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Hooked on Solar: Part 2

Posted on December 18, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

5 inches of rain. Big storm, strong, gusty winds. Wet, wet, wet. That is the prediction over the coming weekend.

I have been meaning to write a follow on to my hooked on solar entry, but have been stymied by the writer’s block, most likely brought on by Shanthala’s return to a punishing, unrelenting schedule. I wanted to put up an entry that showed how the solar panel performed over the course of a year. How close was the actual production to the specifications ? What factors affected the performance ? How did the performance vary through the day ? Through the year ?

A quick recap of the story. In the first year after the installation of the panels, our electricity bill for the entire year was $4.68, not including the monthly minimums (about $2 or so per month). The solar panels are 13 panels of Evergreen’s ES-A 205 panels with a Fronius IG 3000 Inverter. The solar panels were installed by Solarcity. As part of their service, they provide monitoring service with all sorts of relevant information captured and made accessible over the web. The information is captured by a device and sent every 15 minutes to the monitoring location. Via a web portal, I can access either graphs that summarize the relevant information or get the raw collected data. The following charts were taken from the web portal back in November, when I planned the followup to my original article on installing solar panels, so they’re a little dated, but since they tell the story across a year, their current age shouldn’t alter the story by much.

The Year’s Story

Here is a graph that shows the production over the past year. The peak production for the year occurred, naturally, in the summer months of June (490 kWh), July (496 kWh) and August (465 kWh). The worst production has been in the winter months of January (177 kWh) and February (225 kWh). So, the best months produced about double the energy of the worst months.

A look at the month’s data (the best and the worst) reveals:


During January, there is barely 10 hours of daylight and the cloud cover is an average of 51% (which hides the data that had some days of 100% cloud cover and a couple of days of sunshine) while in July, daylight hours average about 14.5 hours with an average cloud cover of only 23%. Only cloud cover during the daylight hours are taken into account in this statistic. So, you have days in January that barely show up in the chart while most days in July have energy production consistently upwards of 15 kWh.

Seasonal Variance

However, if you look at two cloudy days, with the same amount of cloudiness (85%), one in the pitch of autumn and one in almost summer, the production is still quite significantly different as the following two charts show. The hours of sunlight and that the sun is higher in the sky during early summer probably explain the entire difference.


Other similarly cloudy days in May got far better performance as this graph shows:

If you compare a single bright sunny day’s energy production during a summer and a winter month, you get the graph below.

Sunrise was at 7.22 am on the winter day and sunset was at 5.02 pm. The corresponding numbers for the summer day were 5.55 am and 8.14 pm. Energy production peaked around noon on both days. Both the rise and fall in production are quite precipitous. The yellow line shows the production on a day when the cloud cover was 100%. The line barely manages to lift itself off the ground.

So, the lesson from this is that even though the total panel rating is 2.665 kWh, this number is produced around a very narrow spectrum of hours in a day (about 5.5 sun hours, according to this document). Further, the conversion from DC to AC (this is measured at the inverter) cuts the peak power from 2.665 to around 2.25 kWh, about a loss of 15%. According to this document on solar panel performance produced by USREA, system wiring and inverter losses by about 11%. System wiring losses include reduction due to varying performance of the individual panels. If a panel is rated as being 205W +/- 5W, then the production of that panel can be 200W or 210W. Eventually, the total production drops to that of the lowest performing panel according to this document. Evergreen panels state this problem specifically and say that is why they endeavor to keep their panel performance with only a possible upside, never a downside to the production i.e. our panels can produce 205-210 W per panel, but never lower than the rated 205W.

