When Opposites Repel

Pop quiz:

What is the opposite of the word depth?

This question appeared on a test I took in English class in the 7th grade. The reason I remember the question so well is that it is one of the few times in my life, so few that I could probably list them all, that a teacher marked a reply of mine on a test incorrect when I felt that my reply was correct. In fact, in this case, not only did I feel that my reply was correct, but I felt that the reply that the teacher thought was correct was incorrect. (Still with me?)

I showed the test to my father and asked his opinion. Not only did he agree with me, but he adduced evidence to support my point of view. Funnily enough, I don't recall whether I disputed the point with my teacher.

I had pretty much forgotten about this episode until about 7 years ago, when I was at a small dinner party. Something triggered my memory of it and I related it to those present and accounted for, and asked what answer they would have given. To a person, they all gave the answer that my teacher wanted.

At this point, I know that you are bursting at the seams on pins and needles (ah, the danger of mixing metaphors) to find out the answer. Without further adieu, my fellow wordsmith:

• The response my teacher was looking for: shallowness.
• The response I gave: height.

Now I would certainly agree that the opposite of deep is shallow, just as the opposite of hot is cold, the opposite of rich is poor, and the opposite of tall is short. In each of these cases, one word indicates a large quantity of the property being measured, while the other word indicates a small quantity.

But to my mind, depth and shallowness are not opposites, but rather synonyms, for both indicate the very act of measuring a property. Is there a difference between saying that the depth of a pool is 5 feet and the shallowness of the pool is 5 feet?

This is the reason I chose height as the opposite of depth: one is a measure of distance from the ground upwards, while the other is a measure of the distance from the ground downwards.

And the evidence which my father mustered in my support comes from Irving Berlin:

How much do I love you?
I'll tell you no lie.
How deep is the ocean?
How high is the sky?

By the way, I'd be happy to hear from someone who disagrees with this and can explain my teacher's point of view. I think part of the disagreement stems from the fact that the very concept of opposites is to a degree subjective.

If that same teacher were to give me the same test today, I'd give an answer which I believe would be in line with her way of thinking on the issue, but which I think she would nevertheless find highly unexpected. I wonder whether she'd give me credit for it.

Superficiality.

Light My Fire - Illuminated

One of the most well-known American pop music bands of the 1960's was The Doors. Far and away the most popular member of the band was front-man and lead singer Jim Morrison, who, in 1971, joined an exclusive club to which few would wish to be accepted: the club of musicians who met their demise at the age of 27.

But in 1998, it was keyboardist Ray Manzarek who was interviewed by NPR's Terry Gross. The interview may be read here or listened to here. Hear, hear!

Ray was an extremely intelligent, interesting, friendly and charming interviewee. In fact, I found myself thinking that he was the kind of person with whom I would really enjoy to spend time. Such a positive person. An absolutely delightful interview.

(An interesting aside. Around the same time, I listened to another interview conducted by NPR's Terry Gross, this one of David Hyde Pierce, who was then starring in the hit sitcom Frasier. What I found so fascinating was the contrast between the interviews. Whereas every question put to Ray served as a springboard to a sprawling 5-plus-minute-long tale of adventure, David's replies, while polite, informative, and interesting, were brief and to the point, almost to the point of being perfunctory, as if he were taking a test and his goal was to reply to each question in a manner which would simply ensure that he would get credit for answering that question correctly.)

In the interview, Ray, an expert racounteur, regaled with various stories revolving around the band, such as how the band formed from a chance encounter on the beach between Ray and Jim, and Jim's antics during his tenure with the band, which on at least one occasion landed him in jail.

For me, the highlight of the interview is when Ray discusses, at great length, the recording of the band's most famous song: Light My Fire. This happens to be not only my favorite song by the band, but one of my favorite songs of all time, to my ear a perfect synthesis of the "coolness" and improvisational style of jazz with the "sweetness" and "edginess" of pop rock music.

For 15 minutes, Ray gives a wonderfully detailed exegesis on the genesis of all aspects of the song, including:

• The lyrics and melody, a collaboration between guitarist Robby Krieger and the other band members and Johann Sebastian Bach;
• The time signature and the rhythm, influenced by both jazz great Johnny Coltrane and Latin flamenco music;
• The chord structure, with a clever interplay between major and minor keys;
• The introduction, a musical pattern known as a circle of fifths, based on the aforementioned baroque composer; and
• The 4-minute instrumental, an eloquent dialog between Ray's keyboard and Robby's guitar (which, much to the outrage of the band members, is cruelly excised by the producer for the single version, to bring the song's length down from 7:05 to 2:52)

Ray analyzes each of the above elements of the song with consummate musical erudition, bringing a crystal clear illumination of the evolution of how this masterpiece of a song came into being. And I must mention that Ray has his keyboard with him during the interview, so throughout, he is constantly elucidating his expositions musically.

