Samir Chopra's Blog, page 101

RIP Nelson Mandela

I must have been an extraordinarily ignorant teenager because the first time I heard of Nelson Mandela came only when I saw The Specials perform ‘Free Nelson Mandela‘ on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Who was Nelson Mandela, and why was it imperative that he be freed? What had this man done to get a song dedicated to him, one that had made the charts?

It was 1985, and South Africa was in the news. There were riots in its cities, talk of sanctions (not supported by the Reagan regime), and the acronym ANC loomed large. It was a good time to learn about Nelson Mandela’s life and deeds. Then, I satisfied myself with its bare particulars; they were sufficient to convince me the Specials were right. My first passport indicated that it was ‘valid for travel to all countries except the Republic of South Africa.’ I knew why.

A few years later, in 1990, as I finished the final semester of my first stint in graduate school in the US, Mandela was released. The day the news arrived in the US, I was attending a seminar on multi-dimensional scaling. (Don’t ask.) One of my classmates, also an Indian student, arrived late, breathlessly explaining his delay thanks to his being riveted by the live telecast of Mandela’s return to ‘normal life.’ So, yes, his release, for me and many others, counted as one of those ‘where were you when it happened’ moments.

A new South Africa emerged, one that could have easily regressed into retaliations and the usual violence that marked the departure of colonial and imperial regimes. Somehow Mandela expertly shepherded South Africa through that time, making concessions to the National Party that, rather than indicating his weakness, highlighted his strengths and the catholicity of his vision for the new nation that was being born.

It didn’t have an easy time of it and South Africa was lucky Mandela was around in its formative years. Now, it still faces formidable challenges from those usual suspects: poverty, crime, corrupt politicians, racial tensions. But that it is still around, a multi-racial democracy, in a region not known for political stability, is a miracle in itself. That happy fact owes a great deal to Mandela.

It has often been said that for any intractable political conflict to be solved, one generation must let go of the desire for revenge. Mandela passed on the options of bitterness, vengeance and punitive sanctions that were open to him and took on instead a strategy based on reconciliation, forgiveness and a keen desire to move on and leave the past behind. That alone marks him, quite easily, as one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century.

By 2001, I was good friends with an Afrikaner, a colleague at my university; he told me tales about attending Mandela’s first speech after his release and being stunned by the warm welcome him and his Afrikaner wife were accorded by the black South Africans in the audience; he told me his brother had named his son after Mandela (‘Rolihlahla’); we swapped stories about cricket and about South Africa’s miraculous return to the cricketing fold after the dismantling of apartheid.

Later that year, T__ arranged a research visit for me to the University of South Africa. (While at Robben Island, Mandela had studied its correspondence courses.)  In Pretoria, as is my wont when I visit a new city, I went to its bookstores. The first book I bought was Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. I read it during my stint in South Africa, enjoying every page, finally learning just how protracted his struggle for political and racial justice had been. Years later, my wife read my copy. I’ll buy my daughter her own.

RIP Madiba.

The Bureaucrat and the Supplicant’s Wheedle

In a couple of posts a month or so ago, I had written about bureaucrats and the torture they subject their clients to. (As I noted then, growing up in India I was one such client and then later, as an international student in the US, I dealt with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.) Then too, I wrote of the difficulties encountered while applying for a visa to travel to India. Well, I got that visa and I traveled. While doing so, I met more bureaucrats and learned a little more about myself and my relationship with them.

In India some minor banking work remained to be taken care of. (Yes, even long-term immigrants leave behind traces). These included: closing an old bank account; activating a dormant one; cashing some old savings bonds; applying for a new checkbook; you get the picture. My attempts to sort out these older, unresolved issues met with mixed success. Where I was successful, I learned that I had unconsciously or subconsciously adopted a very distinct style of speaking and body language when dealing with bureaucrats. I term this the ‘supplicant’s wheedle.’

In this little piece of performance art, the bureaucrat’s client, the aforementioned supplicant, starts a series of grovels and does not relent till his task is accomplished. What I noticed with a certain alarm–or was it pride?–was that a very old set of mannerisms and language, which I had perfected over years of practice during my teen years made its reappearance without any conscious bidding on my part.