Actual Vs Predicted Performance

There are various tools out on the web that provide some measure of predicted performance based on some installation specific information and solar radiation data gathered over 30 years (1960-90) by NOAA. One such site is US government’s NREL(National Renewable Energy Lab)’s site on solar with its calculator called PVWatts. The detailed installation information provided by SolarCity enabled me to enter all the requested information to obtain the predicted performance data. Here is a chart that shows the predicted vs actual production (not including December) using San Francisco’s data (the closest point to Sunnyvale in the charts):

Like everything else that uses past data, the tool warns that it uses averages of the data and that the performance of any particular year can vary from the predicted performance by as much as 30% (+/-) on a monthly basis and +/-10% on a yearly basis. Still, like an investor looking at a single year’s return of his funds feels thrilled that they have performed well compared to the market indices, I felt somewhat gratified that the panel’s performance over the year has been a little better than the predicted performance. However, Sunnyvale is sunnier than San Francisco with a lot less fog. Oh! Well. The tool provides equivalent data if you stay in some other part of the country, say the Northeast or the Midwest.

Other interesting data provided by the SolarCity include the amount of CO2 offset by the solar panels (I presume this is based on assuming the saving had the equivalent energy been produced by conventional fossil fuels by the electric company) and the dollar amount of energy produced since the time of installation. As of today, these data are that the panels have offset 5,805 lbs of CO2 since installation and produced $816 worth of electricity. Incidentally, 5,805 lbs of CO2 is the equivalent of what 2.8 mature trees would offset over the same duration. Wow! All the CO2 that is offset by all this money (the cost of installing the panels) is matched by just 3 mature trees ?

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Stories From Big Sky Country

Posted on August 8, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

Summer evenings, in the days before Maya, Shanthala and I would go for a walk. If we both had had a long day, or sometimes because we were in the mood for it, or just plain lazy, we would have had dinner at some nearby restaurant. We were done with dinner usually by 7. With daylight lasting till 8.30 or so, we would easily spend an hour strolling the neighborhood.

Many days, we would be too sleep deprived and weary from work day stresses to talk much. As we strolled, I’d peek at the houses we passed. In most, the TV would be on in a darkened room. In some houses, where the kitchen had a window that faced the road, I’d see one or two people busy putting together a meal. Some had their curtains wide open providing a view of even their backyard. Sometimes, I’d see people seated around a dining table, with a bottle of wine, faces animated by conversation. In some others, I saw one or two older people, eating a meal in silence, their faces and bodies reflecting what I thought was the loneliness characteristic of many older people here in the civilized West.

Some days, I projected myself into their lives, carrying out entire conversations in my head. I wondered what their dreams were, what their fears were. Did they feel safe and secure about the future or did they worry about it ? Did they have healthy children or had they lost someone ? Were they planning their next vacation or just mulling over a stressful situation at work ? Were they planning a wedding or contemplating splitting up ? And when we travel, I often wonder what it is like to live in those other places. Does the verdant, lush vegetation make you feel different when you see it everyday ? Do the cold, majestic mountains and the weather they bring with them depress you or inspire you ?

One of the beauties of fiction is that it gives us a way to live other lives, to think strange thoughts, to engage in a conversation in a way that we do not in our real lives. And in great fiction, the inhabitation is not just more real, but it can also shed light on the human condition, say something deep, yet unspoken about our own lives.

Maile Meloy is one such writer whose works I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with recently. Actually, I read her debut collection of short stories, Half In Love, a year back and was so struck by it, that I read it again last week. I also read her second collection of short stories, the more recent, and almost impossible to get even after placing a hold on it at the library, Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. It was through a review of this second book that I read in the NYT book section that I came to know of her.

Montana (flickr picture courtesy of Bitterroot)

Maile Meloy’s stories are usually set in Big Sky country, Montana. Her prose like the country has lots of spaces between. She doesn’t try and fill the description or the narrative as much as possible. So, her prose has an easy, relaxed style that seems to echo the beauty and austerity of the places she writes about, the wide open spaces. Here are some examples of how some of her stories begin:

Chet Morgan grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit his socket, and his mother always thought that he would die young.

One January evening, when the doctor’s new house felt warm and inviolable against the wind and the cold outside, his younger brother called.

For eight months, I had been telling my client that he had no tort claim. Sawyer had worked construction for thirty years, building houses for people with Montana fantasies.

