sure.. The stereo effect of the memory may well be carried in a dual file of the two images that make up the 3-D image. And yet as I imagine 3-D effects made up in my mind, I also can feel the depth as being in 3-D, not a 2-D surrogate. I cannot speak for other languages with authority, but English, for all its richness, is hardly the repository for adjectives or verbs to describe the many ways we see space, or space’s opposite, the objects within it or that define it. We almost have to borrow from the other senses, especially tactile words that suggest textures, or words pregnant with Jungian symbolism, but even so words fail, as they do in so many other kinds of experience, to describe common everyday bifocal experience. But now this 3-Dissing is getting out of hand. We know the very concept of “3-D” is in decline when its most active usage now refers to the latest computer game, wherein a remote or roving mouse produces movement though an intricate, but still 2-D world of the monitor screen. Compare the fortunes of more recent developments in stereo sight and sound. On the one hand, sound is way out in front. We are well past settling for monaural: quadraphonic and surround-sound are replacing stereo, transforming our cars and family rooms. This seems to take hold with a craziness that is beyond mere craze. On the other hand, we are baffled by the strange ride of holography. This laser technology has given us truly 3-D forms that can leap off a planar surface at us, or even move as we move by them. Holographic color can be extraordinarily real, or highly stylized. Subjects can even be living beasts or people, as long as you could get them to sit for a fussy laser beam. Holographic technology is still too cumbersome a medium for snapshots out in the real world, and not much headway is being made to overcome this impasse. In a way holography is caught in the same awkward, largely studio-bound circumstances of daguerreotypes 150 years ago. Manufacturers of the special glass that holograms required ceased production. Sadly, the thrill was gone before it ever had a chance to transcend novelty into high art. As I write this I glance off for a moment through a window at bare tree branches and recapture the experience of depth before heading back to the 2-D world on my computer screen. I close one eye, the world goes flat, harder to make out, the tree branches are reduced to an indecipherable tangle, and when I open my eye again, I am grateful, and shudder to think what life would be like without its 3-D interludes. One might think that 3-D perception is most essential when we are moving—walking, driving, riding, snowboarding, and once again face primal threats to our bodily integrity, or risk causing the same harm to others. But oddly, the sensation of movement crossing our eyes trumps depth perception. Close an eye, and move the head, and the movement of the objects we see in space still defines that space for us, although in a simplistic way. The less motion, the more we rely on stereo alone to read the space, and the more we notice stereo. In a motionless world, stereoscopic vision is all we have to disentangle the chaos and keep us out of trouble. So it is that in stills, more than in movies, the nature of 3-D is clearest and the experience of 3-D is purest. In a world glutted with 2-D expression, sooner or later an interest in 3-D expression will have to be taken seriously, and its practitioners, like serious 2-D photographers and computer graphic artists, committed to a profound new sense of artistry. I take the optimistic view that our media will continue to evolve until they allow us to reconnect with our world as round. 3-D is that much closer to spatial truth, and sooner or later, this truth too shall come to pass. 3-D is nothing less than the secular religion of those who thank God for bifocal vision. And it may well be that 3-D as art-form will lead The Way. 3: Desire As I first discovered in my youthful hobby, bifocalism does not end in utilitarian servitude. Leave it to the human species to discover that 3-D is also an end in itself, a sensory delight, an aesthetic experience. We may not have the words for it that we have for other forms of sensory experience, but there is such a thing as spatial pleasure, a thing to be nourished if we could discover the aesthetic principles that explain the beauty of stereo. As I say, motion confuses things, so what follows concentrates on stills. The first principle I offer consists in this irony: that we appreciate stereo most when we see it, too, vicariously. We are most likely to appreciate the beauty of 3-D when we view 3-D art, mostly still photography, but also including movies, holography, and computer-generated imagery. Stereo perception is at its most intense when there is no motion to distract us. Simply sitting still, with motion far from our minds, our gaze and viewpoint fixed, we are free to derive pure unadulterated pleasure revealed in every detailed spatial relationship. We may well call stereo stills studies in fermata. In contemplating such works it is as if we have power to stop time, like the protagonist in Nicholson Baker's Fermata (fermata being the prolongation of a musical moment), so that we might engage in a lingering voyeurism. There is no movement to hurry us along from one moment to the next. What we have, if the work is great, is a liminal moment, a moment of truth. Vicarious stereo, in turn, reinforces our consciousness of real-time stereo, and in so doing stirs up in us, in our jaded blasé lives, a sense of childlike wonder as if we are reconnecting with our world with fresh eyes. So what is this pleasure that 2-D fermata cannot impart? Our eyes glance over a plane in quite a different way from glancing through a space like an implied sphere or rectangular solid. Each spot we focus on causes all others in a different depth to go out of focus until our eyes move and we focus on them, one at a time, in the seamless process of recalibration that we call stereo vision. Whatever lies at a distance greatly different from what it is that we focus our eyes on is seen double, creating a ghost or transparency that energizes one eye or the other. One eye or the other dominates at a given moment, and the dominance switches back and forth. As soon as we see the ghosting effect, we seek to eliminate it by refocusing on the offending surface. It is that dance, that interactivity with depth, that is so compelling in 3-D and so missing in 2-D, and so essential in our real world. Once we have been there, 2-D images can never again compete with 3-D in-our-face immediacy and immersion. By comparison, most 2-D images seem to be stand-offish. Of course, we love 2-D art, but we love the parallel universe of 3-D just as much, because it is so much nearer to spatial truth, and those of us who are wired to worship 3-deism place high hopes in its future as an art form. A 2-D surface, after all, always remains a surface. More intense than the interplay on the picture plane of figure and ground, in 3-D we must talk instead of figure and space. Indeed, in many 3-D images it is not a figure on a pedestal but the space itself that is so vividly recorded—and so unrecordable in 2-D. Indeed, many such images seem boring in 2-D and only become art when seen in 3-D. In its vividness, 3-D almost bristles with tactile temptations. When we pore over stereos of sculpture, portraits, the human figure, and all living things, our eyes are our hand's proxy. Looking in from the edge of a space spread before us, in the middle of which a figure extends, projects, bulges, we visually touch, even caress the object. Like voyeurs, we are there, yet unseen. Our eyes travel across the face, over an abdomen, down the leg, feeling the concavity of a hollow cheek or the spherical shape of breast or buttock as clearly as the outline. More than that, we can run our eyes over contours too subtle to be seen without stereo, whether on the human body or in the landscape. Stereo links the sense of sight to touch more closely than to smell, taste or sound. Still, I imagine that there are those who enjoy a synaesthetic linkage—stereo to smell, say—that this poor deprived writer can only dream of. For me, synergy is enough: the magic when two near twin images come together in visual sensuality. That is the double happiness of 3-D. The delight in and desire of stereo point to an unexpressed aesthetic. There is a lot going on in stereo, and I cannot claim to do more than scratch the surface in offering a small compendium of archetypes that suggest how we might define the 3-D aesthetic, without being too dogmatic. I am far from being an aesthetician, so I will try to do the sensible thing and restrict what follows to what I think I know empirically. First and most obvious are 3-D images that faithfully record the essence of spatial experience felt on the spot. When not much motion is implied, a still image is a perfect proxy. In this broad grouping I have in mind eight archetypes. Corridor Vista. The most dramatic effect is the beeline sight-line plunging into the depths or toward the horizon, focusing our attention less on what lies at the end of the tunnel than on the receding perspective of the tunnel itself. This most obvious of stereo effects may appeal on a Jungian level as well. Proscenium. The most obvious is the framed view: foreground vertical and horizontal elements form a proscenium through which we see the protagonist, and understand the context of our own vantage-point. Views without foreground elements lack the drama of a gateway, real or metaphorical. Screens and scrims. Layered planes at separate intervals leading from foreground toward background creates a more complex effect than the single proscenium, sometimes almost labyrinthine in its provoking our curiosity as to what lies behind a layer or around the corner. The layers themselves are the view. Still life. Sometimes no framing or layering need set the spatial stage, for in its complexity and depth a grouping standing on a plane, whether table top, floor, ground or water, produces its own magic. Figure. Alone in implied space, the object in the round, whole or close up, can hold our attention if its form works as sculpture, oblique facade or portrait. Sculpture itself is one of the great art victims of 2-D vicariousness. We know most sculpture from books, wherein pre-modernist bronze, marble or plastic sculpture reads as nothing more than monochromatic prints. Sculpture without 3-D misses out on the whole point of the medium, an object in space, in the round, bulging out in all directions, or lunging at us. Enclosure. The other great prisoner of 2-D shortchanging is great architectural space, whether urban plazas, interiors, ornament. Photographs cannot do justice to the spatial power of domes, vaults, gateway vistas. Disentanglement. Like the tree branches outside my window, any busy