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.

Chautauqua Journal, Day Three—Tuesday

I don’t remember ever having looked at the Hall of Philosophy, one of the places I visit most frequently while on vacation here, from anything like the angle I took when I snapped the accompanying photograph yesterday. Like most visitors, I suspect, I normally approach it at eye level, by walking via the Brick Walk from the Amphitheatre.

But I beheld a whole new way of looking at it—as well as the larger Chautauqua mission—as I walked uphill from Lake Drive 24 hours ago, weighed down by the heat and humidity. From this perspective, through one arch and into another, the Hall of Philosophy evokes, even more than the normal approach taken to this sylvan spot, the Olympian perspective suggested by its marble classical pillars. You, too, can reach this height, the architecture and landscape suggest, but you’re going to have to work at it.

This hall is the traditional site for lecturers on religion, or simply authors who might not pull in the crowds that speakers at the amphitheater usually do. But these afternoon speakers, I’ve found, are, more often than not, provocative and/or simply fascinating, and today’s were no exceptions. Over the years, I've seen speakers discuss here the problematic elements of anti-Semitism in the New Testament, what polls were saying about upcoming elections, and stem-cell research, not to mention compelling theologians such as Karen Armstrong and John Dominic Crossan.

Some speakers are bound to make at least some members of the audience uncomfortable—that is, if they’re doing their jobs correctly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be physically uncomfortable while taking in what they say.

The hall looked pretty full when I arrived for today's 2 pm lecture by Geoffrey Kelly, an authority on the great German preacher and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere during this hour except under the hall's wooden roof—otherwise, I’d burn beneath the fierce afternoon sun.

So, as I scanned the hard white benches, I prayed (how appropriate!) for a spot that a) had good sightlines, unobstructed by those large pillars, and b) was unoccupied. It took a while, but something eventually turned up.

Kelly, a professor of systematic theology at LaSalle University, is author of 12 books, including five on Bonhoeffer. He was, then, unbelievably knowledgeable on this theologian whose hard, urgent brilliance still echoes across the more than 60 years since his death at the hands of the Nazi regime he’d opposed for more than a decade.

Bonhoeffer, who never wavered in the slightest from his belief in social justice and human rights, still underwent something of an evolution in how he hoped to achieve his ideals. A longtime consistent believer in pacifism, he had come, by the end of his life, to believe there was no way to bring about his ideals except through the death of Adolf Hitler. And so, he became involved in Operation Valkyrie, the failed attempt by German officers to assassinate Hitler. He paid for his participation through death in a concentration camp in the closing weeks of the war.

Kelly traced this Lutheran minister’s interaction with the African-American minister Franklin Fisher (who influenced him deeply by exposing him in Harlem to the black social gospel), Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mahatma Gandhi. Most of all, what lingers from the lecture is Kelly’s invocation of Bonhoeffer’s most impassioned statements on God and human fellowship:

• “God’s truth destroys our untruth.”
• “Peace must be dared; it is the great venture.”
• “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church.”

After Kelly’s lecture came one by Willard Sterne Randall, a former investigative journalist who has made a second career for himself as a historian of Revolutionary War figures. I particularly admired his studies of Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Franklin and his Tory son, so I knew I had to hear what he had to say about Ethan Allen.

The official publication of Randall’s biography of the leading Green Mountain Boy isn’t until late next month, but he had copies on hand, and I was one of the lucky ones on line after the talk who were able to have him autograph it.

Certain aspects of Allen’s life speak with particular urgency today, Randall noted: Our time, like Allen’s, involves warfare far away in mountainous regions, and the suffering of Allen and other prisoners of war at the hands of the British has deeply affected American policy, in some way or other, down to the present day.

As for the week’s theme of spies: International Spy Museum executive director Peter Earnest spoke twice as long as his lecture in the amphitheater yesterday while continuing to be entertainment and informative on the subject of "Recruitment" in the morning class, “Espionage101,” and Bruce Riedel, a senior Brookings Institution fellow (and former CIA officer), gave a measured, cautiously optimistic assessment of “The Intelligence War With al-Qaida.”