The first time Hank slept with Kay – the only time – was the night her husband drowned.

Winter was bad when it was just ordinary cold and dark and a smoky haze hung over town because everyone had woodstoves blazing in spite of the burning restrictions.

If you’re white, and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch.

With beautiful understatement, Meloy paints a picture of hard-scrabble existence in such places: getting polio when you weren’t supposed to, burning wood to keep warm because that’s all you could afford to, the wealthy outsiders with Montana fantasies. She never calls attention to the conditions or the characters. Blink and you can miss it. Similarly, the harsh winters are ever present in the background, but noticed with a few words, where some writers might devote entire pages.

Her stories are like William Stafford’s poems: very short, very haunting. The longest maybe 15 pages, but most are between 7 and 10 pages, with an above average print size. So, I browse through them fairly quickly, returning to read the story again, in some cases, because they are so luminous. If there’s a stereotype to her characters, it is that most of them speak very little, as we’ve come to expect of such people. Many stories are without a climactic denouement, the whole thing like a snapshot taken of someone’s life, or like the view someone like me might catch glancing through the open windows on summer evening strolls.

But her stories are not without their shocking moments, moments where one suddenly feels the chill of Montana winter intrude a summer interlude. Adulteries are revealed in “by the way” sentences such as “Now he thought about how you can not know the songs a man sings when he’s along with his little girl, or with your girl” or “Naomi had been cooked for, in a motel with a kitchenette, on crappy electric burners”. They’re in the middle of a narrative that you think is going in one direction that the sentence almost passes you by.

I think of Meloy as Montana’s Jhumpa Lahiri. Her prose like Lahiri’s (her’s is the name that springs to mind first, though there are others who write with this quality), never calling attention to itself, always deferring to the narrative, but so exquisitely nuanced if you can spot it. Sentences such as: “he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question” (about a man who has broken his hip and his legs several times) or “There might be decades left for him to not forgive himself” or “Leo was deformed by grief” or “You have to be young to play the guitar, unless you are very great.”

Like all great fiction, there are little nuggets of observations about life that I relished. For example:

There’s a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers, Bea said, It’s that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they’re pretty much okay, they’ve got a force field around them.

He held his wife and felt himself anchored to everything that was safe and sure, and kept for himself the knowledge of how quickly he could let go and drift free.

“The whole soul mates idea”, Alice said bitterly, “is really most useful when you’re stealing someone else’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours”.

In grade school, it’s okay to do well. But by high school, being smart gives people ideas. Science teachers start bugging you in the halls. They say Eastern schools have Montana quotas, places for ranch girls who are good at math.

I tried reading her two long novels – the second is a sequel to the first – a year back but couldn’t find the same level of energy or beauty in them. Maybe it has more to do with me reading long novels than her writing.

The distractions of the web, the interruptions of a two year old, the background stress of work or a problem that you’re trying to solve, the stack of unpaid bills, the ideas for writing that are piled so high that you don’t write even a single one in despair, the guilt of the broken habit of running, the desire to spend more time with Shanthala, all conspire to a point where I lack the energy to rip into a great novel. At such times, poems and short stories like Maile Meloy’s provide the relief, the rejuvenation that I need.

Zoetrope has an entire story from Both Ways for reading on the web.

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Nomad Flute: The Poetry of W.S. Merwin

Posted on April 19, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

One afternoon, when grief still hurt but not like bright sunlight, when parenting was just a synonym for exhaustion, a voice came out of the radio. An older voice, a voice that felt like it had known grief and beauty, love and loss. The voice said:

Almost to your birthday and as I
am getting dressed alone in the house
a button comes off and once I find
a needle with an eye big enough
for me to try to thread it
and at last have sewed the button on
I open an old picture of you
who always did such things by magic
one photograph found after you died
of you at twenty
beautiful in a way
I would never see
for that was nine years
before I was born
but the picture has
faded suddenly
spots have marred it
maybe it is past repair
I have only what I remember

The last line was the jolt of caffeine, stirring me from my slumber of exhausted days. He was saying what I had been struggling with since Kitty’s death: that I’d lose Kitty again once my memories of him started to fade. I have only what I remember. He was giving voice to what I fight even now in my time with Maya. It’ll not be long before I’ll not remember all her baby things, the way she is now. I have only what I remember.