pattern in space remains chaotic until redeemed by stereo. The Cyclopean, 2-D vision in the real world cannot do the job. Composite. Even classic capitals combined otherwise distinct types to form something new and more baroque, composite producing complexity. For example, proscenium/corridor/figure. This is of course an expandable category. So far, the archetypes simply record, as literally as possible, what we experience in the real world. The vicarious experience comes as close as possible to that original experience. The faithful record is interesting enough. More interesting still is the image that reveals more than does the original subject itself. I identify eight more archetypes. Liminal Moment. As I have said, motion trumps stereo, and in the heat of the moment the spatial effect is lost in a blur. Here is when still stereographs give us something reality could not: a vividness of spatial relationships that was lost in the movement. What we have after the fact is not a faithful record of what was experienced, but something new. The beauty of ballet movement becomes sculpture. A group of people becomes a tableau vivant. Fermata. An even greater pleasure flows from a snapshot of something not even suspected in the blur, a surprise, invisible in real-time, revealed in a stereograph, the way Edweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographs first proved that a horse’s four hoofs could leave the ground at once. Topographical empowerment. The great casualty of 2-D is the soft, subtle contour, the shape of the ground, and stereo lets us take it back and savor it. Ask your local landscape architect. Miniaturization. When the pair of images are taken from vantage-points further apart than our eyes, the effect is something the eyes cannot discern any other way. Photogrammetric mapmakers use this so-called hyperstereo aerial photography to map contours; aerial reconnaissance specialists use the stereo photographs to analyze the landscape that appears, in the exaggerated spatial world of hyperstereo, as a kind of scale model. The effect of miniaturization, like a scale model or a model train layout, seems to appeal to some deep-seated delight or longing, perhaps in a Jungian sense. We get to play God. The city or the landscape is laid out before us with the same immediacy of perspective as a body asleep on a bed. Its contours are fully as sensual, or at least as sculptural. Time lapse. Taking two images as a pair in time lapse introduces variations invisible in the real world. Rotation. A river turned sidewise, with its mirror reflection, imparts in stereo an effect too uncomfortable to spend much time with in the real world. A figure reclining on his/her back, rotated upside-down seems to be swimming, flying, floating. Reversal. So-called “pseudoscopic” manipulation is the reversal of the right and left image to invert foreground and background, and thereby produce surreal, almost 4D effects. An aerial shot of a canyon, reversed and upside down, makes the world look inside out, like a piece of worn clothing, only fascinating. Composite. Of course. Don’t get me started. Just imagine. Most interesting of all is the world opening up, ironically, from the advances in 2-D media, through alteration of the recorded images in the darkroom or on the computer. Altered images, non-camera images. Computer-generated montages, morphs, stereographs hidden in patterns of a 2-D image are the latest frontier. Cloning Boris Vallejo’s magnificent paintings of fantasy heroes into stereo pairs demonstrates that anything is possible on a computer, a far cry from the original pairs of line drawings of boxes that announced the arrival of the bifocal age almost 2 centuries ago. Imagine combining, say, a stereo form hovering in space over a hyperstereo landscape, the scale of each distorted into a mythic image, like a God over Olympus, taking the magical realm of, say, Jerry Uelsmann’s fused-image pre-digital photography into the third dimension. Someday soon, I imagine realms empowered by 3-D. I dream of 3-D illusions in outdoor spaces, perhaps holograms, creating magical meanings in otherwise sterile settings. I am optimistic that 3-D projection can be taken outdoors. Somewhere between this disjointed experience and the full-blown IMAX plot-line lies a happy use of 3-D creating the illusion of depth and movement to animate a space, subtly not overwhelmingly, with magic. The more we experience the hyper-reality of viewing depictions in unexaggerated stereo, let alone hyperstereo, the more we can appreciate the sense of space in the real world seen first hand and learn to revere this precious gift of bifocal vision, so full of its own spatial pleasures, and see with two eyes as if for the first time. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

I was lucky enough to grow up in a designed landscape in Weston, Massachusetts, that showcased the talents of Olmsted, Ernest W. Bowditch and Charles Eliot, so my hundreds of bike rides on the sinuous narrow lane amid quiet fields and over a vociferous stream and hundreds of forays on forest trails left their mark. Falling in love at age ten with Stonehurst, a beautiful and primal estate belonging to an aged cousin years before I knew Richardson was the architect, let alone Olmsted the landscape architect, confirmed my environmental orientation. While attending a secondary school on a campus that had originally been another Richardson-Olmsted designed estate, I began to read about the architect, and discover the term landscape architect. Long before China became a draw, in the years of jet travel in the mid 1960s linking Americans to Europe with its cafes and plush parks, a critical mass was forming, and it was critical of our incomplete streets and long neglected public spaces and parks, like shabby Times Square, drug infested Bryant Park, and derelict Central Park, enough to launch a quiet revolution in park urbanism at home. I became fascinated with the roots of New England commons and greens in the “open field” agrarian system of medieval England and France—greenspace before its time. And ecologist Garret Hardin’s impassioned Tragedy of the Commons lamenting the loss of collective stewardship for our wider environment was calling a new generation of environmentalists to action. My undergraduate thesis pointed to me to a career as a landscape architect interested in the public realm. In the same year that kids my age in China were being sent to the countryside to clear their thoughts while engaging in hard manual labor, with hardly a moment to think about landscape anything, I studied public access to the reservoirs and aqueducts of the metropolitan Boston public water supply system that extended halfway across Massachusetts. What I was envisioning was a de facto park system scores of miles long. While China could ill afford to struggle to save its environment, although the real pollution lay in the future, the West was becoming concerned with environmentalism. In 1969, Greenpeace was founded, in 1970 the first Earth Day was held and the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. As the environmental movement gathered momentum, the field of landscape architecture attracted diverse interests and talents. Some still preferred to focus on the design of outdoor space as an art-form uniquely wedded to natural processes. Others loved the emerging holistic, integrative view of analyzing, planning, and designing a “landscape” as large as a region. Still others looked to focus less on natural systems like watersheds than on urban systems like transportation, more grandly the new interdisciplinary specialty called urban design. Preservation and design were now side by side, on a continuum. Less easily mapped than the natural systems were the social systems that elicited the rousing writings of Jane Jacobs and William Holly Whyte. It was all fascinating, as I embarked on the three-year program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) studying toward my Masters in Landscape Architecture. The world’s oldest school of Landscape Architecture, founded in 1900, predated China’s oldest program, at Beijing Forestry University, by over fifty years. The Trust for Public Land founded in 1972 joined the Nature Conservancy, formed in 1951. Open space advocacy in the US had come a long way since the apathetic era of the 1950s and 60s when parks earned so little respect that the neglected ones, shabby, obsolete and rife with vagrants, were not even considered as part of urban blight. Now urban open spaces joined their country cousins in gaining a newfound respect. Again and again, I was drawn to urban public open space. I worked for Genie Beal, then head of the Boston Conservation Commission and later a beloved open space advocate, on a greenway corridor plan for land parcels straddling Boston and the abutting town of Brookline. A team project culminating in a publication called Olmsted’s Park System as Vehicle in Boston (1973) anticipated the emerging zeitgeist. Boston’s park system had already long been affectionately called the Emerald Necklace. Landscape preservation was evolving into a discipline in its own right. I took on Franklin Park, the largest gem of the Emerald Necklace. The project was ahead of its time. So was keypunching land data cell by cell, covering a region in a coarse grid, anticipating GIS to come. Likewise, the best-selling book in landscape architecture, Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, championed an alternative to keypunch cards, the overlay system, the layering of which anticipated computer-aided-design (CAD) files to come. If this was our revolution, so be it, I was a proud revolutionary. In the fullness of time, the more apt term came to be innovator. No use of force, just logic. No chance of being boxed in a jailcell for “thinking outside the box” indeed. But old habits, even in a non-repressive, non-authoritarian society such as ours, still died hard. The revival of all things Olmsted rode the crest of the environmentalism wave. By 1980 in the run-up to the dedication of Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline in 1981, I joined the newly formed National Association of Olmsted Parks that brought together park advocates from all over the country, since that was where Olmsted’s parks were. Friends groups formed to raise funds to supplement stingy public maintenance and capital budgets, and assist in envisioning richer programs and activities for parks first conceived now 175 years ago. Olmsted continued to speak to us because he intuitively knew truths that were made explicit by psychologists a century after Central Park. At Brown Richardson & Rowe, in 2006 at last I had my chance to do something about Boston’s parkways, greenway corridors with sinuous roads winding though them, a form and a term invented by Olmsted that had spread across the country thanks to the