Not even nationalism and socialism account for the decision. The easiest way to put it is that I am always uneasy with the State, any state. I am not quite sure why states and governments and politics exist at all. I certainly see nothing admirable in them and I know no one personally who engages in these activities. I do not feel I have missed much by excluding politics (and politicians) from my private life. I have met a very few politicians, and even a few presidents, with considerable personal charm—Pompidou was one—but this always led me to ask, que diable fait-il dans cette galère, as one would have asked what's a nice girl like you doing in a bordello?

And if I'm uneasy with the state I am doubly uneasy with the French state, which is more pervasive than most. It is true that it provides considerable bounty to its citizens—its quick trains are admirable and I am assured that its medical care is first-rate—but it bothers me that I meet no one who reckons up the cost. Not just the high taxes (which are multiples of any activity you may care to indulge in), but the cost in independence of mind, the freedom to be whom and what one wishes. Not to be able to put laundry out into the sun, lest the sight of it affright the sensibilities of one's neighbors, is the sign of mousy niceness.

Of course I am as much horrified by the latest load of bright young (and middle-aged) men who seem to be hi-jacking my own (as well as another) country. To show you how primitive is my sense of politics, I have only to reveal my two means of judgment. With certain misdemeanors I advocate exile rather than punishment. O.J., Bill Clinton and countless CEOs should be packed aboard a jumbo and fl own to some remote land with golf-courses and beaches and an amiable climate to frolic for the rest of their natural lives. We don't need their kind here.

Of course, if they had any sense of shame they would long ago have left themselves. For Rumsfeld, Wolfewitz and company, my test is even simpler: I don't want people in politics whom I would not invite to dinner. These rules were hard to apply in France. Or at least the French have found it so.

Time was when something went wrong that was fate. We suffered the wrong and moved on. When we dealt with those close to us, as when the local smith delivered a blunt saw, we went straight to him and asked him to put it right. More grievous harms occurred when men disobeyed God's law and God would take care of that. Civil offenses (murder, mayhem, fraud, theft) that couldn't readily be sorted out brought about the 'an-eye-for-an-eye and a-tooth-for-a-tooth' principle, useful enough to soothe out outrage. But it was considered a 'civilizing' element when the law began to consider that what was offensive to God was also offensive to society and merited penalties in this life as well as the next.

In our world, two different kinds of law emerged. The one, Roman Law, specified what was wrong and established penalties for each offense; the other, our Common Law, was less abstract and suggested that a civil society needed to understand what people considered right and wrong, each judgment setting a precedent in the light of which a citizen could scrutinize his own behavior. After all, most of us have little quarrel with the idea that crime should be punished, though many of us have different views about how.

The blunt handsaw and its remedy (take it up with the smith)went the way of all flesh with Donoghue (or M'Alister) v. Stevenson (1932) in which the House of Lords, sitting in appeals, found that a homely bottle of ginger-beer, bought for the plaintiff by a friend and mixed with ice cream, contained a decomposed snail. It should not have been there, she fell ill and, ruled their lordships, the maker owed her damages. That's clear enough. You make an accident-prone Pinto, you pay up. The question of personal responsibility does not count. As a customer you expect dead-snail-free ginger beer and cars that will not kill you.

Only a little more difficult (for those of a commonsensical mind) is the case of the lady who is scalded by a cup of coffee held between her legs as she drove off from a MacDonald's. If an adult puts his hand into the fire he can expect to be burned, where a younger child may be less prescient. But Madam, who carried the cup of coffee to her car, must have known it was hot, and we may think individuals have an obligation to be prudent. It is not wise, having consumed four six-packs of Bud, to walk a rope suspended between two roof-tops.

Because the immediate agent of the damage—the minimum wage brewer of the too-hot coffee or the counter-girl in a paper cap who handed it to Madam without a warning as to its heat—doesn't have fifty thousand bucks to spare, the custom has come to be for the victim to sue the company which employed the direct agent of the tort.

On the surface, this vicarious (as in someone standing in for another) responsibility seems reasonable. It was a rational way of adjusting the cost of negligence. As my case-book on torts points out, 'if all those who committed torts were adequately insured there would be no need for a doctrine of vicarious responsibility.' Barring a universal obligation to be insured against harm we may do, the burden falls on those who have the means to pay for the mischief and its cost.

The difficulty arises with remoteness. The chain of causation and responsibility is all important. Madam was burned on her thighs, a 'special relationship' exists between the MacDonald employee and his employer, and that relationship is 'in the scope of MacDonald's authority. Thus MacDonald's is ultimately responsible.

Common sense tells us that there are many intervening links in responsibility. The coffee brewing machine's thermostat may have failed; the paper cup too. But it's a matter of who can pay. The chain of responsibility stops somewhere. It stops at the deepest pockets. But how remote is that limit when we are speaking of non-product liability? That is, of physical harms up to and including death, torts, that do not involve objects or goods? Whom should we find liable for the possible harm one human being may inflict on another? And what is the responsibility of the person being harmed to avoid that harm, if it is clearly possible for him to do so? The law on vicarious responsibility has traditionally demanded that the chain of responsibility be direct—the person doing the harm was acting on behalf of an employer when he caused the harm and the employer had a duty of care to see to it that his employee did no harm. The trouble lies with the fact that the more remote the culpable, the weaker each chain in the link is going to be.