The voice belonged to William Stanley Merwin and he read a poem “A Likeness” from his recent collection of poems, The Shadow of Sirius. Two other poems that he read aloud in the interview made me head to the local library for a copy.

Poems and lines flew off the page, lodging themselves in my brain in a way that few poems have.

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
From what we cannot hold the stars are made – from Youth

Time unseen time our continuing fiction
however we tell it eludes our dear hope and our reason – from Secrets

As those who are gone now
keep wandering through our words – from The Morning Hills

Like William Stafford, a poet who I’ve often written about, his poems are meditations. A few words of it and I am a willing vessel, ready to carry whatever the day has to offer.

W.S. Merwin

(Image from flickr, thanks to cpacker66).

I obtained a collection of Merwin’s works called Migration. The book stayed with me all through the nine weeks it takes before the book must be returned to the library. After two more withdrawals from the library, I finally purchased the book.

Merwin’s poems run the gamut of human emotions and subjects. He can write just about being:

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me – from A Momentary Creed

Of the moment when we’re more alive than the sum of all the other days:

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else – from One of the Butterflies

He can write about the beauty that we live immersed in, say a raindrop:

touch me this time
let me love what I cannot know
as the man born blind may love color
until all that he loves
fills him with color – from To The Rain

About the sorrow at an animal’s coming extinction:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing – from For A Coming Extinction

Or of the loss of a rainforest:

I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language – from Witness

Or of the attraction of war:

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again – from When The War is Over

Or of fairy tales, mystical one:

Stories come to us like new senses
a wave and an ash tree were sisters
they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost – from Recognitions

Or of a lifetime spent together:

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment – from To Paula in Late Spring

The words, their arrangement. I want to hold them, running each one slowly through my mind, luxuriating in them. I want to be ensconced in them.

Very early on, Merwin let go of all punctuation in his poems. Read like this, eyes searching for the breaks, his poems take on an almost mystical quality, a freshness that never disappears. For example, consider the opening lines from the poem, The Emigre:

You will find it is
much as you imagined
in some respects
which no one can predict
you will be homesick
at times for something you can describe
and at times without being able to say
what you miss
just as you used to feel when you were at home

You can read a break after “in some respects”, reiterate that line and finish the rest of the stanza with one message. You can read a break after “imagined” and the poem reads well again. You can read a break after “predict” and the still the poem reads well. Each echoes a slightly different nuance of the same theme. Reread the two lines from “Secret” quoted above and you can play a similar game.

Merwin was born in the early years of the past century (how long ago it sounds, when I say ‘past century’). He came of age during WWII and enlisted in the army at age 17. Then, he realized what war meant and became a pacifist and refused to fight in the war. A crime for which he was sent to a mental institution. When I heard that, I was shocked. Here were a people, calling themselves the denizens of the greatest country in the world, thinking it was insane that someone refused to kill on order. Stafford too had refused to fight the same war and had been sent to a labor camp for that. In 1971, Merwin donated the money from his first Pulitzer Prize to fighting the draft, against the Vietnam War.

He eschwed a life in the academia and instead went to study Zen Buddhism in Maui and stayed back. He lives in a solar powered home that he built with his wife, Paula Schwartz, on an abandoned pineapple farm. He also worked to restore the neighboring rainforest of palm trees. He writes on scraps of paper with a pencil. He says that writing on a fresh sheet of paper or a typewriter is too much pressure to produce something deep and meaningful. With scraps of paper, anything is good. Stafford said similar things.

His poems, like Stafford’s, come from a place that lives on ideas like these, ideas of non-violence, ecology, a deep communion with all things alive, of living well and dying well. The sound of those poems stirs something deep in me, something that I cannot always access directly, but must come by obliquely.

