Too Many Flutes (4) - Traverso

Before I took up the Western Boehm system silver (plated) flute, I reasoned that it would be easier to play a baroque flute. I love baroque music, and I particularly love the soft, round tone of the baroque flute, which gradually supplanted the recorder during the eighteenth century in Europe. Wooden baroque flutes, copies that modern craftspeople make of old flutes that are in collections and museums, are, as they should be, very expensive. But a Japanese company called Aulos, which makes recorders, also manufactures baroque flutes out of resonite, for much less money.
I bought one.
On the scale of frustration, the Turkish Kaval and the Peruvian Quena are 10 on the scale (most frustrating), the Chinese flute is 4, and the Indian flute is 3. I rather expected the baroque flute to be easy to play. Boy was I wrong. Getting a decent sound out of it was difficult (indeed, I didn't make much progress in that direction till I had played a Western flute for a while), and playing in any key except D major turned out to be cumbersome. The instruction sheet that came with the flute warns that F natural is out of tune, and you have to turn the flute lower the pitch. It also sounds fuzzy, as do other very common notes like C natural, B flat, and so on.
When I listen to contemporary musicians playing the baroque flute, such as Stephen Preston, whom I met at Wildacres in the summer of 2016, I'm astonished at the apparent ease with which they play. I would say that I don't know how they do it, but I do know how they do it: they practiced like crazy when they started out until they mastered the instrument.
That being said, an expert musician can play passages faster on the baroque flute than on the Western keyed flute, because you don't have to move anything mechanical except your fingers.
Incidentally, on a trip to Ireland I fantasized about buying an Irish wooden flute, thinking to add to my collections of instruments that I can't or don't play (including a metal G clarinet that I bought in Istanbul), but they cost up to a thousand euros, and that seemed like a bit too much for a souvenir.

Too Many Flutes (3) - Bansuri

When we finally got to India in February, 2015, the only souvenir I knew I wanted was a bansuri - an Indian flute. Before the trip I did a lot of poking around on the Internet and discovered that one of the top makers of bansuris, Anand Dhotre was from Mumbai, where we would be. From his excellent web site I was able to purchase a flute in the same pitch as a Western flute, and he agreed to deliver it to the hotel where we were staying. He brought two flutes for me to try, but, since I had never played a bansuri at all, I could only choose by the decoration on the flute: the one with the orange trim, which I happen to be holding in the picture with Anand that someone in the hotel lobby took for us.

My intention was not to learn to play Indian music, though I love to listen to it. Indeed, at this moment I'm listening to a Youtube of Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasiya, whom I have heard in concert several times here in Israel. I love the deep sound of the bamboo flute, the way the player makes the sound float, the gentle energy. During our trip, only two weeks in a country where you should spend at least a year, I played the bansuri every day, and when I returned home to my Western flute, I found that it had helped my tone. Every once and a while I take it out and play it. It has a slightly charred smell from the way Anand burned the fingers holes into the instrument.

I didn't really have to buy a high end bansuri. Not far from our hotel, a peddler was selling flutes to tourists for a tenth or so of what Anand's flute cost. I bought a small one and recently gave it to my grandson, a very musical fellow who got a sound out of the instrument within minutes.
Perhaps the best way to use my bansuri would be in a form of musical meditation, which is the way Indian music sounds to me.
That trip to India was mainly focused on textiles, and we hardly heard any music at all. Perhaps we'll be able to take a musical tour some time. Meanwhile, I have my bansuri to keep the memory of India warm.

Too Many Flutes (2)

Our first trip to eastern Asia was to Vietnam, a difficult destination for a man who reached maturity during the Vietnam War, and whose every desire was to avoid going to Vietnam, both to stay alive, and also in political opposition to the war - though I am constrained to admit that I was not an anti-war activist.
Everything about Vietnam was surprising, from the intense motor-scooter traffic on the roads to the youth and energy of the population, from the candor and intelligence of our guides to the vigor of the practice of Buddhism as a folk religion, with the burning of incense, the bustle of pilgrimage sites, and altars covered with offerings for the monks. I was also surprised that we encountered no hostility because we were American-born. The Vietnamese have made it a matter of policy to put resentment and the suffering of the war behind them (though there are plenty of museums and monuments to their victory).

The music in Vietnam was a also major surprise for me. We heard live music in several places, and it pleased and interested us. So, when we passed a shop in Hanoi that sold traditional instruments, I decided to buy a flute as a souvenir. This instrument is called a dizi. It's a Chinese instrument, and the writing on the end of the instrument is a classical Chinese poem, which a friend of ours, Andy Plaks, translated for us.
It took me some time to get a sound out of the instrument, but I finally managed, and that encouraged me to take up the Western flute later on. Some time after we came home from Vietnam, I can't remember now whether it was months or years, I decided to buy a used flute from a local music store, and after struggling on my own, I decided to take lessons - and that was the start of an obsession.

Too Many Flutes (1): Three folk instruments I can't play

Here's a pan pipe. My daughter bought it for me in Peru, and it's a good one, not a product for tourists, but I find that playing it is frustrating. Just getting a decent sound out of any one of the tubes is fairly difficult, but then leaping from tube to tube with your mouth to make melodies is too challenging for me.
I imagine this was the first kind of flute that people made, when they got the idea of playing different notes on reeds that they blew across, before they figured out that you can change the pitch by making holes in the pipe and opening and closing them.
I don't mind that I can't play it. I'm glad to have it. A friend of mine, Professor Jeremy Montagu, professor emeritus of music at Oxford, amassed a huge and varied collection of musical instruments and wrote several learned books on the subject. His collection is museum quality. Mine, maybe 100th the size of his, is essentially composed of souvenirs thrown together without much of a plan.
A few years after my daughter came back from Peru with the pan pipe, we went to Peru ourselves, and I bought a quena, another kind of flute, which I find hard to get a sound out of, though recently I've been able to produce a decent tone - occasionally.

