BOOK REVIEW: Happier At Home, by Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin brings us tales of her second happiness project in her new book, Happier at Home.  (Her first project, summarized in her book The Happiness Project, is reviewed here.)  As the title suggests, this time she focused her happiness efforts specifically on her home, after observing that so much of her happiness depends on the physical and spiritual environment of her home.  (I bet the same is true for you and me, too.)  While the focus on home somewhat narrows the scope of her resolutions, her conclusions that I found the most profound were remarkably consistent throughout both books:  Be yourself; Happiness is found in paradoxes; and Do it now.

Be yourself.  In nearly every chapter in Happier at Home, Rubin reminds herself to “Be Gretchen.”  She has found, and she describes vividly and repeatedly, that trying to be something or someone else is a major source of unhappiness.  Thus “Be Gretchen” has become the first of her “Twelve Personal Commandments.”

For example, for years of her adulthood she harbored a love of children’s literature.  She continued to re-read and cherish classics such as Little Women, The Little House in the Big Wood,  and A Little Princess.  But she felt slightly ashamed about this hobby, since she felt she “ought” to like adult literature and “should” read more educational non-fiction.  But then she remembered:  “Be Gretchen.”  Gretchen likes children’s literature, so she embraced it and started a children’s lit book club for adults.  It has proved so popular that she now has three groups running.  Instead of suffering boredom or worse reading books she “should” read, she is immensely happy reading, discussing and celebrating the literature she has always loved.

Since Socrates first admonished his students to “Know thyself,” being self aware has been a mark of maturity and wisdom.  Unfortunately modern consumerist society, in its rush to sell us more stuff, constantly tries to convince us that happiness will come once we change, upgrade, or transform ourselves, preferably with the latest new product.  Rubin finds again and again that happiness does not lie down that path.  Happiness begins with you know yourself, and then practice being yourself.

Happiness is found in paradoxes.  Early on Rubin makes the observation that the opposite of a profound truth is also true.  Thus in an early chapter on possessions, Rubin embraces the old truth that “Less is more.”  Simplicity adds to happiness.  And yet, she acknowledges, many of the things in her life that make her the happiest have added complexity to her life:  kids, her marriage, big work projects.  More is more, too.  Happiness, it turns out, is not found in the extremes, but in the paradoxes between the extremes.

Once you realize this, you begin to notice the paradoxes all around you.  The days are long, but the years are short.  It would be good to have more time to do some things; it would be good to have less time to do some things.  To be happy, you have to make other people happy; to make other people happy, you have to be happy.  

These paradoxes show that happiness does not consist of a removal of all tension, conflict, and imperfection in life.  Rather, as Rubin finds throughout her book, happiness comes in adapting yourself to the tensions of life, in resolving the conflicts, in celebrating the imperfections.  Want what you have, in other words, instead of constantly searching for the perfect.

Do it now.  The final chapter of her book is Rubin's most philosophical:  as she looks back over her year of new happiness resolutions, she realizes that in each case, Now is the time to be happy.  Now is the time to enjoy and appreciate her kids, her marriage, her neighborhood, her health.  Sure, there may be much to look forward to, but look too far forward and suddenly the Now is gone.  Wishing she were happier would have taken her nowhere.  But taking action--in come cases, quite small action--made her happier right now.  In her words, "Now is now, and now is already a long time ago."  Where does the time go?  Her suggestion is to not let it go by unnoticed.  Undertake a happiness project of your own to help cultivate an attitude of gratitude, and an appreciation of what you have right now.  Do it Now!

I'm no writer of Rubin's caliber, but with a blog about living in the present tense, you can imagine I've thought a lot about Now.  (A couple of examples are here and here.  This post explains what we mean by Present Tense Living.)  As we've said before, it is easy to live your life in any time BUT the present.  We get stuck obsessing about the past, regretting it, or wishing we could return to it.  Or, we worry about the future, or we long for it.  Either way, we miss out all that is good and worthy about Now.  You can't go back to the past.  Tomorrow may never come.  Now is all you have, so make the most of it.  This is your life, this is your time.  What will you do with it?

Make it a great day!  

