Loving in Silence and Stillness

A few weeks ago, I went to a Quaker meeting. It was a fascinating anthropological experience — if you’re unfamiliar, Quakers worship by sitting in a circle in silence, to be broken only when someone feels called to speak to the group. But I want to write more reflectively, today, about a topic the meeting inspired me to think of: love — and, more specifically, loving in silence and stillness.

Let me first motivate the question. When I got to the Quaker Meeting House at Bunhill Fields, adjacent to the cemetery where George Fox was buried, I was handed a nice pamphlet — Your first time at a Quaker meeting — that explained the philosophical-religious understanding of the meeting:

In the quietness of a Quaker meeting worshippers can become aware of a deep and powerful spirit of love and truth, transcending their ordinary experience. We seek to become united in love and strengthened in truth, so we enter a new way of living, despite the different ways we may account for this life-expanding experience.

A handbook —Advices & queries — describes, at paragraph 8, how “gathered stillness” at a Quaker meeting allows congregants to “feel the power of God’s love drawing us together and leading us.” This gathered stillness, to return to the first pamphlet, is meant to create space for people to “listen to the promptings of truth and love in our hearts.” These meetings, therefore, are “based on silence: a silence of waiting and listening.”

For the Quakers, then, gathered silence and stillness is a means to cultivate, feel, and channel love. Thus the question I want to explore in this post: In what sense do, or can, we love others by being with them in silence and stillness?

I wrote that my New Year’s resolution this year was to think more about love, and so let me try to place some parameters on how, specifically, I intend to do so. First, though my inspiration here is religious, I intend — in analogy to Shklar — to think not about a theological notion of love but about an emotion, an action, or a relation felt by and among people for things in the world. For the Quakers, and I suspect for many people of other faiths, being with others is a way to feel God’s love or to worship God. There is, I think, a kind of triangular relationship at play, where the self, others, and God are in some complex, mutual, and transcendental bind. I intend, however, to think solely at the corporeal level.

Second, I want to think about love as manifested in different experiences and spaces. I will not try to categorize (or even assume the existence of) different “kinds” of love. Rather, as Pitkin did with the concept of “representation,” I am going to assume there is some relevance to the fact that we express many emotions, activities, and states of being in terms of “love” and to try to think through the significance of those descriptors. Put more concretely, I assume there is some significance to the fact that we may meaningfully say that we “are in love” (either with or without some object), that we “have love,” “make love,” and “are loved”; that the objects of one’s “love” may range from friends to family to romantic partners, from deities to trivial pursuits to nations. And I will try, like Montaigne, to use my own experience as a kind of prism for thinking about this concept.

The question for this post — on loving in silence and stillness — is interesting because I think it draws my attention to complications in my own intuition. I associate love with an active, passionate, dialogic experience. It’s standard dating advice, for example, to pick an interactive activity — cooking or crafts — rather than a passive one (watching a movie); it’s said that a date goes poorly if the conversation is dull or filled with awkward silences. Surely silence and stillness are exactly what one doesn’t want.

But there is, of course, intuition in the opposite direction. For many people, it is a mark of comfort and ease, and perhaps even love, to be able to be with each other in silence and stillness. One friend told me about her parents, who love to sit together in silence. Montaigne thought the greatest friendships were effectively unions of people, where the friends’ souls “mix and work themselves into one piece”: “If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him [Montaigne’s best friend, Étienne de la Boétie], I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.” In my own experience, it is in moments of silence and stillness when I have felt closest to others: for example, during the bittersweet weeks after graduating high school, right before I was to leave Texas for a long time, when I was simply sitting in a car with a friend as the song “Rivers and Roads” played. It is in such moments, I think, when there is a simultaneity of thought and action that induces a feeling of communion, togetherness, even of oneness, as Montaigne felt.

Indeed, even at the Quaker meeting, I think I felt an inkling of what the pamphlet meant. There was a kind of transcendental experience in knowing that we were all experiencing together: hearing the same kids playing outside on the playground, the same drip of a leaky faucet; feeling the same breeze from an ajar door, just cold enough to make you feel slightly numb on your skin but not cold enough to make you shiver; periodically shuffling our feet and stretching our backs in the same motions as we settled into a shared experience of worship. I felt a kind of hyper-awareness that made me less aware of the people around me. I had never met, never seen, never spoken to the people around me; I didn’t know their names. And yet I did feel, at least to a degree, close and one with them.

But we weren’t actually one. We might have felt, as Montaigne would put it, “some little intercourse betwixt our souls,” but there was no true familiarity and knowledge of the others. In the hour we sat together, only one person stood up to speak, and her speech was miles from what I was thinking about. It reminded me of the rather obvious fact that no matter how much we shared bodily experiences, our minds could be — and likely were — totally apart.

If there is love in these moments of silence and stillness, it is an undirected and corporeal one — a unique kind of love indeed. It is undirected because it is an abstract love for others in the space, regardless of who they are (and, in fact, that love cannot depend on who they are, for we do not know anything about each other). This is a love that stems from the bodily experience of being together, of breathing the same air, feeling the same sun, resting in the same space. After all, I reflected after leaving the worship, the only difference between this Quaker meeting and meditating on one’s own, I think, is the concreteness of our fellowship. The meditator knows, of course, that there are others meditating in the world. They may meditate as part of some social organization, religious or merely associational. They may, therefore, have an “imagined community,” which of course has psychological force and may even induce a feeling of love, as Anderson taught. But there is an experiential difference in the imagined versus the embodied community.

To be physically together is to offer a foundation for loving one another. It may even be conducive to a very special love — “you can hear it in the silence,” Taylor Swift sings — but I did not feel the same force, the same pull, the same conviction, perhaps, from the silence and stillness in the group setting — one that induces a kind of generalized love — as in other experiences of love.

* * * * *

Last time I wrote, I was supposed to go to Barcelona for a trip. For various reasons, that failed. But I was sufficiently sad about it failing that I ended up doing a trip during that period to Bergamo, a city in Northern Italy (around thirty miles from Milan), mostly because I was able to find last-minute plane tickets for around twenty pounds (!) (Feb. 21–23). It was the first time I’d been to Italy, as well as the first time I’d traveled alone. It was a pretty nice experience.