To wit, I began speaking in a plaintive tone of voice; I used a more formal mode of address; I indicated in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that helping me would be a grand thing to do, one definitely within the apparently boundless capacities of the person in charge of my ‘issue.’ I wish I could have made an audio and video recording of myself engaging in this shameless bit of theater.

But perhaps terming my ‘performance’ as ‘theater’ would be misleading. I wasn’t acting; I was merely doing what felt the most natural to me given the circumstances and the task at hand. I was relying on an old survival strategy that had worked for me in the past when interacting with members of the bureaucrat’s species: abnegate yourself, raise up the bureaucrat, flatter his or her sense of self-importance and power. Engage in an old-fashioned Master and Slave dance.

The language I employed was crucial too. Most of those I interacted with would have spoken English fluently, but I relied on the vernacular. I was able to call on friendly colloquialisms,  crack a joke or two to pass the time while a form was being signed by some other officer, and on one occasion even talk about cricket as a way to ingratiate myself.

That word ‘ingratiate’, I think, is crucial. These maneuvers of mine, very similar to those adopted by many others like me, and in all probability copied from those I had witnessed in the past, were, and are, designed for the bureaucrats’ subject to make himself one worthy of being helped. Its success ensured that it would be repeated, adopted and handed down for further use. 

Our verbal and physical language bears the marks of many scars; the supplicant’s wheedle is revelatory in its own peculiar way.

Fearful Reveries, Penal Colonies and Death in the Dark Ocean

In Everyman (Vintage, 2006), Philip Roth writes of his central protagonist’s fears that intrude into an otherwise idyllic sojourn by the sea:

The only unsettling moments were at night, when they walked along the beach together. The dark sea rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars made Phoebe rapturous but frightened him. The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away –and the nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water–made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house.

I’m perhaps not as anxious about death as Roth’s ‘hero’–perhaps!–but the fear of the ocean, and especially at night, is a familiar one.

Years ago, during the second year of my two-year stint in Australia, as I began reading Robert Hughes‘ epic history of its convict years, The Fatal Shore,  I paused when I came to the following description of the ocean waters around Sydney Harbor:

Long swells boil into the cliff in a boiling white lather, flinging veils of water hundreds of feet into the air.

I was familiar, in a fashion, with the wildness thus described. Shortly after my arrival in Sydney, thanks to a good friend, I had been taken for a yacht ride through the Harbour, under the Sydney Bridge and past the Opera House, out to the heads where the open ocean was visible. As we sailed out, the formerly benign waves that bore our craft became steadily more feral, acquiring a shape, substance and heft not previously visible. By the time we had reached our turning around point, walls of green water were bearing down on us, their impact minimized by the skillful helmsmanship of our captain.  We were not skittled; we rode the waves well. But it was time to retreat into the safer waters of Sydney Harbour.

I didn’t forget those roiling waters, especially because I spent a year living at Bondi Beach, slowly becoming familiar with its crushing breakers, its foaming ‘big ones’, that so delighted surfers and terrorized mere mortals. On Christmas Day 2001, I ventured into the waters for a morning swim before heading out for the afternoon’s barbecuing, and found myself retreating a mere fifteen minutes later; I had been flung down, far too often for my liking, face down into Bondi’s white sands, by waves that came roaring in, again and again, relentless in their bruising power.

The thought of those same towering waters at night filled me with dread. What was it like, out on the open waters that were visible from Bondi’s cliffs? It was with some incredulity then, that I read in Hughes’ book of the desperate convicts who, beaten and chastised beyond bearing. had decided to run away from their penal confinement and cast themselves into the open waters at night, hoping somehow to wash up on a distant, safer, shore.

There are many imagined deaths that afflict me with nauseating fear. Among them, occupying an elevated rank, are those of the brutalized souls who thought that a dark roaring ocean was a safer place than the tyranny of their jailers.

Children and Nostalgia

I often find myself talking or writing about nostalgia. As I said here a little while ago:

I’m an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are supposed to be my perennial conditions.

