Dexter Filkins

When I was in J-school at NYU, I took a profile writing class. The final assignment in the class, which was awesome and was taught by the singular Meryl Gordon, was to write a magazine-length profile story. I chose Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Dexter Filkins. Filkins, who at that point had been writing for the New York Times but now writes for the New Yorker, had spent many years in Iraq, covering the war for the Times. But the war and being so far from home took its toll on Filkins, and I found that compelling. I wrote the story, got an A in the class and shopped the article around to lots of magazines. But  no one bought the piece. However, an editor at New York Magazine wrote this to me, "Your story is well done, but so much has been written about Dexter in the past year that I think we're going to have to pass." Although he rejected it, I thought that was kind of cool. A "well done" from a New York Magazine editor.

Anyway, I figured this piece I wrote on Filkins should see the light of day. So below I'm posting it in its entirety. Hope you like it. 

By Chad Smith
 

DEXTER FILKINS IS trying to narrow the distance between two worlds.

In one world, he’s in Falluja with the marines battling for the city — bombs exploding, machine guns roaring, commanders barking orders, “Move!”

In the other world — the one he’s actually in at the moment — the world of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Filkins stands in front of a rapt audience. It’s early autumn and the New York Times foreign correspondent is here at the Harvard Bookstore on Massachusetts Avenue to read from his new book, The Forever War, an on-the-ground account of his last 10 years reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like most of the book’s passages, the one Filkins chooses tonight is gripping and honest. And suddenly at the Harvard Bookstore, the remote starts to feel too immediate.

“Gunfire rang out and we scrambled for the walls on the side of the street,” Filkins reads, as he looks out on a room packed tightly with serious-faced college students in crimson and professors in tweed. “The insurgents knew what they were doing; they were bracketing us with their shells, dropping them from left to right. They were falling now, exploding in titanic crashes, more closely this time. I’d seen mortars in the movies and even in Iraq but never this close and never so big. Their booms were crushing, and I imagined the shards of metal flying away from each shell. I felt sure we were going to die if we didn’t move, and I felt sure we would die if we did.”

At forty-seven, Dexter Filkins just may be one of the bravest — or craziest — men in journalism. As a leading Times correspondent in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, Filkins earned a reputation for his willingness to push physical, personal and logistical boundaries to near breaking points, if that’s what got the story. Best known for his dispatches from the blood-stained battle of Falluja in 2004, Filkins has extensively reported on the Muslim world and the war on terror, registering scores of major scoops for his newspaper. But it’s come with a price: Filkins’ personal life and emotional health haven’t gone unscathed. In some instances, his bold actions in the field have terrified colleagues, and in one case, the push to get the story resulted in a death. Still, many say, Filkins has gone to these lengths because that’s what it took to get the full picture to the readers back home.

A few weeks after the reading in Cambridge — a college town Filkins called the “quietest place on earth,” which may not be bad considering he wrote his book there on a fellowship in late ’06 — Filkins is in Manhattan. He’s agreed to stop for some coffee before heading to his newspaper’s headquarters in Midtown to learn what his next assignment will be.

Right on time and wearing his signature attire, black blazer, collared shirt (no tie) and khakis, Filkins is holding several Iraqi political posters rolled up under his arm, which he wants framed.

The Forever War has received across-the-board critical praise for its scope, its humanistic insights and the proximity with which it was written to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the book, Filkins describes everything from the bathroom habits of 6,000 marines, to the jihadi death threats his colleagues received, to the skyward eyes of a mortally wounded American soldier. Filkins is pleased with the reception, he says, but admits that the readings have left him tired.

“It’s draining and it’s exhausting and the war is a difficult thing to look back on because I keep finding myself in the middle of it, reliving it.”

Filkins, whose wispy, honey-brown hair is a bit more unkempt today than usual and whose grey circled eyes weigh down his otherwise boyish good looks, says that in each of the 17 cities to which he’s traveled for the book tour, he’s worked from the minute he’s landed to the minute he leaves — reading, signing, holding discussions, talking on radio shows and TV news programs. “It’s just a lot."
 
Certainly, this chink in the armor, the fatigue, wasn’t there six years ago when Dexter drove into Iraq alone in a rented car from Kuwait: The U.S. was invading and Filkins believed the best way to get closest to the story was by riding behind the tanks and sleeping in the desert.

But that was then. That was before the three and a half years of waking up day after day to car bombing after car bombing. Before nearly having his limbs torn off by an angry mob. Before the warm blood of a fatally shot marine splattered on his face.

Even so, there won’t be time to rest. Later, after the coffee, Filkins will visit the Times and learn that his editors have no intention of easing up on him. They’ve chosen the location for his next assignment, and it’s no safe place.

FOR THE PAST 11 years, it’s been this type of rhythm — a rhythm of departure and return, risk and relief, war and peace — that has come to define Dexter Filkins’ life. It began in 1997 when Filkins was working for the L.A. Times as a general assignment and political reporter. At the time, tension was flaring between Pakistan and India over nuclear weapons. Filkins happened to have a master’s in international relations, and the L.A. Times decided to take a chance on him, sending Filkins to head the paper’s bureau in New Delhi. The post would eventually lead to his foray into Pakistan and Afghanistan for stories.

Filkins would be one of the first to report on the Taliban. The extremist group even invited him in 1998 as a western journalist to watch an execution of a criminal in a Kabul sports stadium. Eventually, the Taliban expelled Filkins from Afghanistan after he started filing stories about its increasing brutality.  Filkins’ reporting from the region would make him a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. It would also catch the eye of the New York Times. In fall 2000, the grey lady recruited Dexter and brought him to New York. But he wouldn’t be staying in the city for long.

“I was in the New York Times newsroom one day and 9/11 had already happened, and it was one of those things where the foreign editor was walking by me and we started talking, and he was like, ‘Wait, you’ve been to Afghanistan, right?’ and I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ They pretty much sent me on the next plane over.”

By the winter of 2001, American forces had attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for September 11, driving the Taliban, said to be harboring Osama bin Laden, from power. Filkins, now back in Afghanistan after the American military’s intervention, said he was inspired by the Afghan people’s reaction. With the Taliban gone, most were rejoicing.

So as Dexter drove that rented car from Kuwait into Iraq during the American led invasion — he had volunteered to go and report — he thought the Iraqis would have a similar response.

“I had to drop that notion pretty quickly….I had no idea what I was getting into, but nobody really — well, nobody did.” Filkins was entering a world that would consume him for the next three and a half years. 


IN EARLY 2003, the New York Times, much like the other media outlets that had descended on Iraq after the invasion, was trying to find the best and most efficient way to report from a war zone whose journalistic parameters were still taking form.

Initially, reporters filed their stories from hotels, as they had in previous wars. But this war was different. In this war, reporters were no longer considered neutral; they were considered instruments of their states and thus targets. After a series of bombings rocked several downtown hotels, the Times rented a compound near the Tigris River and moved its reporters there.

Though this compound, known as the Baghdad bureau — it was where the reporters worked and slept — sat right across the river from the American Green Zone, the compound, militarily speaking, was in the Red Zone, the unknown and danger zone. As time progressed in Iraq, the difference in terminology would become clearer.

“One time a bomb sent part of a radiator from a cement truck crashing down 30 yards from where Dexter and the rest of us did our writing,” said John Burns, a senior New York Times foreign correspondent who became Baghdad bureau chief in 2004.

Meanwhile, it seemed to some that living in this kind of chaotic, stress-filled environment only stirred Filkins into working harder and at a more frenetic clip. 

“What struck me about Dex,” said photographer Ashley Gilbertson, who first met Filkins at the Baghdad bureau in early 2003, “was he always had something happening. He’d be working at the most feverish pace on one story, exhaustively reporting it, and at the same time, he’d be researching and talking to people for a dozen other stories.” Gilbertson, who’d been working around Kuwait during the U.S. invasion, said he’d never seen anything like it. “Dexter was intense and came across more single minded than any other reporter I’d met. I think that came across as manic initially — I thought he was crazy."

A year later, Filkins and Gilbertson, a tall Australian who was 25 at the time of their meeting, would team up to cover the battle of Falluja. There they’d be bound by a personal tragedy.


BY THE TIME John Burns, a puffy haired, sharply eloquent Englishman officially began running the bureau in 2004, the Times in Baghdad had found its groove. It had hired a half-dozen translators and about 18 Iraqi “string” reporters. These string reporters, scattered across the country’s various provinces, would relay news as it broke to their American colleagues in Baghdad. The New York Times even hired a cook as well as several Iraqi drivers who were well acquainted with the country’s main streets, back roads and alleyways. Several of these Iraqi employees were armed, which would prove crucial.

As 2004 progressed, the violence in Iraq was skyrocketing, all hints of a civilized society were dissolving, and Al Qaeda fighters were streaming in through Syria. But Dexter Filkins still ventured from the Times’ compound — which by then had become well fortified with 25-ft blast walls and razor wire — so often that, between 2003 and late 2006, his tenure in Iraq, Filkins’ byline appeared on the front page of the New York Times 162 times.  

