Last weekend the entire city dressed up as a flea market. Stalls strung for kilometers displayed all you could ever need or hope for: bronze gongs, fur shoes, Smurf figurines, horned headdresses, engine parts, and piles of miniature porcelain arms, legs, and heads.

The best thing we’ve happened upon so far in our intent-on-entertaining city is this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Imagine you’re walking through the main market of the old city at night and you see this projected on the side of City Hall. So, what do you do? Perhaps you’d order an Aperol Spritz and sit for a proper screening. It turns out what we saw was a run-through for the actual event the next night.

Blue Night is celebrated each May in Nuremberg by illuminating various buildings with blue and offering light shows and other art exhibits. Of course, happening upon a light show when hardly anyone is around is much more magical than setting out to see it in a crowd, but here is a bit more of what we shared with 120,000 others:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This show was created by Casa Magica, a German company that has also undertaken architectural projection on the pyramids of Giza, the St. Jean Cathedral in Lyon, and has even transformed Tampa into awe-worthiness.

Is your city out to impress you this summer? How is it doing so far?

Oh, and what is the music to which this light show was set?

Click here to view the embedded video.

In mad excitement for my guests, I spilled coffee on my computer. Then in a series of stupid acts, I erased all the pictures of their visit except for this--saved by Facebook.

After a delightful and stressful month or so that included:

• two weeks of teaching Russian students English online
• losing that job due to my sporadic internet connection (I signed my first contract for DSL in early February and am still waiting for it to be connected)
• a two-week training that qualifies me to teach for Berlitz
• an eight-day visit from my parents (which included eating lots of cake, drinking lots of beer, seeing a couple castles, learning European history, visiting several cities, taking lots of walks, and having meaningful conversations over many a delicious meal)

I suddenly found myself alone with several days in a row of unstructured time. You know what that means. I had no excuse not to write.

Except that I’d spilled coffee on my computer and it wasn’t working. But, after backing up all my files and erasing the entire hard drive, the computer began to work again (except for the keyboard, which explains the auxiliary one stationed in front of my laptop).

It’s just that instead of copying some of my folders I copied “shortcuts” to them. My “novel” happened to be in one of these.

But that was okay because I needed to rethink it, anyway.

We all know that real writers don’t wait for inspiration. We know better than to believe in writer’s block. I held up my thumb in search of a lift, and I got picked up by the comments section of “Why Write Novels At All?” in the New York Times.

[Novels] occur in the mind of the reader most of all and give people the space to consider people and situations in ways that even direct experience does not. (N123, Boston, MA)

I had been contemplating turning my “novel” idea into a play, but N123 reminded me how much I value the intimacy of the writing/reading exchange. I love the way reading a novel relies so heavily on the collaboration of the reader, and I love the care a good writer takes in order to guide the reader’s imagination just so.

I love how reading authentic representations of life allows us to mull over events, motivations, and results slowly, with the depth and care we can’t always offer experiences we witness first-hand. And I love how writing prose allows us to engage with the most interesting thing in the world: layered, intricate, and oftentimes inconsistent human thought.

For all of us who are ill-equipped to offer much to the world in the way of practical knowledge or skill, at least we can keep trying to offer alternate ways of thinking about this nutty world. And even if we utterly fail in that, we can live countless lives—meaningful and tragic—through reading (between stints of washing the world’s cars, floors, and toilets).

A Brave New Book

I can understand why some Germans would like it if the rest of the world’s fascination with Hitler, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Nazis would dissipate. One German woman told me the Germans find talk of all of this “boring.” I was supposed to be helping her with her English so I probably should have helped her determine if boring was the word she really meant. Another German woman told me that what happened in WWII wasn’t the fault of her generation and she wishes people could stop talking about it.

At the same time, some people are engaging with and adding to our knowledge of this particular part of history impressively. One such project is a book written by a German historian called, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939-1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (My Grandfather in the War: 1939-1945: Memory and Facts Compared). In the book, Moritz Pfeiffer, who is a historian, interviews his grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht infantry.

