Okay, so what no one ever told me about Eichmann in Jerusalem is how funny it is; and not only funny but my favourite kind of funny: angry-funny.

To each count Eichmann pleaded: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.”

In what sense then did he think he was guilty? In the long cross-examination of the accused, according to him “the longest ever known,” neither the defense nor the prosecution nor, finally, any of the three judges ever bothered to ask him this obvious question.

Not that there is anything funny about what Eichmann did. I came to this book, obviously, by way of Bloodlands and Postwar, both of which regard it as indispensable. And both of those books, good as they are, are hard going. As Ta-Nehisi said in a related context: “History is quite the burden. I am sorry about that. But this is the work before us.”

Arendt’s name is inseparable from her coinage: “the banality of evil.” And somehow I had walked away with the impression that Arendt’s book itself is banal, or that the experience of reading it is unrelievedly negative. And this is not the case. Arendt’s anger is coruscating. Her intelligence illuminates these dark places like lightning bolts.

Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point in his plea of “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Scheweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do – to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take.

It is a little hard to take, isn’t it? I have said that the terrible question of the 20th century was “Why do you want me dead?” but there’s a worse question, isn’t there? It is “Why do I want you dead?” Are you perfectly sure that you are not what Eichmann calls an innerer Scheweinehund? I am not at all sure that I am not.

As a clinical diagnostician, Arendt makes Greg House look like Patch Adams.

Eichmann’s astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systemic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich. “Of course” he had played a role in the extermination of the Jews; of course if he “had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher.” “What,” he asked, “is there to ‘admit’? Now, he proceeded, he “would like to find peace with [his] former enemies”–a sentiment he shared not only with Himmler, who had expressed it during the last year of the war… but also, unbelievably, with many ordinary Germans, who were heard to express themselves in exactly the same terms at the end of the war. This outrageous cliche was no longer issued to them from above, it was a self-fabricated stock phrase, as devoid of reality as those cliches by which the people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an “extraordinary sense of elation” it gave to the speaker the moment it popped out of his mouth.

Eichmann’s mind was filled to the brim with such sentences.

She examines him under the microscope of her rigor, and finds an ill-educated, failed vacuum-cleaner salesman, temperamentally disinclined to introspection, who rose to the level of his incompetence in a political culture that cynically exploited his particular traits. There were keen minds in the Nazi party, but Eichmann’s was not one of them. He was led into his great sins by his craving for acceptance, his intellectual laziness and his willingness to accept lies at face value.

By that much-abused word “banality” Arendt does not mean boringness. Eichmann’s deeds, if not his character, are too horrible to be boring. She means that Eichmann is inadequate to his place in history. Be angry at him all you want. He cannot even comprehend what you think he did wrong.

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement, to declare something under oath as a witness. I refuse it, I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience has been that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or any other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony, I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”) and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight for his neck, to plead for mercy–and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document, containing his plea for mercy?

As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content, without ever being aware of anything like “inconsistencies.” As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with cliches did not leave him in the hour of his death.

Contemporary parallels are left as an exercise for the reader. I am constantly reminded of DW Harding’s phrase about Jane Austen: “regulated hatred.” I suspect that like Austen’s novels, Arendt’s book should be one that I return to every year.

This post on Cool Tools changed my life. I drive more than I should. I drive to the barn two or three times a week. I drive the kids to swim class and piano class and summer camp. I used to suffer grievously from road rage, on account of California drivers zomg! But since I started listening to audiobooks while I drive, my driving has become serene and Zen.

As KK says in his Cool Tools post, fiction and history are ideal. Well, as those of you with even a fleeting acquaintance with me will have gleaned, reading enough fiction is not my problem. My problem may indeed be reading too much fiction. But history is harder. It’s hard to read history after a long day at work and with the kids, with your head heavy on the pillow. I thought I’d test-drive audio books with some history I had tried and failed to get through in print. That’s how I managed to race through Georgiana and, even more dauntingly, Paris 1919. I got both from the San Francisco public library, on CASSETTE TAPES HOW STEAMPUNK. Then I had a vicious slapfight with the SFPL’s bitterly disappointing audiobook reserves (foul proprietary software with almost nothing available for Android.)