So of course, once the interview was over, I decided that the thing to do was to now listen again to the song Light My Fire, having now learned all of the myriad facets of the song. The result was an experience that I will never forget. Like many experiences, it is very difficult to explain in words. I can use an analogy and say that it was like seeing life in black and white and suddenly seeing it in color for the first time. Every single second of the song just exploded in my mind, rife with the multiple layers of musical meaning contained therein. With every note, I was hearing simultaneously the note itself, and Ray's beautiful explanation of the process that had gone into its creation. What a superlatively rich experience!

Dear reader, if you wish to do yourself a great favor, I highly recommend that you treat yourself to this experience, and listen to the interview and the song, in that order. I'd be most happy to hear your reactions.

Footnote. In the interview, Ray states that the song's introduction, which he terms the "turnaround", was the last piece of the song to be composed. I find this very odd, since every phrase of the instrumental seems to be an improvisation based on that turnaround. As I composed this post today, I just learned sadly that Ray died earlier this year. So it looks like I will not get the opportunity to ask him about this point.

Keep On Smilin'

Upon my completion of high school, I spent 2½ years in Israel, studying at two Jewish theological seminaries. The first year-and-a-half of that period was spent in an institution in Jerusalem called Yeshivat HaKotel. The school is located in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, just a few minutes' walk from the holy Jewish site known as The Wailing Wall, or, in Hebrew, as HaKotel, meaning simply "The Wall".

There were approximately 300 students in the Yeshiva, enrolled in various programs. Most of the Israelis ranged in age from 18 to 23 and were there as part of a five-year program known as Hesder, which is a combination of military service and religious study. There were also a few dozen students in their mid-20's in the Rabbinical program. And there were about 70 non-Israeli students, mostly from the U.S., who, like myself, were just out of high school. Most of them returned to their respective countries of origin after a single year at the Yeshiva.

Obviously, in an institution with a student body of that size, I didn't get to know the majority of the students. I made friends of varying degrees among both the Israelis and the non-Israelis.

But there was one student with whom I shared a very special friendship. He was an Israeli, a couple of years ahead of me, on the short side, with thick, long, straight black hair and a thick, long, wispy black beard. We would see each other only every few weeks. In all the time I knew him we never uttered a single word to each other.

But every time we would pass each other, typically in the large study hall, which was often by filled with the roar of 200-to-300-plus students engaged in Talmudic discussions, he would radiate towards me the most beautiful, beatific, beaming smile, not from his mouth, but from his entire face, and, it seems, from his entire body. I never ceased to derive enormous pleasure from these brief encounters, and I think I reciprocated very much in kind.

But although I always enjoyed these interactions with my cheshire friend, for some reason it never occurred to me to take the friendship to the next level and engage him in conversation. Indeed, I never even learned his name. I think that in my mind, and very likely in his as well, our silent relationship was so complete, in its total mutual expression of good will, that any words would have been superfluous.

Then one day a few months later, another Israeli student flashed at me a similar Mother Teresa smile. This student was younger, of average height, with thick straight fair hair and no beard. But this encounter began a new friendship which was identical in all respects to the friendship I had with my bearded ami. I found it both sweet and amusing that I now had not one but two special friendships of this kind.

One day, not long before the conclusion of my tenure at Yeshivat HaKotel, I learned somehow that my two mute best friends were brothers.

Full Frontal Non-Nudity

One day, many years ago, I was on my way to meet a woman with whom I had arranged to go out on a date. She had told me to meet her at the place where she then worked, a drugstore on a main street. As I walked along the sidewalk towards the drugstore, I felt a sudden call of nature. And this call became quite loud quite quickly. I quickly entered problem solving mode.

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, the only obvious venue in which to respond to the call presented itself: a municipal swimming pool. With a mixture of urgency and gratitude, I proceeded towards and entered the building which housed the locker rooms, found the pertinent facilities, and expressed my rejoinder to the call of nature.