Merwin’s output is prodigious by any standard: 25 volumes of just poetry. He also has nearly two dozen books of translations, 8 works of prose, and a memoir, “Summer Doorways.”. His output is also as varied as you can imagine.  Migration, a collection of his poems from 1952 to 2005, contains poems that are just a single line and poems that span double digit pages. He has written an entire novel in verse, The Folding Cliffs, about the history and legends of Hawaii.

In his interview with Bill Moyers, Merwin says: “… poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are.” Watch the whole interview. I found it a fascinating commentary on a life and the writing process.

These days, I’m a thief. I steal time. Mostly from Maya and Shanthala, but also from work, from all that calls to me all day, every day. I find little time to read long works of fiction or non-fiction. I switched to reading short stories and essays to better fit the time I could make. With poets like Stafford and Merwin, I find I can squeeze in an intense session in just a couple of minutes, reading that peels away the layers of my life, my self.

Who did I think was listening
when I wrote down the words
in pencil at the beginning
words for singing
to music I did not know
and people I did not know
would read them and stand to sing them
already knowing them
while they sing they have no names – from From the Start

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Avatar: Old Body In New Clothes

Posted on February 13, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

Taking advantage of an unexpected day off, Shanthala and I watched the IMAX3D version of James Cameron’s “Avatar”. Hailed by critics and audiences alike, it has since sunk the top grossing movie of all time, the director’s own Titanic and become the biggest grosser of all time. While I joined the masses in taking it there, I can’t say that I wholeheartedly agreed with either the audiences or the critics.

Let me start with the good. The effects are spectacular. James Cameron has spent an enormous amount of time in constructing the world of Pandora, the planetary moon in the Alpha Centauri star system, on which the movie unfolds.  As a consequence, the visuals are stunning and so detailed, they probably hold up to repeated viewing. Cameron was apparently an adviser to NASA for the camera design used on the Mars mission and he’s clearly a technical genius. The visuals are not just randomly created for effects. Cameron has tried to ground this world in a decent amount of science. Quite a few commentators think that the science is even pretty good. A 350 page companion book to the movie, structured like an army field manual, covers in hardcore-fan-satisfying detail the geology and astronomy of Pandora, flora and fauna on Pandora and the physiology and culture of the Pandoran sentient beings, the Na’vi. The language of the Na’vi was constructed with the help of a linguist and has a website dedicated to the language, complete with flash cards to help you speak the language. So, what the Na’vi speak is not gibberish dressed up as an alien language.

And I don’t even think I’m qualified to appreciate the difficulties in filming the movie. The Wikipedia provides some jaw-dropping insights into the subject.

And now for my disappointments. Yes, the special effects are spectacular, but I never felt that I was looking at a real, non-computer animated world. Take Jurassic Park, as a point of comparison. At no point in that movie did I ever feel that I was watching computer animated images. And having watched IMAX movies before (those National Geographic or made-for-IMAX documentaries), I did not feel sufficiently immersed by the movie’s unique “immersion” technology. Watching an IMAX movie about the Grand Canyon a few years back, I felt my stomach plummet with the camera as it chased a hang glider over the edge of the canyon. No such thing happened as I watched the Na’vi soar over hanging mountains on top of strange looking birds. Shanthala reminded me that those IMAX movies were shown on gigantic screens. The Wikipedia points to others suffering from a similar problem as mine and that Shanthala is not incorrect. But still, I was disappointed.

What about the way the aliens look ? Yes, they’re 10-12 feet tall, blue, have a tail and their faces are a mixture of humans and cats. But they’re still so humanoid. Is this how imaginative you can get ? The ICICI blog, a blog about cognition and culture, however, defends Cameron’s vision saying, “Indeed, there are good reasons to expect that life on others planets might evolve as it did on Earth. Everywhere in the universe, living beings would face similar evolutionary problems: They need energy, detectors, and computational systems. And everywhere in the universe, they will discover the same solutions exactly as, on Earth, the same tricks (enzymes, sex, eyes, etc.) have been discovered again and again by different species.” Cameron states in an interview that he deliberately made the Na’vi look human to enable people to relate to them more easily. Otherwise, how many could empathize with the hero’s attraction to the Na’vi heroine ?