To get a sound out of the pan pipe, you just blow across the top of one of the bamboo tubes, the way you blow over a soda bottle. To get a sound out of the quena, you have to press the instrument against your chin and direct a thin stream of air onto the notch in the mouthpiece. Essentially it's a recorder without the structure on the top end to direct the air. When you blow into a recorder, you can't miss. You always produce a sound. When you blow into a quena, you have to find the right angle.
The quena in the picture is a sophisticated model, with a bone mouthpiece and a body made of hollowed out wood. The simpler ones are fashioned of bamboo. Once a visitor to our home, not a friend, but a man who showed up for some event, noticed my quena, tried it, played amazingly well on it, and offered to buy it on the spot for much more than I paid for it. I absolutely refused.
I've seen and heard Peruvian musicians playing these instruments with facility that astonishes me.
As much as I love them and enjoy owning them, I'm not adept at playing folk instruments. I know how to play modern Western instruments with elaborate systems of keys and pads, and that's the kind of instrument I feel comfortable with.

Here in the Middle East musicians play the ney, a tube with finger holes in it, and no mouthpiece at all. Neys are usually made of bamboo, I think, though people also make them out of pvc. Once on a trip to Turkey I bought a related instrument, a kaval. It's long piece of caved cherry wood, light and delicate, and, for me, hard to play. I'm pleased when I manage to get a sound out of it at all, and always impressed when I hear musicians playing the ney in concerts of Middle Eastern music, getting a rich, breathy sound. Played into a microphone, it carries over all the other instruments.
To master any of these three folk instruments, I would have to invest long hours of practice, and I'd also have to play the kind of music they're intended for. I enjoy hearing that music, but it's not what I listen to frequently. Owning the instruments isn't, for me, a commitment to playing the music they were made for, but more a tribute to the human desire to make instruments and extend our voices.

An Unintentionally Weird Picture

A couple of weeks ago, as I was walking in downtown Jerusalem a small golden throne, spinning rather quickly on the dashboard of a parked car, caught my attention. It was a battery powered Hindu or Buddhist prayer wheel, not something one sees every day in this heavily monotheistic city. Intrigued, I decided to take a picture of it with my phone.
Because of the bright sunlight, I couldn't see very well what the camera was picking up, and I more or less forgot about it till today. Now, when I happened to look at it again, I saw that it's a virtually indecipherable image. The reflection on the windshield of the car makes the golden throne appear to be floating in front of the facade of a building, and the graffito, "Being Sad is Part of Getting Happy," which is on the side of the building, appears to be reversed and floating alongside the golden throne.
Cities are full of strange sights which, strictly speaking, are not inexplicable, though their explanations are probably rather complex. Why did the owner of the car buy the golden throne and install it on his or her dashboard? Why did someone feel moved to inscribe their philosophy of life on the wall of a building? Why did they write it in English? Does the author walk past his or her handiwork every day and well with pride? Or has he or she long since gone on to deface walls in other countries?

Nevertheless

I have been attacking use of the adjective “authentic” by extension from the concrete meaning of the term, meaning something in the semantic field of genuine, real, and true. Calling a painting an authentic Goya, calling an Indian meal authentic South Indian cuisine, calling a saxophone manufactured by the Selmer company an authentic instrument – all of this is entirely legitimate and meaningful. What I am warning against is speaking of authentic Judaism, for example, or authentic jazz.

Still, I must concede, people do try to mean something when they use the word. What is it?

*

Years ago my son-in-law worked for a tour company that brought groups to a Bedouin encampment in the Negev. Once, as he told us, he and our daughter were in the encampment, waiting for a bus full of tourists to arrive and talking in Hebrew with the Bedouin, who were all dressed in jeans and tee-shirts and talking on cell-phones. As soon as they got word that the group would be arriving, they put picturesque robes on over their jeans, hid their cell-phones, and prepared to make coffee and flat bread on campfires in a tent. Obviously, the tourists were not going to have what we might call an authentic encounter with the Bedouin. On the other hand, their hosts were undeniably Bedouin, and making a bit of money from tourists is an entirely authentic activity on their part.

My point is that the authenticity of the experience is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure that only the most gullible of the tourists would have failed to realize that the Bedouin were putting on a show. The Bedouin, for their part, were trying to make their way of life interesting and attractive. If the tourists felt they had gotten their money's worth, and the Bedouin felt that they had explained something about themselves to their visitors, isn't that satisfactory?

*

These days people are expected (or permitted) to reinvent themselves: an engineer resigns from a high tech company and becomes a high school math teacher; a lawyer leaves a big firm and becomes a social worker; a comedian, Al Franken, becomes a senator. Indeed, men now reinvent themselves as women and vice versa. Yet there are limits to the permission for self-reinvention granted by society. A white woman, Rachel Dolezal, who decided to reinvent herself as an African-American was seen as an impostor. A person who puts on a white coat, drapes a stethoscope around her neck, but who is not a physician, risks arrest, just as a person who pretends to be an attorney and represents clients in court is a criminal.