On my way out from the facilities, I again passed through the men's locker room. But I was unprepared for the vision which greeted me when I entered it.

Apparently I had entered the room at precisely the moment when the pool swimming hours had ended, or some such. For I found the room full of men who had clearly just completed a swimming session, as the water dripping from their bodies and their discarded bathing suits indicated, and were therefore at that moment in a state of complete undress. The incongruity of being the only clothed man in a room full of completely disrobed men was jarring.

In fact, there's but one word that perfectly captures how I felt at that moment.

The Heart of Darkness at The Heart of Darkness

When I was about 14, my parents bought me, as a Chanukah gift, the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness, which I soon proceeded to read -- after a fashion. What I mean by that last phrase is that although I certainly went through all of the pages of the book and took in all of the words, if you would have asked me what I came away with from the book, my response would have been: precious little.

Why I bothered to read an entire book that I really didn't understand at all escapes me. I have certainly been known to abandon books in the middle. For example, after adoring Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 900-page sprawl The Brothers Karamazov, I next attempted Crime and Punishment, and when I found that book inaccessible, I put it down, after a 150-page investment.

On the other hand, I do have a streak of stubborn tenacity. I went through a George Orwell period in high school, thoroughly enjoying Animal Farm, 1984, Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Burmese Days. When I then tackled his The Road To Wigan Pier, which, unlike the other works, was not a novel but rather a collection of essays on socialism, I bravely plodded through the entire tome, even though it largely went over my head.

And when I was in my Somerset Maugham phase, during which I happily devoured his four volumes of short stories, as well as his novels Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence, I eventually found myself face to face with his memoir, The Summing Up, which I found inscrutable, but which, again, I nevertheless muddled through.

Back to Conrad. Flash-forward a year. English class. Our teacher announces that the next novel we will be studying will be Heart of Darkness, by the author Joseph Conrad.

A loud Ohhhh noooooooo! immediately rings through the classroom. All eyes turn to the source of said sad groan: moi. I relate to my curious classmates that I had already read the book and it was absolutely dreadful. (No doubt, a secondary reason for that groan was boastfulness, that I was such a well-read man-of-letters that my intake of literature included even obscure novels by authors that nobody else in my class had even heard of.)

Our teacher gave us a few days to read the novel, and then, before we began to study it, gave us a very brief quiz, consisting of a few very basic plot questions.

Receiving a failing grade on this quiz, which was designed simply to see whether we had read the book, on a book that I had by now read not once but twice, was certainly an interesting experience for me.

Meanwhile, a fellow classmate, who admittedly did not even crack the book open, aced the quiz. His secret? He told us that he had seen the film Apocalypse Now, which was based on the novel.

(This in turn reminds me of the occasion when our teacher gave us a similar quiz on a different novel, and the highest grade in the class had been attained by a different classmate, who had also eschewed the novel, but who had managed to get hold of the comic book version.)

At any rate, for the next few weeks, we studied the novel in class. And even though my own reading of the novel, twice!, had led to very few insights for me, when our teacher explained to us the various themes which the novel addressed, I gradually found myself increasingly fascinated by all of the profundities that it touched upon, such weighty matters as altruism, hypocrisy, man's inhumanity to man and the very nature of evil.

By the time we had concluded our unit on this book, I was positively enthralled with it. So much so that I resolved to myself with considerable enthusiasm:

This has been such a wonderfully illuminating experience! Now that, thanks to my perspicacious teacher, I completely understand all of the complex motifs of the novel, I am going to go back and read it again, so that the words will finally come alive to me, and I will be able to imbibe their profound wisdom!

Armed with my newfound erudition, I then eagerly proceeded to read the novel for the third time.

And did not understand one word.

Girls Will Be Boys

I spent the year of 1998-1999 in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Like many cities, Baltimore's layout is a grid -- and the safeness of any neighborhood was directly proportional to its distance from the center. I lived in an apartment complex in an intermediate area: if you would walk 10 minutes away from the city center downtown, you'd find yourself among some very handsome homes, but if you would walk 10 minutes in the opposite direction, towards the city's heart of darkness, you'd be in an area which you would be wise to avoid after the sun set.

One evening, I found myself in the AOL chatrooms, engaging in a form of socializing which was then still relatively new to me. As I would do from time to time, I entered a private one-on-one chat with someone I met in the chatroom, on this occasion with a young woman a few years my junior. We spent a pleasant half-hour getting to know each other, and conversing about various topics, and found that we shared many mutual interests.

