Joseph Marohl

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I saw Away We Go yesterday afternoon with a couple of my colleagues at work. I thought the movie was rather wonderful, but my friend Kirsten didn’t much like the main male character’s cutesy boyishness or the exaggerated kookiness of the couple’s friends and family-and Steve, my other companion, mildly objected to the film’s episodic structure, bumpy even by typical road-movie standards-three valid points, however not nearly enough to diminish my enjoyment.

What do I like about Sam Mendes’ latest film? It’s my favorite of anything of his I’ve seen (including last year’s remarkable Revolutionary Road). Well, for one, it is a movie for adults-an R-rated movie that treats sexuality with honesty, even from its opening scene (which had the sort of matter-of-fact sexual frankness I have not often seen in American films since the 1970s). Not to say that the movie is a nudity fest, which it is not, but it handles sex as an ordinary, real part of love without sensationalizing it or obsessing over it. It helps that the screenplay is by novelists, husband-and-wife co-founders of the magazine The Believer, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida.

The movie has been compared a lot to Juno (2007), a highly praised movie I didn’t much care for. As a road movie, it also has some marked structural similarity to Little Miss Sunshine (2006), About Schmidt (2002), and especially Flirting with Disaster (1996).

Another reason for me to love Away We Go is the small but memorable cameo appearances by some of my favorite character actors-Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Allison Janney, Chris Messina, Catherine O’Hara, and Paul Schneider. Gyllenhaal shines as a trippy, wanna-be feminist earth mother, and Chris Messina is touching as a happy young husband and father. But I don’t want to say too much here. I would hate to spoil the movie’s little surprises, though, by further description.

The movie is a satire about romance, without falling into the twin traps of most movies that deal with romance and social satire: that is, sentimentality and cynicism. It is not a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again sort of romance. Rather refreshingly, I thought, the unmarried couple Burt and Verona (played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are indisputably in love from beginning to end-with no fluctuations whatsoever on that score.

They are full of love, respect, desire, and understanding for each other, but what they lack is a sense of belonging to the larger world. Verona fears that they are fuckups. Besides each other, they have no strong emotional connections to family or friends. At the beginning, circumstances unfold to force them out of their isolation and onto a trek across North America in search of a new home for themselves-and their first baby who is on the way.

Like most people in this situation, they follow job prospects and personal contacts, leading them to Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal, and Miami-where they encounter variations on the idea of couple-ness-people who are self-absorbed, materialistic, shrilly despairing and desperate, pretentiously “enlightened” and judgmental, burdened with a sense of loss, and, ultimately, unloved and unloving. At one point Verona senses that nobody else loves the way she and Burt do and panics at their utter isolation from the rest of the world.

This is the satirical point of the movie-the absence of love in all our talk about love and understanding. On that level, it’s a tiny bit like Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), without the infidelity. Everybody else Burt and Verona meet is a foil, emphasizing the genuineness and solidness of their love and commitment, even outside of marriage. A number of reviewers, including my friend Kirsten, felt that the other characters are sometimes cruelly caricaturized. In a way they are, but no more so than the characters viewed critically in comedies by, say, Woody Allen or the Coen brothers.

In his mostly favorable review, Roger Ebert raises the possibility that they are, instead, grotesques-that is, in the Winesburg, Ohio sense, characters who have one over- or under-developed spiritual quality that destabilizes and dwarfs every other aspect of their personality. As such, they are not so much individuals as manifestations of a sick society and its warped values.

But whether caricature or grotesque, the characters are what they are because (as in all satire) the storytellers have chosen to look at the rest of the world from a precise and individual moral stance-and satirists from Juvenal to Swift to Twain to Flannery O’Connor to Sacha Baron Cohen have all likewise been criticized as misanthropes for their coarse and cruel takes on those who fall outside the limits of their unique ethical perspectives. Unlike “soft” comedy, satire embraces many of the stark qualities of tragedy, too.

In other words, without being preachy, Away We Go is a film with a serious message. The audience is never beaten over the head with the message, and I imagine different people will take different ideas away from this movie. Antagonists to this message-the enthusiasms, bitterness, and pretenses of the minor characters-are indeed portrayed in a disparaging light.

And the message is about love-though hardly the naïve or jaded views we have come to expect from Hollywood entertainments.

What can we understand about (and through) love and commitment? What is the right way to live as a couple-or, for that matter, as a loner? And what promise does love hold for us and for those we love?

This movie offers an elegant yet not simple response to this eternal theme.

Joseph Marohl

My friend Dom sent me a paperback book as a birthday present—as just one among a number of precisely thoughtful presents she likes to send me from time to time, like CARE packages.

My birthday was in March. Unlike the other presents, the book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, arrived late. It was late because she wanted the author to inscribe it to me (he wrote on the title page, “To Joe Marohl, A fellow Proustophile! I hope you enjoy … Jonah Lehrer”)—because, I suspect, she thought I would think the 27-year-old writer is cute.

And I sort of do.

The book is a wonder. It is not focused on the great novelist Marcel Proust alone, but covers eight figures of the modern era—Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf included. From the compositions of these original minds, Lehrer extracts details relating to recent scientific discoveries about the human nervous system.