Oddly, impostors, I have read, often feel that the roles they illegitimately assume are, in fact, reflections of their true selves. Their impersonation of a policeman or a psychologist feels authentic to them, while we, looking at them from the outside, regard them as mentally unbalanced. In other words, there's a difference between a confidence man (or woman), who pretends to be someone else, for the criminal purpose of cheating people, and unhinged impostors who believe they are or ought to be what they claim to be.

None of the above, however, addresses the feeling that one is somehow unable to be what one really is, or that someone else is apparently unintentionally and even unconsciously false.

Long ago, in 1961-62, when I was a senior in high school, the best students in French had a fourth year course, given by an impressively worldly, European woman of fifty or so. The course was centered on existentialism, which is a good topic for seventeen and eighteen year olds. We read Sartre and Camus and talked about the meaningless of life, the need to make an existential choice to give life meaning, and about “mauvaise foi,” literally, "bad faith," usually rendered as "false consciousness," belief in a false meaning of life, accepted because of bourgeois conformism. At least that's how I remember it, after all these decades.

The realization that one is living in bad faith is painful, and that is the realization which deprives one's life of authenticity. Looking back at the person I was between, say, the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and the choices I made, I am struck by how clueless I was – even though I was, on paper, a very intelligent young man and a high-achieving student, and even though I had imbibed existentialism. I often think that, had I had a better idea of who I was, I would have made wiser decisions. I would have been more authentically myself. More often, I think this is a ridiculous and damaging way of thinking about my life.

Ultimately, I reject that mode of thought and that notion of authenticity, because it always involves passing judgment from outside. Either one looks at another person and says to oneself, “There's no way a person can honestly believe what that person professes to believe. Therefore his belief and behavior are dishonest. He is inauthentic.” Or one looks at oneself as if one were someone else and passes the same judgment on oneself. But who is to say that the judgmental self is any more trustworthy than the judged self? Suppose that, under the influence of a charismatic religious teacher, I had decided in my twenties, to become a Hasidic Jew, and then, ten years down the line, I saw through the teacher's charisma, and rejected Hasidism. My later self, looking back on my earlier self, would see the earlier choice as inauthentic. But most likely, in another ten years, an even later self, would look back at the self who rejected Hasidism and see that choice as equally erroneous?

*

The way out of this infinite regress is the Buddhist view that the “self” is merely a construct, a cluster of largely unexamined ideas, not anything real. Therefore it is, by definition, illusory, hence inherently inauthentic, making authenticity unattainable and therefore not a useful category of thought.

How Authentic can you Get?

Raku is a pottery technique involving removing the ware from the kiln when it is still red hot, a process difficult to control and producing unpredictable results. Raku is also the name of the family who developed the technique in the sixteenth century, and the family continues to maintain the tradition. During our short and memorable visit to Japan, In February 2016, we made a pilgrimage to the Raku museum in Kyoto, and I bought some postcards of the tea ceremony cups they have on exhibition there. Kind of by mistake, because I was working with clay that was too wet, I produced a couple of cups that might be seen as inspired by Japanese tea-ceremony ware, and it's odd and pleasurable to drink my morning coffee from them.

Today most potters in the West probably fire their work in electric kilns, often computer controlled. Some potters use gas kilns, which are, I've heard, more expensive to operate, but they produce effects in glazing, due to the oxidation of the chemicals in the glazes, which are impossible with an electric kiln. Certain more fanatical potters fire their ware with charcoal or wood in kilns they construct themselves, going to a great deal of trouble to emulate the methods of the earlier craftspeople. This drive to reach back into methods that date back thousands of years is totally understandable to me. I am thrilled by ancient pottery and by the feeling that, when my hands give shape to clay, I am placing myself in a human chain extending back about as far as human culture goes. However, I'm not tempted in the slightest to build a gas or charcoal kiln in my back yard.

I'm not entirely sympathetic with the drive for authenticity. I have often enjoyed hearing baroque music played on instruments of the age or modern replicas of them, and I respect the knowledge and devotion exemplified in these concerts, but I wouldn't say that Bach should only be played on a harpsichord, or that Telemann flute music shouldn't be played on a modern silver flute. No matter how carefully today's musicians may be to play baroque music on baroque instruments with precisely the ornaments that were used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ears that hear them today have listened to a great deal of music of many different kinds, so baroque music now is played in a context unimaginable to the composers and performers of past times. The original context, the society and culture in which the music was produced, is absolutely inaccessible to us. The inauthenticity, as it were, is built in.

Perhaps this is what the Chinese conceptual artist, Ai Weiwei, is alluding to in his transgressive disfigurement of ancient pottery. His often upsetting work is thought-provoking without ever telling us just what we should be thinking. I could never bring myself to ruin a piece of pottery that has miraculously survived for a few thousand years, because I respect the craftsmanship that it embodies, even if, in fact, it isn't (in this case) either particularly beautiful or rare. Interestingly, I don't mind at all when things that I have made get broken. They seem more authentic to me that way.

Authentically Bright Moments

The late and lamented Rahsaan Roland Kirk, an eccentric, blind jazz virtuoso, famous for playing different kinds of wind instruments, often several at the same time, performed and recorded a piece of his called “Bright Moments,” a joyful assertion that, despite his blindness, he enjoyed and shared such moments in his music. He finishes one recording of the song, whose only words are “bright moments,” repeated over and over, by saying, “These bright moments is for all of the wonderful people in the universe that has never known anything about bright moments, so check it out.”

