"Compassion will guide more of our activities in way that they become constructive," the Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso said. "Compassion will bring us in step with more confidence, and inner peace of mind. That's extremely useful for our character."

Before opening the session, Gyatso met with Majority Leader Malcolm Smith and several other senators, and offered blessings to other members on the floor.

"We should always be truthful, we should always be honest, and we should always strive for transparency," Smith said in a floor speech welcoming Gyatso.

"We ask that you pray for this minority," Minority Leader Dean Skelos said in a similar speech.

Gyatso replied during a speech, noting that "liberty, freedom democracy: these are, I think, your true values. I want to show and express my respect and express it."

And then, "I usually side with the minority, so my sympathy would be more the Republican side."

His Holiness was the culminating act of a three-day conference-cum-retreat titled “Longevity and Optimal Health.” The Tibet House and the Columbia Integrative Medicine Program had organized the event, assembling Tibetan doctors with Occidental scientists to contemplate the everlasting mystery of attaining long life. His Holiness—it seemed wrong to address him as Mr. Gyatso—had just been treated to a greatest-hits review of the event’s discussions, including a presentation by scientist Elizabeth Blackburn, a recent recipient of the Lasker Prize, and now it was his turn to weigh in, to offer insights and enlightenment on the question in every mindful person’s mind: What could the West learn from Tibet?

After Dr. Oz posed the question, the Dalai Lama and his translator began to whisper, muttering and murmuring for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 40 seconds while the audience waited in sustained yoga-breath anticipation. Cameras snapped, a person coughed, prayer flags fluttered in the breeze outside. At last, His Holiness addressed the crowd.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know!”

The crowd paused, then burst into delighted laughter. How simple! How profound!

The conference had been a dizzying romp upstate—just miles from the hippie hamlet of Woodstock and the world’s largest kaleidoscope—a cozy but awkward group grope of East and West, mind and body, spiritualism and materialism.

At breakfast and dinner, crimson-robed monks sat beside pointy-headed researchers, who sipped warm herbal tea beside bead-wearing yogis and wealthy Manhattan Buddhists. During panels, discussion was as apt to be about meditation and chakras as cytokines and tumor necrosis factor—or sometimes all four at once, which had the mind-warping effect (to the layperson, at least) of watching a Discovery channel bio-flick looped to a high-speed Tibetan over-dub. Or vice versa.

On the final evening, a group of scientists dug in and debated the biological limits of longevity, while a cadre of white, Western seeker folk swayed and chanted in a nearby yoga studio. “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Rama, Rama,” they sang into the night, bringing to mind the old scene in Hannah and Her ­Sisters.

But unlike Woody, conference organizers don’t do irony. Instead, they believed that such age-old opposites could attract—that the practices of Tibetan Buddhism (meditation, mind-control) could be merged with the research of Western scientists to create a new science of longevity. That was why they had enticed some 200 people to a rolling 320-acre retreat called Menla Mountain, miles from the nearest cell-phone tower. And who better than the Dalai Lama—teacher, Nobel Peace Prize winner and international Symbol of Understanding—to bring everyone together?

“Very useful, very useful,” the wise monk said on the dais, blessing the conference. With a little prodding, he even agreed to share his theory of his own 71 years of longevity, a theory he boiled down to “calm mind,” and which flowed into a deep-thoughts discussion of the meaning of “intention,” the dual nature of violence, the “truth of suffering,” the danger of anger and, of course, the importance of “compassion.”

“The calm mind is very essential,” said the Dalai Lama in his rumbling basso profundo, “and for calm mind, compassion is the key factor. Infinite compassion, or unbiased compassion.”

When the audience emerged from the hall, quite a few declared themselves enlightened.

“Anything he says to me is pure pleasure, anything he says to us is grace,” said Sandra Ross, a Buddhist and psychologist from New Canaan, Conn., who was among the 150 or so guests who had paid $395 to attend the conference. (The 40 or so invited scientists and scholars attended for free). “Some of the things said about him is that when he touches you, it’s like every cell in your body feels ­acceptance.”

INTEGRATE ME!

In recent years the merging of Eastern and Western medicine has evolved into something of a passion, even obsession, in certain quarters of New York’s urban medical establishment. Once the province of California mystics and dreamy organic-philes, it has gradually ohm’d its way toward the outer center, popping up at sleek feng-shui’d clinics and sprawling hospitals like Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical Center. Its practitioners call it “comparative” or “integrative medicine” to signify its embrace of both antibiotics and acupuncture, chemotherapy and qigong.

Integrative medicine “is taking the best ideas from parts of the world that we normally don’t speak with in medicine,” said Dr. Oz, 46, a comely cardio-thoracic surgeon whose titles include director of Columbia University Medical Center’s Cardiovascular Institute and one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive (2002). He also founded Columbia’s Integrative Medicine Program. “We speak to them in banking,” he said, “we speak to them in entertainment. You can get money out of an A.T.M. machine in Tibet, but you can’t get medical care there that’s Western. And vice versa.”

For many New York doctors, that’s been just fine. But in the age of Vioxx, managed care and nonstop cancer alerts—as well as a few genuinely promising studies—angsty New Yorkers have begun responding to the lure of integration, turning to everything from meditation to pain management (on the tamer side) to visualization to shrink tumors (on the fringier side) to all manner of supplements to block cancer. With its promise of new age self-helpism and allopathic reassurance, integrative medicine is perhaps the ultimate elixir of the control-freak class.