That said, I found the imagination still limiting. Why pair bonding between the Na’vi ? Do they have to sleep the way we do ? The men ruled the world, concerned with warfare and diktats. Were the Na’vi hunter-gatherers or agricultural settlers ? Nothing in the movie depicts how they acquire food, but a stratification of society of the form shown is closer to an agricultural world than a hunter-gatherer world. With a running time of over 2.5 hours, there was enough time to show all this, but did not, which disappointed me. Like most science fiction, the physics is well imagined, not so much the biology and culture. The only book that I’ve read that depicted alien culture, cognition and biology imaginatively was the Hominid series by Robert Sawyer.

The story is as cliched as cliche can be. A gentle, nature loving, technologically primitive society is under attack by greedy, blood thirsty corporations and their private armies in search of a valuable mineral called unobtanium. The utopian world of the noble savage is alive and well in the movie. The narrative follows a boringly predictable trajectory: the initiation into the ways of the natives, the rite of passage, the chanting and music of the natives, the hero’s change of heart, the final battle between the hero and his nemesis, his one time boss. Nothing surprised me in the story, nothing at all but the effects. Further, while upholding the peace-loving nature of the natives, the narrative sadly resorts to a stereotypical, violent resolution of the conflict.

And the characters ? Female leads in Cameron movies have always been the strong, kick-ass type and the movie has three strong women in prominent roles including the heroine. The hero is naive, brash and unafraid of authority, but with a heart of gold, a “gift”. He goes on to charm the natives, fall in love with the daughter of the head of the natives and save their world. The objective scientist who is full of questions and curiosity but who hasn’t the heart of gold cannot do what he can. Other prosaic characters include a jealous rival among the natives – the heir apparent – who has been promised the hand of the daughter, the queen who is a shaman, the friendly sidekicks, the insiders who help the hero, the violent military commander with no shred of respect for life, the uncaring corporate bureaucrat. The good have no flaws and the bad have no redemptive qualities. There is not one 3D character in this 3D spectacle.

I thought that Cameron indulges in some clever tongue-in-cheek in renarrating the destruction of the ecology of the native Americans, more commonly called Indians. He draws much from the culture of the real India (not Columbus’ misidentified continent), from the title of the movie to the color of the Na’vi to some words in the Na’vi language. For example, the word for bonding or feeling the connection between the Na’vi and the rest of the planet is “sahelu”, a derivation of the Hindi word for friendship, saheli. The Na’vi are blue in homage to the Hindu deities like Krishna and Rama, according to Cameron. I wonder if Cameron came up with the name “Na’vi” as a pun on Marathi where Navi means new (as in Navi Mumbai).

Avatar feels like the Star Wars of this Facebook generation. I think the floodgates are about to burst on commercial 3D movies. A slew of trailers of soon to be released 3D movies preceded the showing of Avatar. I imagine the movie moguls are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of the audiences flooding back to the movie halls. People who own fancy, expensive home theater are now upended by a technology that cannot be matched in their homes. No more waiting for DVDs or even Blu-Ray discs. If you want the ultimate in effects, come to the movie hall. And the consumer industry must be salivating at the soon-to-follow arrival of the wave of new TVs, home theatres and sound systems. IMAX, Discovery and Sony have already announced the launch of 24×7 3D TV channel. Avatar video games are on their way as is of course, two more sequels to the movie. Avatar franchised dolls and toys will be on every shelf accessible to kids. The very value – commercial exploitation – that the movie deplores and holds as the chief reason for the destruction of native habitats, is being unleashed as a consequence of its success. That is how success is defined in this globalized culture where economics is king.