In his rambling and wise introduction to the piece, Kirk admonishes us to recognize and honor the bright moments in our lives, privileged occasions of exhilaration or deep contentment. The occasional experience of these elusive bright moments can be damaging to our mental stability, addicting us, especially when we are young, to high risk thrill-seeking. Maturity acknowledges that life must consist of both light and dark moments, with a lot of gray moments in between, though we may always imagine an ecstatic existence consisting solely of bright moments, as the Jewish grace after meals puts it: “A day that is totally Sabbath and perpetual rest.” To put it in terms of authenticity, a bright moment is an authentic one, and the yearning for bright moments is a yearning for authenticity.

The Jewish Mussaf (additional) prayer, recited on Sabbath and festival mornings, is an expression of yearning for the Temple and the restoration of sacrifices: “You instated the Sabbath and desired its sacrifices” – the idea being that authentic worship entails animal sacrifice, and all worship since it became impossible to kill animals in the Temple, has been metaphysically inauthentic and will be so until the Temple is restored, and the Priests can splatter blood on the walls of the altar again (as another hopeful prayer has it).

This idealization of a period in the past is both very widespread – Donald Trump won the election by promising to make America great again – and a historical absurdity. It points to dissatisfaction with the present, the feeling that things were once much better and could be much better, if only... And why were things so much better in that imaginary past of bright moments? Because existence was authentic.

Three sorts of people are free of anxiety because their lives are inauthentic: the deeply religious (who are convinced they are living an authentic life), the shallowly indifferent (who don't think reality TV is inauthentic), and the enlightened wise (who understand that authenticity not a useful concept). Those of us who are too skeptical to be religious, too thoughtful to be indifferent, but not wise enough to be enlightened are troubled by the inauthenticity of our lives. We are prone to existential anxiety, which means we are also susceptible to existential blackmail.

For example, the present government of Israel is promoting and financing a program for bolstering “Jewish identity.” Although only a minority of the Jewish population of the country practices orthodox Judaism, the identity being stuffed down the country's throat is entirely that of orthodox, rabbinical Judaism. This is possible because a great many secular Israeli Jews, plagued by existential anxiety, are convinced that orthodox Judaism, the kind of Judaism ostensibly practiced before the onslaught of modernism, is authentic Judaism. They might be unwilling or unable to accept the orthodox way of life, but they can't help but admire it.

 So they are trapped, unable to resist something they know to be founded upon error and superstition. If only we could free ourselves of the yearning for authenticity, we could also free ourselves from the rigidity of orthodoxies.  

Authentic Red Herrings

If you poke around in the dirt in Macedonia and find a coin with a picture of Alexander the Great, dated 331 BC, you can be sure it's not authentic. Similarly, if you're rummaging through an attic and come across a canvas signed Rembrandt, 1932, won't imagine that it was painted by the famous Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. Low-cost Rolex watches and Gucci bags are probably not manufactured by the companies they are purported to be made by. These are not authentic items, and I have no problem with using the word “authentic” in this context.

Nor can I object to the use of “authentic” in connection with people's expressions of emotion, as a synonym for true. The pride a parent feels for her child's success is authentic, whereas a mother's congratulations to the boy who got a higher grade than her son have a good chance of being inauthentic. In that sense, a lot of expressions like, “have a good day” and “let's have lunch some time” are inauthentic.

“Inauthentic” can also mean hypocritical, as in public condemnation of a political graft on the part of a corrupt politician, or condemnation of prostitution on the part of a man who regularly hires escorts when he travels on business. However, extension of the use of “authentic” and especially its opposite to people's character strikes me as presumptuous. For example, Woodie Guthrie, the American folk singer and composer, is regarded as “authentic,” since he was born in Oklahoma and his songs and political activism reflected the interests of the people among whom he was born. By contrast, Bob Dylan might be regarded as inauthentic, since he was born to a middle class Jewish family and his American folksiness is kind of a pose.

That, of course, is ridiculous, as it doesn't address either man's work. Guthrie might have been as authentic as all get out and been a terrible musician, and Dylan's personal background is irrelevant to the quality of his music. Criticism of his ostensible lack of authenticity is beside the point.

Still, one thinks one means something when one says that something is authentic and something else is not. 

Take one of the areas that means something to me: jazz. If you call it, as some do, “classical African American music,” does that mean that an African American jazz musician is necessarily more authentic than a white or Asian musician? Must I automatically prefer, on grounds of authenticity, the playing of the African-American alto saxophone player, Charlie Parker, to that of the white alto saxophone player, Art Pepper? Or must I declare that the European or Japanese jazz scenes are so inauthentic that the music played there can no longer be called jazz?



I readily concede that the great jazz trumpet player, Wynton Marsalis, an African-American musician from the acknowledged birthplace of jazz, New Orleans, has a strong personal connection to the music of his ethnic group, and this undoubtedly motivated him to develop into one of the leading exponents of jazz. However, he also has a very well developed background in Western classical music and could well have become a distinguished classical musician. Had he opted for the latter direction, no one could have called the choice “inauthentic,” just as the authenticity of his choice to be a jazz musician is not praiseworthy because of its authenticity. What's praiseworthy is the quality of his musicianship, his diligence, his leadership, and his influence.

In general, the language of authenticity, in the extended sense, is a claim of ownership. Historically, African American musicians suffered from brutal racial discrimination, and understandably they resented it when white musicians played more or less the same kind of music and got paid better, got to stay in clean hotels and travel in style, and became celebrities, whereas they were treated with contempt. So naturally they would argue that the music they were playing was theirs, and white people who claimed to be playing it were inauthentic. However, as Arnie Lawrence, a white jazz musician whom I came to know well, said, quoting Clark Terry, a black jazz musician who was one of his mentors: “The note doesn't know who played it.”

