EmiliaA12

. . . city areas with flourishing diversity sprout strange and unpredictable uses and peculiar scenes. But this is not a drawback of diversity. This is the point . . . of it.

Hi,

     It's one of those May days when staying in bed past sunrise is a waste; the air is fresh, the sun is out, and the temperature is perfect for doing anything outside. I'm going to celebrate the season by taking a bike ride. I brought your bike in for a tune up and it, like me, is awaiting your return. Speaking of which, I glanced at the calendar and realized my days of having the Sunday paper to myself are numbered. That being said, I'm ready to forgo sole proprietorship of the Editorial page for the chance to discuss it with you. Have you booked your return flight for June 14th or the 21st?

     This week finds both of the women in your life on an urban high. To celebrate the completion of my article, Kate and I, along with thousands of others, packed Madison Square Garden to wish Pete Seeger a happy 90th birthday. It was both reassuring and inspiring to see one of my long time heroes turn 90 without losing his edge. Didn't you have a similar reaction after seeing the Patti Smith documentary Dream of Life? Commenting on Pete's longevity and the end of the Bush presidency, Bruce Springsteen accurately described that mixture of feelings when he said, "Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man. It was so nice." More than nice is the fact that in about two weeks work will start on ridding the Hudson of PCBs. Can you think of a better birthday present for Seeger? My next assignment for The Village Green is to write an article about the twenty-five year environmental battle that was waged to make this cleanup a reality. In the process of doing the research for it, I've gathered background material on Seeger's Clearwater project. The guy has been taking up the cause for a cleaner Hudson since 1969, basically the span of our lives. I'm convinced, now more than ever, that the secret to aging well is to be passionately committed to a vision that transcends oneself and one's allotted time on the planet.

     Guess what? Inspired by Seeger's determination to keep himself open to experience, I'm going to do something I've tried to avoid as much as possible — speak in public. Not only that, my audience is going to be the toughest you can imagine — New York City high school students. I received an email from a woman named Jacqueline Renou. She's a history teacher at a good public high school near Lincoln Center. Apparently her sister lives in town and is a faithful reader of my columns. She suggested that Jacqueline invite me to her class to discuss my work about turning cities green. As Jacqueline explained in her email, she likes to end her American history course on a forward looking note and this year that note is urban environmental initiatives. So it's back to high school; I just hope at the end of my spiel the kids don't stuff me in a locker. I should add, Em's first reaction to this opportunity was to make me swear I wouldn't bring my shtick to her school. Ah teenagers always an ego boost!

     As for Em's urban high there is something afoot and I mean that literally as well as figuratively. During dinner, last Friday, she casually informed me that one of the best times she's recently had was walking in the City looking at people, by herself. This from a kid who was convinced that not getting a driver's license at seventeen was tantamount to falling into an existential abyss condemned to a lifetime of social oblivion. To say I was surprised doesn't quite cut it. But before I reveal the two other surprises, let me give you the back story that led to Em's dinner time epiphany.