Since the chatroom in which I met her was the Baltimore chatroom, I knew that she and I likely lived in close proximity to one another, so I took a risk and suggested that we meet at the downtown sports bar for drinks. She immediately agreed, and we started to discuss the logistics of arranging the tête-à-tête.

I don't recall how it emerged, but in the process of making these arrangements, it turned out that my new she was a he! Well! blow! me! down! It seems that I had been unwittingly chatting away with a young man, whom I had believed all along was a woman. And my fellow masculine interlocutor had similarly assumed all along that I was a woman!

How the two of us had managed to chat for ½ an hour without somehow picking up that we were talking to a fellow male, I'm not sure -- this was the only time I can recall myself in the midst of such a muddle. But the moment I learned the true gender of my fellow chatter, of the many thoughts which crossed my mind, the most salient was:

I knew this was too easy!

I mean, striking up a conversation with a completely unknown woman, and winning her over so completely within ½ an hour that she would agree to meet me for drinks then and there? Nuh-uh. This is my real life, not a James Bond movie.

So the two of us shared a laugh of mixed emotions -- bewilderment, amusement and frustration -- and went our separate ways.

Recalling this more-than-decade-old episode, the question only now occurs to me: why didn't we meet after all? Just because the romantic element was now off the shelf, we could have still met in fraternal friendship -- after all, we had clearly enjoyed each other's company. I mean, men do become friends and get together, male bonding and all that.

Was it the disappointment over a promising new romantic relationship dashed to pieces? Was it the embarrassment over the situation? Was it simply obtuseness and narrow-mindedness which prevented the other possibility from even occurring to us? I wonder. I think that today, years later, I recognize the value of friendships, and how precious every friendship is, far more than I did back then, and that in a similar situation today, I would have suggested to my erstwhile Juliet that we get together after all. After all, there would always be the possibility that at the bar, we would overhear two young women seated next to us who had just gone through the same mix-up...

Hi, Not So Nice To Meet You!

I recently enjoyed a couple of weeks at a vacation resort. Although I had come primarily for health reasons, and socializing was really not on my mind at all, I met a number of really nice people, all from the U.K., and spent many pleasant hours in their company.

One person with whom I struck a very nice friendship was a woman who was originally from Jamaica. A nurse, when she told me that she was in her 50's, I was quite shocked, because based on the appearance of her face, I had judged her to be approximately 20 years younger than that. We were very sympatico, and had some really meaningful conversations.

One of the things which I really like about my friendship with her is how we met. One day, I walked into the dining room of the resort for lunch. A young man I had met a few days prior was sitting with two young women. He waved me over to join them, and introduced me to the two ladies. After a minute or two, he and the other woman left, leaving Miss Jamaica and me alone at the table.

Now of course, what would be the expected next step? Naturally, that the two of us would ask each other all kinds of banal questions, the kinds of questions one asks of a newly met person:

How long have you been here?
How many more days will you be here?
How was your flight?
What activities have you been doing here?
What do you do for a living?
How many children do you have?
What is your cat's favorite brand of cat food?

But no. Instead, for the next several minutes, this woman and I sat in complete stone silence. I somehow sensed that she was uncomfortable in my presence, and so I did not wish to engage in any artificial act of filling the air with words designed solely for the purpose of masking the uncomfortable silence. Been there, done that. And I knew that the other two compadres would be returning very shortly, thus relieving the pressure of the two of us maintaining a conversation.

And sho' 'nuff, when our two other friends returned, the conversation resumed with gusto, and gradually, the ice broke between this woman and I. (Ha! Just kidding! Yes, yes, it's "this woman and me"!)

The next day, I told her that I really enjoyed the fact that our friendship began with that totally awkward 5 minutes of silence. I liked the fact that we had both chosen to flout the rules of etiquette and decided that a few minutes of social discomfort was not the end of the world, and that we could survive it. There was something so refreshingly honest about it, as if we had both said to each other:

Yes, I realize that I'm sitting with you and we're not saying one word to each other, because neither one of us really feels that comfortable with the other, and this is a major faux pas, but so what?

She, in turn, told me that her reason for maintaining the silence was much the same as my own, and that my sense that she was not comfortable in my presence was correct: I was feeling under the weather that day, and the concern apparently showed very much on my face.

So I learned a very valuable lesson that day: there is indeed life after social awkwardness.