 Another area that concerns me is Judaism, and there, too, claims of authenticity are thrown about irresponsibly. But I think I'll get to that in another post.

Importance is Always a Matter of Personal Opinion

1. Dismissing the Idea of Absolute Importance

Alarmists, who are probably right, have been predicting mass extinctions, perhaps even our own extinction, as a result of the disruption to the climate that we humans have caused.

So what? In another hundred million years or so, the earth's ecosystem will probably recover, as it did after the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, and a new species of intelligent life might (or might not) emerge. Is it conceivable that, in another hundred million years, we human beings will be around to see what happens, even if we manage to avoid doing away without ourselves in the next century? No matter what, in the very distant future the sun will flare up, engulf all the planets, and collapse into a white dwarf.

Who cares?

We human beings care, because it's happening to us and the planet we live on. However, in the grand scheme of things, in our infinite universe, these events are of no importance to anyone else.

*

Interestingly, although the word entered English from medieval Latin, classical Latin uses other terms for “important” such as “amplus” and “gravis,” and the verb, “importo,” means “to bring about, cause.” In German, the word is “wichtig” (connected to “Gewicht,” cognate with English “weight,” and semantically similar to “gravis”). French shares “important” with English, and in Hebrew, the only non-Indo-European language I know, the word is “hashuv,” which is related to thinking (hashiva) and calculating (hishuv) and should probably be translated literally as “considered.” The semantic field is well marked out: something important is big, heavy, to be taken into consideration, and, going back to the Latin, having an effect. Important things matter, and matter has weight.

*

We want to attribute absolute importance to things that matter to us, but this is an error, since importance is always relative: something can only be important to someone, initially, to oneself. For there to be absolute importance, there would have to be an absolute being, and, given the scale of the universe, that idea boggles the mind. Reports on the findings of astrophysicists have convinced me (I don't presume to speak for anyone else) that the history of the universe extends so far into the past and will reach so far into the future as to defy comprehension. Events of huge magnitude occur in distant galaxies, dwarfing our own solar system, which, itself, is so huge that I, for one, can't get my mind around it. The earth is about 150 million kilometers distant from the sun. This is a relatively short astronomical distance. Moving at 1,000 kilometers per hour, more or less the speed of a commercial jetliner, it would take 150,000 hours to reach the sun. That is 6,250 days, a little more than seventeen years.

Given the size of the universe, according to current cosmological knowledge, I don't think it's possible to conceive of a supreme being that could be aware of everything happening in the universe that it created, and that cares about what happens in it. Hence, importance cannot be absolute, and, in the absence of the criterion of absolute importance, there is no way of persuading a person who doesn't think something is important that it really is. If someone says, “It doesn't matter whether I live or die,” an issue which, for most people, is of cardinal importance, nothing anyone can say to that person can change his or her mind. What matters to me may not matter to anyone else.

Conversely, I must concede that it is impossible to persuade someone who does believe in an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, divine being, to whom everything in the universe is of absolute importance, that he or she is mistaken. I think the absurdity of the idea is persuasive, but that's only my opinion.

Religion is obviously the locus of belief in absolute importance, where people experience the greatest metaphysical discomfort if they are constrained to admit that there is no such thing, for religions are based on the conviction that importance is absolute. Holy places are intrinsically and eternally holy. Taking communion, performing circumcision, eating only foods permitted by dietary laws, going on a pilgrimage to Mecca – these are not seen as actions of importance only to the people who perform them. Otherwise, it would be a matter of indifference whether or not one did them. Mecca's all booked up this year, I think I'll go to Las Vegas.

If you don't believe in their significance, many religious scruples sound silly. For example, if a Jewish woman lights Sabbath candles a certain number of minutes before sunset on Friday night, according to Jewish law she is performing a commandment. If she lights candles the same number of minutes after sunset on Friday evening, she is committing a grave sin. In the same vein, how could it be that sprinkling a bit of water on an infant or immersing it, in certain contexts, can make a difference regarding the eternal fate of its soul, whereas giving a baby a bath is only of hygienic importance? Why is marching down the street and whipping oneself until one bleeds in certain places, on a certain date in the Muslim calendar, a sign of Shiite piety, whereas no one, not even a devout Shiite Muslim, would think of doing something like that on the Champs Elysées on some random date? These things are important only to the people who believe they are and often incomprehensible to non-believers.

2. What We Think is Important

Importance is a personal matter, but people live in societies, societies seek to determine what is important for their members, and their members are usually persuaded. Traditional societies do so on a relatively small scale, personally, and by means of ceremonies and ceremonial sites. Post-traditional societies do so both by those means and the mass media. Every day the newspaper (which I have chosen because, more or less, it reflects my values and opinions) arrives at my front door and informs me about things that are deemed important by the editorial staff, whose idea of what is important is largely in keeping with the general consensus in the media and the ideological orientation of that particular newspaper . But why do I have to know about an earthquake in Indonesia or whether or not Bob Dylan accepted the Nobel Prize in person (or that he won the Nobel Prize at all)? I have friends who never read the paper or watch the news on television. Their ignorance of current events probably does not detract from the quality of their life. On the contrary, it does little good to me to know most of the things that are printed in the paper, assuming they are correct, which is often not the case. Nevertheless, reading the paper is important to me, because awareness of current events is something I share with people I feel solidarity with.

