A MAN'S GUIDE TO A WOMAN'S WARDROBE

For many men, fashion is a foreign country. Luke Leitch, who has gone native, provides a map ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2011 In September 2009 I was working on the features desk of the Times in London when I was told that I was needed to cover for a member of the fashion team who had gone on maternity leave. Under-dressed and overwhelmed, I set off to report on a round of womenswear shows. From New York to Paris via London and Milan, I sat shabbily hunched among the straight-backed, soigne ranks of the worlds fashion professionals, staring dumbly at the catwalks like some novelty savage on his first day in court. I have now spent two years embedded deep in female territory: in fashion, with a capital F. And I have started to get the hang of it. What has become clear is that fashion is to many women what sport is to many men: a pastime, a passion, a shared language, a form of self-definition, and a temporary escape from the opposite sex, all rolled into one deeply satisfying whole. Most men regard this female passion from a default position of distrust, derision or at best patronising tolerance. Even the cleverest males are liable to take this line. Kant both derided and distrusted fashion: [It] belongs under the heading of vanityand also under the heading of folly. Nietzsche preferred to patronise: Comparing man and woman in general, one may say that woman would not have the genius for finery in general if she did not have the instinct for a secondary role. I very much doubt that either of these great chin-strokers spent any time contemplating the interior life of a woman via the interior of her wardrobe. Because men, when they think of womens fashion at all, tend to see it only in terms of how it makes them feelwhether it arouses, confuses, or repels themrather than considering what it makes a woman feel. Lets not overstate this: cracking the code of fashion wont provide men with an Enigma machine with which to read every baffling unknown in a female soul. Yet a close and at least partially informed snoop through the contents of a womans wardrobe can at least explain why they wear the things they do. And thats got to be better than nothing. Take the wardrobe. How much space does she devote to it? The answer is often: not nearly enough. The walk-in wardrobeeffectively a separate bedroom for clothes, bags and shoes has been the ultimate clothing-consumers fetish since the mid-1990s. Anna Dello Russo, the flamboyant, self-styled Lady Gaga of fashion and fashion director-at-large of Vogue Japan, has gone one step further. She has two apartments in Milan: one for her, and one for her clothes. Size is not the only issue. Recently I toured the cavernous walk-in wardrobe of Tamara Mellon, the co-founder of Jimmy Choo shoes, and was confronted by a systemised kaleidoscope in which everything inside was grouped by shade. It was like walking into a paint-colour chart. Other women I have consulted speak of ordering their dresses according to season, designer, length, materialor various combinations of all these. The more elaborate the personal Dewey system, the more central fashion seems to be to its mistresss identity. The point of a well-marshalled wardrobe is to allow its owner total mastery over her fashion arsenal. And only when everything is thus at her fingertips is she best placed to choose what to wear. Humdrum considerations such as weather and practicality play a passing part, but ultimately this is a decision dictated by three factors: the individual, the occasion and the seasons trends.

Trends are the lingua franca of fashion. To understand themand to articulate them by wearing thememits a signal of membership. Women notice other women wearing pink jeans, an Issa drape-front dress or an Erdem lace, and recognise this as very now. Or at least they did in April. Maintenance of fashion membership demands constant vigilance, for what is very now can very suddenly become very then. Take trousers. Until about a year ago, trousers were a no-brainer: the silhouette to be seen in was tight. From high-street skinny jeans to high-fashion skinny jacquard, legwear was close and clingy. Then came the first intimations of change. There was a brief flowering of boyfriend jeansgenerous at the thigh, and wide at the anklewhich wilted relatively quickly as it became clear that the boy part was unflatteringly true. Next was the harem pant, skinny-ish from the mid-thigh down, but extremely loose and baggy around the crotch. Happily, crotch-levels are now returning to normality and a newwell, not entirely new trouser-shape is spreading. Wide trousersaka flaresflared up everywhere at the 2011 shows. On the first day of the spring New York Fashion Week, none of the catwalk-watchers were wearing them. By the last day, at Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, I spoke to four fashion-editor flare adopters who had dug out pairs from their archives (a term Ill return to later) so as to be early-articulating, alpha-consumers of the new trend. Skinny, it was clear, was over. Yet despite the restless ebb and flow of trends, most contemporary wardrobes are also repositories of longer-term vogues. The thinking behind some of them is relatively straightforwardthe LBD, or little black dress, for example. A garment so vital it comes with an acronym, it is the eternally recurring female equivalent of a mans tuxedo: flattering, undemanding, and generally admired by all. But the thinking behind others can fox even the most careful male observer. Consider accessories. These are the bits that dangle off the edges: bags, shoes and, latterly statementin other words, bigjewellery. For some time they have supplanted actual clothes as the big-ticket fashion trophies that most women aspire to acquire. This is because a 1,000 bag or pair of shoes gives a better return on your investment than a 1,000 dress. Whereas a dress can only be worn a few times before a womans friends will start wondering why the hell shes wearing that old thing again, a great pair of shoes makes every outfit look sharper. An investment (aka wildly expensive) status-symbol bagsuch as the Fendi Baguette, the Herms Birkin or the Mulberry Bayswatercan be given endless airings without anyone getting bored. And accessories have the added bonus of being wearable whatever their owners dress size: handbags dont demand diets. The long, wide and billowy is another apparently inexplicable theme that takes many forms, from empire line (seams under the bosom) to kaftans or the current maxi dress. This originated in the 1970s, when it looked great on the willowy Talitha Getty, and was equally attractive three decades later on the minnowy Sienna Miller. Mostly, the style gives its wearers a tentish aspect. This summer, nonetheless, you will have seen flotillas of them sailing along high streets and beaches. This is because voluminous clothes allow the wearer simultaneously to live the GettyMiller dream of going boho, while hiding the bits of their body they worry about most. If the maxi dress is a practical way of enjoying a fashion fantasy, brightly coloured tights are a sign either of total self-confidence, or disturbing self-delusion. For although they channel kookiness, they demand incredibly good legs to pull off with any aplomb. The wearer is probably either a supermodel, a fantasist or a potter. Ugg boots started life as practical Australian footwear for padding around inalways indoors during winter or after a bracing dip. Now, often trademarked, American-owned and Chinese-

produced, they have swept the globe as a high-fashion item to be worn outdoors, regardless of the fact that they pick up dirt in a flash and become waterlogged in seconds. Like Birkenstocks and the chunky-soled, almost medical training shoes that have become fashionable by claiming to firm the thighs, Uggs are both comfortable and ugly, which makes this trend seem a relatively healthy counterpart to the beautiful, but often fiercely uncomfortable, high-heeled shoes that are so fetishised today. At this point, perhaps a little miffed by the women-only exclusivity of it all, a man could try to torpedo the whole notion of fashion as a vibrant female dialect by making this brutal observation: Fashion (with that capital F) is just a mechanism for the manufacture of novelty to fuel consumer desire. The reason that wide trousers are suddenly in where skinny trousers are out is to encourage lots of suggestible women to buy new pairs of trousers they dont really need. Sticking to this line is fair enough. But it wont help understand why women wear what they wear. And they in turn might be entitled to ask this hypothetical man why he craves that new car, phone or watch that he doesnt really need. Fashion is now so woven into so many womens day-to-day lives that they unselfconsciously aggrandise it by using words more often deployed to describe a persons job, art collection or pension plan. So a woman who wants to remove some clothes from her day-to-day wardrobe and stick them in the attic will say she is editing her wardrobe to archive certain pieces. This is not just about buying stuff. Its part of the job of being a woman. To go back to that sport analogy, women dont consume fashion in quite the same way that men consume sport. Although women may follow fashion, only a few victims succumb entirely to its decrees. Whereas men who follow a particular team will continue to follow that team however heart-rendingly bad its performance, albeit with a few grumbles, many women will reject fashion-led trends if the levels of ridiculousness are too high. (Harem pants may be an exception.) Last year, first designers and then the high street all went big on the most uncomfortable footwear of all: clogs. Very few women fell for it. Clogged with clogs, shops tried selling them at cost. And still very few women fell for them. Catwalk shows, similarly, have a function beyond merely creating the desire for new clothes. The trends they celebrate are never entirely new, just slightly new. Minimalism is now on the rise again, after a ten-year period of neglect, as is the 1970s look, after only four years off the boil. My theory is that the twice-yearly shows are the equivalent of those interminable tribal bonding ceremonies that mean a great deal to the participants, but are utterly bewildering if you arent part of the tribe. Though wearing butterflies, painting your face or plaiting your hair with featherswhether in a tribal rite or at a fashion showhas no practical use, the very fact that it happens provides a context within which the tribe, or fashion-aware, can frame the day-to-day, until its time for the next ceremony. The point is that all these women are in it together. Even if what, exactly, theyre in is not always clear. Women do sometimes dress for men. The 1970s pin-up Britt Ekland said: If I come home alone, my shoes are always the first thing to come off, but with a man around they are the last thing to go. Men love to see women in high heels. Yet clothes power over men is, much more often, a secondary function. Their real purpose is to make women feel womanly, self-confident and upto-speed with other women, and here the parallel with sport gets stronger again. Getting fashion is about recognising the consensus of trends, but then wearing them in an individual way. The fact that flares make all but the skinniest bottoms look bigger than they are, or that last seasons fluorescent colours arelets face itoften pretty repulsive, is by the by: trends are for the women who wear them and watch them to enjoy. Whether men think theyre

hot or not matters not a jot. And that is the real lesson that womens fashion holds for men. Not only is it not all about us, its barely about us at all. Whos secondary now, Herr Nietzsche?