He dwelt at particular length on Pakistan and the successful mission to get Osama bin Laden. (He found it hard to credit the notion that its military and intelligence services couldn't know that bin Laden was so close, but thought it possible that the country's president might have been unaware--a very disturbing possibility.)

The Value of Listening

Yesterday, sitting on the porch at Carey Cottage Inn, I overheard another visitor praising the lunches served at Hurlbut Community Church. For $6, she said, you could get a plate (a choice of soup/sandwich or salad; turkey salad; fruit plate; vegetable wrap, or the daily special, in this case a crab sandwich), and the meal would be ready for you.

In prior years, I saw signs around the grounds about these meals, but maybe hearing it endorsed by someone else made a difference this time. So, at the conclusion of Riedel’s lecture, I headed over to Hurlbut, and was glad I did.

This sounded awfully good to me, particularly since I almost had receipt shock at the Refectory the day before . My memory of that eatery—a place of simple but comparatively inexpensive food—must have been playing tricks on me, since my meal of a chicken sandwich, French fries and soda came to more than double what I discovered I could pay at Hurlbut.

In contrast, at Hurlbut, I was happily rewarded with an inexpensive, tasty, and even comparatively nutritious meal without having to wait forever--as well as the knowledge that I was contributing to a fine cause and institution. I’m hooked now for the rest of the week.

I wish that my experience tonight at the Bratton Theater, where I caught a production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, had been as favorable. But I’ll write about it later in the week, when I won’t be so tired or grouchy as I am now and, hopefully, will be more tolerant.

Chautauqua Journal: Day Two—Monday

Chautauqua Journal: Day Two—Monday

For me, at least, the hardest part about spending a day of vacation at the Chautauqua Institution is deciding what I simply don’t have time for. The events in the Amphitheater—the morning lecture and evening entertainment—are carved out, and very little competes against it. Most people make it a point not to miss either (particularly since their gate passes entitle them to attend these).

But many people don’t take advantage of courses offered in the Special Studies program. I’m not sure if it’s because these involve additional fees or simply because they’re not better promoted, but they’re a fascinating variety of items, for all different kinds of tastes: recreation (swimming), hobbies (bridge for beginners), personal finance, music—you name it.

And so, early this morning, as I stood at the Main Gate to sign up for classes, I wearily considered my options. I was pretty sure, unless I was closed out, that I would take morning classes on the American intelligence system offered in conjunction with Chautauqua’s program partner for the week, the International Spy Museum. After that, the choices became far tougher.

I thought for awhile about a short story class, but some of the authors for the week (e.g., Mary Gaitskill, Ethan Canin) didn’t especially interest me. A more serious contender was an early afternoon class on sonnets. But then I ran smack dab into one of the quandaries Chautauqua puts in the way of the curious: there were competing simultaneous events—lectures by spiritual authors, or bestselling writers (Erik Larson).

I also thought fleetingly aboutclasses on codebreaking and on identifying different plants and trees (an increasing interest of mine as I post more nature pictures on this blog).

Then, finally, I bowed to the inevitable: It wasn’t only a matter of being unable to be in two places at once, or even of spending even more money than intended on classes. I simply needed time to breathe—to write, and even to take advantage of a simple architectural device everywhere in this Victorian Era village but increasingly missing elsewhere in America: the front porch, a place where you can see and chat. Even now, in the age of digital communications, Chautauquans give all signs of wanting to slow the pace of life down. A good thing, too—how else would you learn to appreciate the gardens everywhere you turn here if you didn’t take the time to stop and look?

Masters at Telling Spy Stories

If Chautauqua hoped to kick this week off with a bang, it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams this morning. Both the morning class I signed up for, “Master Class: Espionage 101: Five Days of Spy,” and the 10:45 a.m. lecture at the Amphitheatre featured vivid stories galore.

I’ll admit to some trepidation about the “Master Class.” I could manage the 8:30 starting time all right in terms of waking up. It just seemed like a lot to rush over from breakfast and anything else you needed to do in the morning that early, then hope that the two hours for the class wouldn’t be too excessive.

As it happened, that starting time proved providential. Temperatures today were forecast to hit 87 degrees, and the humidity seemed to be matching it. Better to start the class that early than later, when the heat and humidity would become unbearable.

In the six or seven years I’ve visited Chautauqua, this morning’s “Master Class” might have been the most heavily attended Special Studies class I’ve ever taken. The coursebook indicated that the maximum enrollment was 200, and my best guess, in looking around the Hurlbut Church Sanctuary, the site of the class, was that we were approaching this.

This morning’s class was taught by Tony and Jonna Mendez, a married couple who, a decade apart, served as CIA Chiefs of Disguise. Now both retired, they can speak with more candor than before (though still not entirely unrestricted) about their work. The CIA’s Office of Technical Services, at least as the two described it, could easily rival the executive devices given to James Bond by British’s “Q.”

(In fact, Tony Mendez’s involvement in rescuing six U.S. diplomats from Iran at the height of the 1979-81 hostage crisis has now led Hollywood to his doorstep. George Clooney and Ben Affleck are producing the film, with Affleck starring as Mendez.)

Among the hairy (sometimes literally) stories told by the Mendezes:

• “Lipstick guns” were invented for female agents in a jam. They only had one bullet and you had to get up close to use it, but they still worked in a pinch;
• The technology used for today’s hearing aids was developed to set up bugging devices.
• Miniature cameras were invented to conceal special technology needed to take pictures.
• In a special spy-catching exercise in which the Mendezes were involved, they were able to take advantage of the old-school, male orientation of the FBI to deceive the latter agency.
• At the time of the daring rescue of the American diplomat-hostages, the CIA was trying to recover from its own major intelligence failure. The agency totally underestimated popular support for the Ayatollah Khomeini, believing that the Shah of Iran would remain in power for another 25 years.
• In creating disguises, it’s easier for a woman to pass as a man than visa versa.
* Simple wigs can be quite effective. (Put a wig on a bald man and not even his wife would notice the difference, Jonna quipped.
• At one point, fearing that the Soviets might get there first, the CIA conducted experiments in parapsychology. Most such attempts ended badly, but at least a few such events demonstrated surprising success.

Almost immediately after the end of that class, Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum, put the upcoming week’s events in an historical perspective. Intelligence, he noted, “began in a tall tree, probably somewhere in Mesopotamia,” as one neighbor plotted how to get another’s nuts and berries. (To destroy the neighbor’s nuts and berries, he chuckled, was an early instance of covert action.)

Besides being considered the father of his country, he noted, George Washington is also thought of as the father of American intelligence. The Spy Museum has a copy of a letter in which the general commissioned an operative to set up a spy network in Tory-dominated New York City.

After briefly considering the use of intelligence in the Civil War and World War II, Earnest dealt with the lead-up to World War II. After the war, he noted, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union had, the decade before, recruited 500 agents for work in the U.S. (In fact, they had so many in Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department that the KBG sent a secret message not to send any more operatives, lest U.S. law enforcement grow suspicious.) The number of U.S. agents in Moscow at the time: zero.

Earnest also likened Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as “failures of imagination”—the inability of intelligence professionals as well as career politicians even to think of a nightmare scenario.

Two actions taken at the behest of the 9/11 Commission have produced mixed results till now, he observed: the office of Director of National Intelligence, he noted, was still “trying to find a role,” while things “hadn’t gone smoothly” with the Department of Homeland Security, either.

Theater Enrichment and Evening Entertainment

I won’t see the Chautauqua Theater Company’s version of Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedy Three Sisters until tomorrow night, but this afternoon I couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear the company’s backstage staff tell about their work. Listening to the organization’s “fellows” for scenic, lighting and costume design, it was clear to me that tomorrow night’s show will be extremely daring and avant-garde—not your parents’ tradition of the genteel Chekhov.

I wrapped matters up tonight by listening to the Music School’s Festival Orchestra concert in the amphitheater. Sandwiched between such traditional classical fare as Robert Schumann (Piano Concerto in A Minor) and Richard Wagner (e.g., “The Ride of the Valkyries”) was John Adams’ The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra.).Perhaps it was simply a function of prolonged exposure to this week’s theme, but it struck me in listening to the Adams music that it could have easily served as an excellent film thriller about China, if Alfred Hitchcock were still alive to make it.

(I did miss one entertainment event: a concert at Lenna Hall late this afternoon. As you can see from the accompanying image, my chances of landing seats were slim to none.)

Chautauqua Journal – Part III (Day 3—August 5, 2008)

Morning: Beating the Heat

On my way out to the Farmers’ Market near the front gate to pick up fruit for the next few days, I inhaled deeply. The air felt so much better than it did in the New York area. Temperatures were supposed to climb no higher than 79 degrees for the day. The atmosphere, with its early morning crispness and promise of later warmth, felt more like early May than mid-summer. I loved it.

My luck with the weather seemed to be holding. The night before I arrived, a wicked storm—an offshoot of the same one that bedeviled me in New Jersey at the onset of my trip—came through here, splitting a tree on Waugh, only a block away from where I was staying. I missed that, as well as—at least so far—unbearable heat and humidity.

On at least three prior vacations up here, I stayed in inns with no air conditioning, only ceiling fans. Since I happened to be several flights up each time, the heat rose, making sleep a difficult proposition at best. Worse than that, as an asthmatic who had recently put on weight, I felt breathing to be harder. (Thank God I’ve lost 50 pounds since then!) Though I enjoyed the camaraderie of those inns, the heat made it a necessity to book a room with air conditioning from then on.

Ironically, my vacation last year, in the first year I had air conditioning, coincided with the coolest period of the summer up to that point. The week before that, however, the temperatures had risen into the 90s. You just never know around here—it’s best to be prepared for anything.

Compared with the houses I stayed previously, the one I was in last year was not particularly friendly. However, this time, Carey Cottage Inn combined the personal atmosphere I like with the physical comfort I require.

New Faces on the Green?

Are the demographics of Chautauqua changing—or is it just my imagination? On Bestor Plaza (see the accompanying photo), as I was heading out to pick up The Chautauqua Daily, I could have sworn I saw more younger people—not so much children, but teens and adults younger than myself. In contrast to years past, there seemed to be fewer elderly people in wheelchairs or electric go-carts and more twenty- and thirty-somethings jogging or on bikes. Likewise, I even saw a few African-American faces—still not many, but, it seemed to me, somewhat more than I recall in my earlier visits here.

The issue is important, not just for Chautauqua’s long-range prospects for growth and survival but even for its heart and soul today. It impressed me at the welcoming tea at the Carey Cottage Inn two days ago how many visitors were not just returnees, but habitual ones. Many of these are middle-aged or even older. The only way I can square this with what I had just seen on Bestor Plaza was that the newer faces might be encountering this place for the first time.

But back to the returnees. What accounts for that still-sizable senior citizen component? Several factors, I think, all of which the institution is probably weighing carefully—or, at least, I hope they are:
* Senior citizens enjoy the largest disposable income of any population group. Carey Cottage Inn provides some of the more affordable accommodations on the grounds. But couples in the family-formation years would find Chautauqua a far harder vacation to finance. I’m amused by a line from the 1969 Elvis Presley movie The Trouble With Girls in which he plays the manager of a traveling Chautauqua troupe from the 1920s (the only reason, I strongly believe, that anyone on these grounds would be even slightly interested in that flick). “Everyone can afford Chautauqua,” the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll says on the screen. Would that it were still so!

* Chautauqua appeals especially to anyone who enjoys reading and the arts. Of course, the long-term decline in readers has worried the publishing industry for years, and, I think, is one reason why public librarians have to some extent shifted their focus from books to media over the last two decades or so. As for the Internet—well, just check out this Atlantic Monthly article, “

Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Thanks to my friend Brian for reminding me about this piece, by the way.) Art forms such as opera and classical music—you can even broaden it to the performing arts in general—are also in peril, and these are the genres that Chautauqua does so well. (The situation is not helped when people such as Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, urges that the tax code be modified so that the rich give to the genuinely needy rather than the arts.)

* The spiritual ethos most present at Chautauqua is that of mainline Protestantism—Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, etc. But as

Joseph Bottum shows, over the last three decades most of the various sects in this movement have been declining in membership. I can’t even imagine megachurches, with their sheer massiveness, in the Victorian-era structures of Chautauqua—yet this is precisely the movement that is swelling the most in American religious life.

Afternoon: Elvis, Dolly, Calories and Catholic House

The issue of age came to the fore again at 3:15 pm, when Catholic House, like the other Chautauqua denominations, held its social hour. As I turned toward the parlor, ten to fifteen men and women were sitting in chairs holding sheet music, lifting their voices, first to “Hello, Dolly,” then to “Side by Side.” The average age of these singers ranged from two to three decades older than myself. I began to think about the Hall of Christ, a most unlikely showcase for a screening of The Trouble With Girls followed by an Elvis look-alike contest. It sounded like it could be fun, and certainly, with the rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, more age appropriate for me.

Within less than 30 seconds, I began, to my dismay, to reconsider that proposition. It wasn’t only that the faces in Catholic House were warm and welcoming, as they had been on the two or three other occasions I’d come here over the years. No, I began to reflect, I recognized these show tunes—heck, I even knew many of the lyrics. I couldn’t say the same for Maroon 5, the Jonas Brothers, or other groups enjoyed by my niece and my three nephews. At 48, I had more in common with these senior citizens than with my younger relatives.

Considering all this, I cast my eye toward a table laden with all kinds of liquid refreshments, and especially homemade cakes and candies—in such variety and profusion that they could not all be consumed within the “social hour.” Moreover, they seriously strained my friend Steve Irolla’s factoid that “it’s a scientifically proven fact that calories on vacation don’t count.”

After several minutes of circling the table and loading my plate, I struck up a conversation with a schoolteacher who, like myself, is of Irish-American descent, explaining my passion for Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby that inspired this blog’s title. She told me that, though she was able to teach Gatsby to her rural students when she started teaching 30 years ago, it was no longer possible now—despite its relative brevity, the novel is “just too dense” for them these days, she said.

Like most of the population here, she leaned decidedly toward progressive stances on politics and religion. As a young woman, she recalled, she had been furious with Cardinal Cooke of New York for not speaking out against the Vietnam War. She stopped going to Mass for awhile, and these days found the Church’s refusal to ordain women an ongoing strain on her revived faith.

When I asked about the attitude of other denominations here to Catholicism, she told me that, except for a couple of scattered complaints from one or two denominations several years ago, the house had been welcomed by the community. Clearly Chautauqua prides itself on its tolerance, so much so that it has also voted affirmatively to increase the Jewish and Moslem presence on the grounds with enhanced facilities.

I wondered, though, if there might not be some limits to this sense of openness. I told her about a concert I’d attended several years ago, in which an African-American gospel group performed. The group’s vocal harmonies were uncommonly tight, and the singers—all male, incidentally—sang with enthusiasm and style. It must have been all the more disconcerting, then, when they saw so many members of the audience rushing for the exits. “They were not Chautauqua,” a woman staying at my house explained the next day, trying to sum up the inadequacies of the group that led so many listeners to bail out. That, of course, prompted an inevitable question that I stifled—if that group was “not Chautauqua,” in what way did they not fit?

