"I was irked 30 years ago when our neighbor said she intended to install a free-standing fence between our driveways...."

Writes Margaret Renkl, in "What if Robert Frost’s Neighbor Was Right?" (NYT)(free-access link, the first of the 10 allotted to me in June).

By the time she died two years ago, the unbeloved fence had become the scaffolding for pokeweed and native vines.... The fence had been built in a shadowbox style, and the gaps between the boards gave reaching vines room for twisting.... After our neighbor passed, a developer bought her modest, meticulously maintained house and reduced it to rubble.... The new fence sits on top of a concrete wall.... Unlike the old shadowbox fence, this new fence has a front side and a back side, and it’s the back side that faces us. Worse, its unbroken expanse gives climbing vines no purchase. It took 30 years for the realization to dawn, but once the new flat-board fence went up, I finally understood that my late neighbor had gone to some expense to make the fence she built as attractive on our side as on hers. This choice was her version of neighborliness. I was just too caught up in my own contrary definition of neighborliness to see it....

You can listen to Frost reading his poem, "Mending Wall," here. And here's the text of the poem, which is not entirely about the literal wall. The NYT essay is about a fence. It's quite literal. Renkl has a lot of feelings about fences and neighbors — different kinds of fences and different kinds of neighbors. Do you have neighbors who bring up Trump when you thought you were just talking about your gardens? Well, let me assure you, the NYT essayist does not bring up Trump. It's lovely, all that wall wall wall and never a peep about Trump's wall. Yes, I know, I'm bad to bring it up. But how can you talk about not bringing something up without bringing it up.

"There has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action."

"I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as 'white' or 'Black,' and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as 'Hispanic' or 'Asian.'"

Emailed lawprof Sanford V. Levinson to Thomas V. Edsall and quoted in Edsall's NYT column "The Liberal Agenda of the 1960s Has Reached a Fork in the Road."

The column is about "the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action." The idea of a "fork in the road" suggests a need to pick one or the other option, but liberals could forefront both issues. They're not mutually exclusive. They've simply chosen to use the abortion issue and forget about affirmative action, and the reason is obvious. Polls show that a big majority of Americans — including a big majority of Democrats — support what the Court did with affirmative action. 

I just wanted to pull out that Levinson quote, because I remember thinking — for a brief while, back in the 1990s — that affirmative action "would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories." But I couldn't seem to find other lawprofs who saw that problem. Applicants identified themselves by race, and we took their word for it. Then there's no "impossibility of clearly defining who counts" as what. It's completely clear: You are what you say you are. What could go wrong?

About that "fork" (if there is a fork):

And "Fork in the road" has a Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

"[O]ur mother shattered the protocols of stuffy Washington decorum. 'People were uptight and too concerned about how they appeared'..."

"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."

"We may imagine specific unlived lives for ourselves, as artists, or teachers, or tech bros; I have a lawyer friend whose alternate self owns a bar in Red Hook."

"Or we may just be drawn to possibility itself, as in the poem 'The Road Not Taken': when Robert Frost tells us that choosing one path over the other made 'all the difference,' it doesn’t matter what the difference is... In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between two clearly defined fates, designed by the gods and foretold in advance: he can either fight and die at Troy or live a long, boring life.... But the world in which we live isn’t so neatly organized. Achilles didn’t have to wonder if he should have been pre-med or pre-law; we make such decisions knowing that they might shape our lives.... As Sartre says, we are who we are. But isn’t the negative space in a portrait part of that portrait? In the sense that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately. " 

From "What If You Could Do It All Over?/The uncanny allure of our unlived lives" by Joshua Rothman (in The New Yorker).

This is a subject I raised a few days back, on the blog here. Do you have a "road not taken" point in your past — a particular moment? Do you question your fixation on that moment or do you find present-day meaning in the way that is preserved in your mind? It's not that there was a fork in the road, but that your life in its entirety is a fork, and you still have that fork.

ADDED: I have a post from 2007 called "The Road Not Taken." It's about a day I spent as a docent in a Frank Lloyd Wright gatehouse that has the inscription over the fireplace: "Taken the road less traveled by/That has made all the difference." (The precise Frost line is "I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.")

"Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth."

View this post on Instagram

“SOUNDTRACK” 155x145cm Acrylic and pastel on canvas. Framed 2017/18 @andersenscontemporary - “Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth.” Bob Dylan

A post shared by Farshad Farzankia (@farshad.farzankia) on Sep 30, 2018 at 7:08am PDT

I found that via "The Artist Who Is Selling Out Shows Just Two Years After He Started Painting/Farshad Farzankia left his day job in 2016. Now, he’s putting the finishing touches on his first major U.S. solo show, which will open later this month" (NYT):

Farzankia’s paintings are instantly appealing: Simple, figurative compositions of androgynous bodies, birds, plant life and obscure symbols, rendered in bright pop palettes, they are well suited to the age of Instagram. Less apparent is that he’s only been making this work for two years. In 2016, Farzankia, now 38, quit his day job as an art director at an advertising agency in order to turn his attention to painting, a hobby he had picked up some six months earlier, after years of idly drawing and sketching in his spare time. Since then, he has become one of Scandinavia’s most buzzed-about emerging artists. When, last December, the Los Angeles-based gallerist Richard Heller presented a selection of Farzankia’s work at Art Basel Miami’s Untitled fair, it sold out instantly. Now, he is preparing for his first major U.S. solo show, at Heller’s gallery in Santa Monica, opening on Oct. 27.