During his time in the country, Dexter Filkins talked to hundreds of bereaved victims of violence; he interviewed insurgents, walked the halls of Saddam’s former torture chambers, watched a thousand men bow in unison at daily prayer, and mingled with throngs of people celebrating in Baghdad after the country’s first free elections. He sped through the desert in a convoy with Ahmad Chalabi and his 100 armed guards. He reported from Mosul in the north, where American soldiers were often ambushed; from Najaf in the south, where politicians strove to reach accord with insurgents; from Ramadi in the center — in the Triangle of Death — where a lone battalion of marines hunkered down for weeks in claustrophobic quarters, determined to hold the city.

“Dexter was matchless,” said Burns, who already had over 30 years’ experience as a correspondent for the Times and had reported from several war zones before assuming the position in Baghdad. Filkins says he was driven unmercifully simply by a desire to understand every part of the story.

“The whole time in Iraq, I was just trying to figure things out. That was my passion. But the story was so insanely complex that even if I wanted to stop, I couldn’t. When I’d finally unlock one door, I’d find there were a hundred other smaller doors behind it. I had to keep going.”

One of the few who knew just how determinedly Filkins worked in Iraq was Warzer Jaff, his translator and right-hand-man for over three years. On a lavender-skied rainy afternoon in Manhattan recently, Jaff, who now lives in New York City, sat down in an Upper West Side diner and talked about the time the two shared in Iraq and Filkins’ level of dedication when it came to journalism in that country.

“Sometimes we’d go out to these places that were so dangerous doing one interview could get you killed,” said Jaff, a fit 38-year-old, originally from Kurdistan. Though the New York Times initially hired Jaff in 2003 as a translator, he played several other roles, too. Jaff had been a Kurdish guerilla fighter who fought Saddam in the 80s and 90s. Working for the Times, he was known as someone unafraid to draw his gun to protect a reporter’s life. Jaff continued:  “We’d spend the whole day in these dangerous places and probably interview, like, 10 or 15 people. And I thought at the end of the day, ‘OK, this is great, we did great.’ And then we’d go back to the bureau and Dexter would start writing and would be like, ‘Fuck. We don’t have the story.’ And I’d be like why and he’d say, ‘No, Jaff. We don’t have it. We didn’t get the right quote. We have to go back.’”

In addition to the peak standards Filkins required his journalism meet, John Burns said that Dexter was the best because his reporting techniques often worked so effectively, especially at press conferences. It got to the point where some of Dexter’s American colleagues in the room even took to mimicking him, Burns said.

“You’d have Dexter walk into one of these Baghdad press conferences, looking all disheveled, running his hand through his hair as he’d ask his questions, and he would just take the microphone and he’d say,  ‘Hey, man’ — he was addressing a four-star general — ‘Hey, man, I’m just trying to figure this out, I’m just a little confused.’” Once Filkins had the general’s attention, Burns said, he’d hit him with a follow-up question that was “dead on,” shooting straight to the matter. The effect was jarring and often those Filkins addressed would fluster. The tactic, Burns said, had a tendency to shake loose otherwise closely guarded bits of information. “Dexter is good at disguising how bright he actually is.”

Some of Dexter’s other techniques may not have been so readily adopted. For example, Filkins was known to dress up in traditional Arab garb so he could head into neighborhoods so perilous he almost certainly would’ve been harmed were his true identity discovered. “No one looks less like an Iraqi than Dexter,” said Burns from London where he now heads that city’s bureau for the Times. “But there Dexter was, in his keffiyeh and dishdasha, about to get into one of our armored cars.”

The war gripped Filkins so fiercely, Dexter recently told Vanity Fair, that when he was sitting on a flight returning to the U.S. from Iraq in 2003 and learned from a stewardess, mid-flight, that Saddam Hussein had just been captured in Iraq, “I turned into a lunatic. I literally tried to convince them to turn the plane around in the air.”

Upon landing in Miami, Filkins immediately flew back to Jordan; from there, he drove the 500 miles through the desert to reach the Times bureau. Shortly before reaching the bureau, however, Filkins got into a car accident and nearly paralyzed himself. The next day, after being fitted with a neck brace, Filkins went to Al-Dawr to see Saddam’s spider hole for himself. Upon arrival, insurgents opened fire on Filkins’ car and his driver sped off. It one of his closest calls but it certainly wouldn’t be his last.


DEXTER FILKINS IS standing at a lectern inside Politics and Prose, a neighborhood bookstore in Washington, D.C., telling another packed audience a story he’s told 100 times before. It’s a perfect little story. It always gets a laugh and helps Filkins illustrate how uncertain and dangerous the landscape was in Iraq for western journalists.

“So I’m in Iraq,” Filkins says, looking out at an almost all-white, fifty-something crowd here for the reading at this bookstore not far from the White House. “I’m about to sit down for an interview with a Sunni sheik, Sheik Achmed. And it’s just me and my translator, Warzer Jaff. And so Sheikh Achmed has tea and sweets brought out for us, the whole thing. But before the interview starts, Jaff and Sheik Achmed start talking in Arabic. And it’s a long conversation, and I was getting a little impatient and I said, ‘Jaff, what’s going on?’ And he told me to hang on. And at one point the conversation got very heated; it was almost like an argument. And finally Jaff said, ‘OK, now you can ask your questions.’ So Sheikh Achmed and I had a wonderful talk, it lasted about an hour, and he brought out more tea and more sweets, great.  In the way back in the car, I said, you know, ‘Jaff, what were you talking about with Sheik Achmed for so long? It was frustrating.’ And Jaff said, ‘Oh, he wanted to kidnap you. I told him he better not even think about it.’”

The crowd breaks out in laughter, and Dexter shakes his head, amazed himself at the story.

Even Jaff, as he sat in that Upper West Side diner, had to laugh when he heard how prominent the tale is in Dexter’s arsenal.  “My God did it get close,” he said.  But later, as Jaff would think back to just how many risks he and Dexter took together, and how dangerous most were, he’d stop laughing.

“Let me tell you something, so many times with Dexter we were this close to getting killed,” Jaff said and held two fingers an inch apart. “Sometimes he had no idea how close we were."

One of those times was in summer 2004. Filkins, Jaff and a driver, Walee, were headed back to Baghdad through Falluja after working a 12-hour day when they spotted a teahouse on the side of the road. Though it was months before the marines would storm the western-Baghdad city by fire, Falluja, since the invasion’s beginning, had always been one of the most dangerous places for foreigners in all Iraq. Though Jaff was a translator and Walee a driver, both men carried guns. Without Dexter, walking into this teahouse wouldn’t have been a problem; with him, the equation changed completely. Plus, Jaff added, it didn’t help that Dexter “looks so American” and has body language like “an army guy.” Nevertheless, the three walked inside the crowded teahouse and Jaff went to the bathroom to wash his hands. Right before doing this, he told Walee specifically: “Watch Dexter.” When Jaff returned, Filkins was gone. Walee had turned his back for a second.

“And I look around and I just almost went crazy, and I was ready to take out my gun or something. My God. He didn’t have any idea how dangerous it was, what he just did,” Jaff said.  “I went outside the teahouse and I found Dexter near the road on the phone with the foreign desk in New York, talking loud in English. About twenty men had begun to surround him as he talked, but he didn’t realize because he was too involved with New York. And these Falluja guys in the parking lot looked crazy, and they were just ready to kill him — it was very easy to kill someone in Iraq — and all these guys were whispering about him, and I swear if he stood there for another 15 minutes, he was gone. They would have just put him in something and taken him away.”

Ali Adeeb, who worked at the New York Times Baghdad bureau from 2003 to 2006, managing the 18 Iraqi string reporters for the paper, said that when Dexter is in the field, “he focuses 100 percent on the story. He forgets everything around him and sort of loses contact with his surroundings. He doesn’t mean to, but it’s the way he operates.”

After an especially deadly series of car bombings at the Baghdad headquarters of the International Red Cross in 2003, Dexter wandered into a plaza in the area packed with hundreds of Iraqis; he wanted to do some reporting. Before Dexter knew it, the crowd, hysterical with anger over the chaos sweeping their country, and noticing an American was in their midst, set upon him.

“People started clubbing me,” Dexter writes in his book. “Someone stripped the phone from my hand, then my notebook and others grabbed my arms.” Walee, Dexter’s 6-foot-8-inch driver, noticed what was happening and pulled Dexter back from the grip of the crowd, saving him from what Dexter has said was certain death.

Sometimes, Filkins’ bold actions pushed his colleagues past their limits. On a hot afternoon in 2005 in the northern Iraqi city of Kadhimiya, Filkins was working on a story with another of his translators, Yusra Al-Hakeem, when about 20 men wearing all black and each holding a machine gun — the Mahadi Army — showed up to the city’s government center, where Dexter and Yusra were waiting to get an interview. Mahadi Army members began staring at Dexter, and Yusra, who had worked on many dangerous assignments, had a uniquely bad feeling this time.

“I was starting to get really nervous and something in my gut told me to get out of there. And Dexter saw how nervous I was and he said to me, ‘focus.’ And I said, ‘Dexter, I think we should go.’ And he said, ‘Yusra, please, focus on the story.’ And I said, ‘What about your safety, Dexter?’ And he said, ‘Fuck my safety!’ and I shouted back, ‘Fuck your safety, but what about my safety?!’”