Uplifted by the Decline and Fall

In 2011 I undertook and completed a reading project that I had wanted to do for years:  I read Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety.  My Folio Society edition is eight volumes, with over 2,000 pages, though the original was published serially in six volumes from 1776-1788.  This work remained the definitive history of Rome and its empire until well into the 20th Century.

Although it has been eclipsed by more modern scholarship, and its interpretations are generally seen as antiquated now, Gibbon's History remains one of the great works of Enlightenment scholarship.  It is most compelling to a modern reader because of its narrative style:  this is not history presented as a dry list of events, dates, and people; this is a narrative of brave men (and a few women) making bold moves to expand, hold, and defend a great Empire, and build a great culture.

Taking the time to read a work like this seems slightly antiquated in the age of Google and Wikipedia, where any information you can think of is at your fingertips.  Want to know who the Emperor Julian was and what he did?  You can find it in seconds.  But putting individuals into their context, understanding what came before and after great events and great men in history, and seemingly moving through history with them provides a much richer perspective on the past than what one gets from simply cherry-picking facts from Google.

It certainly took time, and more than a bit of organization, to get through such a magnum opus in one year.  I basically broke the year into eight, 6 to 7-week milestones and set a goal for myself to finish one volume by each milestone.  In general, I'd say it worked out to about 15-20 minutes a day of reading, or roughly the same amount of time it takes to watch one sitcom on my DVR, skipping the commercials.  It would be interesting to debate the merits of reading Gibbon vs. watching The Big Bang Theory daily.  For me, it was certainly time well spent.

What did I learn from the books?  Well, I was introduced to Roman emperors whose names I had heard, but I didn't really know what they had done or how they fitted in to history, e.g. Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Julian, Theodosius.  One volume covers the birth of Mohammed and the rise of Islam, subjects that were not covered in history when I was in school.  I came to realize that the first 1000 years following the time of Christ were a bloody mess of violence and death in everyday life, to a degree that would shock us today, even as jaded as we have become by foreign wars and senseless domestic shootings.  Life really was nasty, brutish, and short.

(One particularly grim episode:  a Roman general punished a wayward soldier by pulling together the tops of two adjacent pine trees, securing them with a rope; tying one arm and one leg of the poor soldier to each tree; then cutting the rope that held the trees together.  Ouch.)

But as different as life was from today, there are certain episodes and people that seem shockingly modern, or that provide inspiration all these years later.  For example:  here is how Gibbon describes the typical day of Alexander Severus, who was emperor from 222-235 A.D.:

The simple journal of his ordinary occupations exhibits a pleasing picture of an accomplished emperor, and....might well serve the imitation of modern princes.  Alexander rose early; the first moments of the day were consecrated to private devotion, and his domestic chapel was filled with the images of those heroes, who, by improving or reforming human life, had deserved the grateful reverence of posterity.  But, as he deemed the service of mankind the most acceptable worship of the gods, the greatest part of his morning hours was employed in his council, where he discussed public affairs, and determined private causes, with a patience and discretion above his years.  The dryness of business was relieved by the charms of literature:  and a portion of time was always set apart for his favorite studies of poetry, history, and philosophy.  The works of Virgil and Horace, the Republics of Plato and Cicero, formed his taste, enlarged his understanding, and gave him the noblest ideas of man and government.  The exercises of the body succeeded to those of the mind; and Alexander, who was tall, active, and robust, surpassed most of his equals in the gymnastic arts.  Refreshed by the use of the bath and a slight dinner, he resumed, with new vigor, the business of the day; and, till the hour of supper, the principal meal of the Romans, he was attended by his secretaries, with whom he read and answered the multitude of letters, memorials, and petitions, that must have been addressed to the master of the greatest part of the world. His table was served with the most frugal simplicity; and whenever he was at liberty to consult his own inclination, the company consisted of a few select friends, men of learning and virtue....The dress of Alexander was plain and modest, his demeanor courteous and affable.....

To summarize, Alexander Severus practiced morning devotions; spent time at work on public and private business; read literature to relax; took daily exercise and a daily bath; and ate simple meals with close friends.  Here we are 1800 years later, after innumerable advances in technology, medicine, psychiatry, and living standards, and yet still one could do a lot worse than follow this daily routine (which, as Gibbon observed, "might well serve the imitation of modern princes").    Talk about history coming alive!