Other institutions, such as university departments, also try to rule on what is important, for their students and the communities who care about their fields. Although I have a doctorate in Comparative Literature and have studied German, I have never gotten around to reading Goethe's Faust, which, I know, is held to be a very important work. I concede that I would be enriched if I read Faust, especially if I read it in German (I even own a copy), but I don't plan to do so now or in the foreseeable future. I do feel mildly guilty about this lacuna in my literary culture, because I like to think of myself as a cultivated man (the kind of man who has read and understood Faust), and I want other people to think of me that way. But my own self-criticism and the hypothetical disdain of my peers is not important enough for me. I will probably die without having had that important literary experience, as well as many other experiences of potential importance to me, literary and other. Will I ever get to Beijing or Tierra del Fuego?

Despite my failure to read Faust, literature is important to me, and I belong to a community that believes in the importance of literature, because it influences people, challenges them, and enhances their lives. However, that community of literati, which might once have been called the Republic of Letters, is far from universal. For most American men, the outcome of the Superbowl is of greater importance than any novel, and men in most other places in the world care as little for American football as they do for novels, whereas victory in the soccer World Cup is of vital importance to them. It's not up to me personally to persuade soccer fans to read novels, though I believe the world would be a better place if people were more interested in literature than in professional sports. This matter is only of importance to me because I'd like to live in what I think of as a better world, though I acknowledge that my vision of a better world is not universally shared.

Our experiences proverbially instruct us as to what is truly important to us and, we believe, by extension to all humanity. Coping with cancer makes one revise one's priorities, and even a minor illness can be a sobering experience. I underwent some very minor surgery recently. Visiting a hospital and seeing the names of all the departments – orthopedics, cardiology, oncology, urology, ophthalmology, nephrology – I began to think about the parts of my body that eventually will go bad on me, and I valued my reasonably good health all the more. I also had greater appreciation of the knowledge and skill underpinning all of these hospital departments. Clearly it is very important to have well-equipped hospitals available, with expert physicians, nurses, and technical staff – immediately important to anyone who is ill, but one needn't be an extreme altruist to generalize about that importance. Everyone might have to be treated some time, we are all related to people who might need medical care, and, as a citizens, we benefit from having good hospitals in our city. However, we do not generalize down from the universal principle that health care is important. We generalize up from the importance of health care to us personally and to the people we care about.

The medical example is a clear demonstration of another kind of importance, that of precise attention to detail, even when no one's life depends on it. In my own work as a translator, I have spent many minutes puzzling over the correct way to render a word or to form a sentence, consulting dictionaries and web sites and revising my choice time and time again. I know that most readers would hardly notice the matters I agonize over, but it's a matter of pride to me to do the job right – or as close to right as I can. Musicians fret over phrasing that most listeners are oblivious to. Painters worry about the colors they choose. Chefs aim to get the seasoning perfect. No one thinks that these things matter as much as, say, making sure a nuclear reactor can withstand earthquakes and tidal waves. But they do matter to the people involved.

Among orthodox Jews, certain people flaunt their piety by claiming to observe minor commandments as scrupulously as major ones, which is to say that they deny the distinction between major and minor commandments. This is because obedience to Jewish law is of absolute importance to them. However, the very idea of praising people for observing minor commandments as scrupulously as major ones implies recognition of the difference between them, and, ordinary people always draw distinctions and set priorities. Exceeding the speed limit by a bit obviously isn't as serious an infraction as driving a stolen car without a license or insurance while under the influence of alcohol.

Priorities that one doesn't share can often look grotesquely inappropriate, as, when, at the end of Proust's Le côté de Guermantes, Swann tells the Duke and Duchess that he is mortally ill and about to die. The noble couple are late to a dinner engagement, and the Duchess is out of her depth. As Proust says: “Placed for the first time in her life between two such different duties as entering her carriage to go to a dinner in town and showing pity for a man who was about to die, she saw nothing in the code of conventions that would indicate which jurisprudence to follow.” (p. 594 of the Pléidae edition, my translation). Her husband, however, has no doubt about his priorities. He is impatient to leave for the dinner party and rushes his wife along. However, when he notices she is wearing black shoes with a red dress, he tells her she must change them. Suddenly there's no rush.

Belief systems determine what is important to the people who adhere to them, but it may not matter to them whether their beliefs are shared. I have met Buddhists who firmly believe that their souls once inhabited other bodies and will inhabit many more after their present body dies, a belief I don't share by a long shot. Because of the nature of Buddhism, my disbelief is a matter of indifference to my Buddhist acquaintances. They know, as it were, that, whether I believe it or not, my soul will transmigrate. By contrast, by my Jewish birth, my secular education, and my considered conviction, I am not a Christian. I can't come close to understanding the concept of “the son of God.” Moreover, in my view the myth of the virgin birth is, although imaginable, preposterous. As for the idea that Jesus died to redeem people's souls, I don't see how that's supposed to work.

Because of the nature of Christianity, I know that my incredulity is offensive and challenging to many Christians, and, as far as they're concerned, I will burn in hell for all eternity if I'm not converted. Since they love me, as a fellow human, they believe it is their mission to persuade me that they're right. They wouldn't be committed to converting the heathen if they thought their religion was important only to themselves, because they happened to have been brought up to believe in it, and that it was rightly indifferent to non-Christians (except, perhaps, as a matter of curiosity, or, for the historically aware, as a force that shaped human history and continues to do so). If they allowed themselves to entertain that thought, their belief system would collapse. For Christians, their religion must be absolutely true. Otherwise it means nothing. It can't be just an opinion. Saying that Mother Theresa was a selfless woman who helped a lot of sick and destitute people, a statement that can be verified, modified, or refuted, is not at all the same as saying that she was a saint. (Interestingly, because of our particularism, we Jews, if we are believers, only believe that our religion is absolutely binding upon other Jews, and we don't expect non-Jews to believe in it.)

