People say of difficult situations, It wasn’t a day at the beach. But life is like a day at the beach. Some days, life is great.  The sun is shining and the water sparkles like so many diamonds. There are no clouds, the waves are perfect and you ride them in—all the way to the shore.  Life is good.

And then there are those other days when life acts like a monster wave that picks you up and slams you down, churning you like so much wet laundry in the spin cycle, leaving you with a mouth full of salt water, or, like this past weekend, worse. The ferocious riptides on the East Coast this week, courtesy of Hurricanes Danielle and Earl, dragged many out to sea. At Narragansett Beach this past weekend, the air was cut with the sound of rescue sirens, en route to help those caught in a rip’s current.

When life’s difficulties and trials drag you out like a riptide, all you can do is go with the flow. Remember not to swim against the current. Don’t fight it. Stay calm. Have faith. By swimming parallel to the shore, you will eventually find the opening that leads you back to the beach. On days like that, it’s important to surrender, with all the grace that that misunderstood verb implies, and to know that the tide that goes out always comes back in.  The ceaseless tides tell us that more important than any one day is the accumulation of many days and small acts—acts of loving kindness, acts of generosity, acts that require impossible leaps of faith. All these add up to a life.

Water’s most remarkable quality is its ability to be simultaneously life giving and erosive.  Drop by drop, very gently and persistently, water will wear down the biggest stone.  It can take down a mountain. After many years, I’ve come to know that persistence trumps intelligence and talent every time. Most people just don’t hang in there long enough.

The horizon line divides the world into two parts—sky and ocean. That distant but ever-present, reassuring line marks the place where earth and heaven connect, where people come together in all their vulnerability and mystery.  It’s a cosmic timeline, marking the brief moment of our own lives, as well as the lifetimes of those who lived before us, and those still to come. As summer comes to a bittersweet end, it’s good to sit on a beach and remember that you have a place in eternity.

Photo: Waves Crashing in RI (cc): Flickr / Laram77

In Austin, I visited the Harry Ransom Center, the magnificent research library and museum at the University of Texas. The collection boasts many firsts—the first book printed in English (William Caxton’s 1474 edition of Lefevre’s Historyes of Troye); the first photograph (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s
View from the Window at Le Gras,
ca.1826); and the first major book illustrated with photographs (The Pencil of Nature, 1844-46, by William Henry Fox Talbot).

Best, though, was seeing the Center’s Book Conservation Lab. It’s essentially a book hospital, where damaged volumes are tenderly brought back to life.  A conservator held up a small plastic bag filled with what looked like wood shavings.  They were the remains of an old book cover that had been repaired.  When I asked what she’d do with them, she said, Oh, we’ll keep them. You never know!  It made me happy—as a writer and a reader—to know that there’s a place, many places, where books and even scraps of books are still considered precious.

These days, as every author knows, publishers are scrambling like chickens without their heads, clucking, The book is dead! The book is dead! But just as opera didn’t die with the advent of movies, and movies weren’t killed off by television, books aren’t dead, they just have to share shelf space with other forms of entertainment. Even though the traditional form of the book may be changing, our innate human need for stories will never die.

Back home, inspired, I saw my writing studio with new eyes.  My bookcases were full to bursting and the floor was covered with precariously tall stacks of books that grew like literary stalagmites. Did I really need all of them?  Sure, as a nonfictionist, I could justify the thousands of titles but, increasingly, I’ve been writing about those bigger, intangible truths that can’t be footnoted but are nonetheless true. I was ready to clear the literal and metaphoric decks and welcome something new, like this blog, into my life.

They say, If you want your life to change, move 27 things.  I moved 27 things—and dozens more. It was an unexpected occasion of grace to sort through my books, releasing those that were no longer needed and acknowledging the authors who had been so helpful to me.  I boxed up about 300 books for Amazon’s new EasySell program, which takes the hassle out of packing and mailing books individually.  But the best part was setting up a book-giveaway table outside my house. Over the course of several weekends, I gave away hundreds of books to neighbors and strangers alike. Sending them into the world so that they could continue to bring pleasure and new insights to others filled me with utter joy.

The book is dead?  Not a chance!

This article first appeared on Intent.com.  Follow my blog on Intent.com!