BOOK REVIEW: Carte Blanche

Every few years, the estate of Ian Fleming authorizes a new James Bond novel to be written by a leading mystery or thriller author of the time. Carte Blanche is the fifth in this series, penned by Jeffrey Deaver, bestselling thriller author and editor of the Best American Mystery Stories 2009.

Between 1951 and his death in 1964, Ian Fleming wrote 9 novels and 12 short stories featuring super spy James Bond. For anyone whose knowledge of Bond comes exclusively from the popular movies, the character that appears in the books may be something of a surprise. Yes, Fleming's Bond is a bon vivant who regularly indulges his taste for cars, women, and liquor. But the literary Bond is thoughtful, often brooding, and sometimes melancholy. He is apparently looking for true love out of his flings with beautiful women, and he daydreams about leaving the service to settle down. He likes nice things, yes, but his Bentley is 20 years old, and he also has a charming taste for simplicity. This complex personality rarely, if ever, comes through in the more purely hedonistic movie character. (Sean Connery in the early movies, and especially Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, come closest to conveying the complex character of the book Bond.)

Fleming's writing style was admirably efficient, with few needless words and generally a snappy narrative flow. His attention to detail gives the books much of their cultural cachet: he freely sprinkled brand names of watches, and liquor, and clothes in the story, a sort of product placement guru before his time. This adds immensely to the plausibility of the tales, as well as their desirability.

Deaver is not as efficient with his words as Fleming, and perhaps overdoes it on details in some places, but overall his story is a faithful imitation of the Fleming style. Deaver places his Bond squarely in the 21st century, with a bewildering alphabet soup of bureaucratic agencies for Bond to navigate (and a helpful glossary in the back for the reader to follow), current hip locations like Dubai and Cape Town, and very cool technology, including a few iPhone apps that would certainly be the hit of any cocktail party. (The eavesdropping app could make for some quite mischievous fun at a party.) Deaver's Bond Girls are also much more modern, in some cases proving indispensable to his success (rather than just serving as decorative accents).

The plot involves Bond trying to decipher the meaning behind various pieces of intelligence that seem to point to an unspecified act of violence and destruction to be carried out by Severan Hydt, the founder of a large, British-based waste management firm known as Green Way. Like all the Bond novels, what happens isn't so important as how it happens: Bond travels in style around the world, dodging shadowy characters, feuding with competing government agents, and enjoying the company of beautiful women, some of whom help and some who hinder his progress. Deaver even proves equal to the task of matching Fleming's knack for double-entendre female names by introducing us to the vivacious Felicity Willing (or Felicity Willful, as we are told she is sometimes called).

While the action is exciting, as is typical in this genre things get wrapped up just a little too conveniently to be believable. But in the end, who cares? It is a wild ride along the way, and Deaver successfully captures that feeling of slight envy at the glamorous life of Bond that Fleming was so good at inducing. Sure, it is ridiculous to think that a government agent can afford a new Bentley Continental GT, or that a supposedly secret agent would drive a car designed to capture attention. But if I WERE a secret agent, I would certainly try to get one too!

Like Fleming often did, Deaver creates a bad guy that is fascinatingly repulsive because he is not only criminal, but also creepy. In this case, the villain is obsessed with decay--in objects, in nature, and in people. Even his female companion is forced to eschew the glamorous hair and make-up jobs that are typical for villain consorts, in favor of unkempt locks and obvious wrinkles. This creepiness, and the criminal activity it inspires, makes Carte Blanche a worthy addition to the Bond bookshelf.

BOOK REVIEW: The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin

What would make you happy?

Gretchen Rubin set out to answer that question for herself, and in discovering her answers and recording her experiences in The Happiness Project (published in 2009) she does not presume that the things that bring her happiness will also bring her readers happiness. Instead, she provides several valuable principles that can help us find our own happiness in our own lives.