Bubble Boys
Out in Silicon Valley, the last bastion of full employment, the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs of the future are staying up all night writing code in dorms.

Feross Aboukhadijeh likes to tell the story of how he got famous. It happened last fall, as he was beginning his junior year at Stanford. Google had just unveiled a feature called Google Instant, which shows search results in real time, as you type. I thought it was kind of gimmicky, says Feross. But it gave him an idea: If Google could pop out instant search results, why couldnt YouTube produce instant videos? He bet a friend he could slap something together in an hour. I lost the bet, he says. It took me three hours. The result was YouTube Instant, a site that lets you flip through YouTube videos in real time. Say you type in the letter A: The top video that begins with that lettercurrently the music video for Adeles Rolling in the Deepstarts playing. Add a B to spell Ab, and you see a stopanimation set to the alphabet song. Abd gives you the trailer for the Taylor Lautner thriller Abduction. And so on. YouTube Instant went live at 9:32 p.m. on a Thursday. When Feross woke up at eight the next morning, he had a bunch of missed calls. One of his transcribed voice-mails said, interview washington post. I was like, Nah, that cant be right, he says. By the end of the day, YouTube Instant had tens of thousands of views, Ferosss name and grinning face had appeared on dozens of websites and TV shows, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley had offered him a job over Twitter. Feross politely declined. He wanted to continue his schoolwork at Stanford, plus he had other projects gestating. But the experience put him in the crosshairs of Silicon Valleys heavyweights, if he wasnt there already. Hed just finished a summer working at Facebook, where he and Mark Zuckerberg had hit it off. (Zuckerberg later came to speak to a Stanford class Feross was T.A.ing and called him out by name.) After YouTube Instant launched, a Google recruiter made it clear its door was always open. If theres anyone more heavily recruited, Id want to know their name, says Sean Holbert, course adviser for Stanfords computer-science department last year. Feross wears his celebrity well. He speaks rapidly but exudes calm, like a presenter at a TED conference. YouTube Instant changed my life, he says. People dont talk to me the same way. Its like I gained twenty badass points. Whether I deserved it or not, I dont know, but Ill take it. YouTube Instant hasnt changed the worldit hasnt even made money. But its story describes the template for Silicon Valley these days, which may be a bubble, but it hasnt popped yet: If you have an idea for an app, do it now. Throw it up online. Find an audience. Worry about quality later. Best-case scenario, you create the next Facebook. Worst-case, you try again. Even then, chances are youll get a job offer you can brag about rejecting. Right this minute, Silicon Valley is Americas opposite: House prices are soaring and demand for young talent far outstrips supply. The ongoing cyberspace race between Facebook, Apple, and Google, among others, means computer engineers enjoy more freedomand powerthan ever before. The barriers to entry for web programming are almost nonexistent. Angel investors are blessing start-ups left and right, and launching a software company is cheaper than ever. Do I take the offer from

Google, or take the venture capital to start my own thing? Only in this one little quadrant do people have the luxury to ask such questions. For Feross, the son of a schoolteacher and a Syrian-born electrical engineer, the forecast is bright, though indistinct. He may become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs; he may not. But while most of the country is in economic darkness, the American Dream is beaming bright in Palo Alto. Its one of the first Saturday nights of spring, and a couple dozen studentsoverwhelmingly male and unseasonably paleare packed into the student union at Stanford University, hunched over laptops, chugging Diet Coke and devouring Red Vines. The occasion is the inaugural Happy Hacky Hour, an event organized by the computer club (Feross is the president), where programmers are invited to hang out, eat pizza, and do lines (of code). The thump of music and the laughter of females pipe in through the open windows, signals from a far-off universe. Three kids huddle around the computer of David Fifield, a grad student and former Eagle Scout. Fifield has a window open that displays all the Internet traffic passing through Stanfords wireless hub. Anytime someone visits a website, the URLsay, http://www.facebook.comand the persons IP address pop up on Fifields screen. With the right powerful technology, Fifield explains, he could snag their Facebook logins and hijack their accounts. But he chooses not to. We dont do that kind of thing at Stanford, one kid says with a verbal wink.

Scientists on trial: At fault?

In 2009, an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila and killed more than 300 people. Now, scientists are on trial for manslaughter.

From when he was a young boy growing up in a house on Via Antinori in the medieval heart of this earthquake-prone Italian city, Vincenzo Vittorini remembers the ritual whenever the family felt a seismic tremor overnight. "My father was afraid of earthquakes, so whenever the ground shook, even a little, he would gather us and take us out of the house," he says. "We would walk to a little piazza nearby, and the children we were four brothers and my mother would sleep in the car. My father would stand outside, smoking cigarettes with the other fathers, until morning." That, he says, represented the age-old, cautionary "culture" of living in an earthquake zone. Vittorini, a 48-year-old surgeon who has lived in L'Aquila all his life, will never forgive himself for breaking with that tradition on the night of 5 April 2009. After hundreds of low-level tremors over several months, L'Aquila shook with a strong, magnitude-3.9 tremor shortly before 11 p.m. on that Palm Sunday evening. Vittorini debated with his wife Claudia and his terrified nine-yearold daughter Fabrizia whether to spend the rest of the night outside. Swayed by what he describes as "anaesthetizing" public assurances by government officials that there was no imminent danger, and recalling scientific statements claiming that each shock diminished the potential for a major earthquake, he persuaded his family to remain in their apartment on Via Luigi Sturzo. All three of them were huddled together in the master bed when, at 3:32 a.m. on 6 April, a devastating magnitude-6.3 earthquake struck the city. "It was like being in a blender," Vittorini recalls. "It wasn't a roar, it was a gigantic noise. And then darkness." The apartment building, a structure of reinforced concrete constructed in 1962, instantly collapsed, and their third-floor apartment ended up in a jumble of wreckage several feet off the ground. Seven people were killed in the collapse of the building, including Vittorini's wife and daughter; he was pulled from the rubble, injured but alive, six hours later. The

earthquake claimed 309 lives in L'Aquila and several towns nearby, injured more than 1,500 people, destroyed some 20,000 buildings and left 65,000 people temporarily displaced. The apartment building on Via Luigi Sturzo is "just a hole now", Vittorini says, and his childhood home and the piazza where families spent the night are, like almost all of L'Aquila's historic centre, now in a barricaded and inaccessible 'red zone'. More than two years after the earthquake, block after block of elegant, centuries-old buildings is corseted by bands of structural reinforcement; wooden braces prop up numerous Gothic windows and arches in uninhabitable buildings. The basilica of San Bernardino, the city hall, the Cinema Massimo all closed. On a cracked ochre wall along the main corso, one of the few streets that remain open in the centre, someone has scribbled in black paint: " L'Aquila morta." (L'Aquila is dead.) In a trial set to begin next week, an Italian judge will decide whether the symbolic death of L'Aquila and, more specifically, the earthquake-related deaths of dozens of citizens included in the lawsuit, including Vittorini's wife and daughter constituted a crime due to the negligence of six leading Italian scientists and one government official, who have been charged with manslaughter in connection with the case. When the charges were first aired in June 2010 by public prosecutor Fabio Picuti, the case was likened to a frivolous attempt by overzealous local prosecutors to make scapegoats out of some of Italy's most respected geophysicists: Enzo Boschi, then-president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Rome; Franco Barberi, at the University of 'Rome Tre'; Mauro Dolce, head of the seismic-risk office at the national Department of Civil Protection in Rome; Claudio Eva, from the University of Genova; Giulio Selvaggi, director of the INGV's National Earthquake Centre in Rome; and Gian Michele Calvi, president of the European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering in Pavia; as well as government official Bernardo De Bernardinis, then vice-director of the Department of Civil Protection. According to an open letter to the president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, signed by more than 5,000 members of the scientific community, the seven Italians essentially face criminal charges for failing to predict the earthquake even though pinpointing the time, location and strength of a future earthquake in the short term remains, by scientific consensus, technically impossible. The indictments have drawn global condemnation. The American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), both in Washington DC, issued statements in support of the Italian defendants. In an open letter to Napolitano, for example, the AAAS said it was "unfair and naive" of local prosecutors to charge the men for failing "to alert the population of L'Aquila of an impending earthquake". And last May, when Italian magistrate Giuseppe Gargarella ruled at a preliminary hearing that the scientists would have to stand trial this September, the Italian blogosphere lit up with lamentation and defence lawyers greeted the decision with disbelief. "On the one hand, he's stunned," Francesco Petrelli said of his client, Barberi. "On the other, he's very pained and sad." The view from L'Aquila, however, is quite different. Prosecutors and the families of victims alike say that the trial has nothing to do with the ability to predict earthquakes, and everything to do with the failure of government-appointed scientists serving on an advisory panel to adequately evaluate, and then communicate, the potential risk to the local population. The charges, detailed in a 224-page document filed by Picuti, allege that members of the National Commission for Forecasting and Predicting Great Risks, who held a special meeting in L'Aquila the week before the earthquake, provided "incomplete, imprecise, and contradictory information" to a public that had been unnerved by months of persistent, low-level tremors. Picuti says that the