     Earlier in the week, I gave her permission to see the New York City Ballet on Thursday night and to sleep over at Rose's. This past week was AP week at school. Em didn't sign up to take Friday's test, so I decided a night at the ballet, accompanied by a friend who's a dancer, was an opportunity not to be missed. I must say Em made it difficult for me to say no. She had looked up the bus schedule before asking and are you ready for this, even read New Yorker Profiles on Balanchine and Kirsten to demonstrate her seriousness about becoming ballet literate. Since she was going to be in the City on Friday I asked if she would do me a favor. This year is the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's first sail up the River. To commemorate this event the Museum of the City of New York has organized an exhibition called, Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson. I asked Em to check it out to see if there was anything I could use as a resource for my article about the Hudson River. Second surprise. According to Em, she could tell within five minutes that there was nothing I could use, but she spent at least two hours at the exhibition anyway. Apparently she was intrigued by the seventeenth century world maps because as she said, ". . . they were a weird combination of accuracy and fantasy." When I asked what she meant by that she replied that the actual geography was surprisingly accurate given the primitive tools seventeenth century cartographers used. But, she observed, on almost every map there were astrological signs and allegorical figures representing the continents, the oceans, or the virtues. From this she concluded that people back then were not ready to trust scientific knowledge to the exclusion of other ways of making sense of their world and she left the exhibition wanting to know how science and superstition influenced other aspects of their lives. Still stunned by the revelation of having a walker in the city in our midst, I now had to entertain the possibility that our daughter had started to wonder about mentalities — Alfred Kazin and the Annales School be praised. There's more. Third surprise — Over dessert, I asked how Rose was doing and Em bolted from the table saying she had to email Rose's question to Rob. My maternal early warning system was activated because here was a name I hadn't heard before. When I ever so subtly inquired about this mystery man, Em cracked up. Yup, you guessed it. Apparently ever since she found your copy of the Platonic dialogues, Em and your Dad have been emailing each other about the ancient Greeks. While engaging in this endeavor, your father asked Em to call him Rob, as any two adults would. In light of these three surprises, I find myself looking at our daughter and asking myself who is this person? Any suggestions?

     By the way, when Em told me about calling Granddad, Rob I remembered this wasn't the first time your father nixed the role for the name. Didn't he ask you to call him Rob when you were ready to leave for college? If memory serves you refused and gave him the nickname Luftmensch instead. I noticed you still call him that whenever you think he has decided to leave the quotidian behind and set up camp among the good, the true and the beautiful. Well, you'll be happy to know Pixar's Up has kicked off the summer movie season with a character that resembles your Luftmensch; his name is Carl Fredricksen, he's seventy-eight, and spends his time in the clouds. There's also another character, a kid named Russell, who's up there with him. Do you think Dad and Em are planning to say farewell to mother earth in order to float among the forms? And we thought going to City was a big deal!

     Life just gets more interesting.

     Love,

Soph

Greetings,

     Soph, get out your list of surprises and add Em's history paper to it. Have you read it? She emailed me a copy and it is the most accomplished writing she has done to date. Admittedly the last history paper I remember Em writing was when she was an eighth grader. That one was actually part of a group project that explained the various interchanges thirteenth century Europeans and Mongolians experienced as they traveled the Silk Road. If memory serves, Em had trouble structuring her research and she approached history in the same way Sergeant Friday solved crimes on Dragnet — "All we want are the facts, ma'am. All we know are facts, ma'am." After reading "The Two P's: Polio and Paris," I was left wondering, when did she make the leap from writing history as a singly plotted narrative to using it as the basis for building an analytical hierarchy? In this latest paper she skillfully gathers and organizes historical facts, not as end in itself, but as the basis for creating concepts, interpretations and even judgments. If you have a copy pay close attention to the concluding paragraph. Instead of the standard summary, Em examines history's purpose with a sense of scholarly detachment that, in my opinion, demonstrates a new level of intellectual sophistication.

     Having had some time to reflect on her analytical leap forward, I can now say that I should have seen it coming. Em's interest in Plato, her questions about usage, even the increasingly well crafted emails she writes, all indicate a marshaling of intellectual power. But what really makes me feel like I've been asleep at the parental wheel is Rousseau. Not only was my first dog named after him, a testament to my father's devotion to Jean-Jacques, but Rousseau was the subject of a major paper I wrote in grad school. One of the discoveries I made while working on it was Rousseau's description of adolescence as the second birth. I still think it is one of the most accurate and insightful descriptions of those years I have encountered. But until Em started giving birthing to herself, Rousseau's description remained an interesting but largely inert abstraction for me.

