Chautauqua Journal, Day Four: Wednesday

As much as I am bursting to share with you all that I’m learning all this week, perhaps the most important reason for a travel journal or diary is simply giving to others (and recalling for yourself) a sense of what was like at a certain time and place. And so, before moving on to the day’s events, I want to try to picture for you, at least momentarily, what it’s like up here in the southwestern corner of New York, not far from Niagara Falls and Buffalo.

When you hit a warm spell, as I did the first couple of days, the heat and humidity can be bad—particularly, as occurred with me in past years, if you’re staying on an upper floor in an older inn that lacks air conditioning. Even with overhead fans, all you can do at night is sweat it out and pray to get through it. Such places are an asthmatic’s nightmare.

My last several times here, though, I’ve made it a point to book a room with air conditioning. You might even be lucky and not need to put it on at all, which often occurs in the final week of the summer season in late August. On those cool nights, breathing is wonderful.

The heat and humidity took a turn for the better last night. The mid-day highs today were more than 10 degrees lower than yesterday, and the humidity was gone.

Now, in this pedestrian-friendly (visitors’ cars are only allowed on the grounds for 45 minutes, for loading and unloading) village, the abundant trees, an absolute necessity during the fierce heat, become a wonderful amenity. So today, taking the Brick Walk to one of the daily “Brown Bag Lunches” held throughout the week (more on this later) and hearing rustling from the trees and tinkling piano keys from Lutheran House, I felt something like heaven.

Cars tend to be in short evidence during the week, so what you’ll see from Monday to Friday are more likely to be bicycles or (in the case of the elderly) motorized wheelchairs, golf carts or shuttle buses. Bicycles have received more negative attention here than in past years because of some riders’ lack of attention to pedestrians, but make no mistake: for any city dweller or suburbanite, you will feel safer than you would at home.

There are lots of reasons to walk as much as you can around the grounds, but one of the best is simply to enjoy the Victorian-era architecture here. The institutional structures—the Amphitheater, the Hall of Philosophy I discussed yesterday, Hurlbut Memorial Church, to name just a few—are striking in and of themselves. But then you are struck by the picturesque hotels, inns and cottages, featuring a variety of styles (and often creating hybrids of these, too).

I had some real trouble settling on just one photo for this post. But you can see in the one I’ve chosen some features commonly found around these summer accommodations: mostly wooden frames, heavy on shingles and clapboard, often covered with gable roofs—and one of the things I love best, and what I don’t see often in my neck of the woods in Northern New Jersey: front porches , not just on the main level, but frequently also on the second, third and even fourth floors. And on these streets, you’re likely to see not just highly ornamental “gingerbread houses” but also many American flags (and even some foreign ones) flying from homes.

Oh, yes—and flowers blooming everywhere, in simple but glorious profusion.

The Brown-Bag Lunch: Another Learning Event

Besides lectures at the Amphitheater and Hall of Philosophy and Special Studies classes, Chautauqua also lists on its schedule a variety of brown-bag lunches where visitors can learn about topics on a more informal, ad-hoc basis. For this week that I’m attending, for instance, there are 10, on subjects including book reviews, nature writing, the role of nutrition in cardiovascular health, and Shakespeare.

The brown-bag lunch I attended today was a book review, on Louise Knight’s biography, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. It was presented by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the oldest continuous book club in the U.S. Between 60 and 70 of us sat in lawn chairs or at picnic tables, listening to two reviewers (one hostile, the other ambivalent) explain how Addams, a child of a Yankee upper-class milieu, founded the multicultural Chicago settlement house Hull House and became the first U.S. woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Other Speakers

The high standard set in the first two days of my “Espionage 101” class continued to be maintained by today’s lecturer, Mark Stout, an intelligence analyst for 13 years and the current International Spy Museum historian. The title of the talk, “Intelligence Analysis: Art, Science or Voodoo?” accurately summed up the ambiguities and stresses involved in this work. (Analysts are often introverts, while policymakers who use their recommendations tend to be extroverts.)

All kinds of information can be processed in intelligence: traffic intelligence (i.e., knowing how often two people speak, how often, and for how long), electronic intelligence, geospatial intelligence, and open-source (e.g., foreign newspapers, TV, Twitter, Facebook) intelligence.

Among the other speakers I saw:

* Stella Rimington, former director general of Britiain’s MI5, on “The Changing Face of U.K. Security”;

* Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights of the American Jewish Committee, on “Human Rights, the Holocaust and Genocide Prevention,” at the Everett Jewish Life Center.