commission was more interested in pacifying the local population than in giving clear advice about earthquake preparedness. "I'm not crazy," Picuti says. "I know they can't predict earthquakes. The basis of the charges is not that they didn't predict the earthquake. As functionaries of the state, they had certain duties imposed by law: to evaluate and characterize the risks that were present in L'Aquila." Part of that risk assessment, he says, should have included the density of the urban population and the known fragility of many ancient buildings in the city centre. "They were obligated to evaluate the degree of risk given all these factors," he says, "and they did not." Either they didnt know certain things, which is a problem, or they didnt know how to communicate what they did know, which is also a problem. "This isn't a trial against science," insists Vittorini, who is a civil party to the suit. But he says that a persistent message from authorities of "Be calm, don't worry", and a lack of specific advice, deprived him and others of an opportunity to make an informed decision about what to do on the night of the earthquake. "That's why I feel betrayed by science," he says. "Either they didn't know certain things, which is a problem, or they didn't know how to communicate what they did know, which is also a problem." Although the outcome of the trial may not be known for months, if not years, the events leading up to the earthquake are already being viewed as a sobering case study in risk assessment and public communication a scenario that might easily be replayed in a future that includes not just 'conventional' natural disasters (such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis), but also extreme weather events (such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and droughts) perhaps cooked up by climate change.The trial has already had a chilling effect on scientists' willingness to share their expertise with the public. "When people, when journalists, asked my opinion about things, I used to tell them, but no more. Scientists have to shut up," says Boschi, whose successor at the INGV was appointed last month. Others see the case as an indictment of the obfuscating, probabilistic language with which scientists characterize the uncertain potential of natural disasters. Selvaggi, one of the indicted scientists, says that the charges serve as a "dangerous" warning to researchers, who may find themselves in legal trouble because of the way that nonscientists such as public officials or journalists translate their risk analyses for public consumption. Given the novelty of the issues, says defence lawyer Filippo Dinacci, "not only the press, but the academic legal community will be watching this case with great interest". Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and chair of the International Commission on Earthquake Forecasting (ICEF), which reviewed the L'Aquila events in a report released in May, says that in his view the prosecution charges have "no merit". But he adds that the trial is nonetheless a "watershed case" that will force seismologists worldwide to rethink the way they describe low probability, high-risk events, as well as an opportunity for the scientific community at large to assess "rising public expectations" about how information on natural disasters should be handled. "The public expects authoritative, transparently available information," he says, "and we need to say what we know in an explicit way." In Jordan's view, "It has to be done right, and it was not in L'Aquila."

Seismic reputation

L'Aquila is or was a jewel of medieval beauty set in the middle of one of the most seismically dangerous zones in Italy. Surrounded by the massive peaks of the restless Apennine mountain range, the city, capital of the Abruzzo region, was largely destroyed by earthquakes in 1461 and in 1703. Its seismic reputation was such that the nineteenth-century British travel writer Augustus Hare noted that, "nature suddenly often sets all the bells ringing and the clocks striking, and makes fresh chasms in the old yellow walls". Its most recent seismic tragedy began in October 2008, when dozens of low-magnitude tremors began to hit the city and surrounding areas along the Aterno River valley (see 'A shaken city'). Known as seismic swarms, these tremors continued intermittently over the first three months of 2009; according to Picuti, they numbered 69 in January, 78 in February and 100 in March, with an additional 57 shocks during the first five days of April. "It was like this almost every day," says Pier Paolo Visione, a local accountant, shaking a table in a restaurant with a slow but vigorous motion that nearly topples a bottle of the local red Montepulciano wine. "I had never been afraid of earthquakes before, but my skin began to crawl." (Visione's sister died in the quake, and he is a civil party to the suit.) Unnerving though these clusters may be, experts agree that seismic swarms rarely precede major earthquakes. In 1988, seismic engineer Giuseppe Grandori, now professor emeritus at the Polytechnic of Milan, and his colleagues published a retrospective analysis of seismic swarms in three other earthquake-prone Italian localities (G. Grandori et al. Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am. 78, 15381549; 1988). They concluded that a medium-sized shock in a swarm forecasts a major event within several days about 2% of the time, and Grandori says that the same was probably true for the region around L'Aquila. Translating these risks is extremely challenging for civil defence officials. In Grandori's view, there is a 98% probability of a false alarm if officials issue an alert, yet a terrible price to pay in loss of life and property if they fail to issue a warning and a major quake occurs. After a medium-sized shock in a seismic swarm, the risk of a major quake can increase anywhere from 100-fold to nearly 1,000-fold in the short term, according to Jordan, although the overall probability remains extremely low. "What do you tell people in that situation?" he says. "You're sort of between Scylla and Charybdis on this thing." To this difficult exercise in risk probability was added a wild card in the case of L'Aquila: a resident named Giampaolo Giuliani began to make unofficial earthquake predictions on the basis of measurements of radon gas levels. Giuliani, who had worked for 40 years as a laboratory technician, including 20 years at the nearby Gran Sasso National Laboratory until his retirement in 2010, had deployed four home-made radon detectors throughout the region. The idea behind radon measurement, Giuliani says, is that emissions of the gas fluctuate significantly in the 24 hours before an earthquake. But their use as a reliable short-term predictor of earthquakes has never been scientifically proved or accepted. The recent ICEF report deemed Giuliani's findings "unsatisfactory", and he has yet to publish a single peer-reviewed paper on his radon work. Nonetheless, he maintained an open website that posted real-time radon measurements from his detectors, and in interviews with journalists and in an informal mobilephone network, Giuliani made predictions about low-level seismic activity. Although the ICEF report notes that he made two false forecasts, The Guardian newspaper dubbed him "The Man Who Predicted An Earthquake", after the April 2009 quake hit. As word spread about Giuliani's unofficial predictions, even more unease percolated through the population. Marcello Melandri, the lawyer for Boschi, says that Giuliani had been terrifying local residents, and that Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's Department of Civil Protection agency, "was

very worried about the population of L'Aquila". On 30 March, Giuliani says, national civilprotection officials cited him for procurato allarme essentially instigating public alarm or panic and forbade him from making any public pronouncements. Vincenzo Vittorinis apartment building collapsed in the 2009 quake, killing his wife and daughter. He says that he feels betrayed by science.IGNACIO MARIA COCCIA/LUZphoto/ eyevine That same day, L'Aquila was hit by an intense, magnitude 4.1 shock in the afternoon that deeply rattled local residents. Vittorini, who performs his surgeries in the nearby town of Popoli, received an anguished call from his wife and son. (His daughter was not at home at the time.) He urged them to leave the house immediately and get outside, he says. L'Aquila's mayor, Massimo Cialente, ordered the evacuation of several public buildings and closed the De Amicis primary school to inspect for structural damage. Italian seismologists had been monitoring the swarm in the Abruzzo region for months, and notifying civil-protection officials in real time of every tremor with a magnitude of greater than 2.5. Now, given the growing unease in L'Aquila, Bertolaso decided to convene an unusual meeting of the risks commission. The commission normally meets in Rome to assess the probability of earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters, but this meeting was to take place the next day in L'Aquila. The goal, according to a press release from the Department of Civil Protection, was to furnish citizens in the Abruzzo region "with all the information available to the scientific community about the seismic activity of recent weeks".