National Park Service, and Robert Moses. In Boston’s parkways, commuting cars had taken a heavy toll on a system first conceived in the horse and buggy era for recreational drives. The Historic Parkway Preservation Treatment Guidelines that I authored for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation accommodate the multimodal world we were now in, while safeguarding the special character of these scenic roads. In 2006 I joined forces with a Shanghai-based design firm. My year with AGER took me all over China and revealed a scale and rapidity of urbanization that I could barely have imagined back in the U.S. I found myself using the term squandering of precious resources. I lectured at symposia and conventions. And I told myself to stop the whining about anything we Americans endured back home. After I opened the company’s first overseas office in Boston in 2008, indeed the first bona-fide office of any design firm in the US, I found myself drawn to the idea of writing a book on urban public space best practices. And it would have guidelines. I wanted nothing important to get lost in translation, so my vision for Cities with Heart included the original English text and the Chinese translation side by side—and Central Park on the cover. The company had hired a Shanghai-based bilingual communications specialist who not only understood my English, but educated me on the differences in exposition, both as to logic and to clarity. When I had met her on a company trip to Shanghai World Expo in 2010, she mentioned that she had been captivated with Thoreau’s Walden since she was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl living in a mountain village a few hours outside central Qongqing. She loved Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Fuller. I was stunned. That she found Thoreau in such a place spoke volumes about where our world was heading, and it was a good place. It was my pleasure to make sure she saw Walden, preserved for all time in its greenspace unsullied by private development (thanks to Don Henley of the Eagles). My book tour for Cities with Heart took me to four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou, four among the hundred cities of over a million in China, many of which were not yet cities with heart. If Olmsted’s Central Park already spoke to the Chinese as a forerunner of “people’s parks” to be found in many Chinese cities, they were even more delighted to learn that in 1843, Olmsted himself had come to China as a young man, a common sailor, years before he took up landscape architecture, and was so moved by the kindness extended to him by the ordinary people of Guangzhou who welcomed him into their workshops, homes, temples and gardens that it helped inspire his vision of parks “unreservedly and forever the people’s own.” “The establishment by government of great public grounds is,” he wrote later, “…justified and [must be] enforced as a public duty,” not something to be left to chance in the marketplace. He had recognized the greenspace imperative way ahead of his time. Over my career, again and again I had returned to open space projects, until I could no longer deny that together they had formed the open space system running through my life, all connected, and all underlying my evolution from childlike delight in nature to the greenspace imperative, and that Olmsted was behind it all.

Just a few car lengths off Route 9 in Newton, Massachusetts, Hemlock Gorge is still the wildest spot on the Charles River. Chances are, for all the thousands of drivers who daily commute by, this momentary mountain cataract working the Roxbury puddingstone in the shade of hemlocks is so much water over the dam. My great Aunt Virginia once took her beloved border collie Kip with her to a friend’s for dinner, over this route, twelve miles from home, and when it was time to leave, Kip was nowhere to be found. Trouble was, Aunt Virginia had to go on a two-week trip the next day, and with a heavy heart left her beloved Kip behind, hoping he would turn up at her friend’s house. Two weeks later, when she pulled into her driveway, who should be on her doorstep to greet her but Kip, a little the worse for wear, but one resourceful navigator. I have no idea how he sorted out the world to find his way home, but I would say this quadruped, ever alert at Aunt Virginia’s car window, probably took in more than would two of us bipeds put together. For bipeds who spend a significant portion of their natural life cycle strapped in a seat behind glass, we have some serious adaptation to attend to. Someone check my math, but I figure that drivers who typically clock double-digit mileage in a day, let alone the three-digit marathoners, are at it for fifteen percent of their waking hours—including hours when they’re faking waking. With consummate self-delusion, we comfort ourselves that we like the time to collect our thoughts, to be boss of our moment, heck, ruler of the road. We all know perfectly well that driving can get pretty catatonic. It is not like taking a hike over pesky tree roots or bouncing along on horseback with the wind whistling through our ears, aware with every jolt of the multi-sensory world we inhabit. Cruising along in a well-suspended conveyance, on a smoothly paved highway, we are lulled away from reality. This is what babies used to like about cradles. As our cars hurtle us through vast terrain with the smoothness of projectiles, it is as if we were stationary and the world were moving past us. Not good. In catatonia, bad things can happen. So we let our ears take us somewhere else—music, talk radio, books on tape, friends on cell phones. The more so if we are in a self-driver, listening to and looking at our cells. Better a dose of cell phone bliss than a doze into obliteration cum oblivion anyday. Unless that proves to be a wake up call, our own distraction putting us in harm’s way. Or worse, road rage, truly a bad call. My beef today is not with cell phones or road rage. It is with how we diss place, and it is a disgrace, a profligate fall from grace. Mile after mile we drive our solitary way through life, sometimes on routes through surroundings too familiar to seduce us with come-hither glances, sometimes on roads less traveled but as unread as closed books. A place commuted through passively is a place that is soon taken for granted or worse yet, held in contempt. Fellow bipeds, this is so lame. If we do much more of this, after a while commuting for a living becomes commuting away a living. Fortunately, it is a sentence that can be commuted. Not by telecommuting, but by active looking. Yes, I mean active looking, or, if you prefer, active listening with your eyes. We hardly know how to tap this resource in our midst, this corridor we drive through, this place that is happening to us while we are driving someplace else. But the biological beast within us demands that we do. We ought to take a little bit more ownership over the places we are in. No, not colonize it, not put money down on it, that’s way too contemporary, and therefore retro. I mean tap into our hunter gatherer roots to resensitize our feelings about place. We ought to know our habitat so much better than we do. We ought to look our surroundings straight in the eye, plumb the depths of the face before us, and find the life story there. Come to our senses, all of them. Be so attuned to all that passes before us that it quickens the pulse. Be as connected to place as monarch butterflies making their rounds from New England to South America. If not the answer to putting cases of advanced tunnel vision into total remission, active looking is like a car tonic. We can reclaim our sensory engagement to a world of real places—natural and built. The highway in a traffic jam at rush-hour, or any-old-hour, is like a river flowing over rocks, now white water, now still. On the banks of that river are villages and deserts, some easy on the eyes, others requiring tough love. We drive at less than warp speed with a warped map of our habitat as guide. Like the Bostonian’s Map of the United States in which Cape Cod is exaggerated to a size and position like Florida for the whole country, the equivalent local perceptual map hypes what’s hip, and glosses over what it does not deign to understand, let alone appreciate. The vastness of Roxbury and Dorchester, filled to overflowing with layers of meaning, is a vast unknown wilderness to ‘burb denizens, and vice versa. The fact is, we all have frontiers to explore. As long as we are here, we might as well get to know this world we are in bed with. We might come to appreciate a place once spurned or overlooked or written off with something like gratitude, even reverence, or at least empathy. The emotional payback could be staggering. We can learn a lot from Kip. To paraphrase a guru named Yogi, we can indeed see a lot by looking. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

For some reason fall is the nostalgia season. Fall foliage has much to do with it. So this week I post the following, written in 2000, in simpler times. They’ve got that thing, they’ve got that thing, that makes most scattershot places look like a bad golf swing… Some towns have a certain seductive charm that others, well, just plain don’t. Whatever it is that makes Chatham the “it” town on Cape Cod, or Stockbridge the heart throb of the Berkshires, or Nantucket Town a near-mythic seaport, that certain charm may hinge on a simple matter of looks. These places are easy on the eyes, and then some. That visual truth, which transcends all seasons and all weather, is what makes killer community character. If the towns people love were delectable French recipes, community character would be their secret je ne sais quoi ingredient, the secret of their success. Of course, the communities we love are not mere confections, and their visual character is not simply frosting on the cake. None were designed by planners, and marketed to Trumans under the Celebration franchise. They are the real thing. The standouts remind us that not all places are created equal: appearances matter, in places as in people. Some places turn heads, and make cameras lose control. There are idols, and there are icons. Travel brochures and coffee table books, the kind sold in airports, fess up to this all the time; and in their own word-free way, post cards and regional calendars do the same. They know what it is when they see it, even if they don’t much explain it in celebrity places any more than paparazzi gone by could explain the equivalent elusive allure in celebrity people from “eternal Roman” Sophia Loren to “it girl” Clara Bow. The “It” place has “There”. Even official documents struggle with the concept. As stated in their comprehensive plans of one sort or another, many communities in New England and beyond, and not just the Nantucketers among us, seek to maintain, preserve, or