Friday, December 2, 2022

Words of Remembrance - Nicholas Sagliano, PhD (May 16, 1955 - Dec 1, 2022)

Nick and I first met at Cypress Road School, on the first day of kindergarten.  I was crying and miserable with homesickness.  Or teacher, Mrs. Miles gave up trying to console me and sat me down at a table.  A boy sat across from me putting together a wooden puzzle.  He told me his name was Nicholas.  He was not crying or upset, and I consoled myself by watching Nicholas calmly assemble that puzzle with confident, methodical resolve.   

At Sacred Heart grammar school, I had no idea what Nick’s grades were–I assume they were mostly ‘A’s.  But about seventh grade, a rumor spread that Nick had read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. The Sisters must have told Fr. Joyce because he came into our class with a goofy smile, asked where Nick was, and exclaimed to the class, “He read the whole encyclopedia!”  On the bus ride home, Nick volunteered to me that he had not read the entire encyclopedia, only a couple of sections. To his credit, I never, ever heard Nick brag, gloat, or try to take credit for something he didn’t do.  


By the eighth grade, Nick knew he wanted to become a chemist, a career choice he pursued with the same single-minded resolve with which he put that puzzle together in kindergarten.


From our class at Sacred Heart, eight of us went to Don Bosco Prep, including Nick, and in hindsight, we were a pretty smart bunch of guys.  Nick knew he was smart.  Once, while coming home on the bus, something possessed Nick to estimate each of our IQs.  He estimated his own IQ as very high, and I remember this because he ranked me about 10 or 15 points below himself.  I didn’t take offense, I just never forgot.  Characteristically, Nick did not rate himself as having the highest IQ.


Nick commuted to Manhattan college driving a Dodge Dart.  One day over lunch, at the McDonald’s on Hemion Road, Nick told me that his car had suffered a blown engine, and the cost of a new engine or to repair the old one was more than the car was worth.  Solely for the purpose of dramatic irony, I told Nick that, coincidentally, my sister Jean had been driving a Dodge Dart and had gotten into a wreck, and the estimate to repair the body and frame was more than the car was worth.  Nick questioned me about the engine.  Having been in an accident, he feared it was damaged or leaked oil.  I assured him the engine was undamaged and in perfect condition.  So I sold my sister’s car to Nick.  But here’s the thing:  Nick swapped out the engine himself, right on his parent’s driveway!  That blew my mind.  To him, it was just another kindergarten puzzle.


While Nick was in graduate school at Rutgers, he worked at Sears Automotive in Nanuet, swapping out batteries, tires, and whatnot.  Around that time, I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 microcomputer.   I told Nick I was dissatisfied with it. It had no software. I couldn’t do much with it.  Nick expressed envy, telling me how much more productive he could be in the chem lab with a microcomputer.  So I gave it to him.  This was about 1978.   A year or two later, Nick expressed his gratitude and confirmed how useful it was in the lab.  Note that PCs, as we know them, didn’t exist yet and neither did the Internet.  Once Nick got his PhD, he worked as a chemist for a series of pharmaceutical companies where he continued to leverage his computational and mechanical talents, to their benefit.


In recent years, we occasionally got together for dinner, both of us being partial to the Mason Jar in Mahwah.  Whenever we ate, to start, Nick always ordered a club soda and fried calamari, and I always ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks, to celebrate the occasion.


We spoke on the phone occasionally.  Among other things, we compared notes about what we knew about old friends. Nick had knowledge about so many things–anything related to pharmaceuticals obviously, but also climate change, fracking, and anything mechanical, especially, cars, and even tanks, which were a special interest of his.  More recently, he spoke at length and in detail about his medical maladies. In hindsight, I realize that what was just as impressive as his knowledge was his ability to articulate what he knew clearly and concisely. He could explain anything to anybody. 


We talked about politics only a little. Nick was a hands-on, practical guy; whereas, I tend to be more abstract and philosophical.  Politics was the one subject about which he never elaborated. Nick was deeply conservative. He knew what he believed, and that was it. No need for discussion. Whenever I expressed anything the least bit liberal, which I sometimes did, if just to draw him out, he would dismiss it with a stubborn grunt or a snort.  And I say that with affection.  


We never talked about sports.  We never discussed religion.  Someday, when we’re both hopefully in heaven, I suppose Nick will be driving a Dodge Dart with Abba or Arrival playing on the radio, and I’ll be driving a Volkswagon Beetle with Bob Dylan or Led Zeppelin blasting away.  We’ll meet for dinner at the Mason Jar equivalent in Heaven.  To start, he’ll order a club soda and fried calamari. I’ll order a Jack Daniels on the rocks.  We won’t talk politics or religion, but we’ll have plenty of other things to talk about.


Sunday, February 7, 2021

Franny of "Franny And Zooey," by J.D. Salinger (1955)

I read Franny last night. I have yet to read Zooey. 

What a vivid snapshot of a specific time and affluent social class!  Similar to a classic, hardboiled detective novel, Salinger confines himself to what his characters say and do--the characters never directly express their inner life. Initially, I found Salinger's constant mindless enumerating of visual details pointless and annoying.  I wondered if this was going to be merely a story of the manners and customs of affluent college students in the early 1950s.  We learn that Franny is dissatisfied and frustrated with her life--perhaps exasperated would be a better adjective.  Moreover, she is apparently in a spiritual crisis.  But oh, the 1950s!  Everyone smokes. They have snails, frog legs, and multiple martinis for lunch.  Franny's fascination with the Eastern religions she has studied echoes a dissatisfaction with herself and her life.  It foreshadows the emergence of the Beats, with Zooey making ironic, sarcastic allusions to her becoming a bohemium.  While the depth of Franny's spiritual crisis slowly emerges over lunch, Zooey has not the slightest bit of interest, let alone empathy.  Indeed, he cannot think beyond the forms of manners and social manners.  But of the Jesus prayer and the end of the story, I didn't see it coming, didn't see it coming.

Side note:  I never liked, Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye.  I now realize that the reason I don't like it is that we never see the inner life of Holden.  If Salinger's point is that Holden doesn't have an inner life, then may God save us.  When he grew up, he became Donald Trump.


Monday, February 1, 2021

The Future of the Catholic Church in the United States

My oldest son, though an atheist, does not scorn Catholicism or any other religion.  He has a fairly disinterested, that is, objective view of religion.  He thinks Catholicism in America is shot, has no future.  Indeed as Bishop Barron says, of each religion in America, we have the highest rate of people leaving.  My son says I underestimate the impact of the priest pedophile crisis.  He observes that the religious groups that are currently thriving in America are tribal--the Mormons, Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and the evangelicals.  He notes that Catholicism is the least tribal religion.  But tribalism is not an option for Catholicism, and rightfully so.   

Friday, January 22, 2021

Mercy

Except when confessing my sins, I never understood the concept of mercy. As such, it always intrigued me.  I read Pope Francis's book about mercy; and yet, I still wasn't able to get my mind around it.  I used to ask, what about repentance, don't we have to first repent in order to receive mercy?  But it says in the Bible that mercy is a gift, freely given--unconditionally--no strings attached. Mercy exists first. It is mercy that enables repentance, not the other way around. Repentance can occur only if mercy exists beforehand. My understanding of this only came after listening to a witness by someone who was sentenced to sixteen years in jail in North Carolina.  People like Nomi Network and The Sisters of Life are agents of mercy.

Friday, September 11, 2020

Chehkovian Christianity?

 Michael Sean Winters on Cornell West:

West has styled himself a “Chekhovian Christian.” He wrote that he was inspired by Chekhov because his “magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.” What that has to do with Christianity is anyone’s guess – and West gives no clues. For the Christian, the Cosmos are not cold, they are created and Nature is not indifferent, it is infused with the love of the Creator. But, never mind all that. It sounds so authoritative, doesn’t it?

Michael Sean Winters quoting Cornell West:

“Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives,” West writes. “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos ... My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O'Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov ... And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms's ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

-from The National Catholic Reporter, "Cornell West: Idiot-in-Chief."  Michael Sean Winters May 19, 2011.

I am not posting this because I believe in it.  Rather, it sounds rather contrary to the idea that all of reality is a positive.  (Luigi Giussani / Communion and Liberation). But it bears thinking about. 

Cornell West - A Love Supreme/John Coltrane

"All we can do as human beings is to try and inspire one another and encourage one another and enable one another, ennoble one another. And that in and of itself is what John Coltrane called a force for good.  How do I become, based on a love supreme, a force for good in a cold and cruel world?  And a love supreme is not love in the abstract. It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.  It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.  It's a love of truth in its concrete forms." 

-Cornell West (Joe Rogan Experience #1325)

Sunday, March 15, 2020

On Experience


From, "Disciples Called to Witness," from the USCCB (2012):

Discipleship is rooted in human experience.  It is through human experience that one enters into a dialogue with modern culture.  The human experience provides the "sensible signs" that help us come to know ourselves, one another, and God.  It is through common human experience that the Word of God is revealed to us.  These sensible signs are not abstract metaphysical signs but the concrete actions of the Holy Spirit.