In that same post, I remarked too, on the particular manifestations of both kinds of nostalgia–restorative, which concerns itself with returning to the lost home and reflective, which concerns itself with longing and the sense of loss–in my being.

I’ve just returned from a four-week long journey to the land that used to be ‘home’, so I’ve certainly had occasion to think a bit more about this old ailment–for that’s what nostalgia is–of mine.

The nostalgia associated with this particular trip of mine was interestingly colored by the presence of a new companion: my 11-month old daughter. She ensured that an established romantic trope–the immigrant travels ‘home’ with his offspring–was immediately made visible to me as I traveled. I was conscious–with varying levels of awareness–that I was ‘introducing the child to her ancestral lands’, ‘taking her to her “origins”‘, that ‘the wheel was coming full circle’ and so on. Of course, my daughter was only ten months old when her ‘epic homecoming’ began so there is little chance that she will retain any of her impressions. But the photographs of her travels and the conversations she might yet have with her parents in the future could trigger some interesting and possibly productive ruminations.

My daughter’s presence meant that I constantly confronted questions about my own past and future as I watched her interact with my family in India: Had her birth, in Brooklyn, guaranteed, once and for all, that I would never ‘go back home’? (‘Return’ was always an exceedingly unlikely possibility but the birth of a child renders it even more remote, more improbable than the presence of a partner did.) Would I be able to teach her an Indian language? (This was a thought triggered by some persistent raising of the question by my family; my short response: I’m skeptical.) And perhaps most poignantly, what would her grandparents have thought of her? (My daughter bears my mother’s name as her middle name, so this thought isn’t exactly too distant for me.)

Because I was traveling with my daughter, I was even more conscious than usual that it had been a long time–very long!–since I had traveled away from ‘home’. Having a child happened late in my life–long after graduation, tenure, promotion, marriage and all of the rest–so my sense of a long journey undertaken was made particularly acute.

Lastly, I was in a land which had paid witness to my childhood. As I watched my daughter crawl about, interacting noisily with all and sundry, tasting new flavors and foods, her Brooklyn nap schedule thrown out the window, I wondered about my own rearing by my parents. I’ve thought about that question before but now, it was raised with a distinctive urgency and force.

These experiences then, made possible by the presence of an infant, were all productive of reflective nostalgia too. My return to the US was not as painful as it has been in the past, largely because I became so quickly caught up in her needs: a new daycare arrangement, an altered sleep schedule etc.

In this, as in many other domains, my daughter retains the capacity to radically reconfigure my experiences.

From a Safe Distance: Reading about Mountaineering

Reading books about mountaineering–written by mountaineers–reminds me of reading books about physics written by physicists. In both cases, I’ve flirted–ever so lightly–with the subject matter: in the case of physics, I’ve done high-school physics, taken a graduate level class in mathematical methods for physicists, taught myself the basic mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, read philosophy of physics monographs and journal articles; and so on.  In the case of mountaineering, I’ve done some high-altitude hiking and basic climbing in a variety of locales (the Himalayas, the Andes, New Zealand etc). In both cases, I know just enough of the difficulty of the work described to understand it and to be in awe of those capable of it: I am in awe of the pristine beauty of the theoretical foundations of modern physics; I wish I were capable of manipulating these structures that intrigue me so. I am staggered by the fearsome beauty of the world’s really big mountains; I only wish I were brave and skilled enough to attempt climbing them.

Among the many pleasures of my just-concluded trip to India–with my wife and daughter–was the chance to dip into my brother’s small, but high-quality, mountaineering library. So, while in India, I read: The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna–the World’s Deadliest Peak by Ed Viesturs; Everest: Alone at the Summit by Stephen Venables; Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer by Anatoli Boukreev; and Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. Viestur’s book details his attempts to scale the deadliest eight-thousander of them all, Annapurna; Venables’ the alpine-style ascent of Everest from the Kangshung Face in 1988; Simpson’s his memorable escape to safety after suffering a near-fatal accident while descending from a successful climb of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes; Boukreev’s is a collection of diary entries translated from the original Russian, which provide some insight into the mind of a man who found himself playing a central role in the controversy surrounding the 1996 disaster on Everest.