In retrospect, Yusra, a sprightly and petite woman with great brown eyes, said she understood why a group of men with machine guns wouldn’t unnerve Dexter, who had already reported from the battle of Falluja. Still, even a year earlier at that battle, Filkins wouldn’t let fear deter him. The only difference was in Falluja someone got killed.


ON NOVEMBER 15, 2004, Dexter Filkins and Times photographer Ashley Gilbertson were embedded with 150 marines from the 1/8 Bravo Company, as it launched an assault on Falluja, a city 40 miles west of Baghdad that had evolved into an insurgent stronghold.

Day after day Filkins filed stories from the battle; it was reporting that would win him a George Polk award. He and Gilbertson were traveling with Bravo Company — on foot — as it fought a ferocious house-to-house style battle with insurgents. The goal was to capture the city, and both sides were taking heavy casualties.

That afternoon, The New York Times, over satellite phone, told Ashley it needed a photo of a dead insurgent for a story. The marines, at this point, had overtaken a large part of Falluja but were stationed now at its outskirts. Ashley and Dexter asked a marine commander if they could go back into the city for the photo — they had heard there was a dead insurgent lying at the top of a mosque’s minaret. The commander agreed but assigned a detail of soldiers to the journalists for protection. The group now walked back into the city, smoldering and in ruins, and headed for that minaret.

“We came to the door of the minaret,” Filkins writes in The Forever War. “Ash and I stepped in to go through the door when a pair of marines stepped in front of us. We’ll go first, they said. The first marine put his hand out...” The marines recognized that, even though the reporters were brave for wanting to go right in, it was their job to lead the way should any danger lie ahead. The two soldiers started up the minaret’s narrow, winding stairs. Gilbertson and Filkins were in tow.

“The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backwards, falling onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face...the first marine was struck…he was dead.”

The journalists were right: There had been a dead insurgent at the top of the minaret. But there was also a live one with him. As the lead marine, Lance Corporal William Miller, walked up the stairs, he was shot in the face three-quarters the way up. Later, a lieutenant in Bravo Company acknowledged that Miller would still be alive had the Times not wanted the photo but he also forgave Filkins and Gilbertson, as did most of the men in the company. “It’s a war; that’s what happens in war” is how one soldier put it, Filkins writes.

Since then, Dexter has tried to make peace with the incident and has visited Miller’s family, who wasn’t angry at him, he writes in The Forever War. Miller’s parents actually thanked Filkins for writing such an honest and full account of their son’s final moments. They said Filkins’ story added feeling and dimension, two things the military’s cold written report lacked.

On the tragedy, Ashley said:

“I think about the kid every day….I see a shrink, and, yes, sometimes we talk about him [Miller]. I, like Dexter, continue to cover the story, and that's one way of coping, and I've been focusing a lot on working on stories that might help the vets. I'm trying to humanize much of the death and killing in a way American's can relate, by photographing the rooms of the fallen marines and soldiers. I'm also focusing on post traumatic stress disorder and suicide. I worked for four months on a story about Noah Pierce, who did two tours and came home and shot himself.”

Not only would both journalists have to carry around this new burden upon returning home, but Filkins would now have to do it without the support he once had. The war had put major strain on some of his personal relationships, and after 10 years of marriage, Filkins underwent a divorce in 2005. During his tenure in Iraq, he writes in The Forever War, “I lost the person I cared for most.”

That person was Ana Menéndez, a Cuban-American journalist and author Dexter met at the Miami Herald, his first major newspaper job, in the early 90s.  In 1995, the two married and, for a long time, Menéndez tried managing her career around Dexter’s. When Filkins went to the L.A. Times in ’95, Menéndez went to the Orange County Register. When the L.A. Times sent Dexter to India, she came along, and when the New York Times, on account of Filkins’ knowledge of west Asia, sent him to head the paper’s Istanbul bureau, she also accompanied. But when Dexter traveled to Iraq in 2003, Menéndez finally had to stay behind. She dedicated her first novel, which came out in 2004, to Dexter who was in the war zone. Eventually, Ana said in an e-mail message, the circumstances would prove too difficult.

“Ours was an ordinary marriage, subject to ordinary pressures and challenges. Our story was exciting in many ways, but ultimately it succumbed, like any other, to the great levelers of distance and time,” wrote Menéndez from Cairo, Egypt, where she’s on a Fulbright scholarship, lecturing at the American University and learning Arabic. Menéndez said she’d read Dexter’s book; she was glad things were turning out well for him. “I’m thrilled for his success — happy that the difficult years he lived through could be transformed into something sublime and even beautiful. And happy because I lived much of that story with him, and it’s my story also.”


DEXTER PRICE FILKINS was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 24, 1961. His parents, Helen and Cedric, met when they were stationed in southern Frankfurt after World War II — she was a club director for the U.S. Army, Dexter’s father was a lieutenant. After moving back to America the two lived wherever Cedric’s job with General Motors dictated — first in Queens, New York, then Cincinnati.

When Dexter was eight, his parents divorced. Helen, not having much money but too proud to move back to her parents’ home in Madison, Wisconsin, took the family — Dexter, his older brother Rick and his younger sister Louise — down to Cape Canaveral, Florida, because, Helen said, the cost of living in this small town near the Kennedy Space Center was cheap.

“It turned out to be a great move,” Helen said over the phone from her home in Florida where she still lives. “The kids couldn’t have been happier because the weather was so good.”    
      
Dexter grew up playing midget football and little league and also had a passion for running, which would never leave him, even in Iraq. Though Dexter still talks to his father, Cedric didn’t play much of a role in raising him. But that didn’t seem like a problem

“Dexter’s very independent and my mother was really a saint and acted as both mother and father,” said Louise, who now works for the Center for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. “Besides,” she added, “Dexter was always too busy and had too many friends calling to worry about that.”

At Coco Beach High School, Dexter was voted most popular and elected president by his senior class. Later he went on to the University of Florida and won a scholarship to study philosophy and international relations at Oxford. It was there that Dexter decided he wanted to become a journalist. “I sort of backed up into it,” he once said in an interview with C-Span.

Helen, however, said she knew her son would be a writer, even from an early age, and could point to a specific moment.

“One day, when Dexter wasn’t home, I think he was about 12 at the time, I walked into his room. And on his desk there was this essay. It was about a trip he’d just taken to visit his father. And I read it and it just blew me away. It was so descriptive and it was letter-perfect. I couldn’t find one error.”  (And Helen had a sharp eye: she had been a writer for the Kennedy Space Center as well as a college English teacher.)

Louise said that when her brother was younger he never mentioned outright that he wanted to become a reporter, but it seems a natural fit, considering his upbringing.

“When our family sat down at dinner it was like the ‘McLaughlin Group’: we all talked about politics and what was in the papers. And Dex was always — you know this was before computers, the Internet and cable news, so basically it was just Time and Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report — and he was always reading one of those.”

While Dexter wasn’t too much of a risk-taker growing up, there were hints he might grow into one if the opportunity presented itself.

“I remember one year he went on a trip to Washington,” Helen said, “and he called me up and told me he had just climbed Mt. Rainier. We live in a place that’s about six feet above sea level. What did he know about climbing mountains?”

“Well, there was this one book,” Louise added, “it was our favorite growing up. It was called Men of Daring. It was published in the early 30s, and it was about, like, just all these cool men — Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill — all these sort of renaissance guys, these adventurous guys, and Dex just loved this book and wanted to be like one of those guys; we all did.”

Though Dexter actually went on to become a “man of daring,” his sister and mother say they wish he just wouldn’t be that daring. They worry dearly for his safety, even more now after having read The Forever War.

“Boy is that book something,” Helen said. “He risked his life and I’m glad it’s over. But I was horrified when I read it. As his mother, I should get a medal. You know, there really should be an award just for mothers of sons in war zones. The worry. It’s terrible."

Louise had a similar reaction. “The book was really hard for me to read. I got to see just how many times Dex escaped being killed or hurt. And when I’m reading the book, that’s my brother, it’s not just a journalist. And, you know, some of these stories I’ve heard over the years, and then I read them and I say to myself, ‘Oh my God, it was worse than I thought.’ It really stays with me.”

Though the family tries to stay in touch, mostly by e-mail — Louise and Helen both have Google alerts set up to tell them of any news Dexter’s filed or when a new book review on The Forever War has been published — having a relative who’s a foreign correspondent is difficult.  The last time the whole family was under one roof was about three years ago, Louise said.

Rick, Dexter’s older brother, who works as an attorney, still lives in Florida and helps Helen who is 85. Still, Helen said, she wishes she could see Dexter more.

“We know the New York Times believes that Dexter is their man but maybe one day Dex will come back home. We hope soon.”


BACK IN NEW YORK, Dexter is checking his watch, anxious to get over to the New York Times for his new assignment, anxious because he barely ever has any time these days — or ever.

In a week he’ll be on the plane to Amsterdam. The Forever War is being translated into Dutch and five other languages, and he needs to make an appearance for the publisher.