It quickly becomes evident that Rubin is a highly motivated, compulsively organized person. To launch her project, she reads widely the works of philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, and poets to identify the physiological, psychological, and behavioral factors that seem to lead to happiness. Then, in the spirit of Ben Franklin's famous self-improvement project (which he described in his Autobiography), she makes a chart of these happiness virtues and sets about to work on a few of them each month for a year. (For many of Rubin's readers, I suspect that simply learning to organize like this would go a long way to boosting happiness, or at least to reducing stress.)

Rubin's quest is not of the total life change variety. Unlike the authors of other recent entrants in the Discover Yourself genre who undertook major disruptions to their lives' routines (like traveling to India or cooking difficult recipes nearly every day of the year), Rubin acknowledged from the beginning that she is generally satisfied with her life, family and career, and that a major change of location or career wouldn't really boost happiness. Instead, Rubin sought happiness by finding more enjoyment in her daily existence; by appreciating more readily the raw material for happiness already present in her life. (At this blog, we might say she sought to live in the present tense.)

The narrative of her year spent working on these virtues is by turns earnest, sad, obvious, trite, poignant, impressive, and exhausting; sometimes more than one of these at a time. Rubin retains a sunny optimism about the project throughout, and I think by the end concludes that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (In this instance, that means that even though she may not have perfected any of her individual happiness virtues, the whole project provided a noticeable boost to her well-being.)

I found that Rubin made one of her most profound observations right at the beginning of the book, when she unveils what she calls her "Twelve Commandments," or rules to live by. Number one is "Be Gretchen," and throughout the book this commandment serves as a reminder not to try to change her fundamental nature. No amount of mental resolve or personal discipline can change your fundamental interests and abilities, and you will only set yourself up for failure (with a resulting loss of happiness) if you try. It doesn't matter if everyone says you should do power yoga to get fit; if you hate yoga, you will never stick with it and thus won't get fit. As Rubin states it in her Happiness Manifesto: "what's fun for other people may not be fun for you, and vice versa." Rubin did an admirable job of keeping that principle front and center.

Also, Rubin proves that a series of small improvements can add up to make a major improvement in our lives. None of her individual happiness virtues is that big of a deal on its own. (Example: "Take Time to Be Silly") But because she was disciplined and stuck with her project, the little improvements worked together to change her outlook on her life; to help her appreciate the causes for happiness that were already all around her. That is a realization from which I'm certain we all could benefit. In a way, that is the goal of Present Tense Living: to appreciate life today.

In the end, I was impressed by Rubin's efforts and inspired to be David, and to be more aware of my everyday blessings. I haven't decided whether to undertake my own happiness project yet, but I have loaned the book to my wife to get her perspective on the idea. Perhaps we will decide to do one together, or to do separate ones at the same time so we can encourage each other. If you've read the book, let me know what you think, and whether you've done your own happiness project. How did it go?

Let Your Boat Be Light!

I recently read Jerome K Jerome's comedy classic, Three Men In A Boat, first published in 1889 and continuously in print ever since. It is the story of the adventures of three friends who decide to take a several-day boat trip up the River Thames, observing life along the way. Filled with amusing situations and spiced with the narrator's (presumably Jerome himself) philosophical musings, the book is a rare mixture: thought-provoking comedy.

As the three friends are preparing their boat for departure, they bring everything they think they will need to the river, only to find they have brought more stuff than they can ever fit in the boat. One of the friends, George, comes up with a different idea, and Jerome's observations about that idea provide excellent advice for life:

George said:

"You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without."

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You'd be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How thy pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation and with--oh, the heaviest, maddest lumber of all! The dread of what will my neighbor think, with luxuries that only cloy with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man--all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, and you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness--no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchids, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need--a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life's sunshine--time to listen to the Aeolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heartstrings around us.......

"Let your boat of life be light"--what excellent advice to those of us who live in a society that drives us in the constant pursuit of more, better, faster.

Consider your own life; there are naturally many things you'd like to have on the journey, but what are the things you truly can't do without? What will you do to devote more of your time to those things?