After interviewing his grandfather and examining letters written by his grandmother, who he describes as a “committed, almost fanatical Nazi,” Pfeiffer checked the testimony of his grandparents against factual, historical documents. The result is what I would imagine is an uncomfortable confrontation with painful truths, a brave act. About the project, Pfeiffer says:

I believe that people will learn a lot if they understand how their respected and loved parents or grandparents behaved in the face of a totalitarian dictatorship and murderous racial ideology. Dealing with one’s family history in the Nazi period in an open, factual and self-critical way is an important contribution to accepting democracy and avoiding a repeat of what happened between 1933 and 1945.

Pfeiffer is encouraging others to undertake similar oral history projects, to listen to those who were involved in the war before we lose access to their testimony and perspectives.

Another piece that engages bravely with history is the film, “Eyewitness Archive of the Nuremberg Party Rallies,” made by Reiner Holzemer. The film is shown at the Documentation Center in Nuremberg, an exhibit that chronicles Hitler’s rise to power and the details of the Nazi rallies on the Nazi rally campus. There is much to criticize about the exhibit—it offers facts that have been sterilized, ironed, and starched. They are so clean one is almost able to forget the horror to which they are attached. The highlight of the museum is Holzemer’s film, which is shown in the last room of the exhibit and is comprised of interviews with Germans and Jews who lived in Nuremberg during the war.

My favorite quote from the film is that of a German, Edi Sers, who explains with impressive honesty how exciting it was to see the Nazi tanks and machine guns. He describes himself as a “fellow traveler,” in the course of Nazi history, as one who went along with things—with “enthusiasm,” even. He says a fellow traveler can’t claim to have been detached, that in going along with things, he “indirectly supported” the movement. He says now he realizes, “You had to shoot yourself in order to stay alive.”

Johann Strauss: German or Austrian?

We are in Vienna. Beautiful, grand, seductive Vienna. I had never given Vienna a single thought and now I’m a fool for the city.

Germany seems to get all the attention, and I wonder what Austrians think of that. It could, however, just be my problem. For instance, on this trip, I’m becoming aware of how many things I assumed were German when, in fact, they are Austrian. I thought I’d create a quiz so you could see how Austria-informed you are.

1)      Falco
a. German
b. Austrian

2)      Sigmund Freud
a. German
b. Austrian

3)      Johann Sebastian Bach
a. German
b. Austrian

What About This Guy?

4)      Ludwig van Beethoven
a. German
b. Austrian

5)      Franz Schubert
a. German
b. Austrian

6)      Heidi Klum
a. German
b. Austrian

7)      Gustav Mahler
a. German
b. Austrian

8)      Robert Schumann
a. German
b. Austrian

9)      Johannes Brahms
a. German
b. Austrian

10)  Marlene Dietrich
a. German
b. Austrian

11)  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
a. German
b. Austrian

12)  Richard Wagner
a. German
b. Austrian

13)  Max Ernst
a. German
b. Austrian

14)  Joseph Haydn
a. German
b. Austrian

15)  Gustav Klimt
a. German
b. Austrian

16)  Egon Schiele
a. German
b. Austrian

17)  Paul Klee
a. German
b. Austrian

18)  Albert Einstein
a. German
b. Austrian

19)  Adolf Hitler
a. German
b. Austrian

20)  Karl Marx
a. German
b. Austrian

21)  Arnold Schwarzenegger
a. German
b. Austrian

22)  George Frideric Handel
a. German
b. Austrian

23)  Erich von Stroheim
a. German
b. Austrian

24)  Immanuel Kant
a. German
b. Austrian

25)  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
a. German
b. Austrian

26)  Rainier Maria Rilke
a. German
b. Austrian

27)  Ferdinand Porsche
a. German
b. Austrian

28)  Oskar Kokoschka
a. German
b. Austrian

29)  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
a. German
b. Austrian

30)  Franz Liszt
a. German
b. Austrian

31)  Rammstein
a. German
b. Austrian

32)  Wim Wenders
a. German
b. Austrian

33)  Johann Strauss (Jr. and Sr.)
a. German
b/ Austrian

34)  Adolph Coors
a. German
b. Austrian

35)  Georg Ohm
a. German
b. Austrian

36)  Yehuda Amichai
a. German
b. Austrian

The Answers–Are you really ready to see them?

