Tag: photography

Growth is Good?

When driving, I not infrequently see bumper stickers proclaiming, “Growth is Good.” I’m not sure about that. I never have been.

I’m drawn to solitude. I can’t fully explain why; I only know it has always been so.

From childhood, I loved my native New England—its rural charm, its villages gathered around commons harkening back to Revolutionary times. I miss the sea, the rolling mountains, the stone walls and white-steepled churches.

Vermont has long held me in its grip, with Maine not far behind—rural, twisting lanes with scant traffic, mountains rising beyond charming villages, the faint salt scent of the seashore.

For all my love of open space, my early years were divided between rural Rowley, MA, and Philadelphia. I’ll take Rowley any day over the so-called City of Brotherly Love. I have returned to Philadelphia twice; both visits stirring up memories I would rather forget—urban blight, high crime, dirty streets, endless row houses and sweltering summer nights.

When I lived in Rowley in the 1950s, the town numbered about 1,600 souls. Thirty-five miles north of Boston, it has since tripled in population to roughly 6,400 and become a fashionable bedroom community for Boston’s well-paid professionals, aided by the MBTA Commuter Rail—a comfortable fifty-five-minute jaunt into Boston’s North Station.

We lived on Bennett Hill Road, a mile’s walk from the common. In summer I would rush out the door, glove hooked over my bicycle’s handlebar, eager for baseball on the green.

I loved walking that narrow, curving road lined with beach plum bushes and open fields, breathing the smell of nearby salt marsh bordering the ocean, as I waited for the school bus at the corner.

Home was a two-hundred-year-old house set on twenty-six wooded acres of pine. Its long driveway was lined with boulder stone walls in the old New England manner, guarded by towering elms like ancient sentries.

Deep in those woods I had a private place I visited often, drawn by its stillness—the scent of pine rising from fallen needles that softened the earth beneath my feet.

Today, Rowley finds itself embroiled in debate over a state mandate requiring density zoning for roughly six hundred new multi-family housing units near the train station.

Bennett Hill Road has changed. The beach plum bushes are gone; open fields have yielded to wooded suburban enclaves. In the 1950s, the average home sold for $10,000. Today it approaches $1 million.

I cannot forecast Rowley’s fate, though I hope it doesn’t become another Danvers or Peabody—once distinct towns now absorbed into the dense sprawl of greater Boston.

A major development called “Rowley Farms” proposes a “town within a town,” combining denser housing and retail—an idea that would have been unimaginable in 1957.

Bumper stickers may insist that growth is good. I remain unconvinced. I am, and likely will remain, a stubborn holdout for a way of life that prized quiet contentment—secluded from the noise, the restlessness, and the accumulated griefs of urban life.

—rj

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: A Review

Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Susan Sontag (Photo by Deborah


Taking photos is now so universally accessible via our smartphones that we’re likely to take it for granted.

Until recently, it required buying a dedicated camera, inserting a film roll, setting the lens, then waiting—perhaps a week or more—to see the results of a distant lab.

I think of photos as a freeze on time, lovers as Keats reminded us, still fresh in their youth; sons and daughters, children still; parents and grandparents as we remember them. But photos, buttressed with videos, do even more, providing a window on what ails us.

Susan Sontag in her splendid book I’ve just read, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that the visual not only helps us remember, but sensitizes us to the plight of those who acutely suffer while we warm ourselves under the blankets on cold winter nights, our bellies full. A moralist and cultural critic, she takes on the scourge of war’s ravages, a predominantly male enterprise it seems, unleashing the human capacity to inflict limitless evil, often with impunity.

Photography reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagasaki viewed aerially following their atom bomb devastations, incinerating 200,000 civilians within minutes; of emaciated prisoners released from Nazi death camps, the residue of 12 million exterminated; of ethnic strife in Bosnia in 1992, culminating in Srebrenica; of the dead and dying of 9/11; the machete butchering, killing 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We cannot afford to let their horrors be relegated to the dumpsters of oblivion.

I remember Vietnam and My Lai (1968) and the American massacre of 500 villagers, the burning of their village, that consolidated American resistance to a needless, barbarous conflict consuming 64000 allied lives and 900,000 Vietnamese, ending a president’s re-election bid. Without film crews, we would have lacked evidence, much like when unleashed Soviet troops raped 130,000 German women after taking Berlin.

The trail is long. Much of Sontag’s narrative isn’t pleasurable reading to be sure, but without photography’s capability for exactitude, man’s inhumanity will never be addressed and perhaps, though distantly, vanish like slavery from the human repertoire. It is our duty not to turn aside, but remember and, beyond acknowledgement, understand war’s antecedents and protest their repetition.

I mourn Sontag’s passing from us in her prime—her cerebral introspection of what ails us, delivered always with compassion and unceasing hope that we can and will do better.

After reading her book, I thought of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, desperate for food, killed daily, many of them women and children. As I write, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) informs us that 900 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since mid-May. Unlike other conflicts, the foreign press has been banned from access to Gaza.

I think, too, of Putin’s accelerated nightly aerial assaults, on Ukraine, targeting civilian infrastructures: hospitals, ambulances, apartment buildings, shopping malls and, by day, farmers plowing their fields.

Photography offers documentation. Sontag was right: without photography, we are denied access to the truth and the scourge of war is assured its continuence.

—rj





Time Musings

Can you hold time in your hand? Place it on your dresser? Put it in your wallet?

Can something impalpable exist?

And yet we measure by it—past, present, future.

While physicists debate its existence, intuitively we believe in it.

Like we do God.

We age by it. We are not what we once were.

Gardeners know its passage, from seed to birth, ripening to harvest.

Or as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam renders it, “One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.”

Perhaps we’d do better to conceive time as flow, or infinity’s rhythm, with neither beginning nor ending, our lives but a wink amid a stellar darkness of unending boundary, a universe among universes, yielding mystery and wonder to finite eyes.

Always Was, Is, and Shall Be.

If we truly believe in time, it behooves us to use it wisely, alter our history, relish awareness, and live in the present.

Or as Mark Twain, one of America’s genuine truth-sayers, put it, “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

–rj