Seeing the Mall fully activated, fully full, democratically so, tearful and hopeful, was an inspiration. The meaning of the Mall’s monuments, those enduring symbols of the nation’s aspirations, sacrifice, and hope for change, was renewed during these last several days–it was great to see them in action.

Given Obama’s interest in architecture, let’s hope that he illuminates the profound connection that exists between our quality of life and the places we inhabit. Here’s a brief recap of presidential architectural forays written by David Brussat for the Providence Journal. Aside from his comments about Daniel Libeskind (Dave and I have agreed to disagree on some contemporary structures), this is a fascinating read.

“BARACK OBAMA spilled the beans at a campaign rally last March 21, in Salem, Ore.: “I can tell you that when I was young I wanted to be an architect, but, um, I . . . [shout from offstage] . . . That was good! Architect of change! I like that!”

If only Obama had not been interrupted by that blockhead, we might know what sort of architect he would have been. Maybe, if we are really lucky and Obama really is smart, we can have not only change we can believe in but change we can see.

Today, many Americans are dissatisfied with their built environment. Obama must try to change architecture from the modernism of the past half a century to a new traditionalism for the future. Is he likely to do so? The tea leaves give us few clues.

On the one hand, given the chance to frame the backdrop of his acceptance speech in Denver last August, Obama chose a classical stage set. He took some ribbing for its supposed pomposity, and classicists furrowed their brows at the colonnade’s prefab clunkiness. But the set contributed to the exaltation of what was then the apogee of his career.

Furthermore, in 2004, when the Obamas wanted to upgrade from a condo to a house, he and Michelle bought a Georgian Revival built in 1910. It was located by his wife, who was a member of the board of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

On the other hand, Obama once attended a lecture (or so claims the lecturer) by Daniel Libeskind, a modernist known for buildings that look like they are about to fall down. If Obama did attend a Libeskind lecture, maybe it was just for laughs.

Let us hope so. Since Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello, the Virginia State Capitol at Richmond and the original buildings of the University of Virginia, no president but Franklin Roosevelt has shown much interest in architecture aside from the occasional monument or federal building. FDR designed a modest hideaway on his Hyde Park estate called Top Cottage in 1939, and several buildings in Dutchess County, N.Y., and Warm Springs, Ga. Other than Jefferson, FDR is the only U.S. president known to have designed a house of his own.

One of FDR’s most enduring legacies has to do with architecture. Among the more notable of his New Deal agencies, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, designed thousands of post offices, bridges and other structures in traditional styles that ignored the emerging craze for the International Style (early modernism). Many of them survive today because of the intrinsic structural and aesthetic merits of traditional over modern architecture. Its merits represent a sustainability whose resurrection would be much more effective at addressing climate change than the high-tech “gizmo green” fad that is favored by the architecture profession.

The federal government was the last major institution of American society to shift from traditional to modern architecture. Corporate, collegiate and institutional America went first. While the classicism of the Lincoln Memorial (1922) was uncontroversial, that of the Jefferson Memorial (1941) was attacked by modernists then on the rise in the profession. The last major federal buildings of classical style were erected by FDR during the 1930s. Tuesday’s inaugural parade passed them on the way up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

The presidential motorcade also passed the first major federal building built in a classical style since then: the Ronald Reagan Building (1998). In fact, the grace of Pennsylvania Avenue arises from the City Beautiful movement, launched by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Obama’s own Chicago.

The worst building on Pennsylvania is the J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, designed in a Brutalist style similar to that of Boston City Hall. If Obama has the eye of an aesthete, as anyone who claims he originally wanted to be an architect surely must, he probably turned his eye from the FBI building to the Department of Justice (1935), a classical building right across the street. If Obama wants to doff his cap to FDR, let him revive New Deal classicism. That would not only create many thousands of jobs, but a physical symbol of the Obama administration to which the public could easily relate.

Three blocks north of the White House is K Street, Lobbyists Row, the worst concentration of modern architecture in the nation’s capital. Part of Obama’s agenda is to push America’s body politic away from K Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Using architecture to tell the good guys from the bad guys might help him surmount the predictable resistance.