     Up until now I assumed I knew what adolescence entailed; a kid's secondary sex characteristics emerge and she becomes increasingly capable of acting independently and well. But observing Em's development and trying to understand it in the context of a second birth, I've begun to think there's more to it than that. I've realized that along with becoming a sexual and independent being, the other developmental project an adolescent faces is to construct her inner life. Becoming conscious of that life, I think, is what Rousseau means by the second birth. That happens when an adolescent starts to take the internal dialogue she has with herself seriously; the dialogue that challenges her to provide her own reasons for acting in the world. Since this is a long term, incremental, and internal process, the second birth, unlike acting independently or sexually, is largely hidden from view. That's why its effects can surprise the adolescent who crafts it and those who are on the receiving end of its outward manifestations.

     Another factor that contributes to the hidden and surprising nature of an adolescent's inner life is it's composition and formation. The source for a young person's internal dialogue originates from her personal cache of intangibles and abstractions — the ideas, values, symbols, metaphors, images, and stories she finds significant. To craft that dialogue an adolescent forges links between these invisible purveyors of meaning and her lived experience. In my opinion, crafting those connections signals the onset of adulthood and raises the possibility of living a fulfilling life. Although I've been dwelling on adolescence's underground quality, I don't want to portray it as a hermetic rite of passage; one in which the transformation from child to adult is the outcome of some arcane art steeped in secret rituals. A great deal of the change associated with that time of life is initiated by communal effort and occurs in the clear light of day. Family, friends, school, and community are essential in providing the skills and experiences that ground an adolescent's inner world. But you have to admit, observing Em over the last few years, there have been times when mysterious most accurately described the changes she has undergone.

     I've also been thinking about the type of public attention paid to an adolescent's inner life, and in the process, I find myself remembering books we read before Em was born. Maybe I'm way off base here, but I remember those books on infant and early childhood development as having a reassuring and accepting tone. The various authors might disagree on the fine points of feeding schedules or the best age to potty train, but generally they advised new parents against making a fetish out of developmental norms. Instead the various experts counseled working with and trusting in the unique developmental style and rate of the individual child. Accepting that advice went a far way to lessen my anxiety over the long time it took Em to start talking.

     What's striking about much of the literature, images, and public discourse about adolescence is the loss of this positive tone. Generally parents are advised to endure those years by adopting a siege mentality. Why the change? Blame it on the second birth. It activates the culture's lack of trust in an adolescent's inner life and therefore necessitates portraying it as threatening and requiring control. No I haven't turned into a conspiracy nut, but I think adolescents are subjected to a cultural bait and switch. Given that their developmental projects entail building their inner lives, understanding themselves as a sexual beings, and acting autonomously, what do all of these undertakings have in common? The potential to upset the status quo. That frightens parents, the schools, the colleges, and the community. So the best way to prevent any upheaval is to make it appear that the conversation an adolescent is having with herself is an authentic attempt to make her experience meaningful, but in reality that conversation has been scripted by others. That 's the bait and switch or you can label it the cultural appearance and reality con. Whatever you call it, the adolescent ends up not being able to distinguish her own voice from those that earn the culture's approval to speak in her name.

     Thinking of adolescence as the second birth, I've come to realize how radical an idea going to city is. What we are proposing for Em amounts to a kind of cultural litmus test. It would allow her to test whether she is hearing her own voice, and if not, to identify who or what is attempting to put words in her mouth. I'm also beginning to understand going to city as an opportunity to create a new vocabulary about the second birth; one that engenders trust in the inner life it brings into the world. Instead of seeing adolescents as potential agents of destabilization we, as a culture, would begin to perceive them as agents of natality. That's a term Hannah Arendt used to describe the newcomer's capacity to introduce something new into the world. So the second birth could be framed as a well spring from which a culture rejuvenates and reinvents itself.

     I almost forgot. I booked a flight for the 21st. But before coming home I was thinking about emailing my father and cluing him in on our discussion about going to city. Have you mentioned it to him? I also want to hear what he and Em are doing. It wouldn't surprise me if, on some level, Em has chosen Rob as "midwife" for her second birth.

     Love,

\John