Peripheral Visions

are found in every culture: true, Americans value frank speech, but in some contexts they are extraordinarily euphemistic; true, Filipinos deal gingerly with strong emotion, but in some contexts they evoke and intensify emotion.
    The differences are not only in expression, as in using words or actions to convey sympathy, or deciding whether or not to allow oneself to weep in public. There are real differences in feeling as well. Because emotions are also learned, we are not the same under the skin. Filipinos and Americans, Iranians and Israelis have learned ways of looking and responding that can be very different. But there is a strange and special freedom that goes with entering another culture and entertaining different ways of feeling, realizing that they differ not in virtue or rationality but in cultural appropriateness. Comparing two cultures leads all too readily to regarding one as superior, so when I teach and write I try to compare at least three, sometimes drawing on my own experience and sometimes drawing on descriptions by others.
    Along with mementos of Iran and the Philippines, I needed something for my MacDowell studio as a reminder of years spent in Israel, both the earliest and the most recent of my experiences of living abroad. I used to have another mandala, one of those diagrammatic plates marked for the ritual items of the Passover meal commemorating the exodus from Egypt: bitter herbs as a reminder of servitude, nuts and honey recalling the sweetness of liberation. Because it was eventually lost or broken, I represented it on my table with a paper plate marked in Hebrew into the appropriate sections, to represent a way of organizing and passing on the memories of emotion. Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas, enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations. Often material objects turn out to be diagrams, cognitive maps, that share our space, teach our children, and argue for ways of organizing experience. Like a shell that encodes its own process of growth, objects summarize histories. Passed from hand to hand they represent new relationships and meanings on each passing.
    My senior year of high school in 1956–57, which I spent in Jerusalem, was the first time I lived for such a long period in another country. The senior year of high school is a difficult time for encountering another culture, for adolescents tend to be preoccupied by the need to belong and to reject those who are different. Nevertheless, Israel offered me at sixteen an intoxicating opportunity to immerse myself in another language and culture and to experiment with models of belonging and community. After the Sinai campaign in 1956, when Israel had occupied the Sinai desert for the first time, a group of my classmates set out with a large number of others belonging to the same youth movement for an extended hike over the Hanukka vacation, into the wilderness where the liberated Jews wandered for forty years after leaving Egypt. Friends suggested that I come along.
    The area was bleak and mountainous, rock desert rather than sand dunes. Because of the Biblical background, Israelis treat such a trip as a voyage of self-discovery, not so much an encounter with wilderness as an encounter with history. We went south by truck to the staging area where we were to set out on foot, each person carrying a backpack with food and water for three days and a sleeping bag. Gathered at the foot of a steep hill, with a narrow trail winding up between the boulders, we were warned that once we left the trucks there would be no turning back and that no one who could not last the course should go.
    Worried, I started up the hill, but I had had nothing like the hiking experience of my friends, and this was the first time I had tried to walk or climb with any significant weight, so halfway up that first hill, with the trucks still waiting at the bottom, I told the other girls from my school that I could not be sure I would be able to keep going and it would be unfair to the others if I stayed in the group. I stepped off the trail and sat to one side, prepared to start down when everyone had passed. Along came a group of the boys, insisting that they could take turns carrying my pack and I would surely be able to keep up with nothing to carry, and I let myself be persuaded by their enthusiasm.
    Within a couple of hours, too late to turn back, it became clear that even without a