Dexter’s finished his coffee and is now on to the bottle of Pepsi he brought with him. Filkins has even been known to drink Red Bull first thing in the morning to get, and keep, him going. As he talks about the war and what it’s all meant to him, he takes extra deep breaths, as though he’s trying to clear a tension that has built in his chest. Mostly, Afghanistan and Iraq have left him with mixed feelings. What he’s sure of, he says, is that the general mood in America today doesn’t resemble that of a nation at war, which upsets him. Dexter says he’s even loath to talk about his political beliefs on Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees it as punditry, an indulgence.

“These wars aren’t about me, they’re not about you and your opinion, they’re about the people who are fighting them, and the problem for me with America is that nothing is asked of the average person, of the typical American, to do anything. We haven’t had to pay higher taxes, there’s no war bonds, there’s no draft, there’s no nothing, and so, therefore, what are these wars? They’re something we argue about.”

Dexter brightens when the conversation lands on all the friends he made in Iraq, many of whom were Iraqi employees for the New York Times. In several cases, Filkins — in ways large or small — helped his friends “get out.” Dexter wrote letters of recommendation for two veterans of the Baghdad bureau for scholarships to study journalism in New York. Both got it. In fact, Warzer Jaff, the translator, had been on the phone with Filkins minutes before he sat down that day on the Upper West Side to recount the risks the two took together. Filkins had been pleading with him to consider accepting a scholarship at Harvard — a scholarship Filkins was trying to help him get — instead of going back to Iraq to work as a reporter.

As for going back to the country himself, a country that Filkins adopted a great respect and affinity for — he even said he now loves Arabic music — it doesn’t seem likely, though he does admit missing Iraq, especially after he first returned to the States.

“When I was there, I was thinking about home. When I finally did get home, I found myself wanting to go back.”

Ashley Gilbertson said he understood what Dexter meant. “Those of us that stayed have a real sense of mission on the story. It’s almost hardwired, that we need to be there, to see the story firsthand and relate it as honestly as possible to the people back home.”

During Filkins’ tenure in Iraq, he saw much death, sometimes on a daily basis. However, Dexter says it hasn’t traumatized him but did admit to having a hard time when he first got home, in late 2006: “I was pretty numb to everything, I wasn’t interested in anything. It took me a long time to come back to life. It really did. I was pretty tired, I was pretty worn out.”

Still, Dexter was able to point to a moment he knew he’d make it.

“I have some really close friends that I’ve known for many years, and they go surfing in Costa Rica every year. And I hadn’t gone in many years, and then in 2006, I went to Costa Rica and met my friends….It was surreal; I had been in Iraq for so long and seen so much destruction and so much violence, but then suddenly I was eating beans and rice and driving to the Pacific Ocean. The tropics helped bring me back. They’re just full of life and color, the sea breeze. That’ll save anybody.”

Filkins’ sister, Louise, said she still had her doubts.

“I think to most people, Dexter’s still the same guy. But I think, to some degree, it’s affected him deep down — probably in ways we’ll never know.”

Walking from the coffee shop near Times Square and heading toward his newspaper’s headquarters a few blocks away, Filkins doesn’t look back. When he arrives at the New York Times, and the elevator stops on the third floor, he’ll get off and walk over to the foreign desk, where he’ll finally learn his next assignment: Afghanistan. Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurging and stepping up its car bombings, where American and Afghan forces are under siege and the future looks opaque. It happens to be terrain Filkins understands better than most, and he knows that’s why he has to go. “But am I excited?” he’ll later ask. “I’ll tell you one thing, I would have been a lot more excited 10 years ago.”

Guns

So on Saturday, I held my first handgun. I have to admit, it was a bit exhilarating. But the whole experience was a bit strange, too, and gives some insight into how I think.

I was working on a story that brought me to a pawn shop. The pawn-shop owner was super nice and helpful. I hadn't gone to the store to write about guns or anything like that, but when I expressed interest in the handguns that were in the back, in a glass display case, one of the shop's employees asked me if I'd liked to see any of the guns. I said sure. Then he asked me if I'd like to hold one. Again, sure.

First he allowed me to hold a black and silver Smith & Wesson, 9mm handgun. It was very heavy and the first thing I thought was, wow, this is a Smith & Wesson. This is, like, an American gun. Many Americans, I'm sure, take pride in this company.  After all, this is top-notch American manufacturing.

The pawn shop employee -- a super nice and bright kid -- told me about clips and safeties. He articulately explained the difference between automatic and semi-automatic handguns. (You have to keep squeezing the trigger for a round to fire on a semi-automatic.) I was grateful he never pointed the guns in my direction when he showed me their features.

Then we moved on to other handguns.

We got to a revolver. It had a rotating cylinder that held six bullets and looked sort of modest, sort of old-fashioned, if you will. He told me that several decades ago, police in the US used to use such guns. But to be honest, the only thing that I could think of was that this gun, this revolver he was showing me, looked incredibly similar to the gun that was used to kill John Lennon.

Lennon was killed by a Charter Arms .38-caliber revolver. I once saw a picture of this gun. I remember a feature that stuck out to me was the shortness of its barrel. The barrel of the revolver that the pawn shop employee was showing me was also incredibly small -- shorter than a pinky, really.

The next thing that the pawn shop employee said about this particular revolver, which he'd put down on the counter, perturbed me a bit.

He said that such a revolver isn't that accurate because it has such a short barrel. He said that you have to be really close to your target, when using this gun. Otherwise, your chances of hitting the target aren't really that great. I thought about how John Lennon's assassin stood about six feet behind him.

We moved on. It was really interesting to see how small some guns are. Heavy, but small. He showed me a Glock, an Austrian-made gun. He told me that Glocks are very durable and dependable. They cost about $250, used. I couldn't help but be reminded of the many rap songs -- I used to listen to rap -- which mention Glocks. So these were Glocks, huh.

I held a few more handguns, even pulled the slide back on one. I asked which weapon was the top of the line, and he showed me a small black pistol, which was pretty heavy. He said that this pistol, which was made by Springfield Armory, had three safeties on it. He liked this feature because, well, safety, is important.

I agreed. But all I could think about was the fact that in the summer of 2011, a drug addict in Long Island, who wrote on his Facebook page that he loved Springfield Armory guns, walked into a pharmacy and cold-bloodedly murdered four people -- a teenager, a 33-year-old woman, the pharmacist and an old man -- with a gun made by Springfield Armory.

Sure, it was exhilarating holding a handgun for the first time. Frightening, too.

Frame of Mind

You know, it's crazy: the frame of mind we're in at any given moment has such a strong influence on how we perceive and interpret things.

Let me clue you in as to what I'm talking about. The other day, my aunt bought me a present. She put it in a bag that was from Talbots, the women's clothing store. (Don't worry, it was a gift but it wasn't from Talbots.) Anyway, I looked at this bag several times, and several times I noticed the graphic located on both sides of the Talbots bag. I thought nothing of this graphic. The bag subsequently stayed on the floor of my apartment because I was too lazy to throw it out.

Yesterday, I learned that the mother of a best friend of mine died. I knew I had to call my friend after getting the news from a mutual friend of ours. I sat on my bed and stared hard at the phone for a second before calling him. Anyway, he and I talked for a while about what happened. During the course of our conversation, I slipped down from the bed to sit on the floor. As he and I spoke of his mother, of her last days, of the shock of it all, of mortality, my eyes happened to fall upon that Talbots bag — it was right in front of me — and the graphic on it. This time, though, my eyes didn't just glaze over the graphic.

Indeed, the frame of mind we're in at any given moment has a strong influence on how we perceive things.

Poems

So I've been writing poetry for a pretty long time. I've written poems on lots of themes and things. I remember one of the first good poems I wrote. I was 16. The poem was about a girl named Rachel Scott. This girl was a victim of the Columbine massacre. Something about her story hit me. So I wrote a poem. And over the years I've just continued to write about things that hit me. Anyway, I don't usually post my poems, but I figured why not. Below are some poems that I've written in the last year. And I promise I'll try to dig up that poem about Rachel Scott sometime soon.

*

I recognize it in you

I recognize it in you
Because I see it in me.

Whether you're sad or happy

I can read your tone with ease

And read deeply in your smirk

Expose the tablets of your heart

With little work.

I can shoot the breeze with you

If I see it's your desire

Or square off toe to toe

If I feel you've got the fire.

I can read your eyes, you know
I can read your brow
And your laugh is like an open book
That's open to me now

I hope you know it's not a joke
And that it's plain to see

I recognize it in you
Because I see it in me.

*

I'll write a bit of poetry

I'll write a bit of poetry
Some solace in the night
The nighttime breeze comes through my room
A black cat to my right

All these things I do not know
Staggering, profound.
Thunderclaps and rain
My heart a pound pound pound

What tethers me to you
Is it something in my soul?
Something in my nature?
No sense in letting go?

I'll live and then I'll die
Without really having known
Something in my nature
Something in my soul.

*


I really don't care what you say

I really don't care what you say
I'm still convinced love saves the day
I still believe that when evening falls
And shadows climb my room's four walls
Love will hold me in its arms
And ward off all the world's ill charms
And with the day, I'll find the strength
Cause love will pull me on. 

