Once
Some things happen only once. Yet we remember them forever.
Some are painful. But many are joyous and teach us how to live.
Here are some of those for me.
Both
Favourite Possession
‘The fifth of your life’ is a ‘favourite possession’. 1 I wish I had a list of all of the choices Nigel has heard for this one. I can imagine everything from fossil to first frangipani.
For me it is my twin’s Bible.
Bill died 20 years ago. His death was desperate for me. It often is for twins. And over these years I have reflected on the ways he served humanity, and me in particular, as a teacher of life’s complexities. He taught me things I have tried to live up to and have cherished.
One was about equality as it lives inside love.
We were 8 years old. Our big sister, Merl, was 14 and away at boarding school, but very much a beloved presence in our house. On this day, Saturday probably, Bill was in his room reading comic books and sneaking Pecan Sandies (heavenly, crumbly and forbidden cookies only he could get away with). I had been playing dress-up in my room. All was pretty normal.
Then suddenly, catapulted by some thought sequence I cannot now remember, I jumped up and walked resolutely down the hall to Bill’s room. I stood in front of his bed and said, with no preamble, ‘Bill, who do you love more, me or Merl?’
He looked up from his Superman comic, slowly rose, put the comic down and looked at me. I was shaking. He leaned gently forward and said slowly and tenderly, ‘Nancy, I love you both the most.’
I remember the relief I felt, and also something too grown up for me to embrace cognitively. There was a kind of wisdom in what he had said that was transportive for me. I look back on that moment now and think that possibly my whole psychological trajectory changed in that moment. I have not learned anything more incomprehensibly wise than that.
And just how he sourced that almost divine paradox, I don’t know. He could surprise you.
He went on to become a fervent, though always gentle, Christian, a striving one, a self-doubting, sometimes even tortured one, but always a wise one. And as a given in his life, in his home, in his heart was his large blue leather-bound Bible with particular verses highlighted where he went often, pages worn with determined learning and concomitant prayer. A treasure.
When he died, his wife, Mary, a dear sister-in-law, gave it to me. Now it is my treasure. Not to use as he did; no one could do that. But to hold, to hear, to heed as a tribute to that sweet soul who often knew beyond his knowing, and I guess led me to that kind of knowing, too – and still does in my most uncertain moments.
Possessions are strange things. Favourite ones even more so. They are not to be owned.
They are to be listen to.
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/the-five-of-my-life/nancy-kline
Favourite Place
Nigel 1 also wanted my favourite place. I didn’t struggled with this one. But I loved thinking about it, remembering, musing. Missing Margaret.
My geographic place would have been New Mexico or Oxfordshire. Their skies warrant glass roofs and forever walks. The New Mexico sky can turn you into a believer in one take. It would have been fun to choose that cerulean place.
But about ten years ago I was driving with Margaret Legum, a redoubtable freedom-fighter economist in South Africa, who changed the subject from anti-apartheid politics and said with no segue, ‘Nancy, where do you most love to be?’ And I said with no swithering (I love that word), ‘With Christopher and in the middle of a sentence while I am writing.’
We both laughed at the non-geographical sense I had made of her question; She had adored her husband, too, and was a writer herself. She smiled.
So for Nigel I chose ‘In the middle of a sentence while I am writing’. I wanted to get at what makes that place so gorgeous for me.
I think it is the primordial ooze of it. The beginnings from beginnings, the designed designlessness of it. There is a freedom sewn from shifting structure, a unguided confident guide stepping over stiles, tossing decoys to clear the water, securing a seat half way up to see the ‘so far’ of it all, saying yes and then no and then perfect.
I have reached for these moments since I was 10 years old. But I fell I love with them when I was 27, writing the first book of my own. But I had to wait until I was 46 truly to get it. Writing the first book on the Thinking Environment, I had to rid my mind of voices of cynicism, of denigration, of relegation. I climbed the spiral staircase to my study each morning and did a kind conscious ritual of clearing the critics. And when I had, when all there was at my desk was one soul resolving to stay true to her self, to her heart, to what she knew to be so from her experience, I discovered this ‘place’.