In each case, there are stories of extreme human deprivation and endeavor, and descriptions of unimaginably harsh environmental conditions: the mountains are no place for the faint-hearted. Every one of the mountaineers above is a brave man, but each finds and experiences terror in the solitary high reaches of a big mountain: Viesturs–arguably the most self-avowedly cautious major alpinist of all–finds it on Annapurna’s treacherous, avalanche-prone slopes; Simpson experiences it during his painful crawl back down the Siula Grande glacier; Venables during his exhausting descent from Everest’s summit; Boukreev on many a wind-swept face of the big peaks he so masterfully climbed during his tragically short career.

Thus, to read the physicist’s or mountaineer’s biography or autobiography is to create and sustain a state of admiration and awe. In the case of mountaineering, I experience another emotion: the stirrings of a very primal fear. The heights, the extreme cold, the loneliness, the sustained, persistent state of exhaustion, all these add up to an experience that strikes me as almost unbearably unpleasant and fearful. Those who can undertake it again and again are, as far as I’m concerned, easily worthy of admiration.

From a safe distance.

Go Hack Yourself

I have been travelling and unable to post for the past couple of days. In the meantime, here is a link to Richard Marshall interviewing me at 3AM Magazine.

 

 

 

Journalism Should Embody Anarchist Ideals

Bill Keller‘s lengthy online exchange with Glenn Greenwald makes for very interesting reading. It illuminates a great deal, especially the modern ‘mainstream’ understanding of journalism–as ‘objective’ reporter of ‘facts’–and its supposed ‘responsibilities’ and the ‘alternative’ view of journalism as fundamentally adversarial, beholden to no nation or state, dedicated to exposing the machinations of the powerful.

Greenwald’s critique of the former view is, as might be expected, quite pungent:

[T]his model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms….The relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who do not, because the latter category is mythical. The relevant distinction is between journalists who honestly disclose their subjective assumptions and political values and those who dishonestly pretend they have none or conceal them from their readers….all journalism is a form of activism.

That last sentence is crucial: it takes journalism out of the sphere of some imagined realm whose contours resemble that of an archetypal scientific laboratory where men in white coats are replaced by reporters with notepads. These diligent collectors and tabulators merely report their observations of little parcels of reality called ‘facts’.

Instead, journalism turns into a form of political activity, its participants struggling just like any other political player to further some ends and not others. In a democratic society’s politics, the journalists are those players whose role is to report on, and make transparent, the workings of those in power. This power is not insignificant: the state can imprison, silence and immiserate its citizens; it can declare war and martial law; it possesses a monopoly of power, and in the modern state, this power is awesome indeed.

This asymmetrical distribution of power can only be offset and compensated for, by way of protecting those who are subject to it, if they are kept fully apprised of their rulers’ doings and deeds. What the citizenry does not possess by way of material power it strives to obtain by means of information and knowledge. Requests for secrecy, for coyness, for message modification, are, all too often, disingenuous requests that the balance of power be tipped back the other way. Thus, we best understand ‘journalist’ as merely a fancy name for ‘citizen activist dedicated to the full transparency of governmentality.’ A journalist represents the segment of the polity dedicated to making the powerful cower, not preen and strut; he is not an observer of the political system, he is part of it.

Understood in this way, a journalist embodies an anarchist ideal: the rejection of opaque, unaccountable power.  The profession’s basic stance is skeptical and adversarial; it should maintain a distance from those in power so that they may be critiqued more frankly and critically. This entails a prickly relationship with those in power, one with many rough edges. But those unable to deal with this consequent unpleasantness would be well advised to stay out of the proverbial kitchen. Critics aren’t supposed to have too many friends.

Tim Kreider and the Problem of Too Many Writers

Tim Kreider has a very familiar sounding complaint in the New York Times. It is familiar because his article follows a well-worn template of talking about the Brave New Bad World of Free Content, and because the Times routinely publishes such Op-Eds. Like most screeds put out by what I have termed ‘the whining artist‘ it is incoherent.