Falco, Austrian Pop Musician

Sigmund Freud, Austrian Psychoanalyst

Johann Sebastian Bach, German Composer

Ludwig van Beethoven, German Composer

Franz Schubert, Austrian Composer

Heidi Klum, German Model and Entrepreneur

Gustav Mahler, Austrian Composer

Robert Schumann, German Composer

Johannes Brahms, German Composer

Marlene Dietrich, German Actress

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian Composer

Richard Wagner, German Composer

Max Ernst, German Painter

Joseph Haydn, Austrian Composer

Gustav Klimt, Austrian Painter

Egon Schiele, Austrian Painter

Paul Klee, German Painter

Albert Einstein, German Scientist

Adolf Hitler, Both claim him—he was born in Austria and moved to Germany when he was three, Mad Man

Karl Marx, German Philosopher

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austrian Actor and Governor

George Frideric Handel, German Composer

Erich von Stroheim, Austrian Filmmaker

Immanuel Kant, German Philosopher

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German Writer

Rainier Maria Rilke, Both claim him—he was born in what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic, Poet

Ferdinand Porsche, Both claim him—he was born in what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic, Engineer and Entrepreneur

Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian Painter

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German Philosopher

Franz Liszt, Austrian Composer

Rammstein, German Rock Band

Wim Wenders, German Filmmaker

Johann Strauss (Jr. and Sr.), Austrian Composer

Adolph Coors, German Brewer and Entrepreneur

Georg Ohm, German Physicist

Yehuda Amichai, German Poet, who emigrated to Israel when he was eight

How’d you do? If you got the majority right should I call you a Germo-phile or an Austro-phile? For the benefit of those of us who are generally confused, can someone tell me: Aren’t the Germans and the Austrians essentially the same people? And yet doesn’t it seem like 67% of all Americans claim to be part “German” (even Jew-ish people like me)? Maybe the Austrians all stayed put. During my short time in Vienna, Austria seems quite different from Germany. Does anyone have any insight on that? Perhaps it will be the subject for a future post…

And Happy May Day! I hope yours is better than those in the below video:

Next Time You Have to Speak in Public, Picture This

While watching bumper cars at a German carnival, I wondered how I’d give a presentation on superlatives for my new boss the next day using only questions. I was resentful that I had to worry when people around me were eating giant pretzels stacked with cheese, ham, and pineapple; being jerked through the air on the Devil Rocker; careening through Dämonium, “the most innovative haunted house amusement park ride  in the world”; or crashing into each others’ rubber bumpers.

Fortunately a vision saved me from my own self pity: A man with feathery, close-cropped hair, a button down shirt, a pointy nose, and an expression always within a hint of a smile, shared a sparkling teal car with his 6 or 7-year-old daughter. He was letting her drive—except for when they got into horrible pile-ups. Then he would place his hand on the wheel and back up or make a hard turn. He seemed relaxed, pleased with his daughter’s driving skills. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

I fast-forwarded to the next day: He would drive his Audi at 180 kilometers per hour (probably without crashing), arrive at work where he would make presentations at Siemens for rooms of people in which he needed to convince them of costly investments in new technologies. How did he manage not to worry about it while at the Nürnberg Volksfest?

Because he knew he could do it. The question is where to get that sort of confidence. I got mine from him. I went home that evening and  rehearsed my presentation. Tracy acted as my non-English speaking student and made some important points (including that he didn’t think my fifteen-minute-long-string-of-superlative-questioning was too contrived). His comments spurred me to revise my presentation and run through it several more times. I went in the next day and made it through my spiel without going blank in the middle and without completely compromising logic.

How do you enter terrifying situations with bravado? How do you fend off the freeze waiting to flash your mind?

This is what I did:

• Wore a blazer
• Rehearsed my presentation about seven times
• Channelled the imaginary man who drives an Audi, works at Siemens, rides an Autoskooter Sunday evenings, and knows he’s dämonium good

Other ideas?