Meeting of minds
The now-famous commission meeting convened on the evening of 31 March in a local government office in L'Aquila. Boschi, who had travelled by car to the city with two other scientists, later called the circumstances "completely out of the ordinary". Commission sessions are usually closed, so Boschi was surprised to see nearly a dozen local government officials and other non-scientists attending the brief, one-hour meeting, in which the six scientists assessed the swarms of tremors that had rattled the local population. When asked during the meeting if the current seismic swarm could be a precursor to a major quake like the one that levelled L'Aquila in 1703, Boschi said, according to the meeting minutes: "It is unlikely that an earthquake like the one in 1703 could occur in the short term, but the possibility cannot be totally excluded." The scientific message conveyed at the meeting was anything but reassuring, according to Selvaggi. "If you live in L'Aquila, even if there's no swarm," he says, "you can never say, 'No problem.' You can never say that in a high-risk region." But there was minimal discussion of the vulnerability of local buildings, say prosecutors, or of what specific advice should be given to residents about what to do in the event of a major quake. Boschi himself, in a 2009 letter to civilprotection officials published in the Italian weekly news magazine L'Espresso, said: "actions to be undertaken were not even minimally discussed". Many people in L'Aquila now view the meeting as essentially a public-relations event held to discredit the idea of reliable earthquake prediction (and, by implication, Giuliani) and thereby reassure local residents. Christian Del Pinto, a seismologist with the civil-protection department for the neighbouring region of Molise, sat in on part of the meeting and later told prosecutors in L'Aquila that the commission proceedings struck him as a "grotesque pantomine". Even Boschi now says that "the point of the meeting was to calm the population. We [scientists] didn't understand that until later on."

What happened outside the meeting room may haunt the scientists, and perhaps the world of risk assessment, for many years. Two members of the commission, Barberi and De Bernardinis, along with mayor Cialente and an official from Abruzzo's civil-protection department, held a press conference to discuss the findings of the meeting. In press interviews before and after the meeting that were broadcast on Italian television, immortalized on YouTube and form detailed parts of the prosecution case, De Bernardinis said that the seismic situation in L'Aquila was "certainly normal" and posed "no danger", adding that "the scientific community continues to assure me that, to the contrary, it's a favourable situation because of the continuous discharge of energy". When prompted by a journalist who said, "So we should have a nice glass of wine," De Bernardinis replied "Absolutely", and urged locals to have a glass of Montepulciano. To have made a joke about a glass of wine and then face a conviction is absurd. Its something out of the Middle Ages. The suggestion that repeated tremors were favourable because they 'unload', or discharge, seismic stress and reduce the probability of a major quake seems to be scientifically incorrect. Two of the committee members Selvaggi and Eva later told prosecutors that they "strongly dissented" from such an assertion, and Jordan later characterized it as "not a correct view of things". (De Bernardinis declined a request for an interview through his lawyer, Dinacci, who insisted that De Bernardinis's public comments reflected only what the commission scientists had told him. There is no mention of the discharge idea in the official minutes, Picuti says, and several of the indicted scientists point out that De Bernardinis made these remarks before the actual meeting.) That message, whatever its source, seems to have resonated deeply with the local population. "You could almost hear a sigh of relief go through the town," says Simona Giannangeli, a lawyer who represents some of the families of the eight University of L'Aquila students who died when a dormitory collapsed. "It was repeated almost like a mantra: the more tremors, the less danger." "That phrase," in the opinion of one L'Aquila resident, "was deadly for a lot of people here." The press conference and interviews, prosecutors argue, carried special weight because they were the only public comments to emerge immediately after the meeting. The commission did not issue its usual formal statement, and the minutes of the meeting were not even prepared, says Boschi, until after the earthquake had occurred. Moreover, it did not issue any specific recommendations for community preparedness, according to Picuti, thereby failing in its legal obligation "to avoid death, injury and damage, or at least to minimize them". Picuti argues that the fragility of local housing should have been a central component in the commission's risk assessment. "This isn't Tokyo, where the buildings are anti-seismic," he says. "This is a medieval city, and that raises the risk." In 1999, Barberi himself had compiled a massive census of every seismically vulnerable public building in southern Italy; the survey, according to the prosecution brief, indicated that more than 550 masonry buildings in L'Aquila were at mediumhigh risk of collapsing in the event of a major earthquake. The failure to remind residents of earthquake preparedness procedures in the face of such risks is one of the reasons that John Mutter, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, declined to sign the open letter circulated to support the Italian scientists. Mutter says that in his opinion, "these guys shouldn't go to jail, but they should be fined or censured because they should have said something other than what they said. To say 'don't worry' that sort of thing just isn't helpful. You need to remind people of their earthquake drills: if

they feel the house moving, get out of the building if you can, or get under a table or a door frame if you can't. Do all the things that we know save lives." As part of the prosecution's case, Picuti argues in his brief that local residents made fateful decisions on the night of the earthquake on the basis of statements made by public officials outside the meeting. Maurizio Cora, a lawyer who lived not far from Vittorini, told prosecutors that after the 30 March shock, he and his family retreated to the grounds of L'Aquila's sixteenthcentury castle; after the 11 p.m. foreshock on 5 April, he said his family "rationally" discussed the situation and, recalling the reassurances of government officials that the tremors would not exceed those already experienced, decided to remain at home, "changing our usual habit of leaving the house when we felt a shock". Cora's wife and two daughters died when their house collapsed. "That night, all the old people in L'Aquila, after the first shock, went outside and stayed outside for the rest of the night," Vittorini says. "Those of us who are used to using the Internet, television, science we stayed inside."

Disputed advice
In an interview in the Rome offices of his lawyer, Boschi derided as "absurd" the idea that he in any way played down the risk to L'Aquila. Brandishing a copy of the INGV's seismic hazard map of Italy, which shows a broad swath of the Apennines in bright hues indicating high risk, the tall, silver-haired geophysicist insisted: "No one can find a single piece of paper where I say, 'Be calm, don't worry'. I have said for years that the Abruzzo is the most seismologically dangerous zone in all of Italy. It's as if I suddenly became an imbecile. I'm accused of being negligent!" He was not invited to participate in the press conference after the meeting, he says, and didn't even know about it until after his return to Rome. Attorneys for the other scientists all insist that the charges are without foundation, while raising additional arguments. Barberi's lawyer, Petrelli, acknowledges that the meeting was intended "in part" to defuse the panic over Giuliani's predictions, but insists that everything his client said was scientifically sound and correct. To convey the difficulty of communicating risk assessments, he offers the analogy of being asked the safest way to travel, and recommending flying because it is statistically much safer than car or train. "If the person takes the plane, and the plane is involved in an accident, this doesn't mean that my advice was wrong," he said. "I gave the right advice, since scientific advice is based on statistics, and the statistics don't exclude the possibility of an event that we would like to avoid." Alessandra Stefano, the lawyer for Calvi, says that the mass media has played a part in the case by disseminating incorrect information about "especially delicate" scientific matters. Eva's lawyer, Alfredo Biondi, has pointed out that in 1985, the then-head of civil protection, Giuseppe Zamberletti, was investigated for instigating a public panic when he ordered the evacuation of several villages in northwest Tuscany after a seismic swarm; on that occasion, no major quake occurred. Antonio Pallotta has argued that his client, Selvaggi, was not an official member of the commission. As for the statement that seems to have resonated most with the residents of L'Aquila De Bernardinis's claim that during seismic swarms, repeated tremors were "favourable" Dinacci says of his client: "He's not a seismologist, he's a hydraulic engineer," and that he had only relayed what the scientists had told him. As to De Bernardinis's suggestion to have a glass of Montepulciano, Dinacci says, "This was a joke! To have made a joke about a glass of wine and then face a conviction is absurd. It's something out of the Middle Ages."

The outcome of the trial that begins next week in L'Aquila can no more be predicted than can earthquakes themselves. It will ultimately be up to a single magistrate to decide whether the actions of the commission, and the alleged "erroneous information" released by officials outside the meeting, rise to the level of criminal culpability. Although defence lawyers say that the prosecution's case is logically flawed, the stakes are high. If convicted, the scientists could face up to 15 years in jail, according to prosecutors. In addition, plaintiffs in a separate civil case are seeking damages in the order of 22.5 million (US$31.6 million).

After shock
Irrespective of the verdict, the episode has been a painful tutorial about the importance of clear public communication when potential disasters loom. The commission and the civil-protection department "got trapped in the wrong conversation because of the hullaballoo that was happening" around the unofficial predictions of earthquakes, says Jordan. "The issue became, is there going to be an earthquake or not, and that choice is the wrong way to talk about this." Mutter adds that in his opinion, the commission's focus on whether earthquakes could be predicted or not ultimately didn't tell people what they wanted to know. "People aren't stupid," he says. "They know we can't predict earthquakes. They just want clear advice on what they should do." The recent ICEF report argues that frequently updated hazard probabilities are the best way to communicate risk information to the public. "Seismic weather reports, if you will, should be put out on a daily basis," Jordan says. "Nobody has set up a good system for doing this, and our understanding of the 'weather' in this case is very poor, so we can only see through the glass darkly." But in an age of social media and instantaneous communication, he says, misinformation travels fast, and the public needs clear, real-time risk assessment. As Selvaggi warns, the number of situations in which scientists are asked to assess hazard is certain to rise. "We have an increasing number of extreme events," he said, "and we have increasing numbers of people living in high-risk regions. It's time to address this problem."