even “enhance” that thing, traditional community character. Even for towns of more average looks, this goal seems commendable and predictable. After all, no plan would exactly go out on a limb and call for a complete makeover, scuttling the town and starting anew, given the staggering short-term economic burden of demolition and reconstruction. Absent a flood or an earthquake or a hurricane, ain’t gonna happen, any more than would whole-body reconstructive surgery for a dissatisfied narcissist. Second only to the quality of the school system and demographics, we take the local measure of the quality of life by the look and feel of our community as a physical place, a habitat. The preferred unit of measurement of community values is dollars, and property values afford a rough index. But very rough, given that the three factors they say most matter in real estate value are location, and living close to a major city may weigh as heavily as living in a good-looking community. Some may prefer living in towns with little commercial development and driving elsewhere rather than living in the thick of it; others may make the opposite tradeoff and live in communities with substantial commercial development, and though these places might add up to roughly the same dollar value, they will hardly look alike, the way Sherborn looks like Lincoln, or Framingham something like Dedham here in Massachusetts. Still, in both kinds of places, aggregate property value will reflect community character almost as much as location. And in both kinds of places New Englanders will be serious about preserving or maintaining or enhancing this thing called community character, or as in the Gertrude Stein line, the “there” there. One way to get beneath the skin of a place, is to plumb the content of its character, to paraphrase Martin Luther King. There was a time not that long ago when most thoughtful people unashamedly believed in certain virtues, and earnestly believed in heroes, male and female, as exemplars of these virtues. This was Character in human terms. Now of course heroism is under assault; “virtue” is “virtual”, and, ironically, character may now be more often applied to communities than to people. But a place with “character” may have personality, indeed, character in the sense of “being a character”, fascinating, perhaps eccentric, but not necessarily heroic. We know good community character when we see it, and yet if we try to be specific, it remains elusive. But we need to try. The more we can say, the more we can save. The more precisely we can define character, the more tightly we can defend it legally. Perhaps that definition will prove less elusive if we take this kind of metaphorical thinking to the level of looking at specific traits. Most obviously, like a person, a community may be attractive or ugly, charming or scary, tidy or shabby. Not particularly helpful yet. But beyond the superficial, places like people may sometimes display traits that might suggest gravitas or integrity, or simply be flawed in an interesting way that gives them personality. A community may range from good-natured to ill mannered, friendly to forbidding, confident to timid, honest to phony, charismatic to boring, down to earth to pretentious, low-key to loud, subtle to blunt, playful to serious, quirky to predictable, alluring to obvious, consistent to uneven, serene to uneasy, organized to chaotic. Each of these traits for me conjures up an image of outward appearance or pattern or detail, varying from a showplace dressed for success to a dive down on its luck. Some may find charm in the troubled town, but most people would want to step in and do something, just as for an addict in need of a little rehab. For all around us are those less fortunate communities whose distance from their favored neighbors is more psychological than real, which seem to have negative karma and to suffer from intractable grittiness, and whose properties are bargain basement values. None of these places began life ugly. Many once had something going, that certain thing. Then circumstances changed, perhaps gradually, perhaps dramatically, but traumatically. A mill shuts down; zoning cannot cope with demand for cheap housing; the cultural elite flees; stores are boarded up; the park becomes covered with more cut glass than cut grass. The quaint term for this used to be “blight”. Such a place has gone from friendly to forbidding, from serene to uneasy, from organized to chaotic. Once a community that has been beloved and beautiful loses its looks, a good Main Street is hard to find. In retrospect this is a tragedy, because with proper care, a community, like a person, can look good at any age. In theory, there can always be a “there” there. We cannot afford not to believe this. Our communities are a huge investment of capital, social and economic. The trouble is, we have not always been good investors. Our communities are like mutual funds performing indifferently to the decisions made by a committee of advisors, most of whom know nothing about stocks, acting without much coordination or urgency, slow to react to market news. Just as no one can seriously believe that an investment can take care of itself to grow in value, let alone avoid loss, we must stop believing that the good things in this world simply survive by default. They must be safeguarded, for eternal vigilance is the price of community as much as liberty, and no victory is permanent. Without that management, gradually the portfolio of place can be eroded, the social capital frittered away, and community character auctioned off. What makes a preserved Concord or Ipswich, and a restored Lowell or North Adams special, are such character traits as a vibrant, inviting, and symbolic town center, a richly textured main street to stroll, along the way a rich mix of wares for admiring (architecture and perhaps public art) and acquiring (crafts plus delicacies), a balance of nature and structure, the random punctuation of shrines of meaning (historical, cultural, secular or religious), a menu of inviting byways offering the freedom to roam, the promise of vistas to the great beyond, and ideally an unusual setting near water or mountains. Between a well-loved town center and pristine landscapes to explore on the periphery lie quiet or special neighborhoods to live in. No one place is a perfect 10; places are human, after all. Sometimes, like invisible chemistry, the meaning beneath the surface adds to the seductiveness. A landmark oak that has survived three centuries is more pithy than a puny Schwedler maple planted in the fifties. A church designed by Bulfinch two centuries ago carries more gravitas than a clone designed seventy years ago. A common where Civil War volunteers mustered is meatier than a park with playground equipment installed in the seventies. A local independent bookstore is more venerable than a local franchisee of a national chain. A granite rock that Wampanoags once used to grind corn is more poignant than a recently excavated boulder. A row of clapboarded millworkers’ houses is more elegant and rooted in its way than a new cluster subdivision. A familiar vista uplifts the spirit; a parking lot in its place is convenient and nothing more. If there is a critical mass of traits, and if the gestures speak deeply and well, chances are it is love at first sight. And if we want this love affair to last, there are certain things that had best not be left unsaid. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

For decades I have longed to discover that I was not purely of European ethnicity, but also Native American, From childhood the evidence of my affinity mounted. I wore moccasins. I had an "Indian chief" feathered headdress. Thanksgiving at school inevitably recalled the caring of Squanto; indeed, the indigenous people who helped the Pilgrims survive deserved a hearty thanks. I had been intrigued for years about the story of Pochahontas and John Rolfe, as illustrated in a folio sized children’s book illustrated by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire. I was clearly too focused on the weaponry, as I made a tomahawk to play a Native American in summer camp and made my own bow and arrows for woodland fantasies. I loved finding milky quartz arrowheads in Virginia fields near where my mother had been born. I built wigwam-like shelters of hay under an elm in a field near the house where I grew up in outside Boston. I appreciated the mutual respect of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a favorite television Western, the staple of the 1950s. Mum had framed a calendar print of a kindly Navajo to hang in the house, complementing Navajo rugs. And I could hardly blame Geronimo and Sitting Bull for standing up to white aggression. I especially liked thinking about how we pay homage to Native Americans every time we say chipmunk, hickory, moccasin, moose, muskrat, opossum, powwow, raccoon, skunk, squash, succotash, toboggan, woodchuck, or caucus. Yes, caucus! Algonquian loanwords. We honor First Peoples in their placenames—the names of twenty-seven out of fifty states—countless names of towns, mountains, rivers, lakes, brooks, and islands. I became fascinated by the connection between Great Blue Hill and the name Massachuset which means Great Hill and named the people who lived near the hill (see my post, "Big Blue is Our Logo"). As I delved more deeply into family history, I had been drawn to those forebears who seemed to go out of their way to live peaceably with native peoples. The first I noticed was Rev. Samuel Treat of Eastham on Cape Cod, who preached to the Nauset. They mourned for him when he died in 1717 after a record blizzard and dug a tunnel through a huge snowdrift to carry his body to his burial place, inspiring Katherine Lee Bates' poem Indian Bearers. I discovered that the first of my New World Paines, Thomas Paine of Eastham, lived next door to the Nauset. I was on the lookout for a copy of forebear Daniel Gookin’s Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, long out of print, and finally snagged it.. An anthropologist without realizing it, Gookin had worked with the Praying Indians in the 1650s and spent many nights in wigwams across eastern Massachusetts. He wrote admiringly of the many indigenous peoples who had welcomed him among them. I was fascinated to read a manuscript about the travels of forebear Jonathan Huntington Lyman out West encountering the Comanche in 1840, years before Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail. At age twenty-two I was fascinated to visit Taos and Acoma pueblos in a world where Native Americans still ruled. But I spent way too many years not wondering who in my world was actually Native American. I had never attended a powwow. In 2016 I went to a historical presentation on King Philips War at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and