Rapaille, who is French, has a doctorate in psychology and was working as a psychoanalyst before being invited to help Nestlé market coffee to the Japanese. What Clotaire found in his first focus groups was that Nestlé needed to create a positive coffee imprint in Japanese children in order to create a viable market for instant coffee. In response to Clotaire’s discovery, Nestlé began selling caffeine-free, coffee-flavored sweets to children. These sold well and eventually the instant coffee market also increased.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You may agree that using psychological research for marketing is wrong; and therefore you may not want to read a book like Rapaille’s. I am not so pure, though. I find Rapaille’s research fascinating. At the time of the invitation from Nestlé, he was researching autism. He couldn’t resist the chance at doing well-funded research with fast results to test his theories regarding the role of emotion in the learning process. I see the writing of this book as a justification for doing research that better allows corporations to manipulate potential consumers. Here he shares the secrets of corporate marketing with us.

Rapaille’s self-proclaimed purpose in writing the book is to help us understand ourselves better and as a result to “liberate” those who read his book. “There is remarkable freedom gained in understanding why you act the way you do. This freedom will affect every part of your life, from the relationships you have, to your feelings about your possessions and the things you do, to the attitudes you have about America’s place in the world” (page 11).

To give you a chance to see if you want to read the book, I’ll include some highlights. Food first:

Americans are intensely concerned with food safety. We have regulatory commissions, expiration dates, and a wide variety of “food police” out there protecting us from unsafe food. The French, on the other hand, are far more interested in taste than safety. In France, there is a method of preparation known as faisandée. It involves hanging a pheasant (the source of the name) or some other gamebird on a hook until it ages—literally, until it begins to rot. While most Americans would consider the thought of this alarming, French chefs utilize this method because it dramatically improves the flavor of the bird. Safety is not nearly as much of a concern for them or the people for whom they cook. Of course, such culinary explorations come with a price. There are far more food-related deaths in France every year than there are in the United States, even though there are five times as many people living in the United States. (page 26)

Americans are “eternal adolescents.” Despite the fact that in some ways we are relatively young, we live by (sort of) a  relatively old document:

We look at Europe as the old world and America as the new. Yet in many ways, America is one of the oldest of the world’s nations. The French Revolution began in 1789, more than a decade after our own revolution. Modern Italy became a nation-state in 1861. The German empire was founded in 1871. Our culture isn’t nearly as old as the French, Italian, and German cultures (all of which existed long before the current nations of France, Italy, and Germany), but we have existed in our present form longer. We have the oldest written constitution in effect on the entire planet. (page 85)

What keeps us young? Well many things, but for one:

Immigrants come here and leave the past behind. They start over in America. They are reborn here, often with new careers and new (American) dreams. Since we continue to receive immigrants in large numbers, this sense of renewal and reinvention is a living thing in our culture. (page 85)

For those of us who continue to try to understand the magical power of repetition in poetry, music, and prose (rhyme, motif, image echoes, the pleasure of hearing our favorite songs over and over again) this commentary on how repetition and home are married in the American mind may be interesting:

When we think of home, we think of words that begin with the prefix “re-.” Words like return (as the girl did when she came home from school), reunite (as the boy did when he got back from college), reconnect (as the family did when they told each other their highs and lows for the week, and as the woman did when she spoke to the picture of her father), reconfirm (as the boy did when he saw his family in the stands of his baseball games), and renew (as the woman did during her family’s various rituals). This sends a very powerful message to us about what it means to be home. Home is a place where you can do things repeatedly and have a good sense of the outcome—unlike the outside world, where everything can be so unpredictable. Home is a place where doing things again gives them added meaning….If home is about return, reconnection, renewal, reunion, and other words with the prefix “re-,” then the physical location means nothing. What is important is that the feelings of family exist wherever you define “home.” (pages 99 & 100)

While many people around the world think Americans are overly preoccupied with money, Rapaille has some ideas why we’re seen this way and why this doesn’t necessarily mean we’re greedy. Unlike other cultures, we cannot be “knighted” or “become a baroness”:

Money is our barometer for success. Most Americans find it impossible to feel successful if they are underpaid. Money is a scorecard. If someone is doing a job similar to yours and making more money, you unconsciously believe that he or she is doing a better job. Being paid for a job imbues it with instant credibility. I spoke with someone recently who told me about his early struggles to become a professional writer after leaving a corporate career. For two years, even though he was doing high quality work, he failed to make any money at it. “I felt unemployed,” he told me, “even though I was working ten hours a day.” A publishing contract changed his whole attitude about his accomplishments instantly. Suddenly the previous two years gained validity. The money the publisher paid him was proof. (page 124)

Yet, not all money warrants admiration for Americans. It needs to be the right kind of money:

Money earned via hard work is admirable, proof that you are a good person. We have little respect, however, for those who inherit money rather than making it on their own. We might be fascinated by the exploits of someone like Paris Hilton, but we don’t feel that she’s proven anything, because she was born rich and her celebrity stems exclusively from her wealth. We attribute Patty Hearst’s early difficulties to her growing up an heiress, and we consider the ongoing problems of the Getty children to be the product of old money. We love it that Bill Gates has more money than the Queen of England, because he earned every penny of it himself. (page 125)

According to Rapaille, Americans aren’t looking for perfection:

If something is perfect, you’re stuck with it for life, and that doesn’t sit well with most Americans. We want a new car every three years. We want a new television every five. We want a new house when we have kids, and another one when the kids grow up. (page 136)

Since we don’t want perfection, we know our things will stop working at some point. The point at which something breaks is a crucial one for our relationship with a company:

Americans are much more responsive to good service than they are to perfection (which they don’t believe in anyway). Crisis is a great opportunity to create loyalty. If a customer comes to you with a problem with a product or service and you solve that problem quickly and minimize the customer’s inconvenience, you will likely earn that customer’s dedication….Ironically, if your product never breaks down, you never have the opportunity to develop this relationship with the customer. When the customer seeks to replace the product (as he inevitably will), he is likely to look elsewhere, because he hasn’t formed a bond with you. The bottom line is that great service is more important to Americans than great quality. (pages 138-139)

One of my favorite parts of the book is Rapaille’s own immigration story. I won’t tell it to you, though. I’ll let you pick up the copy of the book to see it for yourself (yes, I’m getting tired of typing and I don’t want to paraphrase it since it works so well just as he has written it). You’ll find it on pages 180-181, and it helps fuel one of his overriding messages of the book: this country needs to remain a welcoming place for immigrants. Our sense of making the impossible possible is rooted in a confluence of wild dreams, and immigrants are some of the best importers of these otherwise difficult to transport faith-inspired, work-supported, vision-rooted dreams.

Don't Get Trapped in the Yellow Dog Sentence

Back in my demolition days, I was going to a lot of Amazon parties. That was when Amazon had ads every week in the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger in an ongoing hiring spree.

While Amazon snatched up my friends, I tore down walls. I remember describing some of my misgivings about my job to a woman while sipping wine from plastic cups in an overgrown yard in Wallingford. The sledge hammer was heavy, its blows loud. I wasn’t sure I had enough “rrrr” in me to last in the field.

The woman I was talking to had probably graduated from an Ivy League school and moved to Seattle to work for this start-up. She was the type of person who still thought she was the smartest girl in the world. She said, “You need to embrace your inner balls,” and then demonstrated how I should approach my job by springing into a lunge with fists punching the air, scowling, and growling.

I think I quit my job the next day. I just wasn’t an Amazon sort of girl. The friend who invited me to this particular party was reading a book at the time in which the author encouraged other women to “bite off more than they could chew” in order to advance more quickly and gain more responsibility. Biting off more than one could chew seemed scary. What if you couldn’t deliver, I remember wondering while walking around Greenlake with my friend.

I’ve been wondering about this recently, too, wondering how I’ll manage what I’ve bitten. I’m very lucky to have started a new job. I’ve felt grossly under qualified for it, though. Yes, the job is to teach English to non-native speakers. True, I am a native speaker of English and have two degrees in English. And thank you if you’ve happened to notice that my grammar is relatively flaw-free.