There's a link to his Instagram page. I just happened to click on one that had that Bob Dylan quote in the caption — "Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth" — which put it over the line of bloggability for me.

And you might ask, Althouse, are you not jealous?

Hell, yeah.

The Dylan song — from the first Dylan album I ever bought, which was the newest Dylan album back when I started buying Dylan albums — is "Outlaw Blues."

Ain’t gonna hang no picture
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Ain’t gonna hang no picture
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Well, I might look like Robert Ford
But I feel just like a Jesse James

For half a century, I've been listening to that song and hearing "I might look like Robert Frost." No one cares about Robert Frost anymore, but he killed at the Kennedy inauguration:



I loved the absurdity of Dylan singing that he might look like Robert Frost, Dylan being quite young in those days. But the absurdity was all in my head. The line is "I might look like Robert Ford." Here's Robert Ford:



Robert Ford, better known as the man who killed Jesse James. The contrast was between looking like the cowardly killer and feeling like the daring outlaw he killed. All these years I thought Dylan was saying that he felt like an outlaw but he looked like the ancient poet, and now Dylan is an ancient poet, and I'm old too, finally reading a song I've misheard for 50-some years, and not hanging no pictures of my own anywhere, but blogging about a painter who's selling all his pictures, and after only 2 years of painting, because he's got Instagram. He's got Instagram, and I've got Blogger, and I'm going blind, like Robert Frost in that Inauguration clip.

I got my dark sunglasses
I got for good luck my black tooth
I got my dark sunglasses
I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’
I just might tell you the truth

It's not just about breaking the silence anymore. It's about breaking The Silent.

Time made a Person of the Year cover out of "The Silence Breakers," but the implication is, there was a long silence: Who was responsible for the silence? If you care enough about the silence that a few people managed to break this year, you're probably going to want to go after the people who created and maintained the silence. It's not enough to slay the beast. You have to wonder who kept and fed that beast all these years.

I see #SheKnew is up.... pic.twitter.com/ILOSh3LMVe

— Alex W Smith (@AlexSmith1964) December 19, 2017

Via "Meryl Streep #SheKnew posters pop up in Los Angeles amid backlash over Harvey Weinstein comments" (Daily News).

I'm reading quotes about silence:

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." — Martin Luther King Jr.

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself." — attributed to Robert Frost and Harvey Fierstein

"I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more." — C.S. Lewis

"I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity." — Nadezhda Mandelstam (the wife of Osip Mandelstam, whom I learned about last month as a consequence of googling "Who died for poetry?")

You'd think, given Trump and his wall, that NYC wouldn't go for an art project called "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors."

But it's ironic.

Ai Weiwei, the provocative Chinese artist, will build more than 100 fences and installations around New York City this fall for “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” one of his most large-scale public art projects to date....

You're not supposed to think that fences are good.

“When the Berlin Wall fell, there were 11 countries with border fences and walls,” Mr. Ai said. “By 2016, that number had increased to 70. We are witnessing a rise in nationalism, an increase in the closure of borders, and an exclusionary attitude towards migrants and refugees, the victims of war and the casualties of globalization.”

So he's building fences against fences. It's sort of like we're supposed to hate his art. Get this thing outta here.

It calls to mind the old "Tilted Arc" — a long metal wall that blocked diagonal paths across a plaza that many NYC workers just hated. But I don't think that work was intended to express the idea that walls are bad. I think it meant look at my big, beautiful modernist erection. But for those of us who worked in the area and had an interest in freedom of movement through what would otherwise be an open plaza, the predominant thought was, yes, I've seen it, I've seen it in my way a hundred times, get it the hell out of here. And in the end it was removed. The artist was miffed, but the workers were happy. Not as happy as Berlin when its wall fell, but happy to have the arrogant artist's imposition disimposed.

I've talked about "Tilted Arc" a few times on this blog, notably here:

The sculpture's high art proponents ridiculed the complaints, including a fear of "terrorists who might use it as a blasting wall for bombs." Serra himself said that to move the "site-specific" sculpture would be to destroy it. He also said: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people." Fine, but then, keep it out of the plaza! And don't take taxpayer money. The Grand Central carpeting on the other hand, can be walked on comfortably, is amusing for almost everybody, and is going to be removed after a short time, so any perception of ugliness will soon enough give way to the good feeling of relief when it is gone. "Tilted Arc" was there, in the way, permanently, with no feeling or sensitivity for the people who worked in the Plaza. I worked in the area at the time and know first-hand its effect on human beings, who had "site-specific" jobs and did not deserve to be challenged by art to take a 120-foot walk around a steel arc hundreds or thousands of times.