It would be a help if 'harm' were properly defined—as it was with the slug in the ginger beer or the Ford Pinto. It is harder to define and quantify intangible harm such as sexual harassment. As Father X lifts a fourteen-year-old boy out of a swimming pool and touches his buttocks that may (and may not) be sexual abuse. If, that is, lifting the boy out of the pool was sexual foreplay and not a mere 'helping hand'. But how to judge the extent of the harm? Is Father X that 'independent contractor' of the law, acting on behalf of a principal? Are priests 'employees' of their dioceses, or are they 'independent contractors' doing God's job? If Boston's cardinal can be pursued for what priests in his diocese allegedly did and for his failure of care in assigning them, why does this line of responsibility stop with him? Did not the Pope 'allow' a man to head a diocese who in turn failed to stamp out—via his intermediate clergy—the vices of his foot-soldiers? If a Pinochet, a head of government at the time of the alleged harms to his people, can be charged, why not the Pope? The short answer is that we charge the most proximate who can pay up. To go to the very top (as the Nurnberg Trials showed) so reduces the responsibility of all below as to make responsibility itself an absurdity. Only at the very top is anyone responsible for anything.

Legal practice in America—often governed by the hasty acts of a legislature (as for instance in anti-terrorist legislation)—has long violated every common sense aspect of the common law on which it depends. As any serious judge will tell you, litigation has gone well beyond lunacy when it comes to measuring social as against private benefit. If insuring against torts becomes too expensive or unavailable, the down-side of such suits and the ensuing settlements is to deprive society of a good (medicine, ministry) and do nothing but encourage further litigation. As we all know, that ultimately benefits only the lawyers who specialize in this sort of action and who actively recruit further ways of enhancing their income.

When the law goes past common sense, who will trust it?

I have not been attracted to Picasso v. Matisse, or Velasquez-Manet. This is in part because I don't go to blockbuster exhibitions as a matter of principle, and in part because my memory has stored up most of the thousands of pictures I have seen back in the days when museums were uncluttered and free.

Lately, however, I did attend—thanks to an article in that excellent critical review The New Criterion—an exhibition which wonderfully reflected what museums could—if they were not McMuseums engaged in enriching their directors and 'reaching out' to the community in arcane ways—and for a long time did do. The show in question was 'Lois Orswell, David Smith and Modern Art' and it occupied a modest space at the Fogg Museum in Harvard.

It was a thoroughly restorative experience. Here were paintings, sculpture and drawings collected over a fairly brief span of years and for reasonable prices, not by some entrepreneur to bedeck a boardroom, not by an investment group to await a rising market, and most of all not by some group of Personality Curators seeking to be trendy, but rather by a single (and singular) woman of extraordinary good taste and judgment. Walking through the galleries (basically four rooms) one saw a unified vision—works of art one eye had seen, liked, bought, and hung in her own home. The catalogue (by Marjorie Cohn, and published by the Yale University Press), includes extracts from correspondence between Mrs. Orswell and artists and curators. They are tart, to the point, highly intelligent and utterly unaffected by fashion.

Mrs. Orswell favored shape and line, clarity of intent, and skill in execution, and it was a wonderful experience to note just how good her eye was, and how modest her approach. Every work in the exhibition—and even from artists I do not ordinarily admire—was of a very high level: not a dud among them. Some were a revelation. The David Smiths, collected—as the artist himself was befriended—when the sculptor was still developing, were of the expected high, inventive quality, and Smith's preparatory drawings (which is rare) revealing of space, fantasy and obdurate materials working in harmony. But a female torso and 'Buttocks' by Gaston Lachaise had such energy, viewed from any direction, that they literally seized the eye, as did a splendid Rodin, 'Iris, Messenger of the Gods.'

It all showed what a single mind and eye could accomplish if allowed to look and buy without regard to fashion. What finally convinced me of Mrs. Orswell's particular genius and passion, her ingrained sense of what was 'right' in art, were the drawings and paintings. These included superb examples from Henri Laurens('Study for "The Boxer"') and Juan Gris ('Glasses'), and above all an extraordinary in oils, 'Study of Trees' (c. 1904), by Cezanne: modest in size and intent, it is a color study (executed, I suspect, in the quarry at Bibemus, where trees grow out of the stone from which Aix was built) built out of patches of color and abstract shapes, both calm and agitated. I would give the world to have had it myself. Mrs.Orswell collected art she wanted to live with; the works were her friends, her company. She talked to them and they talked to her. That is the proper relationship between a reader and his book, a composer and his audience, a painter and the viewing eye. It is exactly what blockbuster shows and art as entertainment are not.