So I signed up for Audible and listened to Bloodlands and Postwar streaming off my phone. They are both beautifully read by Ralph Cosham, who sounds almost exactly like Kerr Avon. Which was odd, but compelling. The books are twins in so many other ways that I suspected Timothy Snyder and Tony Judt of knowing one another’s work even before I Googled them to learn how intimately they were connected. Both books consider Eastern and Western Europe as parts of a whole. Bloodlands considers state-sponsored mass killing by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as two distinct expressions of a single totalitarian impulse. Postwar examines the aftermath. I was very lucky with the order in which I tackled them. Bloodlands picks up where Paris 1919 leaves off, and Postwar does the same for Bloodlands.

Postwar is one of the best and wisest and most useful books I have ever read in my life, and I am a Judtist now. I’ve been praising it as the missing manual for the world in which I grew up, but it’s more than that. Judt – a reformed Marxist – takes pains to distinguish between Soviet communism, which succumbed to its genocidal totalitarian impulses, and Scandinavian-style social democracy, which didn’t. He is also clear-eyed yet hopeful on Europe itself as a model for organizing human beings that is neither coercive in the Chinese model or cynical and corrupt in the American way. Judt, who died of ALS last year, would not have been the least bit surprised about Greece and Portugal and the peril in which the Euro finds itself: he read the writing on the wall. But in spite of much of the evidence of his own eyes he argues for the continuing usefulness and relevance of social contracts that don’t inherently fuck people over, or arrange to have them killed. So that’s nice.

By contrast, my latest project is Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower. It’s a history of Al Qaeda, beginning in aftermath of World War Two. Narrator Alan Sklar is no Ralph Cosham, and until I cast him in my mind as my friend Bob Foster the genius Koreanist from Michigan, his flat Midwestern vowels seemed set to drive me up the wall. I am glad I persisted, because The Looming Tower is an Iain Banks Culture novel, with the West standing in for the Culture. Specifically, it is Consider Phlebas, because it concerns itself with the point of view of the enemies of the Culture.

The big question of the last century appears to be: “Why do you want me dead?”, for various values of “you” and “me”. All the answers are depressing. The Looming Tower follows Sayyid Qutb, the father of Islamism, as he studies education in Greeley, Colorado: founded as a Western utopia. Qutb is so horrified by people tending their gardens and women talking about free love that he turns against America altogether. It is as compelling and awful as a car accident. As Jeremy remarked: “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

The more I read history the more I hope to stay as far the fuck away from it as I possibly can.

“Well of course people are paranoid about suicide here,” Ron Flud explained in the County Coroner’s Office. “I mean, it’s in business, it needs tourists. Every resident’s bread and butter is based on this city’s image. And suicide doesn’t sell.”

Spoiler: it’s not actually about a mountain.

Imagine if Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion had a lovechild who became fascinated with the disposal of nuclear waste by way of Martin Amis’s Night Train.

“I think everyone’s a lot more comfortable,” Ron said, “if we keep a low profile here. Suicide is the most threatening thing we can encounter as a culture. It’s a manifestation of doubt, the ultimate unknowable. A suicide by someone we know – or even by someone we don’t know – is a reminder that none of us has the answers. So apply that to a city with the nation’s most frequent suicides and you might start to understand this city’s reluctance to talk about it.”

I dreamed that Werner Herzog was giving me a lift home. His forest-green car shapeshifted between Porsche and VW Beetle, and when he remotely controlled it out of its parking space it turned over in a ditch. Not to worry. Herzog threw a rope over a tree limb and hauled it out by hand.

The dream is true to the spirit of the film. It’s a documentary about a French cave found in the 1990s that is full of paleolithic art. Herzog, being Herzog, found the stone eccentrics: a circus-trained scientist, an “experimental archaeologist” and a master perfumer who snuffled his way around the Chauvet Cave before announcing it didn’t smell of much. Oh Herzog, how I love you! NEVER CHANGE.

The paintings, though, are ungainsayable. Despite a couple of weird layering artefacts, the film is worth seeing in 3D because of the way the painters used the contours of the rock. There’s one frieze that made both me and Jeremy laugh because it could have been the Picasso we’d seen earlier at SFMOMA.

Very comforting to me to know that for as long as people have been people, some decent proportion of us has been spellbound by horses.

A small and exquisite Renoir: the head of a blushing girl.

Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse: monumental and charismatic.

A melancholy Matisse self-portrait.

Matisse as a genius colorist. Picasso as a genius of line. But three big pieces from the Blue Period. That’s a good blue.

Two from a Marie Laurencin that I really liked. This is one.

The Le Corbusier house. Daniel Stein gambling all the money away! A magazine headline: “From Picasso to ponies!” Zomg!