BOOK REVIEW: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

American culture has come to equate busyness with importance. If you are busy, you must be important. And, conversely, if you are not busy, then you must not be important. Since we seem to accept without question the premise that to be important is good, we therefore create a lot of busyness, and work. As a result, our identities become wrapped up in our work. Think about the last time you met someone new at a party; I'll wager the first question asked was, "So what do you do?"

Indeed, we often act as if what we do is very important to the proper functioning of the world. Memos are crafted on weekends; emails are returned late at night; phones are dialed as soon as the plane's wheels have touched the tarmac, so that we don't waste a precious minute as we do our part to advance the part of Western civilization that is dependent upon the widgets that our company produces. We behave like the sharks in the ocean, that must never stop swimming lest they die, as we rush from one "important" task to another.

Alain de Botton does a marvelous job of slowly letting the air out of our egos about our work in his thought-provoking book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. The book is based on the premise that nearly all of man's activity amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Even 10 years from now, no one will know or care whether you get the Fitzsimmons memo to your boss by this Thursday's deadline. Or as de Botton observes:

If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis.

In this view, the self-importance that imbues so much of our daily work, that leads us to choke down sandwiches at our desk while we read reports, to travel half way across the country for a one hour sales meeting with someone we don't really like, and to waste countless hours in meetings talking about decisions that need to be made rather than actually making them, is actually a sophisticated form of self-deception, of coping with the fact that we are just tiny meaningless specks in the cosmos.

I know that sounds depressing, but don't let it put you off of this book, because de Botton comes to that conclusion after what I think must have been very enjoyable field work, visiting the practitioners of ten different jobs in a wide variety of industries. Among other pursuits, he spots cargo ships with avid hobbyists; walks the path of high-voltage electricity lines with an engineer; sits with a landscape painter; attends an aerospace trade show; and traces the 52-hour voyage of a tuna steak from a swimming fish in the Indian Ocean to a dinner plate in Bristol, England, in a photo essay that alone is worth the price of the book.

Along the way, de Botton finds much to admire in the work we do. A career counselor is humanely portrayed, a sort of minister in the secular religion of career. Accountancy is shown to be an important part of the modern capitalist system, if a bit of a boring job (about what I would expect). Logistics, especially, seems to fascinate de Botton, and he very compellingly shows it to be the under-appreciated backbone of modern consumerist life. Take that tuna steak, and think about it the next time you are at the market: only fifty-two hours after it was swimming in the Indian Ocean, the tuna had been caught, taken to land, filleted, packed, flown half way around the world, and trucked to a suburban grocery store. I won't soon complain about the price of fresh fish again!

There are many such products that we take for granted--that we expect to be available whenever we want them--without ever sparing a thought for the magic of the markets that have developed to bring them to us. As de Botton observes:

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have know the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools of their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid.....We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt.

Logistics is the enabler of this change, and a result of the change is the increasing specialization of our jobs. De Botton visits the offices of United Biscuits, a company of five thousand souls engaged in the manufacture of cookies and other sweets. We have all baked cookies in our own kitchens, and so understand that there is some meaning inherent in the work of a company baking them. But when that task is subdivided and spread across five thousand people and six manufacturing sites, does it still have the same meaning? Specialization has its benefits, especially in increasing productivity, but at what cost to our personal sense of meaning and accomplishment? Again, de Botton:

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks, or farmers--people whose labors can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.....we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like "Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits".....

But just when it may seem that de Botton's melancholy observations will outweigh his admiration for the work that people do, he makes what I find to be actually an optimistic conclusion: we puff up the importance of our work precisely because we do understand, at some level, that we are insignificant in the universe, that death is our only certainty, and that through our work we can take our minds off that ultimate melancholy thought. In other words, working is life because it takes our mind off of death. De Botton:

The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.....To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break'.....maybe all of this, in the end is working wisdom.

So yes, you are important. Yes, that memo has significance. Yes, your sales calls matter. Do your best at whatever it is you do, for in the end we are all dead. Therefore, live while you are alive!

BOOK REVIEW: "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery

Time is deceptive; that hour you spend stuck in traffic seems a lot longer than the hour you spend on the beach, yet according to the clock, they have the same duration. Time is also valuable; we spend it, save it, or make the most of it whenever we can. But can we make time stand still?