met five members of the Massachuset. I decided to attend a meeting of the Praying Indians in South Natick, where Chief Caring Hands welcomed me, telling the congregation I was a descendant of Daniel Gookin. After I fnally attended my first powwow, I came to appreciate that Americans with Native American blood had been around me all along. Meanwhile, talking to Native American interpreters at the reconstructed Native American settlement at Plimoth Plantation, I learned that one should omit the term “tribe” and use “people” or “nation,” omit “brave” and use “man.” At the downtown Pilgrim Hall museum I first heard of Zerviah Gould Mitchell (1807-1898), descendant of Massasoit, and a early voice for native rights. I was delighted to discover that pioneering female American author Lydia Maria Child had written about interracial marriage in 1824. Her book Hobomok was ahead of its time. It met with resistance. Mom had shared her family tree, and at some point wondered aloud if there might be some Indian blood in her Nash past. There was, to be sure, a large gap in names back before the 19th century in a Nash spouse’s forebears, begging the question. Plus, two of Mom’s brothers, Uncle Mallory and Uncle Phil, her father, and her Nash aunts all looked to be blessed with Native American features. But there the mystery stood. And all the while, in my youth, at the top of the stairs, hung a portrait, painted in the early 1800s, of the Nash grandmother whose part of my family tree was a blank. With dark hair parted down the middle hidden under a bonnet and her dark eyes, she imparted nothing Native American to me for decades. But decades after Mum gave the portrait to a first cousin I can now look at a photo of that portrait and see the Native American in it. But if this woman of uncertain name who married James Nash (1798-1867), and likely in Manhattan, was part Native American, then perhaps her great-grandfather born around 1720 was Tuscarora, or Muncee (Manhattan means land of many hills in Munsi), or Lenape (the indigenous people from New Jersey to New York), or Mohican (north of the Lenape), before their forcible removal in the mid-18th century, although Native Americans hardly vacated Manhattan: apparently 87,000 are still there. I wondered what a DNA test might show. But blogs were revealing that many individuals with proven Native American heritage were disappointed to receive DNA test results showing 0% Native American, a false negative. There are reasons, as DNA inheritance is complicated. Even siblings may not get the same results. In 2018 I learned that a first cousin had been DNA tested by 23andMe and came up 0.9% Native American. None of it could have come from her mother’s side. Later I got another yes when another first cousin sent her 23andMe findings—up to 0.1% Native American or Asian. Still, I realized that these results did not confer tribal identity. Nor was I in any way seeking to intrude on an indigenous people. Never mind: I was thrilled to realize that some forebears had rejected the notion that ethnic lines should not be crossed, and that their union had begotten progeny, and here I was. There was no more shame: they were not alone! DNA research now indicated that 8% of European Americans carried 1% Native American blood. Looking for further confirmation, I decided to join my cousins and get myself DNA tested at 23andMe. The results were disappointing: 99% Western European, and a little stray South Asian (India) and Ashkenazi Jewish (diaspora in Western Europe). A Native American portion did not show up as it had for my two cousins. However, that did not rule it out, as false negatives could occur. Here is how 23andMe answered the often-asked follow-up question “Why doesn’t my known Native American ancestry show up in my DNA?” If your most recent Indigenous American ancestor was more than five generations ago, you may have inherited little or no DNA directly from them. The farther back in your history you look, the less likely you are to have inherited DNA directly from every single one of your ancestors. This means that you can be directly descended from a Indigenous American without having any Indigenous American DNA. Your Indigenous American ancestry may be assigned to a “Broadly” category. Even using state-of-the-art science, the Indigenous American and Northeast Asian populations are genetically similar, and sometimes they can't be distinguished from each other with high confidence. I then contacted 23andMe as to whether the DNA results for any of my children could still turn up Native American, and they answered yes, as follows: "When a parent’s and child’s results are compared, this process is called 'phasing.' Phasing increases the resolution of a child’s results. For this reason, a child may have more detailed ancestry assignments than their parents. Although it is correct that a child inherits all of their DNA from their parents, a child’s results may appear inconsistent when compared to their parent’s. In these cases these ancestry assignments are likely to be reflected [included] within the parent’s “Broadly assigned” or “Unassigned percentages.” My son's DNA test delivered. It indicated that he was 0.4% Native American, indicating that his father despite the false negative had to have double that amount, or 0.8%. By my calculations, doubling the amount for each prior generation, the 100% Native American ancestor was six or seven generations back, perhaps in the early 18th century. Connected at last. The big takeaway in non-Native Americans discovering their Native American Roots is that no matter what prejudice reigned back in the day, they are descended from individuals with courage and decency who had crossed ethnic lines, fallen in love, and had children. They did not let bigotry stop them. Bravo to them. One more thing. Finding out that my forebear Robert Treat Paine, a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, had represented the Continental Congress in a meeting with the Grand Council Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy in 1775 reminds me what our own Confederation owed to theirs, which had been in existence for centuries, but even more, it reminds me of “Seventh Generation Stewardship,” long-term thinking. We need a cross-generational caucus all right. I suspect there is much more to learn from Indigenous culture than we non-Native Americans can begin to imagine. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine. If anything I have said here is inadvertently disrespectful, mea culpa; let's talk!

It is arguably the most historic site in the Commonwealth. Its original name was Massachuset. Yet its historical significance is commemorated in a wink and a nod. The last time Great Blue Hill got respect befitting its historical significance was on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826, when a local parade marched to the summit and its spokesperson declared, “This mountain is consecrated and hallowed ground, dedicated to Liberty and Independence.” But even that grand gesture overlooked the historical significance of this landform to this commonwealth. I’d like to set the record straight once and for all for some high ground that deserves a whole lot higher regard than we accord it: Great Blue Hill. The Friends of the Blue Hills say it best: “Massachusetts, an Algonquin name, translates as ‘At the Great Hill.’ Four hundred years ago the local Native Americans used the term to refer to themselves. In adopting the name for their settlement, the Bay colonists ensured that the entire state would be named after Blue Hill.” The fact survives in web sites and history books (1), even the official state poem, but nowhere on the hill itself is there a sense of shrine or even a plaque bearing the message connecting this place to its original name. The closest equivalent is a passing reference in an exhibit in the Trailside Museum at the hill’s base. 1. "This word was the name for an Indian tribe who lived around the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay. The word Massachusetts, according to Roger Williams, signifies, in the Indian language, Blue-Hills”, John Warner Barber, Historical Collections of Massachusetts (Worcester: Dorr Howland & Co., 1839), 10. “..there is general agreement about the translation of certain [Native American] names such as Massachusetts to ‘Great Blue Hill,’” concurs Arthur J. Krim, in “Acculturation of the New England Landscape: Native and English Toponymy of Eastern Massachusetts,” in New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 70 If only it had been a whole lot higher, things might have been different. At an elevation of 635 feet, the glacially scoured, bald-pate granite rock may not look like Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro. It is only a hundred feet taller than the next tallest of its nineteen neighbors collectively known as the Blue Hills, so they steal some of its thunder. So what if Big Blue is the highest peak so near the coast from Maine to Mexico. So what if the nearest inland peak towering any higher over the land at its base is Wachusett, fifty miles away. This has just not been enough to put Big Blue over the top, respected at last in her own Valhalla. As we drive by Big Blue on Route 128 in Canton, or look down Blue Hill Avenue, we mostly damn her with faint praise. That Big Blue is ground zero for the native American place name of Massachuset is far from our thoughts. Among the half of the states with native American names, Massachusetts came first. Yet no matter how often we utter the syllables, we have to remind ourselves that a name like Massachusetts is not some Angloname like Maryland or Virginia or New Hampshire. Most of the time, we mouth these four syllables without recognizing that they are Algonquin, let alone that this foursome and the hundreds of other place names all around us describe elemental landscapes. The fact that our fair state is named for something indigenous and not insignificant—a specific place—is mostly ignored, occasionally mentioned in passing, and rarely grasped in full, remaining vaguely known and vaguely shown. Adding to the blue haze that veils the subject is that most sources say Massachusetts means “at the great (blue) hills” and leave it at that, as if pinpointing anything more precise would be overreaching. And yet just such precision seems not only possible, but compelling as well. In its first appearance in print, the word “Massachuset” was linked specifically to two things: an indigenous people and the hill currently known as Great Blue. The year is 1614, six years before the Pilgrims and fourteen years before the Puritans set foot here. In his Description of New England, Captain John Smith, self-styled Admiral of New England (the same bloke whose case Pochahantas took up), first described “the Countrie of the Massachusets, which is the Paradise of all these parts,” and “the high mountaine of Massachusit” or “Massachusets Mount.” While most subsequent interpretations seem to assume Smith must have meant the collective Blue Hills, Smith’s language, as well as his engraved map, points to a single peak, by which the highest summit in the group must be meant. The name might have stuck to the hill, except Smith deferred to Prince Charles, an English royal with delusions of dominion, a fifteen-year-old who for less than clear reasons renamed Massachusetts Mount and its adjacent range as the Cheviot Hills, after the hills on the Scottish border that are three times taller and three times further inland from the coast than our Blue Hill Range. This high-handed first attempt at importing a place name from Old England to New here did not exactly take where it mattered, here on these shores, although when Amsterdam-based cartographer Nicholas Visscher compiled a map of these shores from the work of Smith, Champlain and others published in 1655, he clearly delineated the grouping of “Chevyot Hills”, the tallest of which is “Mons Massachuset”. Thirty editions that are close copies of that map kept that name in print over the next fifty years, but not in use in these parts. Here, Charles’ meddling was royal mischief enough to deprive the tallest of the hills of its rightful name ever after. As king, Charles went on to lose his head in other ways, and the Puritans, who might have honored the indigenous name for the landmark, instead started calling the range the “Blew Hills” as found on a map from 1642. Circa 1665-84 a map of land in Dorchester showed “Top of Blue Hill”.