Bit overwhelmed at that point… I should go back. We joined SFMOMA. The building is gorgeous, and so’s the Blue Bottle kiosk with the Louise Bourgeois spider on the roof.

Long trek out to Hampton Court Palace; a pilgrimage in honour of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I read last year and Jeremy is reading as I blog. Hedge maze, formal gardens, Royal Chapel with its piecework ceiling so blue and geometric it looked almost Islamic, J pointed out. “It’s trying to be the Hagia Sofia and the Sistine Chapel,” I said. “It’s too small!” said J, but it isn’t: not to me. It was the first Church of England and I grew up in its shadow. Claire read every single sign in Henry VIII’s apartments, looking like a girl in a Vermeer painting with the light angling through the diamond-paned windows. I resolved to love beauty more, and to read more history, although upon reflection loving beauty and reading history is what got me into all this trouble in the first place. I didn’t like the Christopher Wren bits much. I said so, later, at a picnic in Richmond, forgetting that the Baroque is Hannah’s area of expertise. It took us seven million billion years to get back to Bloomsbury and there were drunk young men on the train and my back is still aching from the armoured spines I sprouted in response, but there was good sushi for dinner, yes, and cold sauvignon blanc. And so to bed.

This was not very good on horses, and not very good on the war. So, um. He seems like a nice person?

Also! That’s a Western (as in cowboy) show halter on the horse on the cover! I just. Gnnrh.

The bloodlands lie between Berlin and Moscow. You’ve read parts of this history before, but Timothy Snyder’s contribution (a great one) is to change the frame of reference. His subject is the decade and a half of mass death in these lands, considered as the outcome of deliberate policies on the part of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Snyder’s story thus transcends national and ethnographic boundaries and the ideological differences between Hitler and Stalin to discuss how institutional genocide was allowed to take place. In Europe. And no one cared.

It is, as you might imagine, depressing. Parts of it are heartbreaking. Parts of it are nauseating.

It’s amazing.

It’s effectively the sequel to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and a companion to both Deathless and The Hare With The Amber Eyes. The other book that keeps nagging at me is Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper (no link love for you, lady: you know why) which considered the Holocaust as some sort of legitimate revenge for the Ukrainian famine… of course she was a liar, as it turned out. But that’s my country for you: people lying about genocide for notoriety. (Hi, Keith Windschuttle!)

I’m listening to it in the car, which is a good way of forcing yourself to keep going. The narrator has a very particular diction, with clipped enunciation and a downward inflection. I couldn’t place it for a while, then I realized who it reminded me of: Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon. Which is downright unsettling.

I had to go to the Department of Homeland Security to get a stamp in my passport. It was one of those bitter cold rainy days. The security guard wouldn’t let me in until the family ahead of me was through the metal detector; then when he did let me in, he and his colleague laughed about the family and ostentatiously sprayed air freshener where they had been.

I said nothing. I shrank into myself and didn’t make eye contact.

I remember when the DHS logo was introduced, so it still looks fictional to me:

It scares me all the same.

A week later we had a work meeting about our health care options. There’s a Bush-era plan that lets young, rich and healthy people opt out of the general pool of employees, thus lowering their own health care costs at everyone else’s expense.

I was listening to the agent explain the plan, but I was also listening to the Republican talking points he had complacently absorbed, very much against his own self-interest; and I was simultaneously translating those Republican talking points into my own Marxist deconstruction of them.

I’ve been doing this a lot lately. It’s exhausting and disturbing. I lost my temper and walked out.

My difficulty with authority is that the older I get and the more experience I have with it, the harder it is to ignore the essential violence of the plutocratic state.

Item the first: When I fell off Bella I landed on the point of my hip. I was kinda stiff for a few days but mostly okay, and even had a riding lesson in the midst of it; but then I had an evening lesson with Dez and Dez was eeeeville; no-stirrups, trot over a crossbar and canter out from it evil. I could not do it. I can half-ass most things on a horse, but this felt like there was a pointy bit of metal jammed into my hip joint, so I had to opt out. Mehness, and likewise mehitude! I was actively limping all weekend, which suhuhuhucked, because that weekend we went to China Camp with the camping gang, who are all great fun and who love to hike. My hip was so hurty Saturday night that it took me forever to get to sleep, even in our lovely tent under the lovely trees.