When I first got into the city center, the sun was already setting; I knew all I would have time for is to wander around and then get dinner. Bergamo is essentially two cities — the “città bassa,” which is a more modern and normal “lower city,” and the “città altà,” the hilltop, fortressed, and older “high city.” The bus dropped me at the città bassa, and so there I explored. Very quickly I found my way into my first (of many) Catholic churches. It sounds silly, but I didn’t quite realize just how much Catholicism there would be in Italy. It was mind boggling, and each church was gorgeous. Basically all I did that night, though, was walk around, get dinner (I had a recommendation from the guy sitting next to me on the plane, which meant the place was amazing, but it was also mostly locals, i.e., they didn’t really accommodate English-speaking tourists), and then walk to the hostel. Something I learned about Italian food: they typically serve an espresso shot after dinner. But not only that, I was also given around half a bottle of wine with my dinner. Both the alcohol and caffeine kept me up, and I think I ended up getting only around four hours of sleep that night, which was unfortunate because I only had one real day in Bergamo.

The next day was to explore the high city. The walls form part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site — the Venetians captured Bergamo in the 1600s and used it as a kind of military outpost, so they also built some magnificent walls in the high city. There was also a museum, a tower with some gorgeous views, and what I think was a seminar that I wandered into. (Bergamo was the home of Pope John XXIII, Papa Giovanni XXIII, so there’s plenty of his memorabilia.) I had lunch that day at another local restaurant, where toward the end of the meal, a nice couple began talking to me. Funnily enough, they started in Chinese, and then when I told them I was an American, we transferred to English. They left me their business card, and it turns out they were Jehovah’s Witnesses (the first Jehovah’s Witnesses I have ever met!). Then the rest of the day was spent wandering into the lower city again, where I found some gelato, went into a more low-key church, and explored the commercial district of Bergamo. All in all, it was a simple trip, but I appreciated having time to be by myself, explore freely, and think. Plus, I did appreciate the variety of churches (I believe I went to ten in total). And on the flight back, I had the opportunity to marvel at the Alps. It drove home the miracle that was Hannibal crossing the alps with elephants.

The week after, I went to the Phantom of the Opera (March 4), which was weird, and then a day trip to Birmingham (March 5). We ended up seeing quite a bit in Birmingham because we were trying to make the most of our time. We saw multiple Anglican churches, a Sikh temple, a graveyard, a Shakespeare library and a Black Sabbath memorial, an absolutely gorgeous library, a mosque, plenty of pride, and a Tim Hortons (!?!). It was wholesome. I don’t know that I need to go back to Birmingham, but it was an enjoyable day trip.

The next Monday (March 7), my friend had pulled me into a trip to see the ballet (Swan Lake). It was . . . kind of boring. But I was impressed by the athleticism of the dancers and by the music.

That week was the admitted students week at NYU Law (March 7–9), which was pretty cool — I got to sit in on a conlaw class with Melissa Murray (!!!), to talk with Trevor Morrison, and to ask Jeremy Waldron about Judith Shklar. It was fun. Also, I’ve gotten access to a piano again — I joined the LSE Music Society, and so it’s been nice to get to play a bit. Then, the week after, the weather started getting nice, and I went to see the Kenwood House (the former home of the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield) with my LSE friend from last year (March 20). Also, I hanged out with a friend who goes to UCL, and she showed me Jeremy Bentham’s body!!!

Big B!

Most recently, I went to Lisbon with one of my old flatmates (March 20–23). It was a bit of funny timing: Portugal generally is the place that British people go on holiday to in order to escape the gloom in favor of the sun. But when we were there, London was warmer than Lisbon, and there were blue skies in London whereas Lisbon was extremely rainy. Alas, we still had a good time.

We arrived in Lisbon midday Sunday, and we were exploring the older part of town, the Alfama district. We found our way to the Lisbon Cathedral (Sé de Lisboa), went to a museum dedicated to Portugal’s experience with dictatorship (the Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade), got our first pastéis de nata (no other pastries/desserts, except perhaps the croissant flavored with port wine, was even close to worth it compared to simply trying different places’ pastéis de nata), walked to a cemetery (it was closed, but at least we got to see different parts of Lisbon), and then had dinner.

The next morning, we went to the castle — the Castelo de São Jorge — which was originally built by the Moors, although the hilltop was occupied much further back historically. There were some gorgeous views of the city, plus peacocks! We also stopped for some more pastéis de nata (we ended up trying them at six different places), went to the church near the castle, and then went to the ruins of a convent, which were turned into a museum. It was stunning architecturally, but it was a bizarre museum. I couldn’t figure out the logic for why there were certain things there: for example, there were lots of gorgeous azure tiles (trademark of Lisbon), but also Peruvian mummies! After that, the sun started coming out, and we walked to the major park in Lisbon (Parque Eduardo VII), where my friend wanted to sunbathe and rest while I kept exploring (I ended up seeing a mosque, walking through a local university campus, visiting a church, and seeing some aqueducts).

On Tuesday, we went to Belém, which is famous both as the place where explorers from Portugal set off (thus, there’s much nationalism — and, in my view, post-imperial melancholy — associated with the place) as well as where the President of Portugal lives. We got more pastéis de nata, went to the maritime museum (meh, not sure it was worth it), got lunch, then split ways: my friend wanted to go climbing, whereas I wanted to continue seeing the sights. I ended up wandering my way into a museum about a local school, a hill-top chapel (the Capela de São Jerónimo), the church of some Catholic sect (I didn’t even know that was a thing! It was the Santuário de Schoenstatt, part of the Apostolic Movement of Schoenstatt), visiting the Jerónimos Monastery (a UNESCO world heritage site!) and its accompanying church, and then running into a cool manifestation of international law: a park mural noting the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Outside of the Monastery, there was also a sign about the Treaty of Lisbon (2007), a major constitutional change in the European Union, which strengthened the power of the European Parliament (the body directly elected by European citizens) and functioned to create a more powerful EU by enabling the process of delegated and administrative rulemaking. It was great.

We flew out midday Wednesday, so we mostly just had a slow morning and had a nice brunch. I couldn’t resist buying some extra pastéis de nata for the trip home because they were so good.

Rose: Traveling has been really nice — it’s cool to see other parts of the world. ALSO, the day before I went to Bergamo, I became an uncle! Welcome to baby Alaska, born February 20, 2022. (She is very cute.)

Bud: I’m going home soon! Next weekend, I have a quick trip to Rome (April 2–4), then I’m flying to the Bay Area to visit Stanford. I’ll be home, after, from April 11–14, then I’m visiting Yale (April 14–15), and then coming back to London on April 16. It’ll be a tiring but exciting few weeks.

Thorn: I still feel knackered by that first night in Bergamo. Don’t make the mistake of drinking espresso after dinner unless you’re really good with caffeine! Also, it’s hitting me that my time in the UK is almost done, and it’s making me nostalgic. I will miss this city.

Gratitude: The skies have been clear, the sun is setting later and later, and I’ve had the chance to spent lots of time with loved ones. What else could one ask for?

Istanbul and Stonehenge

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, so I thought I’d do solely a life-updates post! I got back to the UK on January 10, and between then and January 13, I was mostly just working on finals. On January 13, I left for Istanbul, Turkey.

Jan. 13–16: Istanbul

We got in late January 13, such that we got to the area of our AirBnB around 11pm. We wanted to find food, and after a lot of searching, we ended up at a lovely restaurant that served very basic but really delicious food (I went back there on the evening before we left; two others went back a third time!).

Late-night Rice and Salad

January 14 was our first full day in Istanbul. We walked from our place to Taksim Square (Taksim Meydanı), where we saw our first (but certainly not our last) absolutely gorgeous mosque (predictably, the Taksim Mosque, Taksim Camii). We walked down Istiklal Street (İstiklal Cd) and also went to Çiçek Pasajı, both of which were recommended to us by my roommate. Istiklal Street is known as a commercial high street, a sort of Times Square or Oxford Street equivalent. It wasn’t as crowded as I think it’s supposed to be; you could tell the level of economic desperation. There many sparsely-walked streets and empty seats outside restaurants, with waiters eagerly beckoning tourists to sit down and try their food. It was a sad sight, if expected given the currency issues. But despite those circumstances, you could still tell how vibrant and beautiful the area was, and I loved wandering in it.

We happened by a beautiful Catholic church (Sent Antuan Kilisesi), where a very nice man gave me a postcard for free (I couldn’t find small enough denominations of cash to pay him, but I did donate some money to the church). Our destination for that morning was Galata Tower (Galata Kulesi), which gave us a 360-degree view of Istanbul. It was a glorious, if cold and windy, January day.

From there, we walked to Galata Bridge (Galata Köprüsü), which took us across the Golden Horn to the old city, where Constantinople was based (the section of the town is known as the Fatih district). (My roommate told me to look for people fishing on the bridge; as he suggested, there were lots of people fishing. Interestingly, it was highly gender-skewed, with few women fishing.) I’ve long wanted to see the Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya), and so I was super excited to get to the old city. What I didn’t expect, and what’s so hard to process if you’ve never been, is that Hagia Sophia actually blends in with the rest of the city. When you first get off Galata Bridge, you’re confronted with a huge mosque (I didn’t know its name until I googled it to write this post): the New Mosque (Yeni Camii). And there are mosques, cute and tiny but also massive and grand, all over the place. It was a bit of a surreal experience to be in a Muslim-majority country, because you hear the calls to prayer from all directions at the set times of day, and you see rows of people laying out carpets, often in the middle of the street, to do their prayers. I found it quite touching to see such devotion and faith. We walked through the Spice Bazaar (Mısır Çarşısı) and then the Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı) in search for lunch (it turns out neither has much food), and we finally found a shop right outside the Grand Bazaar. The shop was loveably chaotic: there was so much happening — men and women darting in and out of the building, orders being shouted and plates shoved in people’s faces, massive platters of food precariously walked around to be delivered to who-knows-where — and you kind of just had to yell your order with the restaurant worker, who was extremely kind to us. I’ve heard people say that Turkish people are extremely warm people; I couldn’t tell how much of that was their desire to get our tourist money, but certainly my experience throughout the trip accorded with that sentiment.

After lunch, we were ready for the main event: the Hagia Sophia. It did not disappoint. On the outside, it is truly grand — its dull red exterior and towering minarets, its iconic domes supporting the main dome. Hagia Sophia was originally built as the seat of the Eastern Orthodox church. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, it was converted to a mosque and, indeed, was the primary mosque for Istanbul until the creation of the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Sultan Ahmet Camii, right across the street). Then, with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, Hagia Sophia was made into a museum — a sign of a secularizing and liberalizing country devoted to religious freedom and toleration, as my roommate put it. In 2020, it was turned into a mosque again (to much controversy).

Hagia Sophia’s history has led to some really fascinating attributes:

Paintings: there were many paintings Christian paintings in the original Hagia Sophia, which were subsequently plastered over or destroyed under Ottoman rule due to Islamic opposition to pictorial representations of people (“Islamic aniconism” is the term I learned through Wikipedia). Under Atatürk, when the building was turned into a museum, many of those Christian depictions were restored and displayed alongside the Ottoman additions. Today, the ones in the main prayer room are covered (there is a not-so-inconspicuous white curtain covering an image of the Virgin and baby Jesus), although surprising to me, there were figures that I found uncovered. I had a chat with one of the security guards, and with a bit of Google Translate, learned that the figural mosaics outside of the prayer room were okay; as he put it, Islam’s opposition to figural depictions is only in the context of prayer, since such representations are said to distract a person during their praying. I’m not sure how universally Muslims would agree with that sentiment, but it seemed a reasonable enough explanation for how authorities were dealing with Hagia Sophia.

Ottoman Medallions: there are eight large medallions in added in the late 1840s that depict the names of Allah, Muhammad, the Rashidun (the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” — the four political and religious leaders of Islam after the Prophet’s death: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali), Hassan, and Husayn. The origin of the divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims is in the legitimacy of the successors to the Prophet: the Sunnis like the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, whereas the Shia claim that the Prophet designated Ali to be his successor (and so they view Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman as illegitimate). So for Shia Muslims, Ali, Hassan, and Husayn are revered as the first three Imams; the most common sect of Shia Islam, the Twelvers, believe in twelve infallible Imams — successors to the Prophet, all part of his family (Ahl al-Bayt), who clarified the teachings of Islam and were all martyred. So what’s interesting is that the Ottomans in the nineteenth century decided to place figures revered by both Sunnis and Shias in this central mosque, which sheds some light into how they thought about the divide.

Prayer Lines: Muslims all pray in a certain direction (specifically, they face the Kaaba, in Mecca), and so usually mosques are built to facilitate that orientation. But because Hagia Sophia was originally a Christian church, it wasn’t built so; the new carpets added in 2020, which have prayer lines helping the faithful orient themselves, essentially run diagonally across the building.

Gender Segregation: all of the mosques I’d been in, until I went to Istanbul, were structurally gender-segregated. That is, they would have separate entrances and rooms for men and women, such that I wouldn’t even know where my female friends were in the mosque. Hagia Sophia wasn’t like that, and I didn’t even sense much of an informal gender divide, as I expected. There were requirements of modest dress for both men and women (for men, that meant wearing certain kinds of shirts and long pants; for women it included a headscarf as well as long pants). It felt like a rather secular experience, but for the occasional Muslim praying.

I could have spent hours wandering in Hagia Sophia and talking to folks there; it was really a soul-enriching experience. One aspect of being in a massive space like that, though, is that it got really cold! And so eventually we left to get some warm beverages. We caught a perfect time, though, because we heard the call to afternoon prayers. It was exciting in part because it was only the third or fourth call (adhan) that we’d heard since being in Turkey, but especially because it was special around Hagia Sophia. Right next to Hagia Sophia is the Blue Mosque, which really does rival the Hagia Sophia in magnificence and grandeur. And because they’re so close geographically, they actually alternate in delivering the call to prayer. It reminded me of the dialogue of a pianist tossing a melody between hands. I caught a video depicting part of the exchange; the beginning of the video is the call to prayer from the Blue Mosque, then after is the reply from Hagia Sophia.

We went to the Blue Mosque, caught a glimpse inside (but unfortunately there wasn’t too much to see because it was under renovation, as was much of the city), but then very luckily ran into some locals whom we had chatted with in Hagia Sophia.

It turned out they were students who volunteer as informal guides, and they invited us in for a cup of tea and to chat to us about Islam. It was such a heart-warming experience: we got a presentation about Islam and had the opportunity to chat with locals, which was really fun. The presenter, throughout his talk, kept mentioning that we should go visit the Süleymaniye Mosque (Süleymaniye Camii). So after we left the presentation, we decided to take his advice, and it turned out two of the women volunteering were on their way to the Süleymaniye Mosque anyway, so they walked us over there and chatted with us. (The woman I walked with, it turns out, was studying physics at a local university; it gave me immense pleasure to know that people struggle with physics everywhere.) At the Süleymaniye Mosque, we met with a few other volunteers, who sat down with us and continued telling us about their faith. In total, we spent around five hours in the three mosques. Funnily enough, when we were at a cultural center/reception office near Süleymaniye Mosque, we ran into the presenter from the Blue Mosque; his first reaction to seeing us at night: “I told you guys to visit the Suleymaniye Mosque, not to spend three hours there!” I couldn’t have been happier with how we spent our time. They even gave us tote bags and mugs depicting the Suleymaniye Mosque. (If you ever find your way to Istanbul, reach out to the organization; ask for Betul and Abdullatif, who are wonderful people. They even made time the week after to call me and chat about Islamic law.)

The next morning, January 15, the plan was to go see the Topkapı Palace (Topkapı Sarayı), which is right next to the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque. I went a bit early with two others because I wanted to explore more, so we walked around the waterside to see the Byzantine Walls and to explore the park. Topkapı Palace was where the Sultans used to live, and it’s a huge complex. I felt like I didn’t get to see enough of it; everything, to the smallest detail, was intricate. It reminded me a bit of the Palace of Westminster, where the grandeur actually disguises how ornate, upon close inspection, the building is. I enjoyed seeing the kitchens and an exhibit on coffee at the Palace. There’s also a mosque at the Palace for servants that I was very curious to see, but unfortunately it was closed. (We went to Istanbul at the trough of tourism season, which meant none of the stuff we saw was super crowded but also that a lot was under renovation.)

Lunch that day was really amazing (and incredibly cheap given the quality of food — we each paid on the order of 15 pounds for a five-star meal).

From there, we had some downtime to explore before trying to catch a ferry to go to the Asian side, because folks wanted to catch a sunset ferry. I had hoped to have enough time to go see the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, a kind of Pope-like figure (although not with the same kind of hierarchy as in the Roman Catholic Church) for the Eastern Orthodox Church. As mentioned earlier, the seat used to be at Hagia Sophia, but after the Ottomans turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque, it was moved — eventually to St. George’s Cathedral (Aya Yorgi Kilisesi), which was around a 20 minute taxi ride away from where we were. Alas, we didn’t have time to do both, though, so we just wandered the area (we passed by a nice mausoleum for some Ottoman big-wigs), and then we took the ferry to Kadıköy, a lively neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul. (Finding the ferry ended up being extremely stressful because there were five docks, and it was hard to find the correct one given that everything was in Turkish, but it eventually worked itself out. I had a bit of a sketchy encounter with a man selling tickets, but, again, everything worked out.) I was a bit saddened, though, that we didn’t really get to do much in Kadıköy; our dinner location was around a forty-minute walk away from the interesting parts of Kadıköy, so effectively all we did was take a ferry and then walk to a roof-top restaurant at a fancy hotel on the Asian side. We then taxied home, and a few of us went back to the first late-night restaurant that we went to to get food and chat with our new friends.

I flew out early the next morning on January 16.

Some takeaways from Istanbul:

• I really want to go back — I just loved the city and the people we met. And the city is just so fascinating: it felt like the crossroads of the Old World, both literally straddling the barrier between Europe and Asia but also reflecting an amalgamation of empires, from its conscious mimicry of Rome (Constantinople, like Rome, was built on seven hills) to its Greek influences and then to its Muslim and eastern attributes. Like London, everything is just built on top of older stuff, and so one feels history in a way that is difficult to imagine in comparison to America.

• I think doing a religious-themed tour of the city would be fascinating: to see more of the mosques (and a greater variety of them than just the huge Ottoman ones), but also the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Catholic churches, the synagogues, and everything else.

• The city’s animals really are notable: there are ownerless dogs and cats everywhere, just hanging out (including in mosques!). It was really cute.

January 16–22

After getting back from Istanbul, I had to scramble to finish my finals, and then I had a week of catching up with friends and getting back into the swing of things with the start of the new semester. I’ve ended up doing very little work for school this new term. I’m only doing two classes: a quantitative text analysis class (which is kind of boring but will hopefully be useful for my dissertation) and an ethnography class (which has kept me very engaged, although it does pose a lot of ethical questions in my head). One of my friends also pulled me into volunteering with her through an organization called the Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT). As I can tell, AMURT is the outgrowth of a spiritual movement with yogic roots, but the specific facet of our volunteering is to help with AMURT’s food distribution program: AMURT creates dozens of vegan meals and gives them to housing-insecure people each Thursday. They distribute right next to LSE campus, so it’s a logical way to help, and our specific role is in monitoring and evaluation, which means I get to use the skills I’m learning from my degree for something useful! It’s been a good time.

January 23–29

On Sunday (Jan. 23), I went to the Tate Modern with a Marshall friend, and then I went to a celebration for Fatima, one of the Prophet’s daughters and the wife of the Shia’s first Imam, Ali. Fatima, in other words, is a big deal for the Shia, and there was a lecture by a guy I’ve really enjoyed previously. The lecture ended up being rather strange, although it was a good opportunity to talk to my Shia friend about her understanding of gender roles. The next day (Jan. 24) was the first meeting of a night class that I’m taking — a Moral Philosophy and Islamic Ethics class, also with my Shia friend. I should have expected it, but the entire class so far has just been about Aristotle. It’s also a bit unfortunate in that the lecturer hasn’t given us any readings, and so I don’t feel like I’m learning very much. Tuesday was the first Carlyle Lecture: each year, Oxford invites an academic to spend a semester at the University delivering a weekly themed lecture. This year’s lectures are delivered by Sam Moyn, a Yale Law historian whose work I’ve always thought to be interesting (if a bit … unreadable). But more importantly, his first lecture was on Judith Shklar (who herself delivered the Carlyle Lectures in the 1980s — I believe hers were about Montesquieu, but I haven’t figured out a way to track down the recordings). I was originally intending to go to Oxford to see the lecture, but because of Covid restrictions, I could only watch the recording and read the book he was basing the lecture on (Shklar’s first book: After Utopia). I convinced a few friends to watch the lecture with me, and we met up on Friday (Jan. 28) to chat about it. I’ve now convinced them, and a few others, to do a semi-weekly reading group around Shklar: if anyone’s interested, here’s the materials. We’ve only had one meeting so far, but our next one is this Wednesday (Feb. 16). I’ve also been reading other stuff with others — Augustine’s Confessions with one friend (a few books at a time, Jan. 20, Jan. 28, Feb. 8); C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and then Jane Austen’s Persuasion with a different friend (Feb. 2, Feb. 9) — and for my own interest, Maxime Rodinson’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad. I’ve had a lot more time to read this semester, but by virtue of reading with other people, I’ve forced myself to read more, which has been good.

January 30–February 5

Due to the Lunar New Year, I got to see a bunch of friends this week (Jan. 30, Feb. 5), which was nice! I also heard good news about law school, so one of my friends took me out to celebrate — we went to see Hamilton (Feb. 5); it was good stuff, although Lin-Manuel Miranda did James Madison dirty. My old flatmate was in town, so we got fish and chips together and caught up, which was wonderful (Feb. 3). I went to a Shabbat service for the first time; they had an angelic choir, and the synagogue was gorgeous (Feb. 5). Also, I went to Stonehenge (Feb. 1) finally! It was surprisingly cool — I totally thought it would be underwhelming, but the stones really are massive, and its construction is a testament to early engineering (and human will). One fact they kind of conceal, though: a lot of the stones have actually fallen due to weather, and so some of the stones have been put back upright with modern technology, which kind of makes the structure seem less impressive. But basically, the upright stones are all variable length, and the way they got them to be the same height was to dig differentially deep holes; as one would expect, the rocks placed in shallower holes were more liable to tipping. Near Stonehenge is Salisbury, so my friend and I went to go see the Cathedral there (beautiful building, with very nice volunteer tour guides — perhaps a theme of this post) and the copy of the 1215 Magna Carta, one of only four extant copies at this point.

February 6–12

Last week wasn’t super interesting beyond doing reading with friends! On Saturday (Feb. 12), I met up with a Marshall friend to do a walk around the Rotherhithe area, which is Southeast London but less far east as where I live. We ended up at the Mayflower Pub: yeah — that Mayflower. Because the pilgrims originally set out from Rotherhithe, the nearby pub was renamed the Mayflower. Also, we got some really good Chinese food (the best I’ve had in London) in Rotherhithe. So it was a good time.

Buds: I’m going to Barcelona on Saturday (Feb. 19), and I am really excited to keep going with this reading group. I hope it will stay afloat, although I suspect I’m trying to give too much reading.

Thorns: I’ve begun doing financial aid applications for law school, which is not so fun! Taxes are too complicated for me.

Gratitude: I am grateful for all the people who welcomed me to their spaces throughout this last month, whether in Salisbury, the synagogue, or Hagia Sophia. It was truly a privilege.

On Diversity and 2021

A family friend recently asked me a question: “What do you think Indians are smart at?”

I was puzzled, in part because there were many assumptions going into that question that I didn’t share, but also because this is not a kind of question that I usually think about. I shrugged.

Here’s another example. Just a few weeks ago, when I was visiting a friend on the East Coast (more on this later), one of his roommates made it clear that he didn’t think women should be allowed to drive. The roommate’s argument, as I understood it, was that women are too incompetent to be safe drivers. It was a jarring assertion to hear.

I felt extremely alienated from the person I was talking to in both moments. In a sense, these are moments when I was engaging with the most diverse people I’ll meet. Diversity is of axiomatic value to me, which implies that I should seek encounters with people who think fundamentally different ideas than I do. But those conversations didn’t feel particularly valuable. So I want to devote this post to thinking through what it means to live a diverse life and to celebrate diversity.

*

When valuing diversity, two questions come to my head. First is a question of moral repugnance: what if the diverse perspective is morally abhorrent? Is it valuable, for example, to be exposed to perspectives that do not hold that all people are fundamentally equal and dignified?

I once asked a beloved high school teacher about an issue that was troubling me. I was listening to a lot of Avril Lavigne at the time (it was a phase), and there was a lyric that jumped out at me because it celebrates a night where she blacked out and hints that her romantic interest drugged her. It didn’t sit well with me to celebrate such an experience, and so I asked my teacher whether she thought I should stop listening to it. She explained that she thought everything you consume inevitably shapes you, and so she would be uncomfortable listening to the song. Listening to the song, she intimated, would subtly change how I think and feel even if I consciously resisted the implications.

Her advice has stuck with me when thinking about diversity because it suggests that whom we associate with shapes who we become. In that sense, there is much force to the concern about moral repugnance. It’s just a spin on the conventional wisdom about parenting: ensure that your kids don’t end up in “the wrong crowd.” People don’t usually change their beliefs due to arguments or rational thinking; it’s by spending time with people — by normalizing and modeling their behavior — that people change. Does engaging with difference that is morally repugnant degrade your own sensibilities? And, more basically, is it a bad time? Is it frustrating and grating and tiring to engage with those who are so alien?

I’ve tried to manage these concerns by being curious when meeting someone different. In other words, rather than judging someone for having a “bad take,” I try to be puzzled — to understand how, or why, they came to think the way they do. I’ve realized, though, that this approach raises at least two subsidiary concerns. First, it may reduce people to objects — it may treat them as phenomena “out there” to be studied rather than real, living, thinking humans to be celebrated. Second, it may turn people off. A friend recently told me that I sometimes ask questions too pointedly and that I come off as aggressive when I do so. In hindsight, I can understand where the perception comes from (there are times when I’m bothered by someone and I do ask very pointed questions!). And so while I can work on both of these concerns, they do suggest that being puzzled won’t always work at allowing me to connect across diversity.

* *

Let me assume away those problems, though, and reflect on a second question that challenges my relationship to a diverse other: the issue of mirroring. In social science research, we always need to think about how data are produced. In lots of hard science, we can assume independence between the phenomena we are observing and the observation itself. But in social science, that is almost never true. Read a survey and you’ll notice how much question wording matters. Interview someone and you’ll find that your questions, tone, emotions — even your dress — shape their responses. The postmodern social scientists rightly, I think, call upon us to reflect on our role in creating data — to be reflexive about our positionality, to use the academic jargon.

One way to think about this point is that the encounter with a “diverse other” is definitionally about oneself. You need to know who you are to know who is different from you. There is no difference except in opposition to sameness. When encountering someone who is different, then, you can opt for two different strategies. You can seek to reduce difference: to “code switch” and talk like them; to make small talk over common experiences (“if the weather continues, we are in for a lovely summer”); to seek common ground. But you can also do the opposite — to seek to lean into differences. But doing so also, I think, requires you to box them in — to ask the other, in effect, to perform their difference as you understand it.

I’ve noticed this tendency with my own behavior. Over the last four months especially, I’ve been meeting a lot of deeply religious people, whether through the Anglican church I’ve been attending, an interfaith seminar I took at LSE, or various Muslim events a friend has been taking me to. I find that in meeting people, I’m increasingly boxing them into certain facets of their faith. I push them on points of theology. I read scripture with them. I ask about their understanding of ethics. I do with the religious, in other words, what I do with the nonreligious. Perhaps it’s about the Bible rather than the London Review of Books, but the conversations are hardly different in form. And when I encounter people who have different relationships with their faith — people who aren’t so theologically or doctrinally inclined — the conversations are often more stunted and difficult. I met a Marshall who was raised with a Jewish background, and she basically felt no affinity for studying the Hebrew Bible. We talked about religion some, but it actually ended up being a somewhat awkward conversation in part due to my expectation that we could discuss scripture.

* * *

The problems of moral repugnance and mirroring are ultimately, I think, tests of the authenticity of my commitment to diversity. In some part of me, I feel a sense that I can’t really value diversity if I don’t spend time with people who hold views I find morally repugnant. In some part of me, I feel that I’ve failed to live a diverse life if the people around me behave like mirrors rather than performing some “authentic” diverse other.

But yearning for that kind of authentic diversity — the people who are really different — is probably a self-defeating goal. It’s self-defeating because it’s ultimately circular (it requires me to imagine the truly, radically “other” person to associate with) and it tends toward a kind of paranoid imagination (for I can always wonder whether another person is acting authentically different). And yet it’s not an unworthy goal. For I do believe in learning from difference, in seeking new perspectives and ideas and worldviews. The rub is to continue to seek difference and to learn from new perspectives while accepting that the “truly diverse” life is unattainable.

* * * *

The hero of my last year has been Judith Shklar, and she describes her book Ordinary Vices as “a tour of perplexities, not a guide for the perplexed.” She points to the value of noticing patterns and habits, even if — perhaps especially when — there's no good answer about what to do. The answer for Shklar regarding how to live in a world filled with the ordinary vices is essentially a non-answer: she implores us to exercise good judgment, to be reflective, to be aware. Virtue is about character, not any systematic political or ethical theory.

One of my original motivations for going to the Anglican church, as I wrote about last year, was to find some answer to Shklar’s challenge: how to cultivate an ethos of anti-cruelty and to minimize the ordinary vices while recognizing their inevitability. I don’t think I’ve found a particularly satisfactory answer in Christian teaching, but I have found a community with which to think through and work on these questions. And my exposure to Christianity has given me new questions to think about.

Since it’s now past the new year, I figured I ought to articulate some new goals. (For what it’s worth, my resolutions last year were wildly unsuccessful: of the 21 books I said I wanted to read, I fully read seven and partially read another three; I think I mailed around ten postcards, but I forgot to keep track; and I didn’t do any systematic thinking about my writing.)

This year, I’ll make the goal more amorphous (and thus easier to slip out of accountability for!). I want to think more about love, and I think I’ll want to do so in three separate ways.

• First, I want to read about love. I read a series of sermons by Martin Luther King, Jr., that I found thought-provoking if not fully satisfactory on the power of love. I’ll try to find other books (recommendations would be appreciated!), but most immediately, I’m thinking I’ll turn to C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Arendt, Baldwin, Tolstoy, and (shudders) Plato. Also perhaps some dating books.

• Second, I want to think more with others about love. I’ve begun writing down questions that I want people’s perspectives on, and so I figured I’ll just work them into conversations with friends and try to take notes. Maybe one day I’ll even write a blog post about it.

• Third, I’m going to try to get into dating. We’ll see how successfully this goes.

In addition, I am going to recommit to trying to blog regularly. To be fully realistic, I don’t know if I’ll write them weekly — both due to time constraints and because life has been less interesting on a week-by-week basis than when I first got to the UK — but I will try to keep it up.

* * * * *

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, so let me recap some aspects of life since mid-October, when I wrote my last blog post:

October 15 — I went to a Friday prayer with a Marshall friend in the year below me. Funnily enough, she’s both in my LSE program and was placed in my Marshall “welcoming-committee group,” so I’ve gotten to know her pretty well. We went to the East London Mosque. It’s an interesting feeling to be surrounded by so many people, all doing the same thing at the same time. It reminded me of the liturgies at Catholic Mass or at the Anglican church.

October 16 — I went up to Oxford to visit a few folks and to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I hadn’t been to Oxford yet. It really feels straight out of Harry Potter, very grandiose and medieval. I went to the big art museum — the Ashmolean — and had a most moving experience looking at a mid-twentieth-century Japanese print. It depicted, in idealized forms, a mother holding her baby. I’m not sure why that piece, in particular, was moving, but I think it was the combination of its abstraction — the perfectly round heads and simplified bodies — and the look of pure, calm love on both of the figures’ faces that felt so powerful. Unfortunately they didn’t allow pictures in that exhibit, and I can’t find the piece to share.

October 19 — There was a lecture held at the Inner Temple by the Selden Society, a society dedicated to legal history. The lecturer was John Baker, who wrote the standard textbook on English legal history (and the one that I read for my politics thesis), and he gave a lecture on the life of John Selden, who played an important role in the development of habeas jurisprudence and the Petition of Right. It was a pretty cool experience. And it turns out Selden is buried in the Middle Temple itself, so I got a picture of his grave. I also ended up spending some time chatting with some of the barristers there, which was not as nice of an experience. I came away with the strong feeling that they were making conversation as a way of testing people’s intelligence rather than trying to actually learn from different perspectives.

October 23 — The friend who took me to East London Mosque took me to another event, this time a celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. There was a lecture delivered by a Shia sheikh that I found really fascinating, and we had a good conversation on the way back about it. The lecture was about whether celebrating the Prophet’s birthday was bid’ah (an innovation) and thus unlawful under Islam. The lecturer had a very lawyerly approach to thinking through the question — he articulated the four reasons people offer to argue that celebrating the birthday is in fact unlawful, went through their textual and historical justifications, and then rejected each in turn. From an outsider’s perspective, I was struck by how much people of the same faith might differ on this question — evidently some view celebrating his birthday as strictly unlawful and thus punishable by law, whereas others think it is obligatory.

October 28–30 — The incoming Marshall cohort had its welcome week, and I also got to attend some of their events. I find these kinds of events really tiring — lots of networking-type conversations without much expectation or possibility of building longer-term connections. One nice benefit, though, is I got to meet my Marshall commissioner. The big-wigs who oversee the administration of the Marshall Scholarship are each assigned a set of Marshalls to become friends with, and my commissioner is a lord (literally! in the House of Lords!) who was a high up adviser to the Labour governments in the 1990s and 2000s. Cool stuff. Also, there was a Halloween party on the night of October 30. My friend and I went as Derry Girls — I was ostensibly Erin (hence the blonde wig), so I suppose my friend was Michelle, although we didn’t really try that hard to be specific characters. I’d never before worn a skirt (although what I had was closer to a kilt than a real skirt), so that was an interesting experience.

November 5 — I got high tea with the group of 2021 Marshalls I was assigned to welcome to London. It was very pleasant, although surprisingly difficult to coordinate. The food ended up being okay (high tea is never as good as one would hope; the ratio of sweets to savories is much too high), but it was good company. After, I went to a book talk; there was a book of hadith (sayings of the Prophet) released, and so my friend took me to see the release and to meet the authors. It was fun.

Afternoon Tea with 2021 Marshalls

November 6 — My friends got married! My one LSE friend from last year had been in a very long term relationship, but because she finished at LSE and was going to have visa issues, they decided just to pull the trigger and do the wedding. Her and her now-husband both insisted that the “marriage ceremony” (not a wedding!) was a mere formality, so they just had around a dozen friends and did it in the Islington town center. Their misty eyes, I must report, betrayed that the ceremony seemed to be more than mere formality to them, though. It was an a heartwarming afternoon. And it was interesting to meet their friends; I was by far the youngest person (everyone else was in the late twenties or early thirties), and almost everyone else was Australian (they’re both expats) and in finance. By nature of their stage in life, everyone else was either recently married, about to get married, or very much single. I was grateful to have been invited and gotten to share the moment with them.

After the marriage ceremony, I went to Cambridge; it was one of my former flatmates’ birthdays, so I went up there to celebrate with him. We made dumplings together. The dumplings probably are not passable by the standards of a Chinese mother, but for two Americans, I’d say we did decently.

November 8 — This was the first day of my interfaith religion seminar at LSE. The basic setup was that they had four themed panels, where they brought scholars/leaders from different faith traditions and had them dialogue on a certain topic: (1) What is truth? (2) What is justice? (3) What is the good life? and (4) What is community? The first day was a lecture by the leader of the LSE Faith Centre advocating for studying “religious imaginations,” the internal perspective of a faith tradition, i.e., faith as it is experienced rather than as a mechanical sociological or political phenomenon. I thought the lecture was interesting but not perhaps fully persuasive (I think the need for understanding religious imaginations depends on the research question at hand, and for many sociological or political scientific questions, the religious imagination is not so important a cause). The rest of the panels were quite fascinating, though, because I got to hear from folks from faith traditions I have only ever really known as abstract Wikipedia concepts: Sikhism, Jainism, Greek Orthodox Christianity, Baha’i, and Buddhism. There were also plenty of people from traditions that I have comparatively more experience with (different forms of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism). One downside of the setup is that you lose some of the particularities of the religion, because people tend to want to emphasize similarities in their faith traditions. It made me want to explore religions as they are felt as an insider rather than religions as they are presented to outsiders in an interfaith space.