Being in the middle of a sentence as it is forming, reforming, rejecting, embracing, agonising over and rejoicing in itself is exhilarating. It requires me to be entirely focused, entirely in the present, as even meditation and mindfulness cannot.
I sometimes imagine that it is like being conscious during blastulation in embryogenesis. We have no brains then to perceive that quintessential experience of formation, but being in the middle of a sentence may hold some of that cellular memory of going from nothing to something, and from something to everything.
In that way, that ‘let there be light and there was light’ kind of way, this ‘place’, I’d say, is not just my favourite place.
I think it is a holy place.
[1] Nigel Marsh, ‘The Five of My Life' link: https://omny.fm/shows/the-five-of-my-life/nancy-kline
Question
Favourite Film
And then there was the ‘The Five of Your Life' 1 favourite film.
One film. One.
Forget it.
First of all, I couldn’t choose even one category of film as a favourite and there was at least one film in each category such as:
‘Breathtaking’ (A River Runs Through It)
‘Worthy of a justice activist’ (Three Billboards or Long Walk to Freedom)
‘Achingly hilarious’ (Barefoot in the Park - the climbing the stairs scene is worth the whole film)
‘Meltingly romantic’ (Bridges of Madison County)
‘Unforgivably heartbreaking’ (Out of Africa)
‘Just plain terrifying’ (Silence of the Lambs)
They fell over each other being first.
So did ‘Anything with Robert Redford in it’ (my three decades favourite).
So I made up one: the ‘I’ll definitely love any film in it’ category.
‘Courtroom drama’ was it. No question.
Any highly strung trial in which the good person’s modest, super smart (preferably young or struggling) attorney outwits the really really really bad person’s arrogant, you-wouldn’t-even-want-to-have-dinner-them opposing attorney.
Basically it’s the intellectual forensics I love, the delicate journey of solving any mystery. I love wanting to know something and then discovering it. I love questions, and I love answers, including the tentativeness of answers. As a kid I watched Perry Mason every Saturday night (no boyfriends yet), and as a little girl I read almost every Nancy Drew novel. When I was four I asked my mother why water went down the drain. She did her best to explain gravity to me. But not even Einstein understood gravity. He did notice it. Which was a lot.
Questions are the thing, though. And most questions don’t have answers; we just think they do. But in courtroom drama, you get the answers, too. Usually. Which is enough.
So, ‘courtroom drama’ led to no contest for film favourite: The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey playing the wonderful Mick Haller.
In fact, Matthew McConaughey is my new Robert Redford, so the choice was hard. But you take ‘courtroom drama’, add McConaughey’s irresistibility to a plot that sears the hubris of inherited wealth and entitlement, add a seriously delicious plot twist turning inside out who the bad person is, then add the power of understated truths, disobedient humour at the expense of the hateful, questions that take no prisoners, the tender heart of tough guys, and humility wedded to victory – well? The Lincoln Lawyer. Definitely.
Early courtroom classics were hard to resist, of course, like Twelve Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution, Inherit the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird. The moral snob in me tried to choose one of those. But that would have been reverence more than preference.
Maybe this is the point. Favourites speak of our selves. More loudly than we imagine. And this favourite film, as with my favourite book and place, says something I want to say with my life – that the heart beats out longings: for justice, for sweetness, for searching until finding, for digging when glossing tempts, for razor-edged leaving of mendacity in the dust, for eyes that love. Mick Haller (and McConaughey for that matter) knows that.
And lives it.
I’d like to, too.
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/the-five-of-my-life/nancy-kline
Out
Favourite Song
Continuing with ‘The 5 of My Life’ 1 journey, I will confess to my favourite song.
‘Confess’ because this choice holds in one way or another almost all of who I am. But you wouldn’t think so. I have loved this song for 30 years. Only now do I understand why. It is a kind of 'song of my soul', a capturing of indelible strains of my heritage.