Jordan says that the L'Aquila incident raises one other fundamentally important issue about risk assessment. "The role of science is to present information about hazards," he says. "But it's the

role of the decision-makers to take that information, and a lot of other information, in order to make decisions about public welfare." In fact the legal fight in L'Aquila is viewed by some as a philosophical dispute between scientists, who believe that their role is pure hazard assessment, and the local prosecutors, who argue that Italian law obliges scientific advisers to evaluate the fragility of buildings and other factors in their assessment of risk. Scientists will also have to work hard to convince the public, at least in L'Aquila, that frequent, probabilistic risk assessment is a better way to protect them than age-old traditions. As Vittorini told Picuti after the earthquake, the messages from the commission meeting "may have in some way deprived us of the fear of earthquakes. The science, on this occasion, was dramatically superficial, and it betrayed the culture of prudence and good sense that our parents taught us on the basis of experience and of the wisdom of the previous generations." Glancing at an image of his deceased wife and daughter on his mobile phone, Vittorini says: "We're not crazy people. We just want accountability. We hope this trial can be a symbol of change."

Putting Philosophy to the Test

A new breed of thinkers takes the search for wisdom to the street. By David Menconi Josh Knobe has comfortable seating in his philosophy department office at Yale Universitya small couch somewhere between a love seat and a sofa in size. It is most decidedly not, however, an armchair, which might seem a trivial distinction. But in Knobe's world, one's position on armchairs can be a matter of grave import. "Yeah, it's a couch rather than an armchair," says Knobe, '96. "So there's room for two, and that's important. You don't just sit there alone and think about something. You sit and talk to someone about it." For the past century or so, philosophy has primarily entailed solitary ruminations to puzzle out deep truths about the nature of human existencequestions about reason, knowledge, values, free will. Philosophy can seem like a lonely ivory-tower vigil, but the old school holds that sitting and thinking is still the best way to do it. As one prominent philosopher put it a few years back, "If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can." But Knobe is one of the leading lights of a new field called experimental philosophy, or "x-phi" for short. These scholars use the tools of social sciencethey devise questionnaires, go out and conduct surveys, gather dataand then try to figure out what philosophical truths they reveal. At times, experimental philosophy looks no different than social psychology. (It is perhaps telling that Knobe has office space in both the philosophy and psychology departments at Yale.) It's a lot more likely than conventional philosophy to be a collaborative effort, too. When experimental philosophers disagree over something, Knobe says, the default response is for them to try to work together. In many ways, Knobe is the closest thing experimental philosophy has to a rock star. Since last year, he's been an essay contributor to the New York Times. An admirer from Australia maintains a Joshua Knobe fan page on Facebook. And a phenomenon bears his name: The Knobe Effect, derived from an experiment of his, is frequently cited to explain the effectiveness of negative political advertising.

Conducted in 2003, the experiment examined people's perception of intentionality based on their opinions about two scenarios. In the first scenario, a business executive is told that a new product will increase profits but harm the environment. He responds that he doesn't care about the environment, just profits. The program is implemented, profits go up and the environment suffers. When asked if the executive intentionally harmed the environment, 82 percent of respondents answered yes. Scenario No. 2 is the same except for one key detail: The word "hurt" is replaced with "help." Again, the executive says he doesn't care about the environment. The program goes on, profits rise, and this time the environment benefits. But when asked if the executive intentionally helped the environment, only 23 percent of respondents said yes. So the Knobe Effect holds that people are more likely to assign blame for things that go wrong than to give credit for things that go right, a gap Knobe has spent the past eight years working to explain. Why should the results of an action have a bearing on intentionality? And when it comes to questions of character, why do we tend to give more weight to negativity? Why does it sometimes happen that a single misdeed in a lifetime of otherwise exemplary behavior can destroy a reputation? (Think of how one racial slur can get someone branded a racist.) The human tendency to blame also relates to questions about free will and determinism. The idea that people have free will is integral to Western society, not to mention our criminal justice system; we also believe that people are products of their environment. The concept of a deterministic universe, in which people's actions are inevitable based on past events, seems to contradict that. Asked if blame is possible in a world where every action is predetermined, people almost always say no. But that's if you ask the question in a purely abstract, hypothetical way. The more detail you add about a situation, the more likely people are to say that guilt and blame are possible or even necessary. "There are two views of what is going on here," Knobe says. "On the one hand, there's this sense of a fundamental, very scientific way the mind works, but something distorts or biases our understanding of issues. The other view, which is mine, is that it's a mistake to think the mind has purely scientific characteristics we can understand. At a deeper level, the way the mind works, our understanding of these things is morally infused from the beginning. It's not something that's 'distorting,' it's fundamental to what is going on. We are moralizing creatures, through and through." Knobe admits that he's still no closer than anyone else to definitively answering these questions. Experimental philosophy is more likely to leave things open-ended, which is a strength to its fans and a weakness to its detractors. "I don't know how deep [the Knobe Effect] is, but it's interesting," says Stanford philosophy professor Ken Taylor, author of the 2003 essay collection Reference and the Rational Mind and co-host of the radio program Philosophy Talk. "Like most stuff about experimental philosophy, I find it intriguing even though I don't know what to make of it. I don't know that experimental philosophy has dug very deep toward an explanation. The results are interesting, but I regard most of them as first stepsgrist for the harder thinking and theorizing still to come. I think most experimental philosophy results are under-theorized and philosophically underinterrogated. Most of the creativity goes into designing experiments. To make something philosophical out of them is a harder task."

"Experimental philosophy is hard to define," observes Benot Monin, an associate professor of psychology and organizational behavior at Stanford. "But it's interdisciplinary and it benefits a lot from philosophers taking findings from psychology and applying a philosophical point of view. Now they're using the methods of psychology to test assumptions from philosophy. They're better able to question and parse out issues of ethics that psychologists don't have the conceptual tools for. There's really been a rebirth, a cadre of young turks who have taken off in philosophy the last 10 years. Josh is a perfect example. He's very versatile and able to engage the psychological literature, but he has the conceptual imperative of a trained philosopher." An autumn afternoon finds Knobe and 12 graduate students gathered in a Yale classroom over vegetarian and vegan pizzas, in an informal lab setting where they've come to talk about their research and solicit suggestions. Much of the discussion centers on how to word survey questions, with much parsing of specific terminologysuch as using "how" questions to make respondents think more concretely, or "why" questions to encourage more abstract reasoning. Knobe displays a light teaching touch, keeping the discussion easygoing and at times amusing. Kant, Nietzsche and other classics of philosophy are invoked as reference points, but so are the alternative-rock band The Pixies and dialogue from the computer-animated movie Shrek. One student's philosophical experiment involves a food manufacturing company. She outlines a scenario in which an employee decides to change an ingredient to save money, even though the company's CEO is allergic to the new ingredient. So did the employee intentionally harm the CEO? And if the roles are reversed, would the CEO be responsible for harming the employee? In terms of power, does it make a difference whether the injury comes from above or below? The student and her classmates turn over every word of the scenario description, pondering, among other things, whether the type of food involved (junk or health) might influence responses. After refining her questions, the student will take them out and solicit opinions to see what the results might reveal about people's attitudes toward intentionality. Not everyone would agree that this can show anything of significance. Stanford philosophy professor Allen Wood has served as a dissertation adviser for some students doing work in experimental philosophy, but he remains very skeptical of it. "That more people believe one thing over another, I don't think there is anything very deep to be learned that way," he says. "I'm afraid I don't think that experimental philosophy enables you to learn anything you didn't already know about philosophy, because it's very hard to devise experimental tests to verify claims that are philosophically interesting. Experimental philosophers tend to underestimate the difficulty of designing experiments and research programs. It's much easier to 'know' something than to verify it in a scientific manner. You're more likely to just confirm your own philosophical prejudices and presuppositions. I think a lot of it is false, misleading, pointless at best and maybe even harmful." Knobe knows many of his peers are not enamored of experimental philosophy: that they brush it off as touchy-feely, faddish, politically correct nonsense. Ask non-practitioners of x-phi what kind of philosopher they are and they're likely to sniff, as one Stanford philosophy professor did recently, "A real one." "There is the sense that a lot of people disapprove," Knobe says. "You know, 'Who are these kids?' 'What are they doing?' It's almost all very young people doing experimental philosophy. It's not something that older, more established philosophers are turning to as a new approach. But over time, it's getting more accepted as part of the philosophical enterprise. I was at Princeton when I first started doing this. I'd go ask people in the park questions, and I think that would not sit well with some: Here's this guy trying to take on philosophical tradition by wandering around