(2) By 1778, the State of Massachusetts Bay Council could ratify the hill-versus-hills confusion by ordering a beacon placed “upon the highest or most proper place of the Hill known by the name of Blue Hills.”(3) 2. Arthur J. Krim, in “Acculturation of the New England Landscape: Native and English Toponymy of Eastern Massachusetts,” in New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 75-7 3. Harold G. Travis, The Beacon on Sanderson Hill, Weston Historical Society Bulletin, c 1974, 3 For Captain Smith, as for all who sailed in after him, the undulating pale blue profile of the cluster of hills crowned by Great Blue was the first landform sighted on approaching these low-studded shores. Echoing generations of earlier European boat people for whom this beacon beckoned, John Adams put it like this: “If there is a Bostonian who ever sailed from his own harbor for distant lands, or returned to it from them, without feelings at the sight of the Blue Hills, which he is unable to express, his heart is differently constituted from mine.” In his pioneering description, as I say, Smith also recorded “the Massachusets” as the name of a now lost people. Too busy to study the language, Smith left for others the question of translating the term. Among the very few Anglos who took the trouble to learn Algonquin was Roger Williams, who worked tirelessly for the rights of the native peoples and settled among them in Rhode Island. Williams is barely remembered for compiling his Key into the Language of America, which he published in 1634, much less for writing in 1682, “I have learnt that the Massachusetts was called so from the Blew Hills.” As well it might, since evidence of Native American presence in the hills goes back at least eight thousand years. In the fifty years after Smith offered his version of the tribal name, the name went through many iterations. The original autograph Royal charter of 1629 refers to “Massachusetts alias Mattachusets alias Massatusets. (Yes, Massatusetts: there you go, southern readers!) William Wood’s map of 1634 boasts the first instance of the now standard spelling in print, perhaps accidentally, since his spelling for another well-known harbor comes out as “Marvil Head”. However often the natives uttered their name to the Anglos, our dialect-bewildered scribes and their successors mostly ignored Smith’s precedent. Other trails through the linguistic wilderness include “Massachuseuck” (in Williams’ Key), “Masathulets”, “Massawateusek”, “Messachusiack”, “Massawachusett”, and “Massachisans”. Sometimes singular, sometimes plural or possessive. From the generation of Anglos that included Raleigh and Shakespeare, who are not exactly known to have been sticklers for spelling even their own names the same way twice, we would expect no less. Heck, even now we still can’t agree on Algonquin, Algonkian or Algonquian. In that wilderness, many voices were not heard as one overnight. Standardization of spelling, let alone meaning, took time. So many sounds, so tempting to play with in the translation. We’ll get to the variant translation in a minute, but the translation that has enjoyed scholarly near-unanimity is the one I’ve mentioned, in which massa means “great”, wachu “hill”, and sett “at”, specifically referring to the Blue Hills, if we are to believe Williams, and most specifically, if we are to believe Smith, the mount formerly known as Massachuset. The name is unique in the region for its thematic focus. Unlike any other southern New England people whose name has come down to us, the people who welcomed the first Anglos to these shores named themselves not for a lowly water feature but for the high ground of their world. You had to go inland as far as Wachusett to find another mountain-named people. (Incidentally, this name, too, incorporates “wachu” and “sett”.) In conflating their name and place name, the original Friends of the Blue Hills seem to have been honoring these hills with a respect that surpasses ours. That downhill slide began when Smith’s Mount Massachuset et al. became a.k.a. the Blew Hills. Look again at Great Blue. Perhaps it lacks an obvious Old Man of the Mountain or Squaw Rock profile, but in its subtle curvature it is indeed a logo for our time. Long before art deco streamlining, the glaciers refined the rough edges of the region, unifying drumlins of extruded gravel and mountains of granite in a common undulation. Long before the British Invasion, we can only suppose that Algonquins considered the hills and above all Great Blue something more than a hunting ground. Perhaps they recognized in Great Blue’s radial simplicity of shape something more sacred than a mere landmark. The geometry of Big Blue is more perfect than any other solid rock landform in its compass that extended as far as Nantasket, Woonsocket, Wachusett, Monadnock. This bastion of rock that so humbly yet elegantly lords it over all the other Blue Hills, as they in turn lord it over all the other hills for miles around, suggests an understated brand of leadership, a loose confederation, perhaps the perfect logo for what we are now. I suspect that Algonquins would agree. If the name Massachusetts in a sense slid off this smooth hill, it briefly lingered on two other landscape features, and finally came to rest in a third: fields, river, bay. First, Massachusetts Fields. There was such a place, but it’s long gone. The first Puritans arrived to find hundreds if not thousands of acres of cleared cornfields along the shore, backed up with grove-like forests kept free of undergrowth by controlled burning. One cluster of these coastal clearings was known from the start as Massachusetts Fields, as they had been cleared at the behest of Chickatawbut, sachem of the Massachuset nation. The first Anglo settlers found their work not so much cut out for them as done for them, so conveniently had the planters of these fields recently been decimated by some virus that the English confused with the will of God. The Massachusets, who had once been able to field three thousand braves, were down to only a few hundred hardy but harmless souls, who got the boat people settled, without getting them too unsettled. As New Englanders know perfectly well, fields, unlike rivers and hills, are perishable landscapes. This quintessential lost landscape, the Massachusetts Fields were eventually buried beneath the Wollaston section of Quincy, and emblazoned on the city seal. Fortunately, before the era of photography, Eliza Susan Quincy recorded the vestigial landscape in several watercolors now preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Besides patches of marsh and grass along Quincy Shore Drive and Blacks Creek, the closest surrogate landscape we have today is World’s End in Hingham. Second, Massachusetts River: still with us after all these years. Smith’s name of choice for a certain well-known local waterway got nixed by His Highness Prince Charles, who much preferred the idea of naming the river after himself, and what fifteen year old would not? But for this mischief, the river would perhaps still be named for the people who were named for the hills. Third, Massachusetts Bay. We’ll always have the bay named for the people named for the hills that crown the skyline of the broad-arc bay. How’s that for circular logic? The bay logically gave the coastal colony its name once the name came to encompass all the waters between Cape Anne and Cape Cod, although originally the term meant Boston Harbor proper, and before that, simply the waters off the Quincy shore that once lapped against the Massachusetts Fields. And speaking of the Quincy shore, Moswetuset Hummock plays a supporting role in the saga. Though a hummock (“hammock” in the coastal south) is a coastal knoll, terra firma in a sea of salt marsh, this one looms larger. Here Chickatawbut, who spent the cooler season near the Neponset falls, spent the warm season. The fishing was easy, and the skyline above the Massachusetts Fields danced to the pale blue undulations of the Blue Hills. Moswetuset Hummock may be the oldest documented summer place on the east coast, a classic native American landscape. Chickatawbut was a mensch; did lots to help Anglos, and they loved his table manners. He and his people took nothing from the Anglos and left nothing but footprints. Still pristine and elemental, surrounded by acres of salt marsh, this acre-plus rocky mount, once covered with red cedar, now covered with red oaks as it probably was in Chicktawbut’s day, is unfortunately beleaguered on all sides by the heavy-handed ways of our world. The quaint moniker Sachem’s Knoll has fallen into disuse, and with it a little more of our collective imagination about the diminished Massachuset people. When the Commonwealth rolled out its tercentennial historic markers in 1930, the hummock is where they chose to explain the state name. Some readers may have missed this, so let me quote it in full. “Moswetuset Hummock was the seat of Chickatawbut, sachem of the Massachusetts Indians; adjoining were their planting grounds. ‘Massachusetts’ means ‘at the great (blue) hills.’ With Chickatawbut Governor Winthrop made a treaty which was never broken.” This mini-Blue Hill actually borrows its native name from Big Blue. I side with not only Roger Williams but also our early historian, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, whose landmark History of the Colony of Massachusets Bay came out in 1764. “At Massachusets, near the mouth of Charles river, there used to be a great rendezvous of Indians. That circle which now makes the harbours of Boston and Charlestown, round by Malden, Chelsea, Nantasket, Hingham, Weymouth, Braintree and Dorchester, was the capital of a great Sachem [Chickatawbut], much reverenced by all the plantations of Indians roundabout, and to him belonged Naponset (Dorchester Mills now Milton) Punkapog (Stoughton) Wessagusset (Weymouth) and several places upon Charles river, where the natives were seated.” So? But then in a footnote Hutchinson makes a clear reference to the misnamed hummock: “The tradition is that this sachem had his principal seat upon a small hill or rising upland, in the midst of a body of saltmarsh in the township of Dorchester [now Quincy], near to a place called Squantum, and it is known by the name of Massachusets hill, or mount Massachusets to this day. The blue hills, so called, in the township of Milton, &c. are called in Capt. Smith’s map of 1614, Chevi hills, but they were called before Massachusets mount. Prince Charles changed the name, and also gave the name of Charles’s river to what had been before called Massachusets river.” Why is it the good stuff is often hidden in a footnote? To this fragile and underappreciated place labeled Moswetuset ought to be restored its rightful name: Massachusets Hummock, which was its name on a plan made as early as 1687. In the view from the puddingstone peninsula of Squantum it all comes together: look shoreward, and the rounded profiles of hummock and hill that once shared a people and a name are in perfect alignment. A sachem in his own time, Governor Hutchinson summered on Milton Hill, halfway between the greater and lesser hills that he was so careful to name properly. Naturally, he gave his modest estate a Native place name: Unquity, and that, too, seems like a first. Like Chickatawbut’s, his place in the sun survives: Hutchinson Field, on the crest of Adams Street in Milton. (4) 4. Lost in the 1890s, both the one and a half story house with portico and gardens with a ha-ha wall were designed by Sir Francis Bernard (another Royal Governor in MA transferred from NJ), also architect of Harvard Hall. Hutchinson’s Field has been preserved by the Trustees of Reservations, the world’s first land trust, since 1898. Effectively, if inadvertently, the Anglos dislodged the Algonquin place-name tribe-name from its rightful locations, appended the English place-word “bay” to it, and affixed it to a greater whole than even the Algonquins ever dreamed naming as one entity. For the next century, until 1780, Massachusetts Bay was the name the whole colony or province went by. Meanwhile, the remnants of the Massachuset nation were resettled in villages of “Praying Indians”, among which Ponkapog’s perfect feng-shui just south of the Blue Hills, so fitting, just was not good enough. King Philip’s War in 1676 abruptly ended that utopian experiment, and all the others, and from then on the denizens didn’t have a prayer. Whatever insensitivity affected their treatment of their hosts, whatever precluded the colonists’ command of the local language, to their credit the Anglos here at least honored their hosts with a proclivity to retain their hosts’ place names. But appropriation of the name Massachuset for statewide duty comes at a cost. Because the hill long known as Great Blue failed to keep its native American name, because the river failed to keep the name of the people who were named for the hill, because the primordial fields formerly known as Massachuset's were long ago built over, and because the hummock’s name has been quaintly retooled and redeployed, the ground zero for the name we all take for granted is obscured if not forgotten. Gradually, ever more oblivious to the historical significance of this stark landform that we call Great Blue Hill, we slowly belittle its stature and dilute its symbolic power. Here are the ups and downs of the last century. In 1893 the Blue Hill Range fittingly became the largest urban wildland in the oldest Metropolitan Park system in the country (equally fortunately, four decades later tiny Moswetuset Hummock was added to the system), a magnificent recognition of its landscape importance marred only by the woeful silence on its historical importance that greeted Sylvester Baxter’s 1891 proposal that the Blue Hills be called Massachusetts Forest. True, in honor of Chickatawbut’s many kindnesses to his interlopers, their descendants named the second tallest of the hills after him, but this gesture makes only the most tenuous of connections between a hill and a hummock and a four-syllable place name. The best memorial we have come up with so far is the Blue Hills Trailside Museum, established in 1959 at the base of Big Blue, and now short of state funding commensurate with its significance. Yet even here, there is only the passing reference that the state got its name from the “Massadchuseuck” tribe, “people of the great hills”. The Department of Conservation and Recreation’s recreational mission here crowds out any focus on Blue Hill as an historic site of immense significance to the Commonwealth. Superseding the observatory plunked down on the summit 150 years ago was a more permanent observatory and weather station privately built in 1885, joined by a very retro castellated tower in 1908, and operated by Harvard. In the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps subtracted a forest for a ski area on Big Blue’s northwest flank and added a handsome stone observation tower near the summit. In the early 1950s some other Anglo do-gooders led by Ralph Lowell crowned the observatory with a tower for an educational radio station. Its call letters WGBH paid inadvertent homage to Great Blue Hill as the primal beacon of local Algonquins, who long before radios and weather balloons knew all about using this high place for observing and broadcasting. In the mid fifties came the freestanding WGBH-TV tower and a state police radio tower. At these infractions, Big Blue has been lucky, almost held in high regard; indeed, along the way, a third tower has apparently been removed. No water tower here either. Meanwhile, less protected hills, Bear Hill in Waltham for one, are becoming a hill matador’s dream of bristling airwave-barbs. In our own era it seems that, for a price, no wild hilltop can long continue to meet the broadband sky unskewered. The hills are alive with the sound of static. Wireless wins, the hillsides wither. The message dims that at least one summit hereabouts, Great Blue, Ground Zero for Massachusetts, ought to be sacred to all of us. Or at least to those who smoke the pipe of peace on Beacon Hill. What to do? Long before there was a Beacon Hill, there was Mount Massachusetts. Too much time is spent bickering on one, and too little communing with the other. While it is way too much to suggest so bold a rectification of names as resurrecting the original name for Big Blue, if any state deserves to have and really ought to have an Official State Hill, this is it. Anything else? A modest degree of sacred memorialization designed by a Massachuset, at last setting the record straight, would hardly be amiss up there; I for one would love to trade one of the two transmission towers for a simply inscribed granite boulder. Perhaps here lies an opportunity for the denizens of Beacon Hill to come together and show how far removed their hill is from Mount Gridlock. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

Height matters. We don’t have to be in Steamboat Springs at eight thousand feet, either suffering from oxygen deprivation or enjoying a Rocky Mountain high, to be aware of the local altitude. Granted, we cannot distinguish between degrees of elevation the way we can nuances of color, but our standard equipment does include basic calibration. We conserve kinetic energy, subconsciously remembering that what goes up must come down. We know we are on a height as much by recalling the climb as by looking at the view. At least in relative terms, we know where we stand. Blessed as we are with the gift of imagination, and sometimes acute memory retention, no height scaling experience is done vapidly. Oh, no. Leaning out over the edge of the Empire State Building clutching our cellphone cameras, or descending the Mount Washington on old brakes and tires, makes us feel alive in ways that plain living on the plain cannot top. Whether we go queezy or simply tighten every muscle, a visceral response is only the primate thing to do. The higher we get, the more we calculate the risks of every little misstep. This is no cowardly climb-down, as the Brits so cutely put it, this is just plain common sense. We climb so that we may see, knowing as axiomatic that the higher we climb, the further the view. For some that process of unfolding, in the climb and then in the contemplation, is as profound as life gets. I suspect that such emotions were profound enough in millennia past for all manner of allusions to altitude to become embedded deeply within our cultural roots and our language. Perhaps altitude attitude all goes back to the most primitive forms of religion. Our unknown valley-dwelling ancestors looked to the skies for the basic necessities of sun and rain; and marveled at the nocturnal mysteries of the moon and stars, of all realms the most inaccessible and inexplicable. Somehow, over the eons, bending their chins skyward inculcated in them a sense of divinity in absolute altitude: the Most High. I suspect that from such a widespread response to the physical organization of a world perceived as flat, a kind of baseline above which extended vast heavens, height took on layers of meaning at first religious and later more broadly cultural. Societies did not need to build pyramids and ziggurats to direct religious awe at the heavens. Perhaps long before people felt comfortable climbing them, many societies held mountains to be sacred, like Mount Olympus of the Greeks, Mount Tmolus of the Lydians at Sardis, or Mount Tai in early dynastic China. There are more citadels than sacred mountains. Rarely do they coincide. Mostly the fortified heights include places of worship directed at even loftier heights elsewhere that were both too revered and too inaccessible. The citadel itself was a place for regular worship and ritual, and occasional crisis management. The Acropolis in Athens and Mont-Saint-Michel may be the quintessential examples of habitable heights as places accorded lofty status without being themselves divine. But the cathedral towns on hills—Durham, Orvieto, and Vezelay—are the exception, and even there fortification preceded veneration. For most low-lying cities, the ideal compromise site for the cathedral