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by Richard Nilsen
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After three-quarters of a century bothering people and generally being alive, I’ve come to understand that there are three or four things that sustain me, that provide the stuffings for an inner life. These are the things that provide a framework for understanding the world and a vocabulary for interacting with it. They are the well I draw from.
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Most people have something like these, although I have met one or two so empty inside as to frighten me. You rap them on the noggin and you hear back that hollow sound of an empty oil drum being kicked.
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(I remember my wife, the art teacher, describing a session with a parent of one of her students, where she was attempting to explain imagination to the uncomprehending woman. “What do you see when you close your eyes,” she asked. “Black,” said the mother. For some, there is little or nothing you can do.)
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For me, these three things that have fed my inner life have been with me since childhood, or at least since my own awareness of the rest of the world. They begin with travel.
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My parents instilled in me a love of travel. For their summer vacations, they always made sure that me and my brothers got to visit places we’d never been. One summer, we traveled through Quebec and Ontario; another, we circled through Pennsylvania; once, it was a trip to Washington, D.C. When I was 16, they sent me, with my grandmother, back to her birthplace in Norway. We traveled from Oslo to Kristiansand and her little village of Mosby. I also took a trip, by myself, through Germany, France and the Netherlands.
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Such travel gave me a sense, not only of how large the globe might be, but how different peoples live and think (I remember crossing the border from Germany to France and on one side of the gate, all the houses lined up and all the yards were neat and squared off, but entering France, immediately, everything was whompy-jawed, off kilter, gone to seed and relaxed. I immediately knew I loved France.)
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Later in life, with each of my wives, official and unofficial, we traveled, mostly in the U.S., but also to Mexico and Canada, and with my dear Carole, many trips back to France, which we took in from the Vosges Mountains to the Camargue.
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Beginning in 1982, when we were both teachers and had the summers off, we drove around the country. On that first trip, beginning where we lived in Virginia Beach, Va., we put 10,000 miles on the car in a single trip. Every year after, we went somewhere, and eventually visited 49 of the 50 states (missed Hawaii) and every Canadian province save only Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland (we even hit the Yukon).
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For the newspaper I worked for, I wrote a weekly travel column for years, and every vacation ended with a story or series of stories for our travel section. They also paid me to travel the length of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Another trip took me from Tijuana to Vancouver up the Pacific Coast Highway. I traveled across the U.S. multiple times and every time, I wrote stories for the paper.
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All this travel has made me — as travel does for anyone awake on the trip — understand the diversity of the world, its peoples and cultures. On a trip to South Africa for the newspaper, I slept in a straw-thatched rondavel, drank spit-fermented beer and ate grilled mopane worms. The trip, in 1988, was near the end of apartheid, but that was still the law, and I came across brown-shirt Afrikaaners bullying patrons in a bar, with fascist armbands and billy clubs. When in Johannesburg, I noticed there were no mailboxes and my taxi driver explained they were all removed for fear of bombs. It was very different from my upbringing in suburban New Jersey. Newspapers were filled with predictions of a coming “race war.”
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I learned on that trip that we in the U.S. have very limited understanding of most of the rest of the world. When we in the U.S. heard news of South Africa, most of us immediately translated it into our own understanding of race and ethnicity — which bore almost no resemblance to things on the ground.
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I think of this every time I read news from Afghanistan or Abu Dhabi or Bhutan. Even just traveling through France, which is, by world standards, so close to our own culture, I came across Occitan separatism, the “Brooklynese” accent of Marseille, the sauerkraut haven of Colmar, the stone menhirs of Brittany, the cave paintings and ducks of the Dordogne. Travel makes us aware of the variety and diversity that characterizes everywhere. Mark Twain is often quoted on this, but he was absolutely right: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
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The second sustaining theme in my life is books. Lots of them. I grew up in a house with very few books, but I had access to the town library and read everything I could find. The older I got, the more catholic became my tastes. In high school, I was reading all the contemporary fiction I could find — Saul Bellow, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer — and I couldn’t wait to get to college, where I believed the “real” stuff would be.
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It wasn’t. But I supplemented (or rather supplanted) my official studies with reading everything under the sun that wasn’t part of the curriculum. I first fell in love with the Greek and Latin classics at school. I still re-read the Iliad about once a year (usually a different translation each time).