The song is ‘Good Ole Boys Like Me’, sung by Don Williams (written by Bob McDill).
In my early 30’s, having been trained classically and raised on classical music, and having married a classical music aficionado, I found myself falling in love with American Country Music of the early 1980’s. Concurrently I was learning about the importance of reclaiming pride in one’s heritage even if that heritage is woven with a region’s ‘original sin'. I was learning that you can repudiate the sin, work with your whole life to right it, and along the way be proud of the region, of its good, its sweet, its just.
So I was piecing together pride in being a US Southerner, a white privileged Southerner whose family of six generations, at one time slave-holding, was populated also with anti-racist and anti-sexist writing and activism over two hundred years. Inexorably I became drawn to that region’s ‘country music’.
Along the way, up against my imagined imminent ostracism from classical music colleagues and friends, I stayed true to this my newly-found part of myself, first privately listening to the country music station alone in my car (always re-setting the dial to the classical music before I got out), and then gingerly sharing it with a beloved of mine, and finally ‘coming out’ as a Country Music lover. It took courage and independent thinking to allow Don Williams, who was called the ‘Country Music songwriters’ songwriter,’ to sit in my life side by side with Mozart.
Fundamentally I was finally able to embrace the uneasy relationship between the South’s linearity and its ambiguities, between the history of its hate and the permanence of its love. This wrenching complexity is there indisputably in this song.
I chose the song first of all because I love anything, anything, that Don Williams writes, chooses or sings. I would listen to his tender bass voice if he were singing the phone book. I love this song also because it honours the unblemished beauties of the deep South – its ‘soft southern winds’, its Live Oak Trees, its Cape Jasmin, even its window screens and of course the ‘whispers of Thomas Wolfe in our heads’.
I love this song because it says that love is love wherever you find it. Love is love even inside a white, male, middle-aged, gin-saturated, Tennessean father of a ‘little man’. Even inside the ‘good ole boy’ (a moniker of worthlessness and bigotry). This song says that we can find love even in a little boy’s room with its walls covered with the heroes on the wrong side of the sin. This song stalks us as it asks, ‘What do you do with good ole boys like me?’
It is that question with its impossible paradoxes, its wrenchingly not-all-right-at-all reality that make this song my favourite. It is in its excruciating, forbidden sweetness inside the heart’s chambers that house both scars: the pain of the persecuted and the pain of the persecutor. It is in the holy requirement to loathe the inhumanity but to love the human being – to see, to honour the good inside the bad.
This song makes us ask: what do we do with ‘good ole boys’ like him? What do we do with that heinous and heavenly heritage? What do we do with its torturous twists? What do we do with the fact that the history of sin haunts the saint of the sinner?
This song and Don Williams’ rendering of it makes a sacred offering to us all: a lullaby to navigate the nightmare, to help us enfold in order to grow.
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/the-five-of-my-life/nancy-kline
Lyrics
Good Ole Boys Like Me
Sung by Don Williams
Written by Bob McDill
© Universal Music Publishing Group
When I was a kid Uncle Remus would put me to bed,
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head.
Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man,
With gin on his breath and a bible in his hand,
And he talked about honor and things I should know.
Then he'd stagger a little as he went out the door.
I can still hear the soft southern winds in the live oak trees
And Those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me,
Hank and Tennessee.
I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be,
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?
Nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does,
But you ain't afraid if you're washed in the blood like I was.
The smell of cape jasmine through the window screen,
John R. and The Wolfman kept me company
By the light of the radio by my bed,
With Thomas Wolfe whispering in my head.
When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street,
And I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed,
But I was smarter than most, and I could choose.
Learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news.
When I was eighteen, lord, I hit the road
But it really doesn't matter how far I go.
Yeah, what do you do with good ole boys like me?
Inside
Favourite Book
What is your all-time favourite book? And your favourite film? And song? And place? And possession? And why?