a park asking questions. Seems like a thing some punk kid would do. But I'm untroubled by that. There is a sense of schism, which I hope will evaporate over time, just like the distinctions between different fields. My dream is that interdisciplinary fields can work together, intertwined." An unconventional free spirit, Knobe grew up in Massachusetts. When he was accepted to Stanford for undergraduate studies, he traveled across America on a bicycle, charting a meandering route that took six weeks to complete. Knobe followed a meandering course at Stanford, too, spending one quarter living in a tent in the foothills. He designed his own major he called ethics, which encompassed psych, philosophy and religious studies. "When I was first going into philosophy in college," he says, "what inspired me was not so much the 20th-century work as the classicsNietzsche, Plato, Aristotle. They were very interested in questioning how the mind works, using certain kinds of empirical evidence and drawing from history and other cultures to draw an empirical hypothesis of the nature of the mind. So I think xphi revives a vision of what that could be. It's not new. If anything, it's retro in that it goes back to earlier traditions and is not so concerned with distinguishing itself from other disciplines." Claims about its origins aside, the current wave of x-phi goes back about a decade. One pioneer of the modern field is Shaun Nichols, '86, now a professor at the University of Arizona. During his student days, Nichols says, it would have been "a ridiculous venture and a mistake professionally" to conduct experiments in philosophy. Nichols began working with x-phi after securing tenure in 1998. "For me, it was that an enormous amount of work had been done using one particular tool, sitting in an armchair thinking hard about the problem. How much more progress could we make with that one method was unclear to me, whereas it seemed like there was an enormous amount of untapped potential in trying to understand the processes that generate these judgments. It's not so much that the old armchair techniques were bad; we've just been using them for 2,000 years. We might get more insight by trying a new tool. More than anything else, the difference really is in methodology." Recent years have found Nichols working with Knobe and others on the nature of consciousness, including people's perceptions of the difference between "the brain" and "the mind." But Nichols is best known for his involvement in an early x-phi landmark, an oft-cited 2001 survey studying connections between culture and intuition. In collaboration with Jonathan Weinberg from Indiana University and Stephen Stich from Rutgers, Nichols described a series of scenarios to college students from the West, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent, then asked whether the people in the scenarios "really knew" something or "only believed" it. One situation describes a woman who has driven a Buick for many years, only to have it stolen and replaced by a Pontiac. A friend of hers knows that she's always driven a Buick, but he doesn't know about the theft and the new Pontiac. His supposition that she drives an American car is accurate even though it's based on outdated information. Does he know she drives an American car, or only believe it? One-quarter of Western respondents answered that he knew, while three-quarters said he merely believed. By contrast, more than half of East Asian and nearly two-thirds of Indian respondents said that he knew rather than believed. Proportions varied on the study's other scenarios, but in general Asians and Indians were far more likely to respond "really know" than "only believe." "A lot of traditional philosophy seemed to operate on the assumption that when one figured out a definition of knowledge, you could generalize globally into something universal," Nichols says,

reflecting on the experiment. "But that's a hasty conclusion. There are profound cultural differences in what we think of as knowledge versus belief." Of course, you might get very different results from tweaking the scenario descriptions. Objections to experimental philosophy often focus on its reliance on the methods of social psychology, in which most philosophers are not trained. So the argument goes that it is methodologically bankrupt and has nothing to do with philosophy at all. Last year Timothy Williamson of Oxford University went so far as to call some of experimental philosophy's practitioners "philosophy-hating philosophers" in a New York Times essay. "One peril for those in philosophy where it borders other sciences is they become envious of the shiny new methods and results of those sciences and anxious for the scientists' approval," Williamson says. "As a result, they tend to imitate the scientists and feel ashamed of the distinctively philosophical methods the scientists have difficulty following. . . . Of course, this danger does not mean that philosophers shouldn't work in borderline or overlap areas. But they will have much more to offer interdisciplinary inquiry if they are willing and able to apply distinctively philosophical methods at a high level." Because experimental philosophy gets more attention for its front-end experiments than for its back-end philosophizing, that's a legitimate issue that experimental philosophers themselves are quite aware of. "One thing I do worry about a little is that philosophy has to be what drives the project," Nichols says. "It's a mistake for a grad student to think he can be a psychologist and get hired by a philosophy department. It always has to be at the front of your mind: 'What kind of philosophical point are you making?' Some people think 'none,' that you can't possibly get philosophical points out of experiments. But it's much more professionally acceptable now than it would've been 10 years ago." For their part, experimental philosophers are not above poking fun at the other side. There is a YouTube video featuring the "X-Phi Anthem." Written and recorded by Knobe's wife, indie-rock singer-songwriter Alina Simone, the song lays out the field's M.O. in stark emotional tones: Let's take it to the streets To the parks, to every strip mall parking lot Let's take it back to the primary source And find out who we really are X-phi! The video shows an armchair slowly going up in flames.

My Lost Library: Books, Exile, and Identity

By Ariel Dorfman

In the ninth year of my exile, one sullen day in the winter of 1982, the phone rang in our house in Bethesda, Maryland. When I heard the voice on the other end of the line, I tried to control my panic. I had learned by then that whenever anyone called me or my wife, Anglica, from my forbidden country, Chile, then in the throes of General Pinochet's dictatorship, it had to be bad news.

The worst moment of each call was, paradoxically, before I got the alarming news about death or disappearance or torture. In the split seconds between identifying the voice in Chile and that voice speaking up and identifying the victim, a sense of dread would spread inside, a growth heavy with a soon-to-be-answered question: Who is it this time? I filled that momentary void with faces and possibilities and sufferings, and, worse still, hoped that it would be someone I did not know, somebody else's friend or mother or comrade, and almost immediately berated myself for that hope, as if only my pain mattered amid so much pain in the world. That whirlwind of moral confusion lasted only those scant seconds, but it tainted what I then heard. It left me exhausted and bereft even before I was told anything concrete. The caller that day in the winter of 1982 was Santiago Larran, a member of the resistance whose task was to clandestinely collect and transmit information about repression in Chile, so I couldn't help wondering whether this was some personal tragedy, whether his wife, Mafalda, was in trouble. ... But the initial, customary words ("Ariel? Tengo malas noticias. I've got bad news."), were followed by a surprise. The victim was not a human being. It was my library. Over the past week, Santiago explained, torrential rains had made the Mapocho River breach its banks, carrying with it houses, bridges, and roads, as well as a shed next to their home, up in the hills, where he and Mafalda had generously offered to store a hundred boxes of my books. "You've lost half your library," Santiago said. "I'm so sorry."
"Half my library? La mitad?"

"Yes. We still have fifty boxes, I think. Some of the books are damaged, caked with mud. We're trying to dry them out, but a good many seem to be in fine shape. A bit musty, maybe, but probably retrievable." And that's when the exchange took an even stranger turn. Something close to exhilaration overwhelmed me, and I spent the next minutes comforting my friend, as if it had been his library rather than mine that had been wreckednot allowing myself, uncharacteristically, a morsel of self-pity. After I hung up, I sat there for a while in our home in Bethesda, musing about this lack of sentimentality regarding the library that had formed the cornerstone of my life. Was it because those books had vanished for me before that telephone call, had been taken from me forever, in effect, the day I had been forced to flee Chile after the 1973 military coup? Was it that I had already mourned their disappearance during the bleak nights of banishment as I reviewed the exact ethereal order in which certain favorite tomes were lodged on a shelf, and they had begun to fade from my life when, day after day, I was unable to open one page, consult one note, look up one scene from Shakespeare or Cervantes I had earmarked? Was it that Santiago Larran's call had made me realize that, in spite of all that longing and love, I had ceased to really believe in the existence of that library anymore, that I had given it up for dead, that I never expected to hold in my hands even one of those books again? So maybe my bizarre sense of animation came from gratefulness. Yes, I was grateful to that river for savaging my most prized possessions. It was as if inside that much larger, more destructive flood of history that had exposed my life and left me naked, this Chilean rising of the waters had rescued the library, had oddly made it tangible for me once more. Instead of bewailing the half that had been lost forever, something in me rejoiced at the resurrection of what I had given up for dead.