was the local hill or mound but usually such sites were unavailable. As for places, so, too for people. Once upon a time, for winning in war and for keeping the peace, taller was more “respectable”. Certainly, taller was stronger. The “high and mighty” were to be feared, if not respected. Perhaps in most societies, people have always accorded tall people a sense of superiority, deserved or not, and I suspect that we have been wired for it since our primitive primate days. In elevated language, the wiring reveals itself. A hill could be called an eminence, as a person could be called eminent. In ordinary usage, the wiring reveals itself even more. For example, we still talk of looking up to people who are in a sense “elevated” by virtue, of respecting what is on the up and up, of looking down on people with gigantic failings, and of lifting the spirits of those who have an inferiority complex. We have high hopes and hold the highest regard for those who are high-class or take the high road or occupy the moral high ground or risk high stakes in a high-minded cause. Social climbers make the upward mobility all too obvious. Class means high-class, high-brow, living the high life, if not exactly sitting at high table. We greatly value what we value highly. I am not a musician, but people like me imagine musical high notes as hovering over the low ones as if in three dimensional space, and understand that in some sense higher is better here too. Small wonder then that there are more sacred mountains than sacred valleys. If we rhapsodize over the view of lofty heights, or the view from sublime heights, this should still strike us as manifestly unfair. If we would love our immediate world, there are lots of common-sense reasons to worship valleys and rivers more than mountains. Perhaps the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the upper Amazon are more balanced in their focus than are the descendants of the oldest “civilizations”. Ever since Eden, we tend to sully the paradise of valleys we would inhabit. In nineteenth century America the closest valleys came to being held sacred was in their artistic worship by Hudson River School landscape painters and romantic poets as vales, intervales, and dells. And then Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and Yosemite trumped all. At last America had valleys worthy of being held sacred, which in our secular culture means being declared National Parks. If the fate of valleys became a bit less unfair, still it is the mountains that rule. The void of one would not exist but for the solid of the other. Were it not for El Capitan and the other peaks, there would be no Yosemite Valley; even Grand Canyon has its sacred San Francisco mountains. Most profoundly for us today, the sense of the sacred on high remains embedded in the imagery of our secular patrimony. Consider that the idealized image of the New England community is usually expressed not as a village nestling in a valley but as a city on a hill. Many of New England’s most photographed villages are hilltowns like Litchfield, Petersham, and Craftsbury Common. These are inspiration enough for a nation, but they are merely the literal embodiment of something much more profound than photogenic form, and that is the underlying meaning, the metaphor of the ideal on high. Even as his good ship Arbella had yet to anchor off these shores, John Winthrop launched the language that would in centuries to come stand as the metaphor for the unfolding American ideal: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us. As luck would have it, the site Winthrop finally settled on for the seedling city of Boston boasted not one, but three hills, the middle one itself a “Trimountain,” whose highest ground soon sprouted a beacon, so utilitarian a use for height, and so apt a metaphor for what Boston would become. Boston’s leading lights in the generation of Sam Adams would launch a revolution armed first and foremost with rhetoric of fair representation, liberty, and independence. Once that revolution bore the fruit of idealized government, the founding fathers faced the task of housing that government in a suitable setting. Consider the idealism that guided them still. When the Massachusetts state government outgrew its old digs in the heart of Boston, and years of indecision over a proper new site turned to impatience, there could have been no more fitting site for the New State House than dome-like Beacon Hill, John Hancock’s old pasture, now suddenly available. It was the perfect marriage of building to site. Eight years before the site became available, Boston-bred architect Charles Bulfinch had thought to crown his proposed design for the state house, presented to now-Governor Sam Adams, with a dome. Once the dome-like form of the topmost fifty-plus feet of gravelly hill behind the building was carted into Back Bay, the New State House dome crowned what was left. Within, representatives met in a radially organized space echoing the dome without. All in all, it was a flourish worthy of the occasion. Modest Mr. Bulfinch pioneered an architectural form of such enduring aptness that he was asked to design the U.S. Capitol, as well as the capitol in Augusta, Maine. Launched on Beacon Hill, the Bulfinch form of dome on pediment on hill would inspire, by way of Capitol Hill itself, half of our state capitols. In Bulfinch’s design and all its successors, Winthrop’s grand idea became visible for all the people. Government was no longer the citadel arrogantly rebuffing popular scrutiny, but the shrine serving to inspire with exemplary conduct. A tall order to aspire to, indeed. What free nation before had seated government on hilltops? The overarching metaphor of a City on a Hill, a Beacon calling forth the better angels of our nature, was heady stuff for a city given to restraint, understatement and smugness; by the nineteenth century, Boston’s moral high ground soon commanded so vast a dominion that Oliver Wendell Holmes was to dub it the Hub of the Universe. By the twentieth the message was deeply embedded in the national psyche, even if the source was dimly remembered. Lest there be any doubt of this, two presidents with a gift of the gab let the beacon shine for them. In January 1961 President-elect JFK addressed the legislature on Beacon Hill in words so eloquent they are a joy to read: "I speak neither from false provincial pride nor artful political flattery. For no man about to enter high office in this country can ever be unmindful of the contribution this state has made to our national greatness. "Its leaders have shaped our destiny long before the great republic was born. Its principles have guided our footsteps in times of crisis as well as in times of calm. Its democratic institutions--including this historic body--have served as beacon lights for other nations as well as our sister states. "For what Pericles said to the Athenians has long been true of this commonwealth: 'We do not imitate--for we are a model to others.' "And so it is that I carry with me from this state to that high and lonely office to which I now succeed more than fond memories of firm friendships. The enduring qualities of Massachusetts--the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant--will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation's executive mansion… "But I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. "'We must always consider,' he said, 'that we shall be as a city upon a hill--the eyes of all people are upon us.' "Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us--and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill--constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. "History will not judge our endeavors--and a government cannot be selected--merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. "For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us--recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state--our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions: "First, were we truly men of courage--with the courage to stand up to one's enemies--and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one's associates--the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed? "Secondly, were we truly men of judgment--with perceptive judgment of the future as well as the past--of our own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others--with enough wisdom to know that we did not know, and enough candor to admit it? "Third, were we truly men of integrity--men who never ran out on either the principles in which they believed or the people who believed in them--men who believed in us--men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust? "Finally, were we truly men of dedication--with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and compromised by no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest. "Courage--judgment--integrity--dedication--these are the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State--the qualities which this state has consistently sent to this chamber on Beacon Hill here in Boston and to Capitol Hill back in Washington. "And these are the qualities which, with God's help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government's conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead." President Ronald Reagan embarked on his administration referring to that same city on a hill, and unlike JFK lived to give a Farewell Speech, where the image appears again, by now a metaphor for America. Penned by Peggy Noonan, the speech is worth quoting at length: "I've been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one--a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, `Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.' … "…I've thought a bit of the `shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. "And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home." More than any other leader in recent memory, Kennedy and Reagan made Winthrop’s rhetoric our own, and with it did much good, at home and abroad. Bostonians did not vote for Reagan as they did for JFK, but Reagan voted for Boston. Here was another reason for Bostonians to feel smug in the ideal if wary of the reality; lofty buildings in high places do not always inspire lofty rhetoric, and lofty rhetoric in high places does not always inspire confidence. But we sure miss it when our leaders stumble over their first language, let alone fail to invoke a dream, much less make strides toward it. And if Beacon Hill has had its ups and downs, at times itself transformed into Mount Gridlock, and if Capitol Hills in Washington and beyond at times lose sight of the beacon, ours is still a system as stern as Winthrop and as optimistic as JFK and Reagan, and that is reason enough to keep aiming higher. Height will always matter. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine