When the Student is Ready . . .

What is an education? How does one go about getting one? Where can both knowledge and wisdom be obtained? These are not only questions I’ve spent my life trying to answer, but those explored by the intelligent and insightful, smart and sexy new film, “An Education.”

In England in 1961, following a youth orchestra rehearsal, bright, beautiful schoolgirl Jenny is given a lift home by a charming older man, David. The two strike up a relationship which includes David’s business partner Danny, and Danny’s vapid mistress, Helen. David charms and coaxes Jenny’s protective parents into allowing him to take her to concerts, jazz clubs, and even to Paris.

David goes out of his way to show Jenny and her family that his interest in her is not improper and that he wants solely to expose her to cultural activities which she enjoys. Jenny quickly gets accustomed to the life David and his companions have shown her, and Jenny and David's relationship takes a romantic turn. After seeing Jenny dance with Danny, David hastily proposes marriage. Her father agrees to the engagement, and Jenny has to decide what kind of education she’s going to pursue—David’s lifestyle or higher education at Oxford.

Jenny’s entire life is spent in pursuit of an education, but when she meets David, she realizes for the first time just how limited her, her parents, and her school’s view of an education really is. What Jenny is experiencing and what she must confront reminds me of what John Adams said—“There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.”

Life itself is an education—if we’ll let it be. It’s all in the approach—open, humble, hungry or closed, stubborn, incurious.

Nothing troubles me more—not even greed or violence—than the vast segment of the world’s population that is anti-intellectual and proudly, even militantly ignorant. Allan Bloom said that “education is the movement from darkness to light.” Herein lies the great tragedy—light has come into the world, but people love darkness. We shouldn’t be afraid of the unknown, but the self-destructive defensiveness of not wanting to know. Wanting to know—asking, seeking, thinking—is the very beginning of education.

Education is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual, the process by which accumulated knowledge, skills, and values are deliberately transmitted and received.

Think about all those elements—any act or experience that has a formative effect on us, and the process by which accumulated knowledge is deliberately transmitted and received.

There are many, many ways to get an education. The vital thing is that we get one, not how we get it. And, of course, the best educations are those received through a variety of means, by a plethora of professors.

Are we being educated? If we’re not, we only have ourselves to blame. We are responsible for our own education. And we have access to everything we ever need to receive the best education in the history of humanity—bookstores, libraries, museums, the internet, and life itself. When I think of all we have within our grasp and all the ways we fail to take advantage of it, I think of what Mark Twain said about reading—“the man who doesn’t read good books has not advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

“An Education” is not merely entertaining, but inspirational. It’s a wise and witty film, well made, well acted, well written. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay based on the autobiographical essay by the British journalist Lynn Barber published in the literary magazine Granta. Barber's full memoir, “An Education,” was not published in book form until June 2009, when filming had already been completed.

This movie is magic—conveying so precisely, so powerfully the longing for knowledge and experience by an open person ready for them and the difficult choices involved in truly being educated.

Though “An Education” is filled with subtly brilliant performances—particularly by Rosamund Pike, Olivia Williams, and Peter Sarsgaard—Carey Mulligan’s performance is absolutely sublime. Her Jenny is nearly equal parts old soul and silly school girl, worldly wise woman and naïve innocent child. For nearly my entire life, I’ve been mostly attracted to older women, but Mulligan’s Jenny makes a compelling case against this practice.

Whether in her small bedroom alone with a book or on the streets of Paris, Jenny is hungry to learn, to breathe in every word, every sight, every sound, every experience. We have this in common. She thirsts, and the sheer power of it, its quintessential insatiability is overwhelming. I love this about Jenny, and it’s this aspect of her that I most identify with. These words are contained in all our other words, they are among the final words cried out by Jesus from the cross, they are the unspoken yearnings of mythic immortals who feed on the blood of others. They are the expression from the depths of ever dry and dusty soul, barely hanging on in a parched wilderness wasteland—“I thirst.”

Like Jenny, I’ve spent my life trying to “get my learn on.” I started to say my adult life, but my hunger for knowledge and true wisdom extends way back into childhood. It did, however, take a quantum leap when I finished my graduate degree and became a writer—which, after all, is how it’s supposed to be. School in general and college in particular are meant to teach us how to think, how to educate ourselves. Henry Adams said, “They know enough who know how to learn.”

In the midst of writing this, I happened to glance down at a bookshelf not far from my writing chair at two books I bought just for information—“An Incomplete Education” and “The Knowledge Book.” The books are two among thousands and thousands in my study/cave/sanctuary, for I truly believe what Thomas Carlyle said: “What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

Buddhism teaches “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.” When Jenny was ready, David appeared. When we are ready, we will learn—which is why it’s so important to continually remain in the humble posture of not-knowing, hungry, open seeking. It’s our best chance at a good education.

Stay open. Stay hungry. Stay ready. When we are, education will happen. We should be intentional about all things—but nothing more so than our education and enlightenment. Take. Eat. Original blessing comes from eating from the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. In fact, the tree of knowledge is the tree of life.

In the end, Jenny gets the best education—one that involves both heart and head, school and life, reading and experiencing. It’s the kind of education I’m in daily pursuit of, and the one I most wish for you, the one that, if we all received it, would most change the world.

RIP, RBP

I owe Robert B. Parker more than I can tell. Fortunately, several years ago at a writing conference where we were both speaking, I got the opportunity to attempt to tell him.

I am saddened by his death. His absence leaves a great big gaping hole in American Crime Fiction. One that I and others will attempt to fill, but it is truly tragic that there will never be another Spenser novel.

At the age of 77, “just sitting at his desk” at his home in Cambridge, Mass., according to an email sent out by a representative of his U.K. publisher Quercus, Robert B. Parker is dead. The news of Parker's death on Monday was confirmed by Parker’s U.S publisher, Putnam; on Twitter, a representative wrote: “R.I.P beloved author Robert B. Parker. You were indeed a Grand Master, your legacy lives on, and you will be missed by us all.”

In a statement released late Monday, Parker’s longtime editor at Putnam, Christine Pepe, said: “What mattered most to Bob were his family and his writing, and those were the only things that he needed to be happy. He will be deeply missed by all us at Putnam, and by his fans everywhere.”

I can think of no better way for a writer to go than at his desk in the act of writing. I hope to go the same way (and, if it’s at 77, I won’t complain). Wonder what the last sentence, the last word he wrote was.

For me, losing Parker is like losing one of my literary fathers.

He is one of the main reasons I became a writer of crime fiction. In high school, I watched “Spenser for Hire,” the TV series based on his one-name Boston PI, Spenser. The series led me to the books, the books led me to a love of fiction in general and of crime fiction in particular. (The TV series is also where I fell in love with Mustangs and why I still drive one today).

When I started reading Parker’s Spenser novels in 1988, the series was already about ten strong, and since then, he has added at least one every year. In fact, he wrote them faster than his publisher, Putnam, was willing to publish them.
In recent years, he’d been writing other works in addition to the Spenser novels. Among them, a couple of very good westerns, a great book with World War II, baseball, and Jackie Robinson as a backdrop, a series featuring a female PI, and a series featuring former LA cop and now Paradise, Massachusetts Police Chief, Jesse Stone.

Younger, and not as evolved as Spenser, Jesse Stone, who battles alcohol and marriage problems in addition to the bad guys, is nonetheless tough, autonomous, and honorable—hallmark traits of Parker’s knights-errant. He’s also, like nearly all of Parker’s characters, a man in the process of self-discovery.

In all Parker’s works, crime and investigation merely provide a framework for his characters, giving them something to do while the real investigation into their psyche takes place. Like the Spenser novels, the Stone books are about a man and his journey to becoming a better man, while helping weaker people along the way. This is even truer of Stone than Spenser, since Jesse is younger, more troubled, more vulnerable.

Not a lot changed from one Parker book to another. I don’t mean to suggest that Parker wrote the same book over and over, though if he had it wouldn’t matter much to me or any of his other faithful fans. I’m saying, from book to book, Parker was tweaking the themes that mattered to him—which, more than anything, was what it means to be a man, exploring why hard-boiled men are the way they are. The core of all of Parker’s books is the same, which, I suspect is what we kept coming back for over and over again.

Parker wasn’t read for plot, but for the stripped-down style that nobody did better, the sharp, often witty dialog, the interesting, evolving characters, and the insights he peppered his prose with like a boxer with a great jab. Most of all, Parker was read for the journey of the man at the center of the story, which, whether it’s Spenser, Stone, Burke, or Virgil Cole, is finally and inevitably, Parker himself.

Toward the end of his life, Parker turned to the Western novel, and his work in it shows just how timeless his heroes and themes are.

Long before lone private eyes with heaters holstered beneath their seersuckers walked down the mean streets of uncaring urban back alleys, lone gunmen with six-shooters strapped to their waists walked down the dusty main streets of one-horse towns.

Listen to Raymond Chandler’s praise of the hard-boiled detective and tell me it couldn’t be applied to western gunslingers:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Chandler’s description of this type of hero could apply as much to Parker’s detective, Spenser, as much as his western lawman, Virgil Cole.

If any modern detective fiction writer understood the relationship between cowboys and cops, it was Parker. Not only was he the most popular and prolific writer of the private eye novel of our time, but he studied the form, its origins and evolution—even writing his Ph.D. dissertation on “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality.”

Linked by ethos, code, and honor, literary cowboys and private cops, particularly as Parker wrote them, have far more in common with each other than either has with his contemporaries. Spenser could be in a Western, just as Virgil Cole could easily be in a hard-boiled detective novel.

If you haven’t read Parker or it’s been a while, here are some of my favorites: “Walking Shadow,” “Looking for Rachel Wallace,” “Double Play,” “Back Story,” “Night Passage,” and “Appaloosa.”

Fare-the-well, father. I lift a Samuel Adams in honor of you. Thanks for the hours and hours and hours of entertainment and inspiration, for the characters whose code I share, for speaking to the heroic in us all.

(This) Man’s Search for Meaning

I’m a man on a mission—one that began very early in life.

I’m a seeker—searching far and wide—a traveler of inner and outer landscapes. There’s nowhere I’m not willing to go, no journey too arduous, no climb too steep, no descent too deep.

After all these years, my desire is still at times overwhelming. I thirst with an unquenchable thirst, crave with an insatiable craving. I’m in pursuit of the thing I was pursued for—and though it can be called many things, it is one. What I’m after, what I’ve been looking for so long, what I will ache for all my numbered days, is meaning.

From early adolescence, I have felt that life is fraught with meaning, and that to live a meaningful life requires a certain approach—mindfulness, openness, meditation, contemplation, abandon, deliberate study, intentional experience.

I find meaning in many places and through many experiences. My quest has led me to theology, philosophy, psychology, and to art. In fact, art is in and intertwined among everything—art in general and literature in particular. So much so, I can no longer distinguish between art and religion, art and philosophy, art and psychology, art and life.

Writing this column is a facet of my search for meaning. I’m look for the meaning of life in every book I read, every movie and play I watch, every song I hear, every photograph and painting I gaze at. But reading and watching and gazing aren’t enough. I also have to process, explore, contemplate—and that’s where the column comes in. After all, how will I know what I think until I see what I write?

We live in a world where deep meaning (and therefore living) gets lost in shallow pursuits, in noise, in movement, in franticness and freneticness and forgetting what really matters most.

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of “Man’s Search For Meaning” observed, “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

“Man’s Search for Meaning” chronicles Frankl’s experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend not eating again until you do.

One of the main reasons I write novels (or columns or short stories or plays) is to have a more meaningful life. Through writing, I explore, I delve, I knead, I grope around in the dark searching for light. And I read for the same reason. Art is all about meaning—all about what it means to be human—to exist, to live, to love, to die.

I find art meaningful—both the creating of and the partaking of—as meaningful as anything in my life. That’s why I spend the majority of my limited time on this pale blue dot making it and breathing it.

Many people spend time talking about and looking for the meaning of life—as if it’s one thing to be discovered, a hidden ancient thing to uncover, but the meaning of life isn’t one thing. It’s many.

Frankl also said, “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

Art works this way. I read a poem, get lost in a novel, go to see a film, pass a graffiti-covered boxcar or bridge and all are messages from the universe—ethereal, ineffable, transcendent, true, all spoken to me in the present moment, the eternal now. I pause, breathe deeply, reflect, then continue moving again, only now with more meaning.

Giving ourselves over to art, letting it work its magic in us, is a way to have a meaningful life. Art speaks to the deepest part of our humanity. Artists create from the soul and the art they create speaks to our souls.

My quest for a meaningful life has led me time and again to art. Art comforts. Art heals. Art teaches. Art inspires. Art transforms. Art broadens the mind and expands the soul and increases our compassion like very few things can.

Through art we can explore and experience the depraved depths and heroic heights of humanity—and be transformed in the process.

Frankl said, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

This very moment, you and I are being asked about the meaning of our lives. What will we answer? Art can tell us.

My wish for you is a deeply, profoundly meaningful life—and though there are a plethora of elements involved in such a thing, art needs be among them.

As both an artist and someone whose closest companions are art and artists, my faith is that of Joyce Carol Oates:

“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

“I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called culture—and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

“Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

“The individual voice is the communal voice.

“The regional voice is the universal voice.”

It’s Complicated

Last week my dear friend, John Bridges, was planning to see “It’s Complicated” when he read my column about “Up in the Air” and decided to see it instead. When he told me what he planned to do, I said that I suspected “It’s Complicated” would be more entertaining, but that “Up in the Air” was probably the better, more substantive film. I’m humbled and honored that he trusts my recommendations, and I couldn’t help but think of him, as I watched “It’s Complicated” a few days later, pleasantly surprised at how good it was. It’s funny and charming, and highly entertaining—but not just. It also manages to deliver some insight and provoke some thought.

So, John, this week, I’m recommending you go see, “It’s Complicated,” and for all of us, I recommend we set our Facebook relationship statuses to “It’s Complicated.” After all, when have relationships ever not been?

Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) is the mother of three grown kids, owns a thriving Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant and has—after a decade of divorce—an amicable relationship with her ex-husband, attorney Jake (Alec Baldwin). But when Jane and Jake find themselves out of town for their son’s college graduation, things start to get complicated. An innocent meal together leads to several bottles of wine, which in turn becomes a laugh-filled evening of memories about their 19-year marriage… and then to an impulsive affair. With Jake remarried to the much younger Agness (Lake Bell), Jane is now, of all things, the other woman. Caught in the middle of this renewed romance is Adam (Steve Martin), an architect hired to remodel Jane’s kitchen. Also divorced, Adam starts to fall for Jane, but soon realizes he’s become part of an unusual love triangle. Should Jane and Jake move on with their separate lives, or has the passage of time made them realize that they really are better together than apart? It’s…complicated.

Nancy Myers, an extremely talented writer/director, who two years ago wrote and directed one of my all-time favorite Christmas movies, “The Holiday,” proves once again that Hollywood needs far more women in front of and behind the camera. Her writing is clever, witty, and by turns, poignant and hysterical, and whether paired with Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Cameron Diaz, or Kate Winslet, she gives moviegoers mature, powerful, multi-faceted women not seen nearly often enough at the Cineplex (art house and indie theaters are a different matter, but good luck finding one). And that’s the thing. Myers is bringing feminism to the masses—a certain type of feminism, mostly light-hearted, comedic, meant-to-entertain-first, but a real feminism to be sure. And she’s mastered (or should I say mistressed) the romantic comedy, which she understands in the context of contemporary culture. “There's a hardening of the culture,” she said. “Reality TV has lowered the standards of entertainment. You’re left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. It's probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.”

Film and literature are rife with tales of adultery—from King David and Bathsheba, whose relationship ultimately led to Jesus of Nazareth, to “The Scarlet Letter,” to “Anna Karenina,” to “Brief Encounter,” to “The End of the Affair”—but in both film and literature, most tales of not-entirely-unattached lovers are dramas, if not melodramas, involving guilt-ridden, tortured, ultimately doomed souls, who are punished for what is seen as religious and cultural and personal transgression. But Myers shows that affairs, which are often, among other things, fun, can be funny, life-affirming, and highly entertaining experiences. She does this, in part, by making the lovers formerly married, which gives them a culturally sanctioned relationship in the past and a prior claim over their current lovers. And isn’t that how most people feel—“He was mine first.” “She belonged to me before you even knew her!”

Justification and palatability aside, the movie is about adultery. John Updike saw adultery—whether in life or only art, I do not know, though I suspect both—as “an imaginative quest,” and, as one of his characters put it, “a way of giving yourself adventures, of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.” The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich actually claims “the only social purpose of compulsory marriage for life is to produce submissive personality types that mass society requires,” and that “repressing sexual curiosity leads to general intellectual atrophy, including loss of power to rebel,” which has led Laura Kipnis, author of “Against Love” and “The Female Thing” to assert that “adultery is actually an act of cultural rebellion” and that “monogamy turns nice people into petty dictators and household tyrants.” Radical notions? Perhaps, but we’re all swimming around in the water of culture like fish who don’t know what water is, and our best hope of awareness enlightenment and compassion is to entertain all questions. And no one should question culture and marriage and roles and identity more than women. Thankful many are—from Myers to Kipnis to Anne Kingston, author of “The Meaning of Wife.” And, as Thomas Moore, author of “Care of the Soul” teaches, none of this need be taken literally.

I really appreciate what Myers has done here. True, “It’s Complicated” could have been far more complicated, but for a mainstream romantic comedy, it at least has audience sympathies in the right places. The film could’ve dealt with affairs in a more nuanced, less adulterous way—take out lying and cheating, and things are less complicated and far more honorable—but it’s a comedy and a big commercial studio film, and given that, it’s very, very good.

Forget “greatest living actress.” It’s time to refer to Meryl Streep as what she is—the greatest actress in history. And at sixty-something, could she be any more beautiful, attractive, strong, sexy?

Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin turn in fine, admirable performances, both bringing their characters to life with certain appeals for Meryl Streep’s Jane Adler, but clearly she is out of their league. I won’t tell you which man Jane chooses, only that to make things truly complicated, she should’ve kept both men as friends and lovers. Jane could certainly handle it. And Meryl, well, Meryl could handle an entire harem—or (since there’s not a word for a female harem, which is telling, is it not?) a stable.

Life and love and relationships are complicated enough to make one want to cry, but perhaps a better approach is laughter. Myers certainly makes a convincing argument.