December 22, 2011
Nikolai Rostov and Idleness

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor - idleness - was a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man’s primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class - the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

Nicholas Rostov experienced this blissful condition to the full when, after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pavlograd regiment, in which he already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denisov.

Rostov had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who was liked and respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and was well contented with his life. Of late, in 1809, he found in letters from home more frequent complaints from his mother that their affairs were falling into greater and greater disorder, and that it was time for him to come back to gladden and comfort his old parents.

Reading these letters, Nicholas felt a dread of their wanting to take him away from surroundings in which, protected from all the entanglements of life, he was living so calmly and quietly. He felt that sooner or later he would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with its embarrassments and affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with stewards, quarrels, and intrigues, its ties, society, and with Sonya’s love and his promise to her. It was all dreadfully difficult and complicated; and he replied to his mother in cold, formal letters in French, beginning: “My dear Mamma,” and ending: “Your obedient son,” which said nothing of when he would return. In 1810 he received letters from his parents, in which they told him of Natasha’s engagement to Bolkonski, and that the wedding would be in a year’s time because the old prince made difficulties. This letter grieved and mortified Nicholas. In the first place he was sorry that Natasha, for whom he cared more than for anyone else in the family, should be lost to the home; and secondly, from his hussar point of view, he regretted not to have been there to show that fellow Bolkonski that connection with him was no such great honor after all, and that if he loved Natasha he might dispense with permission from his dotard father. For a moment he hesitated whether he should not apply for leave in order to see Natasha before she was married, but then came the maneuvers, and considerations about Sonya and about the confusion of their affairs, and Nicholas again put it off. But in the spring of that year, he received a letter from his mother, written without his father’s knowledge, and that letter persuaded him to return. She wrote that if he did not come and take matters in hand, their whole property would be sold by auction and they would all have to go begging. The count was so weak, and trusted Mitenka so much, and was so good-natured, that everybody took advantage of him and things were going from bad to worse. “For God’s sake, I implore you, come at once if you do not wish to make me and the whole family wretched,” wrote the countess.

This letter touched Nicholas. He had that common sense of a matter-of-fact man which showed him what he ought to do.

W&P, Tolstoy, Book 7, Ch. 1

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July 28, 2011
"Page 270 of Superclass. “[At Davos], Another of the most interesting and respected dinners is hosted by Victor Halberstadt and his wife, Masha, who is an accomplished painter. Somes Halberstadt will have a chef flown in especially for dinners. He deftly runs it like a salon: At some point early in the dinner he interrupts and says, “let’s start this,” and welcomes everyone, describes with great humour who they are and what they have recently achieved, and then provokes an always fascinating discussion. So for example, he says, Jean Claude Trichet tell us, how do you see Europe’s main economic vulnerabilities? Or to Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, What do you think will happen to the Chinese currency? or You, Mr. Minister of Finance of Turkey, what are the repercussions of the Iraq war in your country? And so on. “The dinner has a strong European flavor, as it normally includes the CEOs of Heineken, Royal Dutch Shell, Phillips, and other major European firms. But Victor always managed to also attract the smartest Russians, Americans and Middle Easterners at the dinner, as well as some of the most interesting academics and media leaders. It is not just who goes to that dinner but the extraordinary way in which he managed to have everyone exchange very interesting information that you would not otherwise get just reading the newspapers or going to the formal sessions."

— Also Klaus Schwab and Philippe Bourguignon

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July 28, 2011

We “know” that there are two kinds of Etonian, Oppidan (those pedigreed lads who pay their own way) and Colleger (scholarship students, whose endowment carries over from King Henry’s original desire that the place be devoted to the education of the poor). That may seem like a laugh now, when the fees including “extras” come to about £30,000 a year (at current exchange rates about what it costs me to send my daughter to a day school in Washington), but the fact remains that Eton provides a number of scholarships and that, mad sports and bizarre practices to one side, it has long been celebrated for its academic rigor alone, and has had some famously fine teachers, not just Aldous Huxley, as above mentioned, but (as a visitor) Lionel Trilling. There is a legend that boys have their names “put down” for Eton at birth, but such a process is no guarantee of admission, and, for example, it seems improbable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose son Yermolai attended the school, went through any such paternal ritual. If it had produced only sportsmen and soldiers and imperial proconsuls, like some other famous schools, it would not be so celebrated. But here is where one of the great reforming Liberal prime ministers, William Ewart Gladstone, received his grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, at which he so excelled. And here is where John Maynard Keynes, who revolutionized political and economic theory, acquired his academic sinews while, according to contemporary reports, doing some very serious sleeping around. The Etonian system is not designed to turn out a uniform product, in other words. “It also has one great virtue,” wrote the austere egalitarian George Orwell in 1948, “and that is a tolerant and civilized atmosphere which gives each boy a chance of developing a fair individuality.” Boys have their own rooms rather than sharing. Thus, though John le Carré—who taught there under his real name, David Cornwell—claims to be able to detect an Etonian in a crowded room 80 percent of the time, he told my Etonian friend Nick Fraser (author of The Importance of Being Eton) that the salient characteristic of his pupils was “cool impertinence.… The boys were adult, funny, a little removed from life even as they evolved effortlessly into the shrewdest operators. They were at once innocent and worldly.” This cultivated affect dovetails perfectly with the Niven-ish image of the deceptively polite and modest Englishman, outwardly unflappable and possessed of steely inward ruthlessness.And steely understatement is the mark of the man here. Let’s agree that things mustn’t be too strenuous either: one aims at the coolly effortless effect because anything else would run the appalling risk of seeming “boring.” This generalized diffidence extends to a number of “O.E.’s,” as alumni of Eton are called, who fail to mention the school on the dust jackets of their books.