I guess the laugh is on me, the nerd in me expecting to see the utopian union of great literature and great art with popular success. I wasn’t old enough to appreciate Star Wars when it came out. I maybe too old to appreciate Avatar.

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Happy Marriage

Posted on January 24, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

What makes for a happy marriage ? What makes two people stick together, day after day, month after month, year after mundane year ? Is it love ? Is it compatibility ? Is it fear of being alone ? Is it social pressure ? Is it ennui, the deadening of desire and energy that seems to come with age ? Is it habit ? Is it the pain of modern divorces, with their petty separations – this pickle bottle is mine, my mother pickled it and you never cared for it, this painting is mine, this coffee table book on Maine is mine ? Is it the fear of knowing that the relationship has been no more than the sum of their collected possessions and a shared bed ? Is it children ? Is it a biological need ? Is it the willful looking past hurts rendered, consciously and unconsciously ? Is it money ?

And what are the ingredients of a happy marriage ? Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike. So what is common across all happy marriages ? Is it fealty, physical and emotional ? I’m so faithful to you, I haven’t sleep with anyone else, even if we haven’t slept together in eons; I don’t discuss my fears and confusion with anyone else, I don’t even acknowledge them to myself anymore ? Is it the ability to work through conflicts, to sleep with compromises and to not think of them as compromises ? Is it the lack of conflicts ? Is it respect ? Are successful marriages egalitarian ?

Few books I’ve read explore the narrative of a marriage, searching for answers to these questions. Most are about either the romance or the breakup, or about infidelity. Only a few are about the sustenance past puppy romance, about the transition from pop songs about love to jazz songs about relationships, of the transformation of coca cola to fine wine. The first book about a married life that stayed with me was Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”. The book was about the grief of losing her husband of forty years, but in chronicling the silence, she chronicled what lived before. She wrote: “Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.”

Two books, one finished a month back and the other still in progress, are two recent reads that explore the inner life of a marriage.

A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. The title leapt out at me as I passed a neighborhood book store. The reviews it garnered made me pick up a copy from the local library. The first chapter barely interested me. The second walloped me. Never before have I read a book that laid out with such unflinching detail what it is like to be by the side of your spouse dying of cancer. The passages stunned me with their rawness and honesty. How do the people around you react when they know that you’ll die in two weeks ? What do you do ? When do you choose to say goodbye ? Who do you choose to say it to ? When is it too early and when may it be too late ? He writes the details he has to manage, people (the in-laws, the parents, the children, the friends), the choices of medical treatment, who gets to see her and for how long, what does she have the strength for and for how long. Just as Joan Didion’s book first showed me a glimpse of the foreign country that is grief, this book offered me a clearer glimpse of the landscape of the end of days of a spouse. Like Didion’s book, this book is semi-autobiographical, a mostly truthful rendering of the death of his wife, Margaret (only some of the dialogues have been made up, to make up for gaps in memory).

Juxtaposed with these chapters of end of days are chapters of courtship, marriage, parenting, the temptations of love outside marriage and the reasons for sticking on. While the chapters on courtship come off seeming weaker than the ones that describe her end, their courtship is rendered with honesty in unusual scenes, vulnerable scenes, vulnerability brought on by patterns laid out by the author’s culture, complicated by his early success (the author was a successful, published author at 16, a position I envied. He narrates the consequences of such an early success with such candor, I reconsidered my envy). Some of the author’s awkwardness reminded me of my own when I courted Shanthala. I read with a sense of deja vu scenes such as the awkward birthday gifts that he usually got her in the early days.

Yglesias writes: “He longed to penetrate the mystery of how they had managed to live a life together while they were so different in their natures and in their expectations of one another. And if there was no answer to be found in a last talk with his wife, at least he wanted to tell her what she had meant to him, and to hear what he had meant to her, because soon there would be only the loneliness of monologue.” Yglesias’s unstated question is whether their’s was a happy marriage. As I read the book, I wondered about some preconceived notions I had about a happy marriage such as: Is a happy marriage empty of strife, of infidelity ? Do opposites attract only during courtship or can it also cement a marriage ?