I hope you have about 11 hours because these questions are formidable. They don’t look it. They look easy and fun. But they’re not. A bit fun, actually. But wily.
Last week Nigel Marsh interviewed me about my five favourites. His podcast, ‘The Five of My Life'1, is an ingenious idea. It requires ruthless introspection, some struggle and gingerly disclosure.
He promised a happy, light conversation. And it was, because he is a joy. He also promised psychological safety. Which there was. Because he respects individual truths.
But for me the real value of it all was the not so light juggernaut of a journey to the interview itself.
Nigel always starts with your favourite film. But I want to start with my favourite book.
Loving literature as I do, and loving beautifully written science and penetrably written philosophy, I soon could see that I would be dead before I could choose only one book. Then I realised the whole thing was my choice. Even my interpretation of ‘book’. When that sank in, I knew instantly: my all-time favourite book is The Oxford English Dictionary. (It is, of course, actually many books, as in volumes, but Nigel didn’t think that was cheating.)
The real meat of Nigel’s concept is the followup ‘why’ question. ‘Why’ takes you back. And ‘back’ can be sublime or wrenching. Or both. My book ‘back' was wholly sublime.
I fell in love with the Oxford English Dictionary as an undergraduate. In those magical years I began seriously to love words, not just as a collective in the form of sentences and books, but also as individual entities, life forms emerging through centuries. Newly smitten with the ‘life story’ of the words themselves, I soon discovered that I could immerse myself in exactly that history, that I could get (almost physically) inside the 10 massive volumes of it by becoming friends with The Oxford English Dictionary. I remember seeing for the first time that collection standing tall, beckoning me into the dedicated alcove of the elegant ‘cathedral’ that is the Scripps College Denison Library.
I spent hours and hours there. Those are now beloved memories.
Also, my mother, herself a word devotee, gave me for Christmas in my senior year, the new two-volume complete OED, (sporting an absolutely essential magnifying glass). So for more than 50 years I’ve brought that Scripps alcove with me wherever I’ve lived.
I often think, in a ‘desert island’ sort of way, that I could survive with only the OED, ever-absorbed in the chronicle, culture, and literature alive in each entry.
And these days I feel, if begrudgingly, grateful for the digitised OED. I didn’t want to like it. It is visually enervating, gasping for white space. It does not lift my aesthetic heart at all to go into its pages. But all of the richness of each entry is there still. And best of all almost every line has a ‘link’ to further material about a reference in the definition. So the OED has become a kind of GKP. Global Knowledge Portal is what this magnificent dictionary is now.
Also, you can click to hear the correct pronunciation(s). No more squinting at the diacritics.
So I forgive it its crowded digital halls. I guess.
It seems to me that the OED is a ‘wonder of the world’. Its own biography, captured compellingly in Simon Winchester’s book: The Surgeon of Crowthorne 2 shows human beings at our imaginative and indefatigable best. I love knowing, for example, that Sir James Murray and his team, the brains behind the massive project starting in 1879, worked for five years and then faced the fact that they had gotten only to the word ‘Ant’. Undaunted they competed the dictionary in 1928, after Murray’s death, true to his vision.
Their original aim of 6400 words in 4 volumes became 400,000 words in 10 volumes.
1933 saw an update. 1972 another. 1986 another. And in 2000 the digital wonder appeared.
The number of entries rises even as I write this. Just last month 650 new words appeared, including trequartista. (Which added quite a lot of sophistication to football, if you ask me.)
Frankly, I revere the Oxford English Dictionary. I would argue that it is itself an act of evolution as well as an evolutionary celebration of the rise of our form of primate life that wondrously conceptualises and speaks in words and syntax, ever-changingly and enchantingly.
In that way the OED I think helps us forgive some of our species’ monstrous acts. We are exquisite, after all.
Inside the Oxford English Dictionary we remember that.
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/the-five-of-my-life/nancy-kline
[2] The Surgeon of Crowthorne, © Simon Winchester, UK, Penguin, 1999 (The Professor and the Madman, USA, Harper, 1998).