Lucky J and I had dug some old Burning Man camping armchairs outta the attic, because I jammed myself into one of those Sunday morning and read books for a couple of hours while the able-bodied – including, humiliatingly, my four-year-old – circumnavigated Turtle Back Hill. This was follow-the-sun sloth, because I had to keep dragging my chair into new sunbeams in the woods at our campsite. Eventually the chair had little tracks behind it, as do rocks on Racetrack Playa. Anyway, enough rest and being lazy and I started to get the circulation back in my toes, and on Tuesday night I had a decentish ride on Omni, the big handsome black off-the-track Thoroughbred I have been riding lately.

Omni is item the second. He’s way dumber than lovely Bella but he’s brave and strong and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly. He reminds me a little bit of Scottie in that you talk to him through his cadence, lengthening and shortening the rhythm of his stride. But Scottie was a big chicken, and Omni’s not afraid of anything. I am, you’ll be relieved to hear, not getting attached to him at all; when I secretly think of him as Black Beauty I am merely being ironic. The other day, when the message I was passing along the reins to him was “I love you, I love you, I love you,” was an inexplicable error for which the management apologizes; the relevant brain centres have been summarily fired.

Item the third is maps. One reason I adore China Camp is because it is surrounded by wetlands, so that the map of it always reminds me of the awesome map in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water:

What made it even awesomer this time was reading Secret Water to Claire. We’ve been having a revival of Swallows & Amazons fever ever since Liz moved into a houseboat and Danny bought Daisy. I see that Liz has been doing some cartography of her own.

Item the Fourth: glory but I have been having a brilliant run of books lately. I can especially recommend The Little Stranger and The Haunting of Hill House, two basically perfect Gothic horror stories; The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, which succeeded in making me even more upset about the DPRK, which is quite a feat; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the first book of popular science to reduce me to incoherent sobs three times – it encompasses the whole spectrum of what I think of as My America, from Wired to The Wire; everything by Peter Hessler, whose books are an excellent complement to that awesome Yellow Gorges documentary we saw, Up the Yangtze; The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think lingered in the back of my mind all through this Cambridge jaunt until I had the first glimmering, a couple of weeks ago, of insight into the way the Oxbridge experience was intentionally watered-down and exported throughout the English-speaking world, so that what I was given was not a classical education in that sense but a colonial simulacrum of one, the University of Sydney as a branch of the Scouts or Pony Club – not a new insight at the intellectual level (sidere mens eadem mutato, after all) but actually *felt* this time around, and now having to be processed; and on an entirely different note, a novel that has stayed with me ever since I read it much earlier this year, Michelle Huneven’s remarkable Blame.

Blame got me interested in AA, which turns out to have been heavily influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a copy of which is also on my nightstand waiting to be read, which is not altogether surprising as both the Huneven and the James were recommendations from Jessa Crispin, whose taste is sometimes enigmatic but never dull. Oh! I am so very fond of books, and of the San Francisco Public Library, and I am so lucky to have them.

Item the Fifth: I want to tell you about two awesome things that Claire said; forgive me. On the second-last morning in London we took McKenze out for a large and stodgy English breakfast. McKenze was amused at having overheard Julia describe her as “bossy”; we laughed, and asked the children whether McKenze was bossy or nice. Julia stubbornly stuck to “bossy”, but Claire said with what was to me quite surprising judiciousness: “bossy and nice.”

Later she came up with an idea for an art project for this year’s Balsa Man. I said that this year we could stay back from the fire, so she wouldn’t have to be scared about getting burned, and she said something that absolutely floored me:

“I wasn’t scared I would get burned. I was scared for some of the other people, who were being silly.”

She’s only seven. She was six when this happened, and she got in such a right state about it that I had assumed for a year without even thinking about it that she was terrified on her own behalf. I’d no idea she had such complex modelling of and empathy for complete strangers in place already. Some days I think maybe I am doing a few things right. But really I can’t take much credit for her remarkable and complicated self; it is, after all, her self.

I guess I did have a lot to say, and didn’t need the artificial constraint of Five Things Make A Post after all! Let me go back and rewrite the segues! Nah, bugrit. You know I love you, right?

My heroine this Ada Lovelace Day is Dr Elizabeth Flint of Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr Flint is New Zealand’s leading expert on desmids, which are single-celled freshwater algae of considerable beauty.

Dr Flint took her MSc degree at what was then Canterbury College in 1931. She moved to England where she monitored London’s water supply before working for the RAF’s Operational Research Section in World War Two. She returned to New Zealand in the fifties and wrote the three definitive books on desmid taxonomy.