According to Muriel Barbery in her delightful philosophical novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, time does indeed stand still when there is perfect consonance in the world; indeed, such consonance between what we see and what we feel is what defines Art. Through the thoughts of one of her protagonists, Barbary asserts that great paintings share this ability to stop time, to make us appreciate the exact moment pictured, while forgetting all our own cares and desires. For that moment, we are experiencing "existence without duration."

This is a novel of essays, disguised as thoughts and diary entries of the two primary characters, that cover a diverse set of topics: art, the nature of beauty, our animal natures, and houseplants, to name just a few. (As you might expect of the author of a philosophical novel, Barbery is French, and the novel was originally published in French. The English translation was nicely done by Alison Anderson.) Barbery's diverse musings all follow the same thread: how do we find meaning in our individual lives that are so evidently insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe? What are the little charades that we erect around ourselves to try to convince others, and ourselves, that we matter?

The story follows the inhabitants of a smart Parisian apartment building, in particular two seemingly very different, but in the end quite similar women: Madame Renee Michel, mid-50s, who is the long-time concierge of the building (sort of like the superintendent); and Paloma Josse, 12, a precocious young woman whose family lives on the fifth floor of the building. They know each other only by sight, since the typical posture of an inhabitant of a smart apartment building is to speak to the concierge only when necessary.

Much of the first half of the book is taken up with introducing us to these two characters by way of listening in on thoughts (Mme. Michel) and reading diary pages (young Paloma) that encompass the aforementioned philosophical essays. From this, we conclude that neither woman is what she seems, that both are playing the roles that their circumstances find them occupying. Mme. Michel is careful not to let on to the snobby residents that she is anything more than a simple concierge, while in reality she spends hours reading literature, especially Russian literature, and thinking sophisticated thoughts about life and philosophy. Young Paloma is obviously smart--she is a good student--but her very adult outlook is kept secret from her family, whom she believes to be stupid.

Midway through the novel, the narrative pace picks up as the stable world of the apartment building is turned upside down by the arrival of a new resident, a wealthy Japanese gentleman, who sees beyond the facades of the two women and undertakes to introduce each to her true self. Suddenly the charades are exposed; the careful walls that Renee and Paloma have erected to keep the world out are knocked down by the subtle and measured actions of Monsieur Ozu. That Barbery has done a masterful job of creating her characters through their essays became apparent as I found myself rooting for Monsieur Ozu to keep pressing Renee to knock down another brick, to have the courage to display in public her true nature that has been kept so carefully hidden in her apartment all these years.

Barbery's technique of characterization by essay has its weaknesses, among them that the plot is slow to unfold, leaving the reader wondering at some points early on whether the whole story has come to a stop. Also, the peripheral characters, whose thoughts and diaries we are not privy to, are not as well developed. Even Monsieur Ozu is only a shadow; I was left wondering much about where he came from, and how he got to be so wise as to see in a short time the interesting, intelligent women that so many others had missed.

But these are mere quibbles, for once Monsieur Ozu befriends the two women, the story picks up pace steadily, and our care for Renee and Paloma pulls us right into the stunning denouement. Once the walls are down, we find that the two women, who seemingly had nothing in common other than an address, are soul sisters in a very special way.

Through it all, Barbery challenges us to a new appreciation for the Art of life; for those moments in memory that seem like "existence without duration." Next time you are at a museum, go to a masterpiece painting and stand before it. Gaze at it and notice that you can almost sense what the moment was like that the artist captured, whether it was 50 years ago or 500; it seems as if everything is just where it should be, that it is just as you would have recalled it had you been there. In that moment, you are experiencing existence without duration, and time is, in a way, standing still, since you are sharing that moment with everyone who has ever looked at the painting.

I think about memories I have that share that same sense of being timeless. I think of the birth of each of my children; I don't recall every detail, but the impression in my memory is of a perfect moment--the smile of my wife; the press of her hand in mine; the wet tears striping my cheeks; the jerky first movements of the infant; the excitement of new life. That is a timeless memory; what I saw and what I felt were in perfect consonance; at that moment, life was Art.

May we all find many such moments that add meaning to our otherwise insignificant lives.