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Like travel, reading takes me away from my provincial self and opens the whole world up, other ways of thinking, other ways of feeling, of acting, of seeing self and non-self, of regarding time and history. I have amassed, over time and sequentially, several large libraries. Too often, I have divested myself of the majority of the books as I’ve moved from place to place. But I’ve always started over again, collecting more volumes — often re-buying favorite books I’d gotten rid of and missed owning.
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We came across a good word for this obsession with books: “bibliopath.” I confess, I may be a bibliopath. When Carole and I moved from Arizona to the Blue Ridge, I wound up selling or donating most of my library, including a research-library-worth of books on American Indians and Native American culture. We both regretted that almost immediately. But we had to shrink our belongings down to something that would fit into a moving van.
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But since arriving in Asheville, I’ve spent so much money with Amazon or with Barnes and Noble — but mostly with local used-book stores — that now there are bookshelves in every room in the house, including the kitchen and bathroom.
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Which brings me to sustaining theme Number Three: art.
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I grew up exactly 11 miles from the George Washington Bridge, and therefore, a short Public Service bus ride into Manhattan. I went into the city as often as I could and spent hours, days, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, the Frick, the Whitney and what was then the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle. To say nothing of the commercial galleries.
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It was MoMA, more than all the others, that spoke to me in my teenage years. I knew intimately Picasso’s Guernica, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a raft of Jackson Pollocks and Matisse’s Red Studio. It was a raft of “greatest hits:” Rousseau’s Dream; Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie; Dali’s Persistence of Memory; de Kooning’s Woman I. Of Picasso alone, there was the Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Girl and the Mirror, and the Three Musicians. What a trove for an eye-hungry young man. Remember, this was in the early and mid-Sixties when the general population still considered Modern art somewhat suspicious and Jackson Pollock rather outré. “My kid could do that” springs to mind.
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But I was hooked. I knew that art and literature was the open gate to everything civilized and, more importantly to me at the time, everything that my suburban New Jersey upbringing was not.
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Through my college years, I went back to New York, but also spend many hours of happy time at the National Gallery in Washington. Soaking up masterpieces that most of us only get to see in reproduction in art books or perhaps in an art history class. Over the years, I’ve added LACMA; the Art Institute in Chicago; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Getty; SFMoMA; and many lesser known but significant museums in Atlanta, Denver, St. Louis, Virginia, Minneapolis, North Carolina, and Seattle. All to see original art so as not to rely merely on reproductions.
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And then, there’s the Louvre. You spend days in the Louvre and only visit a tenth of it. It is vast, and on every wall you spot works you have seen in books your whole life. It’s hard not to walk through the galleries with your mouth not gaping open and your tongue hanging out.
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It all added up to my becoming an art critic for 25 years with The Arizona Republic. I ate, drank and digested painting, sculpture, installations, videos, prints, photographs and the occasional Chinese ritual bronze.
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But I’ve privileged painting and sculpture here. I don’t mean to forget music, theater, and film. When I say “art” I mean all of it. And so, I eventually became the classical music critic for the paper, also. Oh, the concerts I have attended. And the CDs I have collected. I had to divest at least three-quarters of them when we moved to North Carolina, but I have since been adding them back in and now have thousands of CDs, mostly of classical music, but also jazz, folk, early Country music, blues, world music, and the whole of the Alan Lomax collection.
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And finally, the art form I came to love most of all: dance. I have now seen many of the world-class dance companies (of which Ballet Arizona is no slouch) and, to make it clear, when Carole and I went to Alaska, and we returned home, she asked if I might want to live in Alaska. Without thinking, I blurted out, “Nah. Not enough dance.”
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There is a fourth sustaining force in my life, and that is, of course, the people in it. All my life, I have been gifted with people who have helped and guided me, gave me models to follow, forced me to be my better self. Prime among these was my late wife, Carole — the smartest person I ever knew. Love and empathy deepens us and makes it impossible to remain the center of our world: The psyche expands like the universe, and we are enlarged with it (or as The Simpsons has it, “embiggens.”)
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But I suspect that last one is true for most of us. I have my travel, my art, my books, but others may have their faith or their politics, or perhaps an undying dedication to cuisine. We’re all different. But most would also have to include the people closest and most meaningful to them.
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An inner life is necessary for the full development of a human being. It is the well out of which one draws, and it must constantly be recharged. It can be fed many ways, for me it was travel, books and art. For others it might be furniture making or sewing. But something must engage us not only in a physical way, but speak to who we are.
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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic. A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina. We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal. We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.
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