Betty is also my mother-in-law’s godmother. I met her on a trip to Christchurch in, I think, January 2001. We talked nonstop for two hours at the cafe in the botanic gardens – for all her stature she is generous and curious and pragmatic and fiercely funny – and then she dropped us at the airport in the 1958 Ford Consul that she had bought brand new. She was working then but has since retired, although not particularly early: Betty will be 101 this year. She was, and is, tireless.

To women of her generation – to the Bettys and Rosalind Franklins and Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hoppers and to my Auntie Barb – my geek feminist sisters and I owe more than I can possibly say. These women light my way and let me see what I can be, and what my daughters can be.

A long plastic fringe as a flyscreen in front of a milk bar. Endless afternoons at the swimming pool. Christmas cake with marzipan and icing. A bruise-coloured cloud cracked by a bolt of lightning. Covert glasses of Baileys in our hotel room.

It is the Australia I remember from my childhood.

—–

With its art deco style and urbane hosts, the Playhouse Hotel is the ideal venue for a Roaring Twenties sex farce. Next time we should bring all our crushes, and no children.

—–

The memorial site for the Myall Creek Massacre is very moving.

“This is your inheritance,” I said to Jules as we piggybacked on ahead, moving quickly so the bullants wouldn’t bite my sandalled feet. “I’m sorry it doesn’t have more honour.”

“What is honour?” she asked, and I was enlightened.

Claire said: “I am against the white people, even though I am white.”

I said: “But some of the white people behaved very well. William Hobbs reported the murders, and Governor Gibbs prosecuted them.”

“It’s complicated,” said Jeremy.

—–

On the way home we rescued a snakeneck turtle from the middle of the highway.

If you go to flummery.org and scroll down to Handlebars, which is right now the second on the list, you’ll see the awesome inspiration for yesterday’s gloom. It’s a portrait of the Tenth Doctor as the lonely trickster God, getting increasingly out of control. It got me thinking about how the Doctor is in some ways the personification of Britain, or even of the Anglosphere: brilliant, in love with humanity, in love with cleverness, lacking a sense of proportion, ruthless, Death, destroyer of worlds.

It’s a remarkably prescient piece of work, foreshadowing not only the 2009 story arc of Doctor Who itself but also that of the Obama administration. But as the first-hand accounts start trickling out of the smoking embers of Copenhagen, it’s clear that the days of the Anglophone trickster are over. It was China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the USA that sat down in the decisive meeting, and it was China that prevailed. It’s the Monkey King’s century now. It’s his planet to destroy.

In some ways it’s more painful to live under the Obama administration than under Bush. You seriously never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? It’s impossible, however, to avoid the conclusion, if you sit down and look at this botch of a health care bill – women and children thrown under the bus again – and the near-total-disaster of Copenhagen – saved only by the man himself arriving in his Tardis at the last possible moment and salvaging something, anything from the wreckage.

I had hoped for so much more. I don’t know what. Comprehensive, single-payer health insurance and a binding treaty on climate change, for a start. I know Obama is at heart a moderate, a reformer, one who believes in institutions and working through them. I don’t know whether I am that moderate any more. I held on through the tumultuous summer and fall but when he committed tens of thousands more troops to the war in Afghanistan – I almost wrote fresh troops but they won’t be fresh, they’ll be the same tiny minority of working-class people on their sixth or seventh tour – the president broke my heart.

I am not saying I have better options. I guess that’s my point. I let myself dream of better days, and now those days are here and they involve a difficult and disappointing set of compromises with the real world and its constraints, and I no longer even have the fire of my outrage to keep me warm. Paul Krugman, who is rather like Jeremy in his infuriating habit of being right about everything all the time, tells me to suck it up. “If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.”

No one is coming to the rescue. Time to grow up.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

R: “I find myself unexpectedly very sad about Ted Kennedy.”

J: “Yeah, me too.”

*

Claire clocked heads with a kindergartener today and came away with a black eye and some shallow cuts. She spent the afternoon at my office and we wandered over to AG Ferrari for lunch.

R: “That’s the earthquake memorial.”

C, remembering earlier conversations: “Your grandmother was born three days after the Great Earthquake! I bet her mother was glad she wasn’t in San Francisco. Your grandmother’s mother is my great, great… wait, let me gather my greats.”

*

R (as I finish recounting this to Jeremy): “And then I exploded. All over Third Street. A fine red mist.”