It is possible that change of great magnitude will want an aesthetic component. It might need a symbolism capable of representing its spirit to the public. Jefferson understood the importance of having an architecture that reflects the nation’s aspirations. Obama should embrace his inner architect by initiating a national conversation about architecture. If he does, he will do far more for his country than he could ever have done as an architect.”

-David Brussat, Providence Journal, January 22, 2009

Author Michael Chabon, a member of Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, describes the critical importance of the arts at this moment in our nation’s history:

“Every grand American accomplishment, every innovation that has benefited and enriched our lives, every lasting social transformation, every moment of profound insight any American visionary ever had into a way

out of despair, loneliness, fear and violence—everything that has from the start made America the world capital of hope, has been the fruit of the creative imagination, of the ability to reach beyond received ideas and ready-made answers to some new place, some new way of seeing or hearing or moving through the world. Breathtaking solutions, revolutionary inventions, the road through to freedom, reform and change: never in the history of this country have these emerged as pat answers given to us by our institutions, by our government, by our leaders. We have been obliged—to employ Dr. King’s powerful verb—to dream them up for ourselves.

America’s artists are the guardians of the spirit of questioning, of innovation, of reaching across the barriers that fence us off from our neighbors, from our allies and adversaries, from the six billion other people with whom we share this dark and dazzling world. Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.

Our children need training and encouragement and support—they need rehearsal space and tempera paint and bass violins, teachers and tap-shoes; they need constant, passionate exposure to the great artistic heritage of their people, so that even if they don’t grow up to be artists themselves, they will still have been blessed, as Americans have always been blessed, with the artist’s gift for seeing the possible in the impossible, the fellow soul on the other side of the fence. Our artists need freedom to pursue the solitary investigations into which their art inevitably leads them. America needs that untrammeled flow of creativity, of the willingness and ability to innovate, to skylark, to tinker, to daydream out loud: over the course of two and a half centuries now, our creative flow has filled the world’s libraries, museums, theaters and recital halls, its academies, movie houses and marketplaces, with works of genius to break the heart and boggle the mind. And the people of the world–our world–need an America that remains in full, confident possession of its mighty gift of imagination, not merely to meet the global demand for our entertainment and art and literature, but so that they–and we–need never fear the brutality, the arrogance and the inhumanity to which a nation in want of imagination must, inevitably, descend.”

Inspirational speaker Nicole Johnson uses my book, Churches, to deliver a powerful message of hope for everyone who feels invisible and taken for granted. I don’t know Nicole, but what she took away from Churches and how she brought the lessons of the Gothic cathedral builders to bear on today’s problems, blew me away. Watch, and be inspired! For more on Nicole, visit Fresh Brewed Life, hope for the daily grind.

Building a bridge is a monumental undertaking, and there is something inherent in projects of this size and scope that makes people want to participate in their creation. In the case of the sleek, new I-35W crossing over the Mississippi that opened in Minneapolis this week, Twin City residents engaged in a day-long discussion that determined aspects of the bridge’s design, eighteen hundred schoolchildren made mosaic tiles that adorn the bridge, and thousands watched in wonder as this heroic ten-lane highway bridge rose, incredibly, in eleven short months. To celebrate the bridge and spirit of collaboration, FIGG, the bridge’s designer and engineer of record, has published Bridging the Mississippi: The New I-35W Bridge.  Rich with color photos, plans, and graphics, the book provides a step-by-step overview for the general reader of the bridge’s design, planning, and construction. All book proceeds will be donated to two Minneapolis organizations that further the cause of education.  For more information, and to order the book ($20 plus shipping), visit FIGG.

One thrill of the writing life is receiving pictures of one’s “babies” taken in faraway places. Bill Pinkney, the visionary behind the recreation of the Amistad schooner as a floating, living memorial to civil rights, presented a copy of Monuments, which tells Amistad’s story, to Josephine Kargbo of the Monuments and Relics Commission of Sierra Leone during the Amistad’s 2007-2008 Atlantic Freedom Tour. This historic 18-month journey retraced the slave trade route to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom in 2007, and in the United States in 2008. The Amistad’s arrival in Sierra Leone—the West African homeland of many of the Amistad captives—was a symbolic “homecoming” and the capstone event of the Atlantic Freedom Tour. Amistad’s epic voyage concluded on June 21, 2008 when she returned to New Haven to fanfare and rejoicing.