And yet, even if the library had turned into a ghostlike mirage, a phantom I could not touch, verses I could not read or essays I could not meditate on, it had determined, in great measure, our first years in exile. We were in the most dire need during the period immediately after the coup. Having escaped death in Chile and possessed by the need to give all I could to the struggle for democracy in my land, driven as well by the guilt of having survived the onslaught, I had accepted without reservationsand without any sort of financial aidthe assignment from the leaders of the opposition to General Augusto Pinochet to settle in Paris, where the resistance had decided to install its main network of press and culture abroad. Without a job, and with no health care for the family, precariously residing in a series of rotating apartments loaned by friends from the world of solidarity, wary of the police because I was in France on a phony student visa, supplementing my scant income from my books with Anglica's babysitting and English lessons given to youngsters with atrocious Gallic accents, I knew that it made sense for us to sell our bungalow on Vaticano Street back in Santiago, a house that had been my parents' gift to the newlyweds. If we resisted putting on the market the only thing of value we still owned, the only thing that could relieve our economic distress and tide us over until the time when the dictatorship would fall and we would return triumphantly to our liberated land, it was because of the library. Those books, full of scribbled notes in the margins, had been my one luxury in Chile, companions of my intellectual voyages, my best friends in the world. During democratic times, before the military takeover, I had poured any disposable income into that library, augmenting it with hundreds of volumes my doting parents acquired for me. It was a collection that overflowed in every impossible direction, piling up even in the bathroom and the kitchen. It was a daily comfort, in the midst of our dispossession in exile, to imagine that cosmic biblioteca back home, gathering nothing more lethal than dust. That was my true self, my better self, that was the life of reading and writing I aspired to, the space where I had been at my most creative, penning a prize-winning novel, many short stories, innumerable articles and poems and analyses, in spite of my own doubts as to whether literature had any place at all in a revolution where reality itself was more challenging than my wildest imaginings. To pack the books away once we fled from the country would have been to acknowledge our wandering as everlasting. Even buying a book was proof that we intended to stay away long enough to begin a new library. "We need a French-Spanish dictionary," Anglica would say to me as we roamed the outdoor bookstalls along the rue de Sebastopol. "Look, here's a used one, not in bad shape." "I have six in Chile," came my unwavering answer, embellishing my predicament as usual, but not inflating the number by that muchfour maybe, four in Chile that I had rarely opened, and none in France, where we would have needed to check a dictionary several times a day. How do you say in the language of Camus and Foucault that we were fucked? Nous sommes foutus, that's how, that's what we were, one phrase we had learned, heard too many times over. That the books would be waiting for me in Santiago gave me one certainty, one anchor, in the ever-shifting swamp of exile. A certainty that was not delusional, as so much is when you are far from home. A certainty that I gleaned from an eyewitness, a messenger who came from Chile. In August 1974, I had arranged for Jean-Pierre Clerc, a journalist and friend from Le Monde, to visit my country and secretly interview one of the leaders of the resistance, Jaime Gazmuri, the

secretary general of the MAPU, the revolutionary party I belonged to. The international media had been full of depressing tales of death and agony leaching out of Chilenot a bad tactic to isolate the dictatorship and get it condemned in all manner of diplomatic bodies, but missing had been news of how, underneath the conspicuous country of terror where Pinochet seemed to exercise total control, a second country of defiance was growing. Le Monde knew that it would be a scoop to speak with someone who was resisting under the shadow of the death squads. But the editors also wanted to know if we could guarantee the safety of their correspondent. "Jean-Pierre is as safe in Santiago as he would be in Paris," I said. "We have hundreds of cadres dedicated to making sure the secretary general of our party is secure." It was a bluff, a blind leap of faith. I had no idea if this operation involved three militants or the hundreds I had invented. It turned out that Jean-Pierre completed his mission brilliantly. The interview was published on September 11, 1974the first anniversary of the coupon the front page of Le Monde and then syndicated worldwide. Rereading that report all these years later, I'm impressed with Gazmuri's foresight. He might be clandestine himself, our party leader said, but the way to overthrow Pinochet was mostly above ground. The resistance would start occupyingno matter the cost the surface of the country, strangling the dictatorship with thousands of initiatives, exercising democracy in everyday life and activities until we won our freedom back. A few days after Jean-Pierre's return from Chile, he invited us to his home for a debriefing session. It was good to see Santiago again, if only through Jean-Pierre's eyes, the bizarre normalcy that suffused the city as if nothing were amiss, no torture chambers, no secret police. A woman from our party had contacted him, set up a rendezvous. Wedged into the back seat of a car, where he wore opaque glasses that blocked his vision, he had to change cars three times before arriving at his destination. Jean-Pierre would stop once in a while to depict a member of the network and then ask us, "Is this anyone you might recognize?" We would press him for more details. My eyes would meet Anglica's, wondering silently if maybe that person could be ... and then we both let the name dangle, did not dare mention it, but her eyes and my eyes were saying yes, it was somebody we knew. "As for Gazmuri," Jean-Pierre said, "I've been asked by your comrades not to describe him. He's changed his appearance significantly. But let me tell you this. Pinochet doesn't have to get him cigarettes will do the job. He smoked nonstop during the three hours of our interview. Must have gone through several packs." "Can you describe the house?" "Unpretentious, with only a front yard, I think, not very large, though I could barely see through the window, but there was the most wonderful, what do you call it, jacarand tree outside the front door. And the room where Gazmuri was sitting on a couch, it seemed like a library. In fact the whole house was like a secondhand bookstore. There were books everywhere, not a wall without a bookcase. Even in the kitchenthe woman who acted as our hostess, a dark-skinned woman, slender, with long black hair, matched by eyes of the same color, well, she invited us into the kitchen to have some coffeeeven there I found books." He looked at us quizzically. "Maybe you've been to that house?" Anglica touched my foot under the table. "I don't think so," she said.

"Tell them about the bathroom," Jean-Pierre's wife chipped in. "Oh, the bathroom. It was painted all in orange. With a gigantic poster of Bob Dylan, the one with his hair like a rainbow in flames." "Not anywhere I've been," I answered. "I'm sure I'd remember a bathroom like that one." We had painted that bathroom orange ourselves one hilarious Sunday in Santiago, and the hostess in our own home was none other than Anglica's sister Ana Mara, and the woman who had first contacted our journalist friend seemed to be Antonieta Saa, Anglica's cousinboth of them were involved, we knew, in underground activities. But we had not an inkling until then that Ana Mara, who was living in our bungalow on Vaticano, was leading a double existence, like in one of those movies from occupied France during the Second World War. It worried us, naturally, but at the same time it took some of the edge off our tribulations in Paris to think that our house was being used by the resistance. And now Anglica and I had another reason for not selling the house. It was not merely to save my libraryor my idea of it, in factbut our distant contribution to the resistance. Several years later, when our circumstances became even more drastically difficult, when we were stranded in the States, again without work and again without permanent legal status and by then ready to admit that Pinochet was not going to fall tomorrow or the day after, and that we needed some modicum of stability after seven years of wandering in Europe, the house was sold and the books were boxed and, eventually, that call had come from Santiago Larran with news of the death and resurrection of my library. It was not until 1990, when the return to democracy in Chile allowed us a return that we thought would be permanent, that I was reunited with the remainder of my books, began to unpack the boxes in the house we had bought in Santiago. How often, during the years of roving, had I not dreamed of the day when I would hold in my hands the first book of my lost library, place it back on a shelf, turn and reach for the next one, untouched during all those years, thumb it, read a couple of lines, glide into those pages and find a note scribbled in the margin by my younger self, and then look up as if roused from a delirium, the next volume calling for rediscovery, how often had this future been evoked? But the rendezvous with mi biblioteca did not quite turn out the way I had imagined, True, reading from here and there in my library was like taking a trip in a time machine. Every volume I dug out of its box, saved from the soldiers and the deluge, offered me an expedition to the past, a geological inquiry into the layers of the life I used to live, a way of communing with the eyes and mind of the boy, and the adolescent, and then the young man who slipped into the covers of this novel or that treatise on philosophy, meeting old friends again. Madame Bovary and Alyosha Karamazov and Aeneas and Joseph K and Gilgamesh and Electra and that old fool Polonius accompanied me once more, though not quite as when I last left them; since we were last together I had learned something about dead bodies and betrayals and ethical distress. To read Dante in Chile in 1990, after having tasted the bread of exile, could not be like yesterday, when I believed I'd live and die in the country of my choice. I remember picking up a volume by Julio Cortzar, pausing at one of my favorite stories, "La Autopista del Sur," which I read before I ever met him, before we ever sat down to listen to Bessie Smith in his apartment near Les Halles, before the day he confided in me that he was leaving Ugn and had fallen in love with Carole, before we stepped together into the sea of Zihuatanejo. I skimmed through that story again, remarking on my scraggly annotations in the