(A clarification: I exploded with pride in my daughter, who gathers her greats; and not, as my father assumed, in a temper tantrum.)

Ursula Le Guin says: Offer your experience as your wisdom.

This is my country. This is where I am from:

I was born twenty miles from where this photograph was taken. I swam and fished in that water throughout my childhood. I rode my horse across those hills. I love this place beyond the telling of it. Today I am sitting in my office in San Francisco and missing my country right down to my bones.

Everything you see is stolen.

On this day 221 years ago, George Johnston stepped out of a boat and onto the sand of Sydney Cove. “Johnston received extensive land grants in areas of modern Petersham, Bankstown and Cabramatta… Johnston’s other grants included land which is now the suburb of Annandale, named for his property that was in turn named after the place of his birth. He and Ester Abrahams farmed and lived on this land with their children until the 1870s when it was sold and sub-divided for residential development.”

George’s daughter Blanche had a daughter she called Isabella, whose daughter also called Isabella had a daughter Brenda whose son Robin is my father. My family prospered and I was given an inheritance and an excellent university education. The people from whom the land was stolen have not prospered.

“Over the period 2002-2006, Indigenous Australians died from diabetes at nine times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians and from kidney diseases at four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians.”

“Over the period 2002-2006, Indigenous Australians died from hypertensive disease at four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians died from rheumatic heart disease (which predominantly affects children) at 9 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians.”

“Indigenous males and females died from avoidable causes at around 4 to 4.5 times the rate of non-Indigenous males and females.”

Nor have we finished stealing.

When we went to see Ric the day before we left, he was completely alert and present as he had not been on other visits. As soon as he saw me he wanted to talk about how much he was enjoying his book, and once we’d got him installed on the verandah with a cup of tea and some gingerbread men the girls had made for him, he turned out to be willing to answer questions he’d never wanted to answer before.

His mother’s name was Mildred Lyons. Richard’s grandfather Grantley Hyde Fitzhardinge was a NSW judge and himself the grandson of an earl, so there appears to have been some question about whether Mildred was Good Enough for the judge’s son, Ric’s father. The marriage went ahead, perhaps in the face of the judge’s disapproval, and turned out to be fairly unhappy. Mildred languished in Girilambone.

It’s remote today and must have been incredibly isolated then, although Ric points out with some pride that they did have a quite magnificent car. This was driven by everyone, over unsealed roads and recklessly, until its steering wheel came apart in Ric’s hands and it was abandoned to rust near the railway station. He liked the car. He did not, however, like horses or cattle or dogs, preferring books. He was not at all a country boy.

(On another memorable visit this trip, Lulworth had arranged a petting zoo. We found Ric in the garden gazing with considerable distaste at a calf, some goats and a poddy lamb. I dandled a sweet rabbit on my lap, and asked him: “Vermin?” “Oh yes,” he said, in his courtly way.)

Richard said Mildred was a wonderful mother, musical and artistic, and that she encouraged him in his interests and fully supported his desire to flee Girilambone. He went to school and university in Sydney and was halfway through an architecture degree when he had a great falling-out with his professor. This was in the late forties, after the war, and he managed to get a berth on a ship to London at two weeks’ notice. His family rallied round in and a terrific scramble supplied steam-trunks and a passport. His mother was still alive when he returned to Australia years later, but she died before Ric met Jan.

In this one conversation Ric spoke more about his childhood than in the rest of the thirteen years I’ve known him. Once he’d taken his degree in London he went on to have a lovely and interesting and productive life all over the world. Looking back on this life seems to afford him great pleasure, which is lucky, because old age and infirmity really have nothing else to recommend them that I can see.

The hardest thing to accept about Ric’s predicament is that this is about as good as it gets.

My dear old friend Garfield is back in Sydney after a decade in Russia working for Bloomberg. I asked him what it’s like to be in Australia again. “The trickiest part,” he said shrewdly, “is that Australia’s not the paradise we could imagine it was, before we came back.” Obama is saying more or less the same thing. I am still struggling with it. This is the happy ending? This is it? I made a life for myself in California, but Australia still tugs at my heart? I still need to clean out the cat tray? Ric doesn’t get any younger? We don’t get him back the way he was?

I watched as Barnaby and Jeremy helped him back into his walking frame, their hands so tender on his thin back. Ric raised good sons. He made meaning in his life.

It’s not enough. But I think it’s all we get.