The book has opened my eyes to the fact that my humanist heroes, like Whitman, Proust, and Stein, followed the scientific discoveries of their day with not only great interest but also some expertise. But, more importantly to Lehrer’s thesis, their imagination of human nature was decades before their time. In some cases, science has only recently discovered proof of what the poet Whitman intuited in the nineteenth century.

For instance, we learn from Whitman that all the body is mind, which is not restricted to the brain at all, and the sensations it pulls in become ingredients of a self—the subjective consciousness, or soul. Lehrer relates a series of experiments that suggest, for instance, that the hand “knows” some information before it even reaches the brain.

From Eliot, we learn that human individuality springs from the interplay of nature and nurture alike—environment and DNA together give shape to our neurons. From Escoffier, we learn the complexities of taste and smell; from Cézanne, of vision; from Stravinsky, of hearing. It turns out that the modernists were right in weaning us from objectivity and teaching us new ways to perceive the real world.

Lehrer’s point is that linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky is accurate in stating, “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”

Recent research proves that early science’s positivist confidence in systems and natural laws was naïve. The mind is more haphazard, self-contradictory, and creative than any step process can map out. We are, after all, infinitely variable and free—and constantly changing. The subjective self we come to imagine as the center of the universe has no location at all. Instead, it is a process and a synthesis.

“The self is simply our work of art,” Lehrer explains, “a fiction created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole ‘theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.’ If it didn’t exist, then nothing would exist.”

One reason Lehrer’s book and ideas enchant me so is that they undertake the three aspects of existence I find most compelling now—sensation, consciousness, and language. Chapter by chapter, Lehrer constructs the compelling argument that “what we call reality is merely the final draft” of what the “multiple channels” of the human mind pull together experimentally, and then, like good writers, or editors, tidy up in draft after draft, interpreting and revising our individual perceptions throughout our lives.

Joseph Marohl

In my British literature class today, we were discussing Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle, who lost his faith in the Calvinist religion he was raised in, conservatively argues that the forms of Christianity (in particular, the idea of duty) have value in structuring culture, even in an age of doubt and skepticism.

Several students raised the issue of religion and meaninglessness and morals, arguing that without a belief in God there can be no morals because life then has no meaning.

Carlyle’s point, though, is that work and action have meaning even without a fundamental faith in myths of origins and without a clear view of the future towards which one is supposedly working. His stance is that doubt is better than faith when doubt works in the interest of a genuine love of truth and faith provides only a pleasant fantasy in which one cocoons oneself from the harshness and indifference of history and the cosmos.

People who say that they need belief in God because existence would be too terrifying without it are, at heart, pleasure-seekers—even worse, as Carlyle implies, because they are pleasure-seekers willing to sacrifice truth on the altar of comfortable illusion.

To act, for Carlyle, is better than to believe. Some students objected though that moral action has no merit apart from a belief in a God who judges those actions. I pointed out that the Greeks developed a sophisticated moral sense based on the needs of society, quite apart from their gods, who, as forces of nature, acted any way but morally.

One student objected, stating that this precisely was her problem with “secular philosophers”: they argued about morality—what made a man or a republic good—but failed to find a center or reason for moral behavior. And therefore each successive philosopher debunks the findings of his predecessor, and we are then left with a belief in nothing.

I pointed out that religion did not solve this problem any better—because just as philosophers cannot agree on their conception of the Good, theologians cannot agree on their conception of God—and, further, a 21st century Christian’s concept of God is markedly different from a 19th century Christian’s concept.

At bottom, there is a problem with idealism, I think. The purity of concept that idealism demands is incompatible with taking action, because no real action can embody an ideal. Our choices are then to preserve moral ideals—encase them, codify them, study and defend them—or to act on them.

Simply to preserve principles of morality is a form of idolatry, one that does nothing to ensure that culture grows and flourishes. Its focus is entirely purity of form, and that purity must never be sullied by crass action—such morality has limitless capabilities, but no duty to act.

To act morally, though, means to rub shoulders with the realities of life at a particular time, under particular circumstances, and in the process almost certainly to watch as that morality mutates or evolves into something altogether different. But it is the latter morality, not pure and not ideal, and constantly mutating, that has the force to push culture forward—whereas the rarefied ideal morality is decadent, self-absorbed, and impractical.

Surely, then, it is better to pursue goodness in one’s actions—even at the risk of making mistakes, perhaps even in unintentionally doing harm (and here it’s useful to remember that Carlyle hated utilitarianism, which argues that ends justify means, regardless of intentions—and judges results in terms of statistical norms)—than to define and defend a pristine goodness that is impossible to perform.

Though I can’t say that I buy into all of Carlyle’s ideas—and hardly any of his Tory politics or love of duty for duty’s sake—I think he’s on to something here. Certainly the problem with the great ideologies—Christianity, for instance, or, for that matter, liberalism or conservatism—is that they are prone to self-absorption, endlessly refining themselves and polishing themselves up to the point that they cannot be touched, much less performed.

