ARNOLD BERNSTEIN

I love vintage steamship paper items from the 1920s and 30s - brochures and booklets, deck plans, passenger lists, menus, luggage labels and tags. They often have wonderful graphics, deco ship images a la Cassandre, the great French graphic artist, with strong clean lines, blocks of color, everything crisp and clean. I can't say why I'm so drawn to these particular pieces of paper; it's one of those mysteries of aesthetics, why we respond to one thing and not another, but there are times I think the "hit" I get from them, the aesthetic pleasure, is as sharp and deep as that from a great painting. 

     A couple of years ago I came across a brochure with a typed letter from the Arnold Bernstein Shipping Company whose ships sailed between Europe and the United States. The company's headquarters were in Berlin and the letter is dated 1934. I looked at the date and I looked at the name and knew instantly what probably had happened to a man named Bernstein in that time and place. I shivered as I put them carefully away and, from time to time, when I'm looking for something else, I come across them and stop for a long silent moment before I rush on to something else.

     Then, last weekend, as I was going through a stack of vintage luggage labels at a paper show, I came across a little trove of Arnold Bernstein Shipping Company ephemera - six different luggage labels and tags. There's a big one that could be marked "Wanted" or "Not Wanted" to identify which bags were to go to the passengers' stateroom and which to be held in the hold for the duration of the voyage. There is one for Plymouth and another for Antwerp, tagging which bags were to go ashore at which port. Two more are for a sailing from New York to Le Havre and New York to Plymouth. Amazingly, they're all unused and in very good condition.

     This morning, as I was putting them away with the letter and brochure, the papers in my hand were suddenly sacred relics, ritual objects that led me through the abstractions of history and into the real life at its heart. I saw Arnold Bernstein, the man. He was obviously prosperous and I imagined him in one of those huge Berlin apartments I've seen in the movies, with polished wood floors and beautiful carpets, paintings in gold frames on the wall, heavy drapes and dark wood furniture, fine china and silverware - all of it the essence of gemultlichkeit, welcoming, warm, inviting. He's at the dinner table raising a glass of red wine, surrounded by family and friends. It's an ordinary scene, almost trite, and that's the point. There's no hint at all of what is soon to come.

     I felt Arnold coming back to life, and he was suddenly very close, this man I knew almost nothing about. I wasn't thinking about his probable end. The man I wanted to touch was active, productive, deeply enmeshed in a thriving world. I found myself wishing, really wishing that he could know I was thinking about him. I want him to know that something of him survives, that across the years and distance, I have found this record of his existence: I have found him. I feel his heart beating, as if I'd placed my hand on his chest. It's not too much to say I feel love. 

     After I put my Arnold Bernstein archive away, I sat for a while thinking about our human capacity for empathy, this ability we have to feel another person's humanity across time and space, even without knowing them. In fact, it's one of our greatest gifts, that as sealed off as we usually are in our private egos and consciousness, from time to time, we crack open and a deep reservoir of feeling flows out of us, connects us with another, and loops back to enrich and expand us.  If I want more of that enrichment and expansion, I can remind myself to reach out to the many people that cross my path every day, to be kind, generous and tolerant, to see fully the person standing in front of me. But, sometimes, I don't have to remind myself. A deep empathetic connection arises spontaneously and carries me out of myself and into the world. Those are the golden moments for me, when all the barriers to another are gone and all I feel is love.