*

Existential angst

I've got this huge burning intensity inside me
What's this feeling that I feel?
A pocket full of anxiety,
A lightning rod wheel
Chugging, chugging, chugging
A fighter plane, a tank
A ramrod or an oil rig.
Existential angst.

*

A melancholy feeling comes at night like sad instrumental music you can place your own words over.

*

The postman asks, Priority?

The postman asks, Priority?
As if there's any other way
For me love's number one
A few more dollars I can pay
A few more hours I can spare
Believe me it will pay
The postman asks, Priority?
My god, of course, I say.

*

All of us need anchors

All of us need anchors
We don't want to be adrift
To feel life alone
To feel as if we've missed
Our calling in another
Hold this heart, hold mine
All of us need anchors
In sea, in space, in time.

Remembering Jessica Mena...

Below you'll find a free form kind of piece about my friend Matt's sister, Jessica, who died in 2009. The piece, when it gets down to it, also deals with the impressions that people leave on us. There are several sections to the piece. I think it's worth the read. I hope you do too.

On a recent morning, I woke up and was able to remember a dream I’d had during the night. The dream was about Matt Mena, my childhood friend. Dreams are strange and sometimes, after we wake, we remember only snippets or individual scenes from them. When it comes to this dream I recently had, I remember only one scene.

I was sitting along the edge of a round, aboveground pool (the type often seen in people’s backyards) and my feet were in the water. I was wearing a bathing suit and was taking in the sun. Matt Mena was sitting next to me. We weren’t talking. It seemed as though he was just keeping me company. I had a sense of impending dread. Dread. This was the dream’s pervading feeling.

Anyway, as I sat there, I looked in the water. Now, this pool, it was very, very deep. Usually aboveground pools in people’s backyards are eight feet deep, max. The pool in the dream seemed bottomless; it was more like a void.

At any rate, there I was, just sitting on the edge, peering into the water with a sense of dread. The feeling turned out to be founded. From the deep, I saw someone beginning to swim toward the surface. I kept my eye on him. He was getting closer and closer. Though he was swimming to the surface, I first espied him when he was quite deep. Don’t ask me how he was able to hold his breath for so long, but he managed. Anyway, I knew why he was swimming to the surface. He was coming for me, to pull me under. I was certain — insofar as people can be certain in dreams — that these were his intentions. I was also certain that this person wanted to pull me under as a prank. I’m not sure, however, if he wanted to drown me. It felt more as if he wanted to pull me under to be funny.

Now, this person swimming to the surface, he knew Matt. In fact, he and Matt were friends. I’m not sure if I were friends with this person but I was certain he and Matt were. Anyway, I was watching him swim upward and before I knew it, this person was moments from breaching the surface, from reaching me and trying to pull me under.

But I was ready.

I had a firm grip on a pipe that was fixed to the pool, near its edge. I knew that this person in the water was about to try and pull me under, but I wasn’t going to let that happen; I was prepared. Anyway, the person finally breached the surface and started tugging on me. But he couldn’t budge me. And he knew it. He had to quickly rethink his plan.

He turned to Matt, who was sitting next to me, and said, “Help me....Tickle him" — referring to me, of course — "Hit his hand!” This person was trying to enlist Matt into helping him drag me into the pool. When I noticed this, I was a little concerned. I knew he and Matt were friends. But Matt and I were friends, too. Anyway, as I sat there, holding on to this pipe — the only thing preventing me from succumbing — I turned to Matt. I wasn’t sure if Matt was entertaining the idea of helping this person but I wasted no time nevertheless. I said to Matt, “Don’t you fucking dare.” Matt then looked at me and his expression said everything. It said that he was by no means about to help this person pull me into the water. His expression told me that he wasn’t even entertaining the idea. Matt was on my side. And I wasn’t, in the end, pulled under.

That was the dream.

Anyway, that morning, the morning on which I woke from this dream, I had an urge. I’m not exactly sure why I had this urge, but it probably had to do with the fact that I’d just dreamt of Matt; it probably had to do with the fact that Matt’s noble actions in my dream reminded me of the strong bond he and I once had. Anyway, the urge was this: to write about Jessica, Matt’s sister. Jessica died of a drug overdose in the winter of 2009. But you would never have thought it. In fact, I never knew Jessica had a drug problem or even took drugs. Anyway, I had this strong urge to write about Jessica after waking up from this dream the other day. So here goes.

*

I can’t remember when I first met Jessica. To me she always seemed pretty young. I was three years older than she. I must have met her in late 1994 when I was 12 because that was the year I became friends with Matt. I must have met Jessica at Matt’s house, at his mother’s second-floor apartment in the Great Neck Terrace.

Jessica had a caramel complexion, sort of like Matt. Unlike Matt, though, who has frizzy hair, Jessica’s hair was straight. It was black, too, and I remember her wearing it long. Her eyes, if I can remember right, were the color of her skin. Like caramel. But I’m not really sure. At any rate, her eyes were light. Jessica always seemed very calm, too. Her voice was smooth and soothing. She spoke at a slightly-slower-than-normal pace. I was never sure why she spoke this way, but it sounded fine and it was completely natural to her; there was no affectation going on.

I remember her room at her mother’s apartment in the Terrace. It had a fire escape and it was always very messy. A mirror hung above a long cabinet across from her bed. I think her walls were painted magenta. Anyway, Jessica was often on the phone when I came over to Matt’s house. (I started coming over often in 1995.) Yeah, I remember her frequently being on the phone or out when we — as in Matt’s friends — came over. She was never too interested in Matt’s friends. She’d always speak to us, but she was never interested in involving herself in our circle. She certainly never dated any of us; at least I think she didn’t. Jessica always had her own friends. She was always very popular. However, it must be said that she could be reticent and she didn’t always seem that extroverted. Therefore, I did wonder at times how she had so many friends. Not that she wasn’t a likable person, she was, but she seemed more the type who wouldn’t be that interested in making a ton of friends. Still, she had them.

Jessica would always ask you a few questions if you were to come to Matt’s house while she happened to be hanging around. She seemed to be interested in you, but, as I mentioned, not that interested. Still, it must be said that, when Jessica asked you a question, it never seemed as though she were simply trying to make conversation. It never seemed like she was talking to you out of a compulsion to be polite. She was asking those questions because she was interested.

To be honest, I don’t have that many memories of Jessica before she entered her first year of high school. I was a senior when she was a freshman at Great Neck South High. I remember that she was in my first period keyboarding class, which I took my senior year. Jessica sat next to me, at the computer to my left. I think I might have even cheated off her during a test once or twice. I remember Jessica as a decent student. I remember always thinking how strange it was that Jessica had entered my high school. She always seemed so young. I always felt as though I was much older than she was, and it was always a bit odd seeing her in the hallways.

However, when I did see her walking in those hallways, ignoring her was impossible. If I’d see her walking, and if I wasn’t too much in a rush, I’d always look her way....I’d always acknowledge her. I also remember that she, too, would always acknowledge me. Most of the time we wouldn’t even say anything to each other. It was usually just a look. We’d make eye contact and sort of grin. But it was nothing flirty. It was more a look that said, “Well, well, well...what trouble are you causing?” Or perhaps the look — and we’d always maintain strong eye contact when we passed each other; we’d maintain eye contact for as long as we could — said, “Oh, you again. God, it’s kind of strange seeing you in my school, but it’s cool.”

Whatever the case, we’d always acknowledge each other. Jessica knew how close Matt and I had been even though Matt and I had grown apart a bit during my high school years and she knew that I’d had a pretty big influence on him. I sort of got Matt into graffiti. In fact, I think I was the person who originally helped Matt get in touch with his “bad” side. At any rate, Jessica knew I was no angel. The expression she had on sometimes when we passed each other let me know this.

Ah, Jessica...what else? I remember that I went to a house party, which Jessica also attended, during my senior year of high school. As mentioned, I always felt as though I was a lot older than she was, and true to form, I remember saying to Jessica at this party that I couldn’t believe that I was partying with her; after all, she was so young, right? She and I were in the backyard of this house and we were sitting on lawn chairs facing each other and it was night. I remember saying that I couldn’t believe that I was drinking a beer with Matt’s little sister at a high school house party. I can’t remember what her reply was but she must have in some way played down my comment. She must’ve replied with something cool. She probably told me it really wasn’t that big of a deal, then changed the subject.

I also remember that Jessica was supposed to study psychology in college. I remember thinking that I thought that that would be a good pursuit for her. You were never able to really get inside Jessica’s head. It was always hard to read her. People would also say, perhaps somewhat jokingly, but still, that Jessica was good at persuading people, that she had strong powers of persuasion. I guess I could see that. It always seemed as though she was always able to read you; that she could see inside you, if you will. Whether this was true or not, I don’t know. However, it felt that way.

I saw Jessica for the last time on an LIRR train heading toward Manhattan. She was sitting with some guy, some guy whose likeness I can’t at all remember. I was traveling on the train alone that day. Jessica and this guy happened to be sitting a few seats away from where I’d taken a seat. Jessica noticed me, I think, and came over. She sat next to me and we started talking. She seemed very interested in what I had to say, more interested perhaps than she ever had been. She seemed very interested in what I was doing with my life. She was asking more questions than usual — though not too many — and she seemed very interested in the answers. This must have been 2008, the latest.