margins, the same handwriting then, at the age of 24, as now (some things, amazingly, stay the same), and the shock of recognition: Cortzar subjects a group of voyagers, returning by car to Paris one evening, to a colossal traffic jam, one that lasts for over a year, asks what would happen if they had to live in their vehicles and endure winter and hunger, reduced, as were the earliest humans, to nothing other than their bodies and their solidarity. What would they discover about themselves once some mysterious force threw an apocalyptic monkey wrench into the cogs of civilization, making us question where we are going and why and with whom? Cortzar's prophecy, itself springing from the nostalgia for the primitive and ghostly that informs the vision of so many antibourgeois artists from the Romantics onward, informed my critique of Chilean society and the forced march to modernization that Pinochet had inaugurated, turning us into a greedy nation of consumers with little sense of the common good. Cortzar had taught me that there persisted a mythical, magical Chile lurking underneath or behind or beyond the everyday, haunting the ordinary, challenging the conventional. And yet, nearby, in that lost, submerged library, my annotated Marx and Descartes, Asimov and Sarmiento, also awaited me inside books that proclaimed the need to tame nature. I had also been formed in that other tradition, the one that underscores the importance of science and progress. Those books contained, therefore, the metaphors and paradigms and characters from which I could never be expelled, a vast imaginary that would always be mine. It was there that I had learned a long time ago, in the boundless pages of that library, to become cosmopolitan Diogenes was alive in the passage where he invented that word derived from cosmos and polits, a citizen of the universe, someone who does not have to fear exile because, gloriously homeless, he belongs only to his thoughts and to what is eminently human. I wondered if that was why I had gone back to Chile. To dust off the pre-Socratics, to dip again into the classics, to recall that Socrates, according to an essay by Montaigne, said he was not from Athens but from the world. To acknowledge that when I first read those words I didn't really understand them as I ultimately did after decades of roving, so much made more sense now, that on the same day that I could visit the women of the desaparecidos, the disappeared, protesting that even though democracy had returned to Chile, their husbands were still missing, still without graves, on that very afternoon I could return home and read of Antigone's determination to bury her brother. But the collected plays of Sophocles were not just spiritual passports to the universe. They were also, alas, inside an object to be disinterred, hefty and material and, above all, dirty. The words inside might shine, but the pages that carried them were caked with the dust of their own transitory funeral. I couldn't read Euripides or Plato until I'd wiped down the books in which they resided, where they had established their residence, unless I'd cleaned up the residues left behind by time and the river. Yes, Thomas Wolfe was also here, I'd read him before I had an inkling that I'd establish myself for so long in the North Carolina where he was born, the state where I write these memories, remembering that I told myself wryly that I wouldn't be able to look homeward with his angel until my muscles and fingers had done some exercise. Though not alone. About four hours after I had started on my labors, I came down with an asthma attack. The previous evening I had already been left dizzy by the noxious smog of Santiago, the third time in as many weeks. The return to Chile in 1990 was not only the joy of devouring the empanadas and seafood of my adolescence, not only the familiar slang in the streets and the even more familiar smiles of my family and friends. It was also the mad miasma in my lungs, the crushing headaches, the substandard gasoline, the buses belching fumes, the misguided industrialization of decades exacerbated by the anything-goes dictatorship and the public indifference to the environment and, of course, the mountains that I loved and missed so much, the mountains

hemming in that foul air, exacting revenge on the descendants of the conquistadores who came to despoil and celebrate the legendary valley of Santiago. The heaving beast in my lungs had subsided by the time I awoke the next morning, but the spores in the books ferreted their way into me soon enough, so that by noon an allergic reaction endangered the Great Rescue. At that rate, of a few minutes of work a day, it was going to take me, I thought, more weeks to clean up my library than it had taken Tolstoy to write about the battle of Borodino, maybe longer than Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, which I was itching to read again in the Constance Garnett translation. I would glance at a description of Pierre watching the slaughter and then sneeze, read another line about Pierre's yearning for Natasha and then dab my eyes, and so it would have continued if salvation had not come at the hands of a spindly 12-year-old lad with a shudder of unruly black hair and clean olive skin. Miguel was at our house with his father, a stonemason summoned by Anglica to cover the exposed bricks in my youngest son Joaqun's bedroom so tiny spiders and bugs wouldn't creep out and attack our boy, who also happened to be 12. Miguel should have been in school, but I suspected that he'd been pulled out of the system, that his dad wanted him to start workingnot that he was much good as an apprentice, as the kid kept floating away from the masonry job to contemplate me pounding the soil away from a binding and then absorbed in one of William Blake's poems and then un estornudo and a similar operation with Rilke, and I can't remember now quite how or when it happened. It would have been narratively appropriate if it had been when I was trying to salvage Oliver Twist. All I know is that Miguel suddenly appeared with a rag, given to him by my wife. Concerned by my health, she had instructed Miguel to sit down on one of the boxes on the red-tiled terrace of our patio and make himself useful. And so he began taking out books, scrubbing each one at a clip 10 times faster than anything I could accomplish, weighted down as I was with asthma and curiosity and my hankering for a repetition of the pleasures of le temps retrouv. He ended up being my assistant until I finished cleaning and classifying all the books in the week it took us to clean up the library, a bright kid, quickly able to organize like-minded books in piles that I could then reaccommodate in relative order on the wooden boards of my rapidly filling study. It was not a strict division of labor in which the boy sweated away and I read select stanzas lounging on a couch, because I also got my fingernails filthy, but it was my aide-de-camp who bore the main burden of that toil, though I don't doubt that he was happy as he plugged away, especially when the talk turned to the books themselves. Besides making more money in those hours than he'd earn for the rest of the month (his father probably didn't pay him at all), Miguel was receiving the rudiments of a literary education, otherwise denied to him by the accident of his birth. He was avid for the stories embedded under the covers, which I transmitted to him from time to time as he wiped away the grime with fruition. Miguel would nod, frowning with concentration when I recited some lines from Neruda or told him a fable by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges whose work I loved in spite of his having been decorated by Pinochet, Borges who wrote about a library as infinite as the universe but never once conjured up a child scrubbing his Ficciones on a sunny day in winter, never once stopped to think that the intellectual delectations of eternity and avatars could be denied to a boy like Miguel because of what that very general inflicted on my country, never realized, my dear Borges, that if there had not been a coup and Allende, our democratic president, had not been overthrown, Miguel would inhabit a nation where his future, as a reader and as a worker, would have been diametrically different.

I did not expect to be using the services of anyone like Miguel. In fact, I had said as much at a dinner five or six days before I had started that campaign to retrieve my books. Our host, Antonio Skrmeta, author of Il Postino and one of my closest friends, upon hearing of my latest tribulations (I had spent a whole morning flitting to offices scattered across the city in order to retrieve a package from my editor at Viking in New York), suggested that if he and I and maybe another writer pooled our resources, we could share a "junior" who could run our errands and would be better off working for us than begging on the streets or selling asparagus one day and trinkets made in Hong Kong the next. I launched into an Arielesque tirade about our fraudulent service society, its roots in the semifeudal past, why we assumed that so many of the poor were automatically supposed to do our biddingand added that I wouldn't pander to such exploitation. My years abroad had taught me to unshackle myself from this sort of bond. A prodigious speech, but less than a week later, I had engaged my very own private helper. Though not for long. The library cleansing finally came to its end, and I found myself sending Miguel off with an extra-large tip and some books. And then, disturbed though I might have been that this was all I could do for him, I went on to indulge my fancy with other Miguels remaining behind with me: Miguel de Cervantes and Miguel ngel Asturias and Miguel Street by Naipaul and, of course, Michel de Montaigne. What did he say, my Michel, about poverty and the mind? I shuffled through the cold to the almost-full library and found the Essais, perched close to luard and Rabelais, I opened the volume until I came to the phrase underlined by a furious pencil that once had been mine: "Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable," words I had already designated as notable from Montaigne years before I had lived through a revolution and a military takeover and all those years of exile. When I had first read that line, memorized it, repeated it to myself, I actually believed it was possible to cure the pandemic of poverty, and yet almost two decades later there I was in a Chile brimming with kids like Miguel, there I was in my devastated country, returning because it was the place where I was close enough to understand the stories and distant enough to write them, there I was, hoping to add more works of my own to that library, hoping that I could carry on the only struggle left to me in that land, wagering that the poverty of our nation's mind was not as irreparable as my dead Michel de Montaigne, now rescued from a sullied river, once wrote. Six months later I had left Chile again, this time of my own free will, this time for good. I have puzzled often how I could have spent 17 years trying to go back and then, when I did indeed return, I forced myself to leave. It is still not clear to me if it was the country itself that had changed too much or if I was the one who had been so drastically altered by my exile that I no longer fit in, but whatever the cause, it left me forever divided, aware that my search for purity, simplicity, one country and one language and one set of allegiances was no longer possible. It also left me with two libraries: the one I had rescued back home and the one that I have built outside Chile over the years and that is already so large that not one more new book fits in the shelves. I have had to start giving hundreds of books away and boxing many others in order to donate them to Duke University, where I teach. But no matter how many I get rid of, it does not look likely that there will ever be space to bring my whole Chilean library over. And yet, I had already lost it once when I left my country and then regained half when that phone call came in 1982, and rescued what was left yet again in 1990 and can dream therefore that perhaps, one day, I will unite some books from Santiago with the thousands of books bought during my long exile. I can only hope and dream that before I die, a day will come when I will look up from the desk where I write these words, and my whole library, from here and there,

from outside and inside Chile, will greet me, I can only hope and dream and pray that I will not remain divided forever.