November 12 — The Red (Taylor’s Version) release day! A friend and I embargoed listening to the album, and then we met up over dinner and wine to listen to it through together. It was a wonderful experience. Overall: All Too Well (the ten-minute and the sad girl autumn versions) is a masterpiece; Treacherous, State of Grace (both versions), and Stay Stay Stay have all improved; a few songs were disappointing (see, especially, Holy Ground and Everything Has Changed, although in part both songs were so good to begin with that improvement is difficult).

November 13 — The LSE Methodology Department took us on a field trip. We went to Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and the Allied codebreakers worked during World War II to decrypt German war communications, as dramatized by The Imitation Game. It was a very pleasant trip, although I was so tired after the late night of Taylor Swift listening and early morning that I didn’t take in as much as I probably should have.

November 14 — I’d been meaning to do a Random Walk for a while. The basic idea is to choose a place, walk until you hit an intersection, and then roll an n-sided dice (where n is the number of directions you can go, not including backwards) to decide where you go. I finally went on one with a friend! Our movement ended up being more linear than I expected, although we did end up going in circles in a park for a while.

November 20–27 — I had three Thanksgiving events this year, which was fun. (Ironically enough, though, I’m not sure we did formal thanks-giving at any of the three.) The first was hosted by the Anglican church I’ve been attending, although it was surprisingly diverse from a faith perspective — they invited people from many religious backgrounds, and it was a pretty secular experience beyond taking place in the basement of a church. The second was at my own place — my former flatmate came down from Cambridge and we cooked a meal together. The third was Marshall Thanksgiving, which was a lot. There were probably eighty people, and I was extremely tired that day for some reason. So I ended up doing a lot of dishes (it’s a great way to avoid having to interact very much with people).

December 1–3 — Strike! A bunch of universities across the UK were on strike, and so I didn’t go to class those days. I also joined the picket line on December 1. It was kind of fun, to be honest! I’ve never picketed before, but it’s a lot more enjoyable than canvassing: less solitary, less blatant rejection (the worst people do is walk past you, whereas with canvassing, you often get slammed doors in your face), and more opportunity to talk to random folks. I met some of the library staff at LSE, along with an LSE Government Department professor. I also saw a lot of the younger Methodology Department professors out at the picket line; it was nice to meet them in a more informal capacity and to hear insider perspectives on the department. On December 1, I also met up with my other former flatmate (he’s still living in London, in his own apartment), and we cooked a meal together. I went to Winter Wonderland, a Christmas-themed county fair basically, on December 2. I’d say it was mediocre (very cold, very expensive, not super interesting stuff to do), although I enjoyed thinking about the various games; the friend I was with was very astute and able to figure out how the games tricked you into thinking they were easier than they are.

December 6–10 — This was the last week I was in town, so it was filled with lots of friends, coffee, and good food. Here are some pictures from around London that week:

December 10–now — I went on a trip to the East Coast and then came home! I started in DC, because I’d really missed DC (it was the first time I’ve been since 2018). In 2018, I left the city feeling very inspired: I was surrounded by really passionate and smart people working on issues that I felt mattered, and it made me very confident that I wanted to go back for my career. This time, I felt more ambivalent about the city, but I was still glad to see old friends. I also felt like a lot of the monuments were a lot more powerful this time around, especially the MLK, Lincoln, and American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorials.

After that, I spent a few days in New York City. I liked the city a lot more than I thought I would. Last time I was in DC/NYC, I felt New York was overwhelming but DC was much more manageable; this time, I thought the opposite. In New York, I got to meet up with a lot of old high school friends, as well as a really close Pomona friend, which was all around a lovely experience. I wandered through downtown, seeing Chinatown, the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, and the World Trade Center. I saw the High Line, got a glorious egg bagel, ate lots of pizza (99 cents!), and went to a poetry event (out of character, am I right?).

Next, I went to Boston, which I’d never really explored before and found myself loving. Here, too, were many friends from high school and college. Two of my high school friends just had a kid, and he is ADORABLE. We spent a lot of time playing with the five-month-old baby. We also went for a walk in a nearby graveyard, where I saw the graves of (among others) Charles Sumner, John Rawls, and Joseph Story. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Judith Shklar! A friend took me to a few mosques in the area, and I also had some soul food. Great stuff.

I ended my East Coast trip going to Buffalo, to see a quasi-college friend whom I hadn’t seen since 2018. It was a lovely time meeting her family, exploring the local area, seeing Niagara Falls (it was cold), stumbling through Taylor Swift songs on piano with her on violin, and otherwise relaxing.

I then came back to Oregon (after a twelve-hour layover in Chicago O’Hare — I’m truly bad at travel planning), and have been spending time with family ever since. I did a daytrip down to San Jose to help my brother pack on January 5 and got to see an old Pomona friend.

Somewhat miraculously, throughout all of this travel, I still haven’t gotten covid (although it’s of course possible that I caught it and my lateral flow tests didn’t detect/haven’t detected it).

I won’t bother with rose/bud/thorns this time, but things I’m grateful for:

• Friends — I’m grateful for those who have welcomed me, who have counseled me, who have introduced me to new cultures and ideas, who have challenged me, who tolerate my love of Taylor Swift, who think through ethical and theological questions with me, who teach me, who argue with me about politics, who share coffee with me, who show me new places, who introduce me to their families, communities, and loved ones, who cook with me, who read books with me: who make life good.

• Family — Benedict Anderson once argued that the power of nationalism stems from its assumption: that one is of and has obligations to a nation is a taken-for-granted fact. I think our family assumes to take care of and look out for each other, and I am grateful for that familial love.

• Vaccines.

Future posts: I have two posts that are planned and just need to be written (one on corporations and one on Derry Girls).