Anyway, we talked for a while and then she and her friend got off the train somewhere in Queens, though I’m not sure where. I really can’t even tell you what we talked about exactly. Our conversation must’ve centered on what she was doing with her life and my journalism. Anyway, I remember that she looked good, healthy. She looked the same way she looked when I first met her — thin, with a soft smile and long black hair. Her voice was still smooth and calming and she still talked at a slightly-slower-than-normal pace. I remember she had a nice smile on when she said goodbye to me that day. I also remember that she maintained eye contact with me for a little longer than someone else might have. She maintained eye contact with me for just a few moments longer, similar to the way she would when we’d pass each other in the hall in high school. And, just like all those times in high school and even before, she seemed to posses an ability to see what was inside.

Slowly Read and Dream

I’m not a critic. Never have been. When it comes to journalism, my thing is writing stories. Let the stories speak for themselves, you know? But that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy critiquing; that I don’t go over things in my head — song lyrics, an actor’s mannerisms on screen, brushstrokes from a Rothko painting — and think about why I believe those things are good, bad, terrible or profound.

With that in mind, I want to share with you a poem that I like; one that I long ago memorized and feel is far superior to many others. The poem is William Butler Yeats’ “When You Are Old.” Now, I can’t say when I first came across this poem, but I can say that I remember being awed by its crushing beauty. I want to share something that I like best about the poem with you, but first, without further ado:

          When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
          And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
          And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
          Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

          How many loved your moments of glad grace,
          And loved your beauty with love false or true,
          But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
          And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

          And bending down beside the glowing bars,
          Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
          And paced upon the mountains overhead,
          And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

In addition to the incredible way Yeats mixes melancholy ideas and images ⎯ love fleeing, a quick, sorrowful expression ⎯ with those that are happier ⎯ a photo album, the comfort of a fire place ⎯ to evoke a feeling of pure nostalgia (a mixture, mind, you, that is quite effective. After all, why do you think that the Beatles song “In My Life” is so popular? It, too, melds sadness with happiness with heartbreak and hope, four feelings that for the most part mark our lives on earth and characterize our relationships with each other), there is something else at play in “When You Are Old.”

The way in which certain words rhyme — or sort of don’t rhyme — in the poem, which was written in 1892 for the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, a woman Yeats loved but who would never marry him, is reminiscent of one of life’s truths.

Read the first line of the first paragraph. You see how it ends at the word “sleep”? O.K., now read the first paragraph’s last line. You see how it ends at the word “deep”? These two words rhyme, of course. But had you realized that while reading the poem?

If you’re like me, you read the word “sleep” at the end of that first line, thought — because, after all, this is a poem — that you were soon to read a word that rhymed with “sleep,” like “beep” or “creep” or, even, why, yes, “deep.” However, by the time you actually reached “deep” at the end of the fourth line, you’d totally forgotten that there was a word at the beginning of the stanza that shared that “ee” vowel sound, and were no longer anticipating the rhyme. The rhyme, so to speak, had been lost.

Nevertheless, it must be mentioned ⎯ and I think you’ll agree if you read the poem a second time ⎯ that a relationship still exists between “sleep” and “deep,” just as a relationship exists between “grace” and “face” and “bars” and “stars” even though these words don’t seem to rhyme when the entire poem is read in one shot. 

The vowel sound of each last word on each first line faintly echoes when you reach its supposed counterpart at the very end of each stanza.

In other words, even though the rhyme “isn’t” there, it sort of is, in a very slight, almost hardly traceable way.

So what’s the meaning behind all this? Well, here’s where the critic part comes in.

We all know that poetry is all about expression; that poets don’t only use words to express meaning, they also use meter, rhyme, punctuation, even the appearance of the words on the page. Yeats, in “When You Are Old,” does this non-rhyme rhyme, this echo-of-a-rhyme technique, for a reason.

He wants to emphasis that nothing in life is eternal and the poignant sadness of such a fact. By making sure in the poem that that rhyme is lost, or gets lost, he wants to draw attention to the way the things we love in life leave us or become less a part of us.

Think of it this way: When we recall all that we love in life ⎯ the beautiful things, the things rich with meaning, with poignancy ⎯ they arrive in our consciences in a powerful way. But for how long will  ⎯ can?  ⎯  these memories be so powerfully felt? Furthermore, how long will we have the opportunity to love the people we love or experience things that are meaningful? It might feel like forever sometimes because life, especially in the moment, can feel quite rich.

But time marches on. And we can’t escape, nor should we forget, time’s eroding powers. Furthermore, we should never forget how time has the power to transform our consciousnesses and snatch people and opportunities from us. Time erodes life, no matter how poignant life seems sometimes.

Yeats reminds us of this fact through his poetry.

Through that lost rhyme, the one that almost vanishes on the way from the last word of each stanza’s first line to the last word of each stanza’s last line, Yeats reminds us. Even though something beautiful exists, it is eventually lost. The rhyme itself erodes to the point of near extinction. Only a faint echo exists when we arrive at the last word of each stanza. Similarly, only a faint echo of the things we love might exist at the end of life, no matter how rich or beautiful or saturated we believed them to be or how intensely we once felt them.

Although this idea is sad, it’s also natural. Life passes and time erodes things. Eventually, we’ll turn around to look at the things we love and, though it’s no fault of our own, they’ll hardly be there. Just an echo of it all. 

It’s like walking out onto a narrow walkway made of rock with someone you love. It’s sundown and the two of you walk out on this path, one that extends from a high bluff, hundreds of feet above a crashing sea. And then, for some reason, you walk ahead of your partner; perhaps something strikes your fancy and you just walk ahead. The sun is beautiful and warm and casts a bronze glow on the rocks and the water and the grass. And you’re absorbing the view and enjoying it, and you turn to mention something to your love, perhaps some sweet remark. But when you turn, you see your love is gone; that you’re standing out there on that pathway alone. Just you and the hardly perceptible essence of something that had been there only moments ago.

Good karma

The other day at work, it must have been late afternoon, I had a craving...a craving for sweets.

See, sometimes, especially when I've worked jobs that have forced me to keep strange hours, I develop serious cravings for cookies or candy. It probably has something to do with the fact that I'm not exactly getting the right nutrition as it is — due to the crazy schedule I'm working — and the craving for sweets is a manifestation, more or less, of malnutrition.

Anyway, so there I was, at work and in the mood for something sweet. And I wanted it bad, you know?

So I looked in my wallet for a dollar for the vending machine.

Wallet was empty.

I really had no idea what I was going to do. No colleague from whom I could borrow money was in my vicinity, and I needed something.

Then I remembered...

That desk.

One woman who works near the vending machine always kept a bowl full of chocolates on her desk. The chocolates, I presumed, were for everyone. Sometimes, when I had no money but was really in the mood for something sweet — it was usually during after-hours time — I would walk by her desk and help myself to a few chocolates. It was good chocolate, too, Dove.

Anyway, so after checking my wallet to see I had no cash and after giving up on the idea of asking anyone for a dollar, I was really happy to remember this woman and the chocolates on her desk.

So I walked back to her desk all excited. My craving by this point was huge and I was also quite proud of myself for remembering that this bowl existed. It was time to seek my reward.

I reach her desk.

One chocolate left.

Just one little Dove chocolate wrapped in sapphire-blue tinsel. The last piece in the bowl.

And so I think to myself.

Why is it this way? Why must there be only one piece left? If the bowl had two pieces left in it, I'd have absolutely no problem taking one piece and leaving the last one for her — whoever she is — benevolent owner of the bowl.

But no.

There's just one last piece of chocolate left. I can't take this piece.

See, I may have taken a lot of chocolate from this lady's desk in the past, but I never left the bowl empty. After all, even though the chocolate is out there for the offering, it's also there for her.

Nope, can't do it. I turn around and start walking back to my desk, more in the mood for sweets than ever — I was primed! — but not willing to take the last piece.

And so there I was, walking in this one corridor, back to my desk, utterly dissapointed, when I look over at a table near a water cooler I was passing on the way.

Oh, hell yes.

There on this table, someone, some kind soul, had put out a spread of cookies. And not just any cookies — Girl Scout Cookies. Shortbread, Lemon Chalet Crème and Peanut Butter Sandwich.

I took a handful, smiled and walked back to my desk.

Reflecting

Here's something I wrote while sitting/thinking in a Barnes and Noble Cafe. I was reflecting on what I was seeing and places I've been and things I've felt. Enjoy.

Sitting here in a cafe with wet socks from the walk here. The cafe is the Barnes and Noble Cafe in the Barnes and Noble bookstore. The Barnes and Noble Cafe, I’m informed, “proudly serves Starbucks” coffee. I’m sitting here at a table with my laptop. The other people sitting at the tables around me read books about Windows 7. They read People magazine and Architectural Digest. Some of them still wear their coats even though we’re inside. One woman, an older lady, sits at a table underneath the Barnes and Noble Cafe sign, which is rectangular in shape and is suspended from the ceiling. The sign says, “Barnes and Noble Cafe”; the letters are backlit. The round Starbucks logo is conjoined to the bottom of this rectangular sign.