The other book, the one that I’m still reading, is Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Angle of Repose”. The narrator is an old, wheelchair bound historian, Lyman Ward. Trapped within the confines of a frail, paraplegic body, living alone – stubbornly, despite the misgivings of his son – he tries to piece together the life of his grandmother. Like Mark Knopfler, in narrating the story of a single life, he narrates a larger story, of a country, of a generation. Interposing passages of his grandmother’s life are Lyman Ward’s musings and aspects of his life. His introspective thoughts are filled with a grace and luminescence that make me want to go back and read them again and again.

The book drew me in with its meditative power, observations of nature, musings about the applications of the laws of physics to life, of life at the wild frontier that was the American West. For example, the very first page has this passage about the intersection of time and personality: “Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, cultures, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors I defend as if they were personal and not familial.”. In another passage, Lyman Ward muses about the Doppler Effect of the life of his grandmother: “The sound of anything coming at you – a train, say, or the future – has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. … I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne”. In a third, he writes about a morning in Grass Valley, California: “May 28, I see by the calendar. The brief and furious spring of these foothills is over, summer is here before I saw it coming. The wildflowers along the fence are dried up, the wild oats are gold, not green, the pine openings no longer show the bloody purple of Judas trees, the orchard and the wisteria are in fruit and pod, not blossom. From now until the November rains, the days will be so unchanging that without the Saturday ballgame I won’t be able to tell week from weekend. Who wants to ? When I was a boy here, summer was narcosis. I am counting on it to be what it always was.”. I wish I could write a tenth as sublimely as Stegner does.

In trying to piece together his grandmother’s life, Lyman Ward realizes what he’s doing is trying to understand the marriage of his grandparents. Lyman Ward explains to his skeptical son: “What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That is where the meaning will be if I find any”.

Two thirds of the book are a record of that relationship. Of a relationship forged by distance, by the hard frontier life. And in describing that relationship, he also describes the conquest of the West, of life in one horse mining towns, of lynchings by vigilantes, the conflict of interest between government surveyors and the miners wishing access to that information before it became public, and the people who lived in these times. But the kernel rests on the unlikely relationship. The remaining third of the book cover aspects of Lyman Ward’s life, how this quest affects his life and his graceful musings.

Like Yglesias’ book, Stegner’s book is part fiction and part true story. The characterization of the grandmother and grandfather are also drawn from Stegner’s mother and father. Stegner also modeled the grandmother on Mary Hallock Foote, whose letters provided a basis for the novel (and stirred up some cries of plagiarism). The novel is peppered with cameos by real life Western explorers and engineers such as Clarence King, Henry Janin and Samuel Emmons.

The story of people striking West in search of opportunity, fame and fortune is not unlike an immigrant story. Of the many Indians I have seen in this country, the price of the journey has always been paid more dearly by the women, just as women and children have always paid the price of men’s ambitions through history. A passage that addresses the plight of such women is an example of the universality of Stegner’s writing: “When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them”.

Shanthala grew up in a single place since she can remember, mostly in the same house. I grew up everywhere, uprooted every 3-4 years. Shanthala, like Scarlett of Gone with the Wind, is rejuvenated by a visit home, her parents’ home. I envy her. I wish sometimes a place could rejuvenate me so, a place I could call home the way she does. Stegner addresses this feeling from a different perspective, but in a way that touches the essence of my envy when he writes: “I wonder if ever again Americans can have the experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to ? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places”. Reading this, I realized that I was an immigrant before I came to the US, have been an immigrant all my life, living too shallowly in too many places, uprooted just as I was beginning to set roots.

Great literature can speak to people of completely disparate backgrounds, to the common humanity that binds us all. Stegner’s book is great literature.

I highly recommend both books.

You can read excerpts of both “A Happy Marriage” and “Angle of Repose” online. I also recommend Terry Gross’ interview of Rafael Yglesias (transcript available too).

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