But I had no idea that English had twelve simple tenses until last week when I realized I had to explain them to my class. Nor did I have any idea how many rules exist that determine when to use articles for nouns and which articles to use. I’m the sort of person who, when trying to explain a grammatical rule, gets dizzy with the possibilities.

For instance, when a student suggested a sentence should read, “The yellow dog is the old dog,” I thought, Well, yes, that sentence could work, and then I lost myself in imagining the very strange scene that would need to exist in order for a person to say this: There are two dogs—one old and the other young. The yellow one is the old one, but one of the people in the conversation can’t see so she is unable to tell that the yellow one is the old one. That is why her friend has to tell her this very important and fascinating detail.

What it comes down to is that I’m not good with absolutes. My mind almost always sets out to explore what ifs. And this is why I began to wonder if I was–or even could be–qualified to teach English.

But this weekend I watched Black Swan, was infused with ambition, and this is what I came to realize: I am the kind of person who can sit down for three hours at a stretch and read rules about article usage with feral interest. I’m the kind of person who enjoys talking about the possible uses of each sort of word and the nuanced differences in meaning that can be gained with the slightest variation. I care about language in a way many don’t. I care in ways most people can’t—unless perhaps they realize that language isn’t just about following rules. What if I were able to spread my crazy love for English to my students?

I ventured to try today, during one of my not-so-clear-answers regarding why “electricity” didn’t get an article and “telephone” did.

“I know it can be frustrating that English has so many exceptions,” I said, “but one of the good things is that there are lots of ways to say things in English and many of them can be right. I encourage you to experiment, to play with language, to have fun trying different ways of expressing things.”

And that is when the Metallica lyrics appeared in the Skype chat box.

Lay beside me, tell me what they’ve done
Speak the words I wanna hear, to make my demons run
The door is locked now, but it’s opened if you’re true
If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you

“This was written by a native speaker,” one of my students told us. “I never could understand why there is an article before ‘me’ and one before ‘you.’ Is this what you mean, Shira, about playing with language?”

And I think we all took some comfort there.

Undoubtedly the Star of the Nineteenth Century

I’ve been making friends with a German woman who is studying to be a middle-school English teacher. She and I talk about poetry together and she has shared some reading lists with me from which she’s studying for an oral exam that will qualify her to begin her teaching practicum.

I was surprised by which poems were selected for the 19^th Century American poems. For instance, I’d never read the poetry of Emerson. Don’t we seem to take his essays more seriously than his verse? William Cullen Bryant I had hardly heard of. And Longfellow—besides trying to memorize “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 4^th grade, I was largely unfamiliar with his poetry, too.

Poems of the 19^th Century

1. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1832)
2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” (1845)
3. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ulalume” (1847)
4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854)
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Days” (1857)
6. Walt Whitman, “Facing West from California’s Shores” (1860)
7. Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain” (ca. 1862)
8. Emily Dickinson, “I like to See It Lap the Miles” (ca. 1862)
9. Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” (ca. 1863)
10. Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (1865)

I was curious what “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” was about so I read it and read a bit about Longfellow to try to understand the context in which he wrote this poem. And this process has brought up a couple questions I’m curious to ask you:

1) Do you find that biographical information about a writer is:

a) useful
b) irrelevant
c) invaluable
d) other

Why?

And who would you want to put on the American poets of the 19^th Century reading list?

I’m happy Dickinson and Whitman make a strong showing here. I have nothing against Poe—he is often a favorite with students, I’ve found. His stories are dark and his rhymes delicious. I did actually enjoy “Days,” by Emerson, and it made me want to read more by him. Reading Emerson makes me want to go hiking and exploring. He makes me feel strong and free and these feelings breed a sense of ingeniousness. In the United States, strength and freedom are highly valued. And it is a country of ingenuity.

I’d propose replacing Bryant with “Art,” by Herman Melville. Though I’m not a big fan of Longfellow, he belongs on this list. He was extremely popular during his life and, though he seems to have fallen out of fashion, he was important in the 19^th century. I suppose we didn’t have much in the way of poetry to show for ourselves until Dickinson and Whitman came along.

Which poems do you think belong on the list?

Do They Really Need to Be Separate?

When a friend recently asked my dude, Tracy, how Germany was treating him, he replied, “It is almost like Denver, it’s just that here I’m illiterate.