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July 27, 2011

On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest — African-Americans and affluent white liberals — has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking — Canetti’s feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama’s vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.  

A creature of universities and churches and nonprofit institutions, the Illinois senator, with the blessing and acquiescence of his upscale supporters, has glided past these hard distinctions. On the face of it, it must be surmised that his affluent devotees are ready to foot the bill for the new order, or are convinced that after victory the old ways will endure, and that Mr. Obama will govern from the center. Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate:

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July 27, 2011
"One insider has another guess—that the conversation had to do with Obama’s unrequited support of Lieberman in the 2006 Connecticut Senate race. “Obama, once you get beneath his patina of aloofness, is a real guy. He talks very directly in private conversation. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a conversation about that—‘Hey, bro, what’s the deal?’ "

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July 26, 2011
"Obama was the most prominent minority student on a campus shaken by racial politics…. If he failed to use his office to criticize Harvard, Mr. Obama would anger black and liberal students; by speaking out, he would risk dragging himself and the review into the center of shrill debates. People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama’s words…. According to Mr. Ogletree, students on each side of the debate thought he was endorsing their side. “Everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me,” he said…. Obama stayed away from the extremes… choosing safe topics for his speeches…. His speeches… were more memorable for style than substance…. Another of Mr. Obama’s techniques relied on his seemingly limitless appetite for hearing the opinions of others…. That could lead to endless debates… as well as some uncertainty about what Mr. Obama himself thought about… his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice…. “The things that make law school politics fractious are different from the things that make American politics fractious,” said Ron Klain, who preceded Mr. Obama at the law review and later served as Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff…. [Obama’s] “is that is a style of leadership more effective running a law review than running a country"

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July 26, 2011
"He then and now is very hard to pin down,” said Kenneth Mack, a classmate and now a professor at the law school, referring to the senator’s on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand style. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., another Harvard law professor and a mentor of Mr. Obama, said, “He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts.”…"

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July 25, 2011
Before the presidency

BARACK OBAMA: All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background—very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life.

Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person. ♦

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July 25, 2011
Playing Bridge

So argumentative were students that Charnes, a senior law review editor, recalls a heated discussion one morning over whether it was elitist to bring editors bagels and muffins.

Higgins recalls Obama walking in during another argument.

He summoned one editor to a meeting and began climbing the stairs to his cramped second-floor office. The editor made no move to follow and kept arguing. Obama paused.

“Upstairs, now,” he said firmly. He kept walking. The editor sheepishly followed.

Obama rarely raised his voice.

“In law school and on law review, most people like to talk a lot and exercise their mouths more than their ears,” Charnes says. “And Barack was just the opposite. He was very judicious in expressing his opinions and views.”

Kenny Smith, a year ahead of Obama, joined him for pickup basketball games on Fridays in the law school gym. Though the games were physical, Obama was unflappable. Smith says it was a quality that helped him get along with students of all stripes.

“He was sort of a bridge person for various camps because the law school was very, very divided,” recalls Smith, now 43 and an assistant U.S. attorney in Charlotte. “He seemed to have almost an ‘old soul.’ … He just had a practical wisdom and always seemed grounded and comfortable in his own skin.”

After a game, they sometimes stopped for pizza and talked about their futures. While others foresaw lucrative careers, Obama, who’d come to Harvard after three years as a community organizer, wanted to return to Chicago.

“A lot of people, quite frankly, thought he was crazy,” says Smith. “For him to take the more principled approach rather than the pragmatic approach was remarkable.”

Spurning other offers, Obama went back to his adopted hometown and led a voter-registration drive before going to work for a firm specializing in civil rights and discrimination cases.

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July 24, 2011
Traveling together

I change the subject to a politician who is more congenial, his old school friend from Eton, Boris Johnson, who is now mayor of London. Johnson stayed with Abhisit in Thailand, in their year off between school and university, and the two have remained close. I ask whether they had both always harboured political ambitions. Abhisit says: “I had expected Boris to go into politics but he’s a character so it was never going to be a smooth ride for him. But all credit to him that he’s used his character and is sticking to being his true self and getting to where he is today.” Johnson has boasted that he is the only British politician who knows how to spell “Vejjajiva”. At Eton, the future prime minister was frequently referred to as “Veggie” for short.

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