This sentence is the heart of the complaint:

[In] our information economy..“paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom.

You’ve heard it before: writers are being asked to write for free; no one values writing any more; writers won’t write any more if they don’t get ‘paid’. And so on. (Musicians often make similar complaints.)

This sentence though, does not inspire confidence that Krieder has the slightest clue of what he is talking about:

I spent 20 years and wrote thousands of pages learning the trivial craft of putting sentences together. My parents blew tens of thousands of 1980s dollars on tuition at a prestigious institution to train me for this job. They also put my sister the pulmonologist through medical school, and as far as I know nobody ever asks her to perform a quick lobectomy — doesn’t have to be anything fancy, maybe just in her spare time, whatever she can do would be great — because it’ll help get her name out there.

I’m guessing a pulmonologist is not in the business of producing intangible material that can be effortlessly copied and distributed at minimal cost. Furthermore, barriers to the market for pulmonologist are high: years of expensive education, apprenticeships etc. It’s a pity Kreider’s parents blew so much money on training him to be a writer; perhaps they didn’t realize that these days just about everyone and anyone thinks they can be a writer. And too many of them act on this belief.

That brings us to the heart of the matter. I too, would like everything, all the time, for free. I realize quickly enough that some things in this modern world are not free and yet others–depending on their relative scarcity–are almost free.

For instance, once I’ve paid my internet subscriber’s monthly fee, I can read unlimited amounts of political opinion; everyone has one, and everyone wants to share it with me. I can also read unlimited amounts of poetry, short stories, essays, and so on. There are, it seems, many, many writers around these days. What is it that makes the writing profession so attractive, that so many writers, according to Kreider, are giving their work away for free?

The answer, I thought, was obvious: for a while, thanks to a very particularly structured industry that grew up around it, writing made money and fame for some writers. These writers are cultural icons, giants who stalk the land. Their lives beguile us; we want to be like them. Their fame and riches made many people forget that they were exceptions, and that most writers still failed to make a living. Even the writing lifestyle began to seem glamorous: all that drinking and hanging out in cafes. And didn’t Arthur Miller hook up with Marilyn Monroe?

Writing seems easy. Why not just pull up a piece of paper and a pen and write? Or a typewriter? Or now, a word-processor? Perhaps if you get lucky, you could be admitted to a ‘writing program’ and tap into all the contacts your professors have with agents, editors and publishers?

Soon you find that many, many others have the same dream. And everyone is scribbling away furiously. So many tools to write with; so many publishing platforms; so many lives and things to write about. There’s too much to read; how will I get readers to notice me in this sea of well-crafted words?

Perhaps by ‘exposure’? Perhaps by using my writing as a ‘loss-leader‘ so that I can secure that paying gig, that big contract, that advance, that book tour, that glossy jacket photo, that writer’s cabin on a remote island? Or if not, perhaps I can get a job teaching writing at a writer’s program that turns out more writers? Or less glamorously, perhaps I could teach writing at a college to incoming freshmen? That way, my writing will have made some money for me. Not directly, but indirectly. And then I can get to hang out in cafes and call myself a writer.

Written content is not scarce; quality written content still is; writers need to get noticed. The situation that Kreider then complains about–content being asked for, and being given away for free, just to get ‘noticed’–is almost inevitable.

It would help if writers would stop thinking of themselves as God’s Gift to Mankind and instead began regarding themselves as just another species of creative ‘producers’ whose ‘content’ is not very scarce, and lends itself to easy distribution and reproduction. Interestingly enough, I don’t read too many Op-Eds by artists saying that people are asking them to make paintings for free; they never had a content industry grow up around them and hence have no reason to not think that things are just as they have always been: most artists don’t make money from their art.

Perhaps the fame and riches of the writers of days gone by was a blip in normal service, and not the norm?