Thus the idea that nothing is of absolute importance is extremely threatening to people like evangelical Christians, orthodox Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims, who are committed to a certain belief system. But I'm not at all threatened by the idea. I don't see why we need to believe in the absolute, intrinsic importance of events on our tiny planet. The danger that hundreds of millions of people might die because of rising sea levels, famines, wars over resources, and the spread of diseases is very important to me, whether or not my own grandchildren will be among the victims, because I care about the world and the people in it. They are important to me because I feel solidarity: I care about myself, about people I know and love, about the human beings who live around me, and so on, until, as much as I can, I extend my concern to all humanity, or, if I were enlightened, to all sentient beings. If there are other sentient beings out there in the universe, the hypothetical sharing of sentience would make them important to an enlightened person, who would be sorry to learn that their planet was annihilated in a supernova.

Ordinary, unenlightened people like me tend to care most about sentient beings that are close at hand, or ones they can identify with. When elephants and giraffes are threatened with extinction, we respond with sympathy. If mosquitoes were threatened with extinction, unless someone explained to me why we need them desperately in our ecosystem, I wouldn't bat an eyelash. But, absolutely speaking, are mosquitoes less important than giraffes? Of course not. But, then again, maybe we aren't capable of thinking in absolute terms. We can only think parochially, though we may delude ourselves that we are thinking absolutely. Things do matter to us, personally, if we're engaged in life, and mattering to us personally is probably the best and most we can do.

3. What we Think is Important is a Function of What we Believe, and Belief is a Major Component of our Identity

One can infer what is important to someone, either another person or oneself, by examining that person's actions, though people frequently profess a belief, violate their own principles, and, possibly, feel remorseful. I eat the meat of animals that have probably been kept in dreadful conditions and slaughtered cruelly. I claim to believe that it is immoral to mistreat animals (I don't do so directly myself), and I am aware that raising animals for slaughter is damaging to the environment and contributes to global warming. However, the fact is, my behavior tells me that the pleasure I get from eating meat is more important to me than loyalty to my abstract principles. At best this is a confession of weakness. At worst, a confession of hypocrisy.

Despite my weakness, I can't imagine myself doing certain things that are not only out of character (I was never tempted to get a tattoo or pierce my ear and wear an earring), but also abhorrent to me morally (like raping a woman or seducing a little boy). I also can't imagine crossing myself in a church, prostrating myself in a mosque, or burning incense in a Buddhist temple.

Looking at the above examples, I see four categories of action in relation to belief, all connected both to the matter of importance and to that of identity. The first category is what the Catholics call “venial”: sins that, if you commit them, won't send you to eternal damnation. Almost everyone, I imagine, has a list of minor failings, things they think of as mainly wrong, but which, in fact are neutral, unimportant to them, such as betting on horse races, smoking cigars, not calling it to the cashier's attention if she makes a small mistake in their favor, and so on. We have rationalizations for committing these minor sins: the chicken I'm eating was dead anyway; Microsoft is so rich, it doesn't matter if I use an unlicensed version of Windows; everyone cheats on income tax a little – not reporting a couple of hundred dollars that you got in cash isn't the same as concealing millions of ill-gotten gains in a numbered bank account. While I concede that people disagree as to what is minor and what is major – militant vegetarians see the slaughter and butchering of animals as tantamount to murder – this doesn't do away with the distinction people make in judging themselves and others between very bad deeds and minor vices.

The second category is, in fact, morally neutral. I regard certain things as wrong for me, because they don't fit into my self-image, but I understand that they fit other people perfectly. I would never buy and wear an expensive wristwatch, though I bought and play an expensive flute.

The third category is morally significant. For example, I can hardly think of a rationalization for killing or injuring someone, for extortion, or for fraud – among other major crimes. A gangster or tyrant who commits such actions obviously must rationalize them and persuade himself that they conform to social norms of some kind. Moreover, most ordinary people can persuade themselves or be persuaded that even actions of this kind are moral in certain circumstances such as war. I have been a soldier during a war, and I was on the team of a self-propelled howitzer that fired shells at distant enemy troops. I have no idea whether the shells that we fired killed anyone, but I have to admit that I don't feel guilty about it. The Syrian soldiers I shot at would have been happy to shoot at me.

Aside from the exception I mentioned, most of us do not believe that condemning violent and cruel crimes is a matter of opinion, and we do believe that it is important to live in a society in which such crimes are rare. Moreover, I also think that, while acknowledging that my own moral values are not universally held, I do have grounds for condemning societies where slavery is practiced or where people can be sent to prison or executed for expressing opposition to their government. Nevertheless, no matter how widely they are shared, ethical norms cannot be absolute.

The final group of examples shows most clearly the connection between the attribution of importance, belief, and identity. As a Jew, it is important for me not to participate in a Catholic mass or to prostrate myself in Muslim prayer. This is because I don't believe in the tenets of those other religions, and because of who I am. For me to convert to Catholicism or Islam would be an extreme transformation of my identity. My own identity, my idea of whom I am, is important to me, and the values I regard as important are among the factors that compose my identity.

