Arms
My daughter wants to be an artist. Or to be more precise, she is an artist. That is the first thing she will tell you about herself, after she has told you her name. From dawn to dusk she can happily do nothing but sit and draw: dozens of pictures, hundreds of them, reams of paper cramming the drawers and cupboards. She will draw us out of house and home. The pictures turn up everywhere. If I pull down an obscure nineteenth-century novel from the shelf, likely as not I’ll find a homemade bookmark tucked inside, some improbable picture that she’s planted there, hidden away for its day of discovery—or never found at all, it’s all the same to her. When I am away, I call her on the phone and she gives me breathless reports on all the day’s drawings. She lives for drawing: she breathes in air and breathes out pictures.
Yesterday while I was playing with her at the park, she fell and broke her arm. We didn’t get a wink of sleep all night. She lay in bed next to me tossing and turning and commanding me to stroke her arm—“but without touching it.” She asked for a story, so in the dark I told her a long somnolent tale about a Russian prince who disguised himself as a pauper and went out one winter afternoon to see how all the townsfolk live. He walked from his palace into the hustle and bustle of the town, and no one recognized him. But he wasn’t used to the big streets, the mud, the pools of slick ice on the ground, and he slipped in the street and broke his arm. The people rushed to help him. A man in a huge coat took him back to a little house down the lane, and made him lie down while the man’s wife tore one of their sheets and bound his arm. She fussed over him and brought him hot stew and a piece of hard stale bread, and begged him to stay the night with them. It was the smallest house the prince had ever seen, smaller than one of the great wardrobes in the palace. It was damp and musty with low ceilings (not a single chandelier), one tiny kitchen window, and a few pieces of plain hard-edged furniture. They made up a bed for the prince beside the kitchen. It was the hardest mattress he had ever known, and the thinnest blanket too. But the fire in the stove was warm and good, and a light snow was falling outside. Before long he had closed his eyes, and he never slept better in his life (broken arm and all). In the morning he went on his way, stepping very gingerly on the icy road. The man and his wife never learned the identity of their guest that night; in fact, they soon forgot all about him. The prince never saw them again either. But as the years passed, from time to time they would wake on a Sunday morning and find—to their never-ceasing puzzlement—that someone had pushed the kitchen window open and slipped something inside. A silver coin, some cheese, a parcel of fine meats, or, once, a single yellow flower, bright and welcoming as sunlight.
When the story was over, there was a long silence. Relieved, I thought she had finally gone to sleep. But then she moved on the bed with a great sob, and said: “But it’s my drawing arm. I won’t be able to draw.”
Have you ever broken a limb—as an adult, I mean? In the same situation, you or I would be worrying about the loss of utility: how will I drive? how will I shower? how will I cut my food? But my daughter sees her arm for what it really is: not a useful tool but a boundless aesthetic resource, a limber extension by which shapeless nature and the wilderness of imagination are disciplined into form. The arm is the mind’s pencil, the heart’s crayon; it is an instrument not of work but of making. One needs it because one needs (every day) to draw the world into being. If you also occasionally use your arm to brush your teeth, then so much the better: it is a happy coincidence, a side effect of the fingers’ capacity to grasp a pencil.
Lying in the dark while my daughter wrestled with her thoughts, with that awful bone-cracking discovery of an inhospitable world, I found myself praying. Not just for relief from pain, not just for sleep, but also for her lucid intuition about what her little limbs are for—what she is for. May her arm still ache to draw the day the cast comes off. May she never grow satisfied with the tawdry three-dimensional drabness of this world. May she always long to color it, to flatten it into shape, to bring forth those bustling graphite landscapes where the sun bats its eyelashes and all the birds smile knowingly and children’s faces stretch out wide from ear to ear, straining to contain the enormous shining bubbles of their eyes.
Berlin
It has been said that great books are the ones that have to teach us how to read them. It is the same with cities. London cannot teach you how to experience New York, any more than Dickens can teach you how to read Dostoevsky. And when you are in Berlin, the correct way to experience the place is by bicycle.
Now there are people—you will have heard of them, I’m sure—who believe that riding a bicycle is a “sport,” a way to “keep in shape,” something that is merely “good for you.” Nothing is more morally or aesthetically objectionable than such a cyclist, zipping through the traffic lights in his skintight lycra suit and shiny torpedo helmet, sanctimoniously sipping water from an aerodynamic flask strapped to his shoulder.
Who is this fellow? What is he about? He is performing that peculiar Calvinistic ritual that is known as Exercise. On the surface he might appear gregarious enough, but in truth he is a mean unsympathetic creature, this secular ascetic with his sculpted buttocks and his strap-on water bottle. He pursues cycling for his own selfish ends, and therefore cannot enjoy it. To him, it is all the same whether the bicycle actually goes anywhere or whether it is fastened to the floor of a gymnasium, a mere simulation, one of those monotonous unmoving Exercise Bikes that are exactly like a real bicycle in every respect except that they have no wheels and cannot propel you down the street.
There are some things that are corrupted by proficiency. The expert lover, the slick preacher, the professional childcare provider—these are not honest things, because good honest preaching and childrearing and lovemaking require some element of awkwardness and ineptitude and surprise, something tenderly human that resists the cold logic of technical mastery. Just so the cyclist: the fast expert sporty cyclist is an ungodly man, you can count on it. He speaks harshly to his children and spends hours grooming his fingernails and has always felt, deep down, that his father didn’t love him. He uses the bicycle the way an expert lover uses a woman, his mind absorbed by all the correct techniques for stimulating pleasure, working at her body as coolly and clinically as a pornographer. Such a lover goes nowhere with his beloved, just as the Exercise Cyclist goes nowhere on his bicycle but stays imprisoned in his own immaculate body even as he whizzes through the city looking straight ahead with a steely gaze through four-hundred-dollar wraparound pink sunglasses.
Expert cycling, therefore, I abhor. Expert cycling belongs in no proper self-respecting city. But the bicycle as a vehicle—the bicycle not as an instrument of self-improvement but as a machine of transportation, the bicycle as a strictly utilitarian way of getting about town—now that is a noble and excellent thing, beautiful and true and good in its rattling clattering swiftness, all legs and arms and wheels and whirling gears.
What could be nobler than a bicycle? For in the bicycle, you take the most marvelous, ancient, portentous triumph of human invention and ingenuity—the wheel!—and append it to the human anatomy so simply, so naturally, that you would think the human body had been designed for nothing else than wobbling about town on a pair of wheels. Perhaps a million years from now the human species will be born with wheels instead of legs; it would be an improvement. But for now, this spoked, sprocketed, handlebarred, rubber-tired, pedal-pushed apparatus supplies what nature lacks.
Berlin reveals itself to the cyclist, just as Paris reveals itself to the walker and Los Angeles to the freeway driver and Dublin to the drinker. If you want to know what Berlin is, throw away your guidebook, forget about all those tourist sites, and don’t even think about setting foot in one of those brand-new bright red sightseeing buses. If you want to know what Berlin is, all you need is some loose change in your pocket, a scarf around your neck, and a bicycle between your legs.
Blue
The six stained-glass panels of Marc Chagall’s America Windows were presented to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977, in celebration of the bicentennial of the United States.
1
For once you decided to avoid religious subjects. You said: I will show the city just as it is—its streets and parks,