Note: The complete interview with Nick Benson appears in Monuments: Life in Memory.

JD: How much stone cutting did the World War II Memorial involve?

NB: There are 4,682 letters in total—a lot of lettering—in twenty-two inscription locations. The letters vary in size from three-quarters of an inch tall to more than 19 inches.

JD: What kind of granite was used?

NB: It’s a North Carolina granite called Kershaw. One of the reasons [memorial designer] Friedrich St. Florian chose it is because it has an incredibly large grain. Even from a distance, you can see the character of the granite. Finer granite, especially with such large, bold architectural forms, would get lost.
JD: Will the lettering be stained?

NB: Yes. The stain is painted into the interior of each letter with a brush, very pain-stakingly. The stain penetrates the stone, but is transparent so that you can see the quality of the granite through the stain itself. It’s important not to turn this three-dimensional sculptural form into typography. You want these inscriptions to be beautiful, sculptural elements that will partake of the architecture scale of the monument, so you can’t think of the lettering graphically—black on white. Which is what everyone does today. Big mistake.

JD: Do people read inscribed letters as they would text in a book?

NB: They do. The key thing about carved letters in stone, what’s called the “lapidary letter,” is its sculptural quality.

JD: What cuts do you ordinarily use?

NB: I mostly always use V-cut. There are many different types of cuts. People have done all kinds of crazy things—square cuts, pillowed bottoms, double-edge cuts—with the interior treatments of the letter. But, again, you have to do what’s going to work best with the monument. The same goes for the letter design. The actual process of carving the stone is not a terribly difficult skill to learn. You can become a competent carver in three or four years, a fine carver in one or two, but a very good carver in three or four years. The difficulty is in the design of the letter itself.

JD: How do you move forward in a situation where a single mistake can be fatal?

NB: That’s where the skill comes in. You have to know what you’re doing. You’re taking out such small amounts of stone at any given time that it’s not as if you’re going to mistroke and blow out the center of an O. It doesn’t work that way. The strike of the piston and hammer against the chisel is fairly light, and you’re taking off small bits at a time.

JD: How long have you been cutting stone?

NB: Twenty years. My dad taught me. He got me into the shop more than twenty years ago. I started in 1979. I was fifteen and needed a summer job. I wasn’t interested in taking over the family business. My father was hard on me and got me moving quickly, making finished work for him, and carving at the shop level which is a particularly high level of craftsmanship. He has the highest standards of anybody you’re going to find, bar none.

JD: When you look at a block of text are you conscious of individual letters or the entire composition?

NB: Both.

JD: Which comes up first?

NB: The entire composition is key, but the proportion of the letter, the design of the particular letter form itself, is extremely important too. Equally important is the cadence of the text, how the negative space is used, word spacing, line spacing—all of that is absolutely crucial to good inscriptional carving. And very complicated and subtle. That’s the type of thing that people don’t see. The inscription will be easy to read, the letters will look pretty, and they won’t give it a second thought.

JD: When it’s done well, stone cutting is invisible. Do you think of it as art or craft?

NB: I’m an artisan, not a fine artist. I am practicing a very specific craft. In the realm of that craft, there is a certain amount of leeway for artistic interpretation within relatively specific rules. The inscription work on this monument was made to be highly legible, easily read, with no strange idiosyncrasies that would have people scratching their heads and wondering.

JD: My son, who is studying Chinese, told me that in China if a woman has a choice between a handsome man and one who writes beautifully, she will always choose the man with the beautiful handwriting.

NB: I’m not surprised. They’ve got such a reverence for calligraphy over there, and everyone has some skill with the brush. People here appreciate calligraphy, but it doesn’t receive the same reverence. Maybe at some point, people will start studying penmanship again. Wouldn’t that be nice?

JD: Do you judge people based on their handwriting?

NB: Not at all, because when I was a kid, my handwriting was atrocious, nearly illegible.

JD: What happened?

NB: Study, study, study and perseverance. Hermann Zapf, the great type designer, said, “My friends would go out and drink and dance while I stayed at home and bravely drew letter form.” You’ve got to put in the time.