Nicholas Carr on Automation’s Perils

Nicholas Carr offers us some interesting and thoughtful worries about automation in The Atlantic (‘All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,’ 23 October 2013). These worries center largely around de-skilling: as automation grows ever more sophisticated–and evidence suggests it is pushing into domains once thought to be inaccessible–humans will lose the precious know-how associated with them, setting themselves up for a situation in which once the technology fails–as it inevitably will–we run the risk of catastrophe. Carr’s examples are alarming; he highlights the use of the ‘substitution fallacy’ in standard defenses of automation; most usefully, he points out that as automation proceeds, all too-many humans will become merely its monitors; and finally, concludes:

Whether it’s a pilot on a flight deck, a doctor in an examination room, or an Inuit hunter on an ice floe, knowing demands doing. One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a difficult task, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but it’s the work itself—the means—that makes us who we are. Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don’t grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.

This is a good question to ask. I want to complicate the picture somewhat by raising some questions.

1. Does Carr want to suggest we roll back the advancing tide of automation? Should we demarcate some areas of human expertise as ‘too human’ or ‘too important’ to be automated? Should we discourage research on automated driving, navigation systems, spell checking and the like? Should we make a list of ‘core human cognitive capacities’ and then discourage research on automating these? How would we ‘discourage’ such research? By law, the market, or social norming? What would such judgments be based on?  Do we have a set of values that would animate them and that we could rely on?

2. There is a flip-side to the de-skilling blamed on automation: a tremendous increase in human knowledge and technical capacities has been required to create and implement the systems that so alarm us. Where does this knowledge and its associated power reside? As a society, we are witnessing the creation of a new elite of knowledgeable producers, those who make the gadgets that Carr worries are making us dumb. Are we, along with economic inequality, also creating cognitive inequality? Can the technical knowledge gained by work on automation help us alleviate the problems associated with de-skilling?

This latter consideration suggests that perhaps the real problem with automation is not automation per se but automation in a radically inegalitarian and economically skewed society like ours, one whose economic and moral priorities do not permit an adequate amelioration of the effects of automation, or permit a rich enough life that may allow those de-skilled by automation in some domains to develop and apply their talents elsewhere.

‘The Road’ and the Centrality of Love for Existence

How can a difficult read be an easy one? It can be easy because the difficulty is compelling and seductive, because ‘difficult’ does not mean ‘obscure’, because difficult can be worthy of admiration.

A few days ago, when I saw John Hillcoat‘s The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy‘s novel of the same name, I had not yet read it. Today I did so. It was an unputdownable book that pulled me into its grasp and didn’t let go till I was done, its pages all turned and marked ‘read.’ It was an easy read for the reasons mentioned above; McCarthy is a virtuosic writer, a master of the  spare and savage prose he deploys to bring alive a chilling, gray, slowly sickening and dying world; you read because are compelled to. And The Road is a difficult book because of its central subject: the possibility and desirability of hope in a world without one.

Why live if there is nothing to live for? This is not an easy question to answer. Is continued existence a worthy enough objective to warrant endless self-privation and misery, the killing of others, and acts of deliberate cruelty? In ‘normal life’ we may excuse seeming exceptions to the moral order we dimly glimpse because we are convinced by some calculus of consequences that a ‘better world’ will be realized because of our actions. But what if the only outcomes to our actions are ignoble and base, narrowly conceived and realized?  In a world where existence never rises above the level of mere non-death, and is destined to never get better, why persist? The inhabitants of a world like the one through which the Man and the Boy journey resemble nothing quite as much as terminally ill patients. The contours of the ethical debate surrounding their demise will be similar to those engaged in by those who, like the Man and the Boy, persist and persevere in order to stay alive.  For their death is foretold; discomfort and despair is their only lot.

The Man’s wife sensed that there would be no survival if stronger reasons than wanting to preserve one’s own life are not found:

The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with some words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.

And for The Man, the existence of the boy will be all the reason he needs to go living before, eventually, his body and mind give way and he lays himself down to sleep. In the end, all the cruelty and privation of the world he left behind cannot disguise the fact that though ‘love’ is not a word that is uttered too often in it, it was always present when the Man and the Boy were together.