The older lady sitting underneath the sign wears a black ski cap and makes use of all three chairs at her table: one for her coat, the other to stack the magazines she’s brought with her to the cafe with the intentions of reading, and the last to sit on. I’m sitting at a table in front of the cooler near the counter. You can buy Fiji Water, Nantucket Nectars and Red Bull, among other drinks.

I opt for coffee. In my wet socks from the walk up here I opt for coffee and grab a magazine from the bookstore’s “newsstand.” The New Yorker. As I sit at my table and leaf through the sweetly perfumed pages, I see an article by George Packer: “Letter from Dresden. Embers. Will a prideful city finally confront its past?” The picture that comes along with the article shows — in a panoramic style — a city of baroque buildings and church towers abutting a river, the Elbe, over which spans a heavy stone bridge that looks like it’s from Roman times. All at twilight. A smaller black-and-white photo next to this panoramic-styled one shows Dresden during less happy times: right after the Bombing of Dresden, in 1945. The city, in this black-and-white photo, is in ruins — nothing to see but shards of grays and blacks and deeper blacks, gutted buildings with no roofs and wispy smoke.

As I read the article, which is good, I can’t help but think back to my time in Germany. I think of a girl I knew from Dresden, a girl I met this summer who proclaimed that Dresden was the most beautiful city on Earth. Fine, I thought at the time. I’m not one to argue. After all, I often heard fond things about Dresden during my time in Germany: Dresden is beautiful; you really ought to go.

Dresden is also the place where a rabid xenophobe this summer stabbed a pregnant Egyptian woman, an immigrant, to death in a state courtroom in front of the courtroom guards too stunned or slow to come to her aid.

Sitting here in my wet socks in the Barnes and Noble Cafe, with a kid standing in front of the cash register asking his friend next to him, “Dude, actually, can you spot me a dollar?” I think of that bread Dresden’s famous for, that sweet bread powdered with confectionery sugar and stuffed with nuts and raisins and marzipan. I remember how I bought the bread one time in Germany because I was curious about it. I bought it even though I knew it was possible to buy it in places other than Europe, namely in America. I didn’t eat all of this bread after having bought it. Too sweet. Instead, I left most of it wrapped up in plastic on a shelf in my girlfriend’s pantry and looked on in horror a few days later, when I was again in the mood for it.

Fruit flies had made their way into the plastic and were using the bread as a breeding ground. Dozens of them crawling about inside the packaging, feasting and laying eggs.

But Germany wasn’t all that bad, I think, as I read this Dresden article and take small pauses from the solid New Yorker text broken up by cartoons and weird poetry to look around this “cafe,” where many teenagers and old men and women sit at their respective tables and snack on processed, tastes-the-same-in-every-Barnes-and-Noble-Cafe cupcakes and cookies, and drink warm sugary drinks made with opaque syrup and other beverages made with non-fat syrup and still other beverages, warm and chocolaty with foam on top for the pleasant texture.

I sit in this cafe with people who read People, old men and women who wear scowls, even though their face muscles are at rest, who come to this Barnes and Noble Cafe, which “proudly” serves Starbucks coffee. Proud, huh? Is that the same “proud” as in “Proud to be an American”? or “Proud parent of an honor student”?

I digress.

Germany was actually pretty nice. My time there was well spent, aside, of course, from that experience with the Dresden sweet bread that they’re so proud of. I turn back to reading this George Packer article about Dresden, which forces me to think more about this baroque city on the Elbe.

But my thoughts just as quickly turn to another German city, as I sit here in the Barnes and Noble Cafe with wet socks from the walk here and high school students around me, studying for the SAT’s, and other people around me who are also importantly typing away on a laptop. I think of Dresden’s sister city to the west, Leipzig.

Now Leipzig isn’t known for the grandeur Dresden is known for. But one experience I had in this less glamorous and more industrial city starts to take hold.

That church.

I think of that church that Rosa, my girlfriend’s friend, showed us. We were visiting Rosa in Leipzig, and she wanted to show us around the city on Sunday. On Saturday all three of us had attended a late-night Halloween party where people came dressed as vampires and Sponge Bob Square Pants and vampires. My girlfriend and I chose not to tour Leipzig on Saturday before the late-night Halloween party because we needed to rest up first from the nine-hour train ride we’d just endured from Aachen, Germany’s westernmost city, to Leipzig, near Poland. Sunday, we all agreed, would be the day for checking out the city.

And so on Sunday morning, out for our tour, we came upon this church. It was nothing spectacular from the outside. In fact, the church was a bit squat and had beige bricks forming the facade. The roofs were slanted and shingled with charcoal-gray shingles. The church had a not-so-high tower in front with an octagonal balcony wrapping around it. It was a Lutheran church, kind of sober. Fine.

But, Rosa tells us, we shouldn't be fooled. This church is an important church. In front of this particular church in the autumn of 1989, men and women, young and old — 70,000 in all — held a candlelit, passive-resistance-styled protest against East Germany's Communist government.

See, for months prior to this particular protest, Leipzigers had been showing up to this church, the Saint Nikolai church, to hear “sermons.” These sermons centered on certain messages in biblical texts, yes, but they also dealt with other themes, namely freedom and democracy. The Saint Nikolai meetings continued until the Communist government decided that they were growing too insurrectional in tone. Police were dispatched. They beat some people in front of the church and dispersed a crowd that had gathered after the violence broke out.

For many Leipzigers, enough was enough. A few days later, they gathered in front of the Nikolai church and their numbers overflowed into a nearby public square. No one was budging. The message, Rosa tells us, was simple: less maltreatment, more freedom. The police, shocked by the amount of people who had amassed to have their message heard, didn’t act.

The balance had shifted.

The people saw that they had more power. They saw that if they gathered in large enough numbers and remained resolute, they could speak their minds publicly — they could demand more freedom — and the government would not, or could not, act against them.

After this act of defiance in Leipzig, more people in the GDR began following suit. More people started amassing in the eastern states to speak their minds, including the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in Berlin on November 9, 1989 — a gathering so large and full of energy it eventually precipitated the Wall’s falling. But, if it weren’t for those initial Nikolai protests, many would have you believe (especially if you're in Leipzig), there’s a chance that the Berlin Wall would not have fallen.

Anyway, so there we were, in front of this plain looking church, famous for an act of rebellion that had occurred 20 years prior. But it wasn’t just roughly 20 years ago that this act occurred. As I stood in front of the Nikolai with my girlfriend and Rosa, Germany was in the midst of celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — it was almost to the day.

Now. Although the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s falling may not have been the biggest news in America, it was huge news in Germany. In fact, the German media, in the run up to the historic day, managed to explore every angle of the story possible. Every anecdote, halfway interesting recollection or personal history was rehashed. It all filled the newspapers.

Germans, you see, are proud that communism, for all intents and purposes, was defeated on their turf. They like to draw attention to this history and, in some cases, even cash in on it.

With that last fact in mind, I stood in front of the St. Nikolai with Rosa and my girlfriend. Although by this time we were all well aware of the church’s history, which seemed interesting enough, it was really on a whim that we decided to walk in.

And this part I’ll never forget.

We walk in the church and start heading down the main aisle toward the altar. The vaulted ceilings are high, and the columns that line the aisle are painted a pastel pink. What really strikes me, though, are the capitals. The highly ornamented capitals at the top of each column depict foliage: stone leaves that shoot from the columns and seem to support the vaulted cathedral ceiling. The white pews to my left and right also stand out. Sure, this is a pretty cathedral, I think, as I walk further down the aisle. But in all honesty, I’m not that excited. After all, pretty cathedrals are omnipresent in Europe. In fact, as I continue to walk down the aisle with Rosa and my girlfriend, I kind of get the feeling that they, too, are not so enthralled — our body language subtlety betrays our sentiments. In fact, it was right then, right when each of us began to slow down and look in each other’s faces, as if to say, “All right, well, I’ve seen just about enough,” that the very first notes were suddenly heard.

The beautifully drawn out first few notes emanating from violins — notes rising up to meet the ear, clear and bright, like rays of light, but for the ears. These are the first drawn out, sorrowful notes to “Adagio for Strings.”

The church all of a sudden resounds with the sound of violins. Then, just as quick, deeper notes are heard — bass notes, which counterbalance those sharp, rays of light for the ears.

Yes, this is definitely “Adagio for Strings,” that undulating, powerful, morose, has-the-tendency-to-knock-you-off-your-ass-with-feelings-of-sorrow-and-longing piece by the composer Samuel Barber. You know, “Adagio for Strings,” the title theme from Oliver Stone’s 1986 film “Platoon.” This is the classical song that brought the drama in that Vietnam-War-era movie to an entirely new level.

“Adagio for Strings” can break your heart. You don’t even have to like classical music.

Those violins, which cut like knives one moment and then, suddenly, come to a complete stop, the last of a sharp, bright sound zips off the many bows. A dramatic pause. A dramatic pause that surely must be one of the most famous in classical music — it’s that spellbinding. A dramatic pause that’s eventually broken by deep cello notes, which begin to mingle with the violin notes that have started up again.