We cannot reduce morality to a set of rules without destroying the dynamic power of morality. Likewise, we cannot simply believe in moral precepts and believe that that belief, without works, without action, without performance, is enough. And we cannot so spiritualize or intellectualize morality that it loses touch with ordinary human existence—or fails to address real human problems, such as hunger, homelessness, panic, and despair.

An inflexible idealism, though awe-inspiring to look at, never gets its hands dirty. In effect, in reality, all it can do is criticize and destroy. Nothing, in fact, that leaves a grimy footprint can ever measure up to its pure ideals.

And, as Carlyle puts it, the gulf between capability and performance is immense. Moral and political ideologues work best when they have no power whatsoever—but display a sense of vast though untested capability. Then they can stand on the sidelines and shine superiorly.

Allison Bricker

As our Republic continues to swerve recklessly away from its Constitutional founding, the opportunity for us to salvage what so many have died for, slides further away from our grasp. Just as Winter has begun to set in across the nation, our Liberties seem to have fallen away like leaves lost into the breeze. Whether it be legalized torture or the Department of Homeland Security suspending the Constitution along the border, the country I fell in love with as a child, looks less and less like the land of the free.

Many amongst us are pinning their hopes of a better tomorrow on yet another politician who promises “change” from the status-quo and business as usual in Washington. However, within hours of the election, his “transition” website, laid out his and his enforcer’s vision of mandatory unpaid servitude for the youth of our nation. Shortly thereafter upon echoing criticism ringing across the blogosphere, they whitewashed the website and scurried their indentured labor force back under the rug. The Obama transition team decided to replace the compulsory service text with toned down verbiage so as not to cause a scandal prior to his formal coronation.

In this Winter of our discontent, there are a few sparks which seek to reignite our lost sense of self. It has for a long time now been my opinion that the planets must have aligned to have allowed such an assembly of thinkers such a Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and the rest of the founding generation to have known to each other in order to be able to hammer out Independence and beat back tyranny. Perhaps, we may be so fortunate yet again, to recapture that spirit of ‘76 with a new gathering of minds dedicated to reason and human liberty. One such intellect where parallels can be drawn is Naomi Wolf. Her latest works, “The End of America” and “Give Me Liberty” are written with such a dedication and sound resolve towards the virtues of freedom that the pages in her books seem to echo the spirit and tenacity of Thomas Paine.

In support of the ideas presented in, “The End of America”, and to help spread the word virally in the internet age, Ms. Wolf has released an online video where she covers the ten steps taken time and again, by all would-be tyrants in a closing society. The movie is available free for online viewing and is a must see for those in tune with our current state of affairs. Her content and tone is so well reasoned and articulated, even those who refuse to acknowledge the danger, must at least pause to question, what our Republic will resemble in two, five, or ten years from now.

The video can be viewed here, and please if you find her presentation to be a powerful arguement as to why we need to restore, preserve and defend our American Republic, please consider passing it along via DiGG, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etcetrera.

Mandy Hyndman

I was overjoyed the day my loquacious and homophobic Sophomore English teacher announced that he would be stepping down for the semester to make room for Ms. Harrison, our new student teacher. Until that point I had never experienced an English instructor who had not become long-winded and jaded by his or her many years in the public system. Ms. Harrison, on the other hand, from the first clearly held a passion for the world of literature that would benefit me throughout my life.

It was custom sophomore year for the class to read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (the story of a family living during the time of the Great Depression), and Ms. Harrison wasted no time handing copies out to the groaning, whining class. I, of course, was the nerd who loved the opportunity to read something with substance. Apparently Ms. Harrison was too, because she hushed the class immediately and began the first of what was to become a series of lectures that would be the only valuable literature discussion I would have in my early high school career with the words: “Remember, this book is truth. This book is telling a story about something that could easily happen again. Pay attention.” I did.

Through the ravages of dust from a thirsty and dead ground, and the danger of society made feral by desperation, the story of the Joad family serves ONE purpose: To remind us what could easily become of our world again if we aren’t careful.

I remember the way the other sixteen year-olds around me reacted when the character ‘Rosasharn’, a pregnant teenager, offers a starving stranger her breast milk for nourishment. They were disgusted, amused, appalled, stricken horrified by what seemed a taboo to them.

I had tears in my eyes. The beauty of such an unselfish act floored me and filled me with a sense of good beyond any I’d felt before. The people around me did not see it because they were caught in the idea that such a scenario could never play out in their lives. The battering poverty of the people in The Grapes of Wrath would never be a part of who these teenagers were. I saw the truth though. I saw that the book wasn’t just a story, but a warning–a parable.

Now, during a critical time in the history of our nation, before we take that final step into desperation I hope those same kids who laughed and groaned at how uncomfortable the idea of a pregnant teenager breast-feeding an old man made them, now remember the message that the story meant to send. We are not immune from misery. We have no shield against devastation. We only have each other when it comes. John Steinbeck knew this, Ms. Harrison knew this, and because of them I know it and hope to pass it along, because when the flood comes I plan to have my arms strongly linked with strong people.