Life is full of fear and wonder when you’re illiterate. Getting the mail is daily cause for dread. Each envelope is filled with words that often don’t make sense even when typed into Google translate. Sometimes the temptation to ignore the documents in German is too great to resist. And then when you get around to looking at them, they can be very surprising.

Being from Seattle, the polite but not-so-warm way of Germans feels fine and familiar. When you do meet a warm person, however—and we have met one—it is really comforting. The nicest German we’ve met so far works at the Nuremberg equivalent of the DMV. He smiled at us, spoke to us in slow, simple, understandable German, and joked around that we should come back and chat with him so we could practice our German. He asked what we wanted our license plate number to be and gave it to us.

This week when I was looking through our auto paperwork so I could apply for a resident parking permit, I noticed a paper that didn’t look quite as official as the rest. It begins with, “You are valuable, Shira!” (Du bist wertvoll, Shira!)

You can probably guess where this is going. Why would someone be unnecessarily nice if they aren’t trying to date you or convert you? The letter from the DMV worker continues:

That’s right you reading this – you. Your life is precious and valuable, even if it might not seem so to you.

It just gets better and better:

If you have a pet that you love and take care of, then this animal is valuable to you. You are also valuable for your pet and are doing something valuable that is in the spirit of God.

If you are responsible for the budget, then you manage a household, and that is valuable.

Everywhere, when you listen to someone, smile at someone, or help someone do something, you are doing good, maybe a lot more than you realize.

The document ends with a prayer:

Dear Mr. Jesus, dear Father, thank you for last night and for a new day that is a gift from you.

I still like look back fondly on our time with the man in the Nuremberg DMV, still appreciate his help and his kindness while helping us. His smile did do something good for us, and it’s impressive that he’s living out his religious imperative to spread the gospel and be a light unto the world. But am I sick to feel disappointed—to feel that his kindness had strings attached? The strings: that we must notice he’s being kind for Jesus.

Yes, I suppose I am sick. I should just be happy that he was kind, that we had a good experience while getting our car registered and our license plates made (they are made on-site, by the way). How do I expect joy to be fueled, anyway? I suppose God is as good a fuel as any.

Germany continues to surprise. Apparently this country doesn’t require the separation of church and state. Is that ideal strictly American?

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

This is what Jhumpa Lahiri wrote recently in the first piece of a new series called Draft in the New York Times, which will feature writing on the art and craft of writing.

They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

–Jhumpa Lahiri, “My Life’s Sentences,” The New York Times

Another article this week in the New York Times, “Your Brain on Fiction,” offers a scientific explanation to this “live current” sensation that great sentences can evoke, as described by Lahiri:

Last month…a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

The research represented in this article also proves that reading fiction makes us more empathetic and gives us access to experiences and mental processes we would otherwise not have access to; as a result, reading fiction deepens and expands our thinking and makes us smarter.

Besides making us feel good about ourselves, how might this research be useful? I doubt it will make people who don’t read fiction begin reading it. But maybe it will help prevent the elimination of English departments. We can use this research to assure our most practical students (and provosts?) that reading literature is not just enjoyable, but useful, too.

Towards the end of a near-year of counseling over a decade ago, I finally confessed a serious source of shame to my therapist. I told her I didn’t like to read the newspaper and, therefore, rarely read it. She told me she thought a person could live an engaged and well-informed life by reading exclusively fiction and poetry. I was grateful for her affirmations. Soon after, I created a writing portfolio and soon after that I began applying to MFA programs, committed to a life of literature.

Of course, the New York Times has thwarted my plan. It keeps drawing me in with its fascinating articles. Still, with shame—though not as strong—I admit that I rely mostly on literature for my sense of connection to the world. I’m less interested in what happened than the motivations leading up to the happening, the feelings about it, the aftermath, and, of course, the delicious ways in which all of this can be told.

One of Lahiri’s favorite sentences is from James Joyce’s “Araby”: “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” Evocative sentences allow us not only to read about what is going on, but to experience it. At least that is what the scientists are saying.

Which sentences have struck or stuck with you?