It all sounds as if God were having a conversation with angels.

So I’m walking down the main aisle with my girlfriend and Rosa when this huge song, “Adagio for Strings,” begins to fill the church. A few moments after I heard the first few notes, though, I was already smiling. Or shall I say smirking. Yeah, it was more like a smirk. To be honest, I was smirking because this is what was going through my mind: “Adagio for Strings,” as beautiful and deeply stirring a song it is, as resounding and as fitting it seems, is only being played in this church through a set of speakers for one reason: to make the experience of touring the St. Nikolai a more moving one. And if the people are moved, I'm thinking, they will be more likely to open up their wallets and donate to the church. Cha-ching!

I get it, this ploy, I think, as I stand in the aisle among the pink columns listening to the music. Very clever. Play a deeply stirring and well known piece of classical music through some speakers (you’ve got the acoustics in your favor) and watch as the experience moves people. Coin purses will be unsnapped by the dozens. Real clever of these church people, I muse. Play dramatic music in the same church where, 20 years prior — almost to the day — protests began, protests for freedom, which precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall, a historical event already considered intensely dramatic, and watch.

Watch as people — tourists, natives, whoever — open up their wallets. Watch as the power of the music and the sights move them into doing so.

After all, who can resist?

Religious or not, when classical music is paired with such sights — angelic frescoes, stained-glass windows, sweeping cathedral ceilings — the joining of the two combines to form a sensory experience that pulls at the soul, whether you want it to or not. (In a flash, after having heard those first few notes, I’d gone from coolly detached to emotionally involved.)

And, while you’re at it, why not make the most of the fact that a lot of historical significance already surrounds this church? Why not capitalize on the drama that’s already there by adding more drama? That’ll surely work the people up enough to ensure that they donate more.

I recognize this ploy, these speakers, which must be the source of this sound, because the sound is so voluminous, so perfect, the timing is so right....I get it: just a CD, some well placed speakers and a little faith that people will be moved enough by the whole bit to open their wallets and donate more money.

And then I turn around.

I turn around while standing in the main aisle and I look up. And up there, below the modest pipe organ, there is a balcony, and on that balcony I see six violinists, instruments at the neck, all sitting in a horseshoe arrangement, with a bassist on one end of the horseshoe and a cellist on the other. Standing in the center of this horseshoe arrangement is a man. A man with a wand.

And I listen. And now I watch, too, as the violinists’ forearms move slowly, methodically, with quivering precision. I watch as they saw their bows over the strings in graceful unison. I look to their other hands, running up and down the fingerboards, again in unison. Those hands then pause at the same time, then lock in an identical position — six wild vibratos.

And I listen and watch as all their bodies jerk in their seats in good time with the music, moving with the music. Then suddenly stop.

And I watch as the conductor slowly points his wand in the bass player's direction, and the bass player, bow in hand, slowly saws that bow across his big instrument’s belly. It moans. And I listen as the cellist and a violinist come in. Deep tones dominate....They undulate invisibly but vibrate in the chest. And then the conductor flicks his wand and suddenly all the violinists are again slowly sawing their bows across the cherry wood instruments at their necks, up and down in graceful unison, bright, sharp, beams of light for the ears.

And I stand in the aisle and look up at these eight musicians playing “Adagio for Strings.” Why are they doing it? Just cause, it seems. Perhaps they are warming up for a later performance, perhaps not. Who really knows why. After all, they’re wearing regular clothes — jeans, sneakers and collard shirts.

And I just stand there and look up and feel. Feel the music wash over me, surround me, shoot right down me, vibrate and rattle. The music, in fact, transfixes almost everyone in the church who looks up at the balcony to see. To see one hand wave a wand through the air while others perform wild vibratos. To see bows being brought up and down, obscuring the musicians' faces, then revealing them, then obscuring them again. All gracefully. All in unison, in good time, on a Sunday afternoon.

And so my eyes open wide and my mouth parts a little and I continue just standing there. And as I stand there and hear the music, feel the music, I quietly and privately censure myself for having been, just moments earlier, so sharply, so purely and so undeniably cynical.

The Right Light

Below you'll find something I wrote the other day in my journal. Yes, I keep a journal; no, it's not a diary. It's more like a book with blank sheets of paper in which I write down things that inspire me or I find amusing or scary or hypocritical or beautiful. Sometimes, in this journal, I sketch scenes with words. The end product is usually something akin to a vignette. The following is one such vignette. I "sketched" it the other day while in a New York City office building. Enjoy.

Staring out a window on the 13th floor of a building in Manhattan. It’s around sundown. From this perch, looking down at 7th Avenue, south. The tall buildings, each about the same 20-story height, line one side of the avenue like soldiers. Manhattan is wonderful for its buildings, yes, but also for the shadows that the buildings cast on each other, at sundown.

Looking down 7th Avenue, noticing how those buildings lining one side of the street all seem to have the same shade of faded brown brick. Noticing the geometric shadows on the buildings. Noticing sundown’s sunlight too: where it hits the buildings, the faded bricks appear orange and warm.

Looking down this street, at these buildings bathed in patches of orange light, I’m able to actually start and feel the history in Manhattan. Looking at the tops of these relatively tall buildings, the step-backed terraces, the blind arcades, the deco spires, and think: sundown on this row of buildings probably looked the same 75 years ago. Just like this. High above the noise and the ads and the moving bodies below, sundown on these buildings probably looks the same now as it looked 100years ago or even 125 years ago, in 1885.

And as I look out, I feel a longing mixed with a sense of continuity. The right light has the tendency to inspire such feelings.

Fumbling Toward Oblivion

Yeah, file this one under "late to the party."

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Have you read this book? Um, yeah, holy smoke, it's good. It came out about four years ago, and I had always heard good, great, incredible things about it. I knew that the folks in Hollywood had recently turned it into a movie, which bears the same name, The Road, but I hesitated when it came to buying the actual book several years back even though I’d read all those positive reviews. After all, you know how critics can be: wrong sometimes. Plus, the book, as I’d seen it in Borders, struck me as overpriced. "Sixteen dollars for such a slim book?" I thought. So I balked.

Then just the other night as I was shopping for groceries, wheeling my rickety cart along the “media” section in the supermarket, I happened to come across the McCarthy book again; saw it up on the bookshelf. Yup, there it was amid the Danielle Steel and Dean Koontz books and all the other paperbacks with embossed titles on their glossy covers. This time, however, I noticed that The Road was markedly less expensive -- it was only 8 bucks, a drop in price that can probably be attributed to the fact that the book is being more widely distributed now that it’s also a major motion picture. So I said, $8? Why not, and threw it in my shopping cart.

And so I started on it. I wasn't that impressed at first. At first. Yeah, the prose was spare, powerful and poetic. But McCarthy seemed to repeat himself in the set up. See, the premise of the book is this: A calamity has struck the earth -- or America -- killing almost all traces of life. A father and his young son seem to be the only two survivors of this unnamed catastrophe. Together, the two trudge through the treacherously barren and dead landscape, following a road south (the story takes place in America), where their chances of survival, the father tells the son, will be better.

OK, fine, but the whole book starts off really slow because McCarthy seems incredibly preoccupied with describing ad nauseam the bleakness of this literary universe. We learn, over and over again for about 30 pages, that father and son inhabit a world of ash, scorched forests, death, detritus, gray skies, gray snow, dead ponds, dead flowers, abandoned homes, and of course ash, ash and more ash.

And then if all that’s not enough to slow things down at the beginning, there’s another issue when it comes to The Road: the punctuation. See, Cormac McCarthy really wanted to convey to his readers the barrenness and desperation of this post-apocalyptic world, so he manipulated the actual punctuation of the novel itself in his efforts to achieve this goal. The actual prose, in certain areas, lacks required apostrophes and commas, and there are no quotation marks around character dialogue. None. This whole idea of manipulating the novel’s text as it’s seen on the actual page to further convey mood, if you ask me, is very Joycean. But then again who’s asking me?

Anyway! So all this peculiar punctuation and all the repetitive description led me to believe that the critics were off the mark. Granted, McCarthy’s writing, his actual prose, is so beautiful it probably could’ve carried the novel in and of itself: “The blackness he woke to those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.” But I was still really starting to wonder why all the critics had been going gaga.

Finally, however, the novel's action started picking up. And my god did it pick up with a vengeance. Cannibalistic predators donning gas masks, armed with bludgeons stalking the road; flashbacks to scenes from the initial apocalypse; dialogue that gives us a torch-lighted view inside the minds of people teetering on the edge of oblivion. Actually, once the action starts heading into high gear, we are no longer distracted by the initial lack of it and are better able to appreciate all the other positive aspects of the writing -- the heartbreakingly beautiful lines, the ruggedly terse dialogue, the vivid descriptions. Once all the elements are there and set in motion together, they begin to form a hard-to-put-down, rhythmically hypnotic -- and sometimes frightful -- tale of love, death and survival.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I may have been late to the party when it comes to The Road. But better late than never.