So my initial suspicion had been correct—those who left early did so for no reason related to musical skill. So many white faces left at that point that some wags, had they seen it, would undoubtedly have referred to this as “white flight.” And it’s not that the institution is unaware of the racial imbalance here—a year and a half ago, after all, the board of trustees approved a resolution noting that racial diversity was “more limited than desired” and vowed to increase “the representation of African Americans and other racial minorities at Chautauqua.” (How they would do so, of course, remains at issue.)

So, why did so many whites leave this concert filled with African-American singers, musicians and songs? I can pinpoint almost the exact point in which this occurred—it was during a song called, “Miracle Worker.” In the lectures I’d attended at Chautauqua, the realm of the “miracle” did not exist. Everything in the prevailing Protestant atmosphere depended on rationality as the yardstick for truth. God as a “Miracle Worker”? Only in, at best, the most vaguely symbolic manner.

Chautauqua Journal – Part I

Last week, while on vacation, I thought I would try something a bit different with this blog. I didn’t have much time then to write more than the usual quote and "This Day in History" posts that have been features of this blog since it was first established. 

But over time, I've wanted the blog to be as freewheeling as I intended it to be—a return to its original intent, if you will. Time away from home and work provided as good an opportunity as any for something like this. 

I’m not going to recapitulate my “Quote of the Day” posts from last week, which reviewed statements made by several speakers from last week. There was so much else going on last week, though, that I think my readers will understand after reading this just how crowded and rewarding my destination, the Chautauqua Institution, can be. 

Every summer since 1874, this nonprofit institution has played host to thousands of vacationers like myself seeking recreation, spiritual understanding, and intellectual and artistic revitalization. It glories in the rich paradox at the art of its mission: to address the issues of the present and future in a setting rooted firmly in the past. 

As with the other half-dozen times I've come here over the last 14 years, I journeyed eight days ago to this Victorian Era village in the southwest corner of New York State via Pittsburgh, which is less than three hours away as well as where my oldest brother lives. 

After Sunday Mass, my brother John and I stopped at an exhibition at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie museum called "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition"--fascinating stuff, but at $20 for an exhibition separate from the rest of the museum, a bit pricey. (I'll have more to say about this exhibition before it closes.) 

Day One: Sunday 

I reached Chautauqua by 5 pm Sunday the 3rd, just in time for a meet-and-greet at where I'm staying, the Carey Cottage Inn. Since I was here last, a decade ago, the inn has been renovated. 

Though the other guests and I were relieved that our rooms now feature air conditioning, we lamented the loss of the house's restaurant—part of a bothersome long-term trend that has seen most of the eateries on the grounds here at Chautauqua vanish. 

Nevertheless, I was pleased with my second-floor room. I later learned from the resident housekeeper, the very helpful Harriet Culp, that one of my musical heroes, George Gershwin, stayed in a room just down the hall from me. He hoped to complete "Concerto in F Major" while here in the 1920s—though, in truth, he was such a convivial guy, always so ready to play for anybody on any occasion, that I'm not surprised he had to do most of his hard work on the piece in a piano shack on the periphery of the grounds. 

Originally, Harriet said, Gershwin was supposed to stay on the third floor of the inn, but smoking was not allowed in the rooms (an errant match would have sent the wooden house up in flames in no time). Instead, he was moved to the second floor which, conveniently, had a porch where he could slip out for a cigarette. 

His room—still there—was only a few steps from the porch. As I looked out on the narrow streets below, I could easily imagine how relaxed the great composer must have been in the morning as he looked out. 

After the meet-and-greet, I spent the evening wandering the grounds (including Bestor Plaza, seen, with the library in the background, in the accompanying photo), had a buffet dinner at the Tally-Ho Restaurant, and started to read the paper from the weekend. 

In past years, I’ve taken a tour of the institution’s mighty Massey Organ and attended an interfaith service, with hymns and a beautiful chorus, in the Amphitheater. This year, however, after my three-hour drive, I badly needed some rest, so I turned in.