Taking “identity” in a somewhat loose way, we have overlapping identities – people talk about intersectionality today – various predicates related to types of people that can applied to us: gender, age, ethnicity, mother-tongue, and so on. We also have professional identities (soldier, politician, care-giver), and identities related to our avocations and interests (art collectors, gun enthusiasts, fans of Steven King). Some of these identities are givens, and others are subject to choice and variable emphasis. When we accept an aspect of our identity and act upon it, we can be said to be identifying. Everyone in America is of some national extraction or another, something they can't change, but they might well be uninterested in their ethnic background. A man might own a rifle and go hunting now and then, but not be a member of the NRA or a fanatic advocate of the right to own a gun. Sometimes identity is pinned on a person as with Robert Klein, the gentile character played by Alain Delon in the 1976 film by Joseph Losey, who is arrested and deported by the Nazis as a Jew, because of his name. And sometimes identity can be evaded or repudiated, as with Coleman Silk, the protagonist of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, who conceals his African-American ancestry. Conversely, one can embrace an identity that is not exactly one's own, the way Barack Obama chose to be “black,” although he was not descended from African slaves in the United States, like most African-Americans.

The issue of identity and identification is closely related to the subject of what one thinks is important, a matter of choice. An Italian-American whose extraction was centrally important in her life might study Italian, travel in Italy, learn to cook Italian food, make contact with distant relatives still in Italy, and be a devout Roman Catholic, but she would have no convincing argument against her sister, who might be more interested in Chinese culture than Italian, more inclined to Buddhism than to Christianity, and indifferent to her distant Italian cousins. One sister feels solidarity with Italian people, and the other doesn't. If importance were absolute, one sister would be wrong, and the other would be right – and they probably would hate each other.

 Belief in absolute importance is often an obstacle to compassion, understanding, tolerance, and human solidarity, values that many of us believe to be of absolute importance. Paradoxically, the best way of fostering those values is to acknowledge that they are not of absolute importance.

A Puzzling Family Photograph

Sixteen people, dressed formally are lined up in someone's back yard. The clapboard siding of the house, with only two windows, provides the background in the upper right of the sepia picture, and the rear entrance – a short flight of stairs and wooden railings leading to an enclosed back porch with a single window, is the background of the left side of the picture. The people are on a not particularly well tended lawn. The season is probably springtime, not too hot for the men and the older boys to be wearing dark jackets and ties.

A matriarchal figure sits on a chair in the very center of the picture, she is holding a baby, probably a grandchild, and the baby is the only one in the picture whose face is out of focus, because it moved. A young couple stands to right of the matriarch. They look very serious, and the man's arm is around his wife's shoulder. To the right of the woman, separated from her, stands a boy in his early teens, wearing a dark jacket, tightly buttoned, a tie, and knee-breeches. His hair is carefully slicked down and neatly combed. He has a pleasant smile and his eyes are partially closed, perhaps because he is facing the sun. His arm is around a slightly younger girl wearing a white dress, high buttoned white shoes, and her hair has a bow in it. Her eyes are also slightly narrowed.

These two people are my uncle Bill and my aunt Ethel, long dead like, I assume, everyone else in the picture. Seated on the grass, directly in front of my uncle Bill, sits a pretty boy dressed in white, a child of about three, my uncle Bobby. He is holding what appears to be a toy pistol, which is surprising, because I don't think I ever knew a man as mild as my uncle Bobby. Next to him sits my mother, also in white, who must be around four. She seems to be holding some flowers, and she looks a bit annoyed. My uncle Seymour, who was a couple of years older than she, is seated next to her with a kind of rascally expression on his face, which my two cousins, his sons, inherited from him. My mother was born in 1910, so the picture was probably taken no later than 1914.

To the left of the matriarch, three children are seated on the grass. They seem to be a bit older than my mother and my two uncles. Chances are these are people whom I met when I was a child, but I have no idea who they are. Behind them stand two adults and two older children. A thin, strong-looking man with a thick head of black hair, wearing serious looking wire framed glasses, stands with one hand on the back of the matriarch's chair and the other on the shoulder of a girl of about eleven, presumably his daughter. He is wearing a dark, three-piece suit, and his expression is intense, like a revolutionary Jewish intellectual. His daughter wears a white dress. Her left arm is around her father's back, and her right hand rests on her hip. Her elbow is out, and she has an even more mischievous expression than my uncle Seymour. A dark woman, probably her mother, stands next to her, and her arm is around a boy of twelve or so, wearing a double-breasted jacket, a tie, and knee-breeches, like my uncle Bill, probably his cousin.

The picture intrigues me partly because I can't identity the people in it, though I'm sure they're fairly close relatives of mine. But I'm not even sure whether the two men standing at the side of the seated matriarch are her children or her sons-in-law. Why, I wonder, weren't my grandparents in it with their children? What brought these people together in that back yard, probably in a New Jersey town? I assume it was taken by a professional photographer, though there were roll film cameras at that time, and a member of the family might have taken it. Maybe a whole bunch of other pictures were taken on the same day – all of them gone.

Without doubt the picture tells a success story. Jewish people who had come from the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century managed to establish themselves in the United States and produce a crop of healthy-looking, well-dressed, American children. It also shows family cohesion, the desire to preserve a moment when they all came together, evidently to celebrate some important event.

More than a century has passed since the picture was taken. All the sixteen people in it lived lives and had stories, somehow present in the fraction of a second when the film was exposed. These people are remembered, possibly dimly, by those who knew them when they were alive, but today we, who remember them, are all older than the people in the picture were when it was taken - except for the matriarch in the center.