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some discussion of the extent to which the taxpayers are funding this. And Matthew Sablan wants to talk about the Robert Frost poem (the full text of which you can read here):

The fence/wall in the poem always struck me as one guy saying, "we don't need this; it wastes our time every year rebuilding the damn thing," and the other guy saying, "yeah, but we might need it in the future, and besides, you and I trust each other, yet, trust but verify."

There's a lot packed into the poem, but in general, it is two different people approaching the wall problem. Frost wants us to think the narrator makes a good point, but the other guy has plenty of valid reasons for wanting a wall (without it, in say, 20 years, how will they know where the property line is? What if an apple tree DOES sprout on the opposite side?)

Also, the wall ISN'T walling the two people out from each other. They could talk over it, if they wanted. Without the wall there, they wouldn't see each other any other time in the year.

That made me read the poem and feel I can enlighten you. This is purely on my reading it just now and not looking at what anybody else says. I think the narrator enjoys the yearly activity with his neighbor. He calls it a "game." They don't really need a wall because they're only growing trees and the trees aren't going anywhere. But a second amusing thing you can do when you've got another person with you — besides playing a physical game like wall-building — is to have a conversation. The narrator is satisfied with the wall-building game — he's not really trying to avoid the trouble. He kind of likes it.

He's disappointed by the inability to get the verbal game started. He parries with that idea that the trees aren't going to behave any differently. But the other guy has a go-to old saying: "Good fences make good neighbours." The narrator babbles out a few things and stops short of another idea he could throw out — that elves are taking the wall down — but "But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather/He said it for himself." The narrator wants to have a conversation. But the other guy is just doggedly continuing the physical game, lugging another stone. And all he adds to the conversation — that the narrator thinks could get really interesting with elves or something, anything — is another repetition of the old saying.

Yes, there's repetition in rebuilding the wall every year, and yes, that repetition isn't really necessary, but I think the central problem is frustration at not getting a conversation started. I think the narrator would be just as happy to get a flow of interesting words about the good of maintaining an old fence and redoing the shared annual ritual of moving the stones back where they were. What he wants is to do something with another person with his mind and not just his body. But the other man — whose body is good enough to lift "boulders" — just doesn't have a mind that can do much. He says the same old thing twice, and the narrator wants a real conversation. When the narrator says "Something there is that doesn't love a wall/That wants it down," he means Talk to me, for God's sake!

"The first time I took LSD was in 1969, when I was seventeen.... The older people were drinking, and three or four of us teen-agers were tripping."

"For what I recall as a long time, I stood in front of a closet door by a washing machine. In the door’s grain I saw, to my astonishment, the span of history, as if on a scroll that was unwinding. I’d bring people to stand in front of the door with me, and I’d point out Jesus, and Charlemagne, and soldiers with lances riding elephants, and I’d say, 'See!'... Very few songs influenced by a drug reproduce the sensation of taking the drug, but 'She Said She Said' comes close. It’s a solemn song, and seems to coil snakelike in on itself... 'She Said She Said' is a witness song. A piece of theatre. You’re listening to an argument, a dialectic. 'I know what it’s like,' one character says. 'No, no, no, you’re wrong,' the other says.... I would listen over and over to the song while looking at the cover.*... Somewhere in the psyche is everything we can imagine. Cities we have never visited, characters, landscapes, circumstances that will appear in dreams, all brought into being by some agency we don’t fully understand and can’t summon easily in waking life. Alone in my room, 'She Said She Said' seemed to me like a bulletin from the other side of the fence** (even though I didn’t yet know there was a fence), and it still does."

From "My Obsession with a Beatles Song" by Alec Wilkinson (in The New Yorker).

______________________

* The "Revolver" cover is one of the 6 framed album covers on the living room wall at Meadhouse.

** That bit about he fence made me think about this video I saw on Facebook today:



It made me think: Something there is that doesn't love a fence....

"I don’t endorse the argument of the philosopher John Rawls that no one is entitled to a high income because..."

"... even characteristics that we think internal rather than external to a person, like IQ and leadership skills and athletic skills and energy and good health, are ultimately the product of luck. Therefore, Rawls argued, no one should be allowed to keep more of his earnings than necessary to 'incentivize' him to exert himself in a way that will maximize the social product."

So says Richard Posner. His objection is:

That treats people like the cells of an animal’s body, or the ants in an ant heap. Rather my point is that, to the extent reducing income inequality increases overall social welfare, there is a case for programs, financed by the well to do, that increase overall welfare by more than the cost of the programs. There is no reason to think that the cost would impose a crushing burden on the well to do, a result that would be objectionable quite apart from the costs in diminished incentives, and related costs such as tax avoidance and emigration.

Chew on that. I was distracted by "ant heap." Who says "ant heap" rather than "ant hill"?  I'm more the literary type than the economic. But speaking of departmentalization of each of us having our various skills and predilections, whether inborn or cultivated, my searching for the answer to my heap/hill question brought me quickly to this Robert Frost poem, "Departmental":