“Integrative medicine is definitely the future of medicine,” said Dr. Woodson Merrell, executive director of the Continuum Center for Health & Healing, which, he said, has seen more than 100,000 patients since its June 2000 opening.

In certain integrative circles, talk of “revolution,” “renaissance” and the “future of medicine” is apparently as de rigueur as green tea and St. John’s wort.

“We want to create a long-term medical think tank here, a healing think tank, in which the so-called alternative and complementary people have an active agency and voice, and their voice is as respected as the Western technocrats,” Professor Thurman, 65, told The Observer in his excitable baritone as a flurry of monks and staffers fluttered around him, building an altar, hanging tangkas, preparing a throne for the Dalai Lama’s arrival.

“It starts out with this conference, and then maybe there’s a more long-term thing; we have fellows, we have even pilot projects, and so it develops.”

On the second morning of the conference—a sunset and sunrise before the Dalai Lama’s visit—Professor Thurman’s “think tank” was chugging at full throttle, buzzing along with a series of talks with titles like “Mind/Body Practices that Regulate Immune Functioning” and “The Cascade of Transformations and the Fountain of Youth.” In the audience, an inordinate number of women in shawls sat or sometimes crouched, while one after one, a parade scientists, Tibetan doctors, and new-age mind-bodyists traipsed to the podium. Some flipped through PowerPoints, others lectured blind, and at least one thing became clear: There were at least a few science masters in the room. “The take-home point is that the brain can control the amount of an immune response to an infection,” said Dr. Kevin Tracey, director of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, as he zipped through slides of his research on the “the inflammatory reflex”—a theory of infection that suggests the immune system is regulated by the vagus nerve (in essence making it the elusive mind-body link).

“Is stress related to cell aging? The quick answer is yes,” declared Dr. Elissa Epel, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, while slides of chromosomes capped by little fez-like caps—called telomeres—flashed across a screen.

One could almost feel one’s own cells aging as the lectures progressed, moving from the realm of traditional Eastern or Western medicine to a jumbled in between, where the slides moved fast, the words came long and the very frame of meaning seemed to ­disjoint.

“The focus on transformation becomes a transformational process in its own right,” intoned an “accelerated experiential-dynamic psychotherapist” named Diana Fosha. “ … If you have an energy body like this, you have to have ways of sensing changes in that energy body,” mantra’d Daniel Brown, director of the Center for Integrative Psychotherapy in Massachusetts. “ … Cancer may not be accidental, it may have to do with a missed energy signal in that area,” he said in a later lecture, generating the kind of questions you don’t want raised at a medical conference.

Was it all just made up? Was it real? What is reality? Can some humans actually live to be 200 years old? And do any of these questions actually matter in the omnivorous marketplace of medical ideas?

As the conference wound to a close on Thursday, in the febrile moments after the Dalai Lama spoke, a sparkly-eyed internist turned spiritualist in a crushed-velvet top and pinstriped pants stopped to opine on the message of his speech and its meaning for medicine.

“I think [one of the most important things he said] was that if you have compassion toward your enemies, that will make you more healthy,” she said as she bent to put on her shoes. “If we incorporated this right here we’d be healthier physically and emotionally.”

My forgotten agenda item—or one of them, anyway—has been the Rubin Museum of Art. Located in the old Barneys store on Seventh Avenue, the Rubin Museum is dedicated to the “arts of the Himalayas and where they lead you.” Having passed by it often on my way to and from Chelsea, I dutifully noted its existence and made a plan to visit at some indeterminate future point. Indeterminate, indeed: It’s now been two and a half years since the place opened. But though priorities can be misplaced, they can also be righted. A recent afternoon’s visit to the museum offered pleasures of a rare order.

Shelley and Donald Rubin’s collection of Tibetan art is considered to be among the world’s finest. Rather than donate their holdings to an established institution only to see them languish in the flat files, the Rubins created their own venue. What might have been an act of hubris turns out to be a gift to the city and a specialist’s delight. The museum’s architectural features—the faceted domed skylight and, especially, the sweeping seamlessness of space—parallel and bolster the tranquil character of the art on view. In that regard, the Rubin is a model for cultural institutions of any stripe.

Yet how tranquil is the art, really? Received notions of Eastern art bring to mind mystical reveries, spiritual calm and a supremely ordered sensuality. But two exhibitions of painting and sculpture at the Rubin, Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas and Take to the Sky: The Flying Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism, posit a worldview more accepting of contradiction and earthliness than the uninitiated might imagine.

The titles alone—by indicating psychological paradox and absurd, fantastic visions—are enough to elicit doubts about typical cultural assumptions. Any exhibition that rattles preconceptions is doing its job and doing it well. At the Rubin, you get two magnificent jobs for the price of one.

Holy Madness explores the role of the siddha—translated from Sanskrit as “accomplished one,” a proselytizer of sorts—in spreading Tantric Buddhism from India to the Himalayas between the seventh and eleventh centuries. “Tantra” is an umbrella-like term encompassing a great variety of esoteric practices concerning ritual, magic and sexuality. The practices were centered on spiritual development but didn’t entirely exclude worldly and political considerations. Tantric practitioners promised kings who looked kindly upon Buddhists that their deities would smile upon them in turn, even during times of war. The siddhas retained some sense of footing in the here and now.

Tantric Buddhism is also characterized by eccentricity and antisocial behavior. Rob Linrothe, the guest curator of Holy Madness, describes the siddhas as favoring “ecstatic bliss” over conventional piety. The flaunting of taboos—including, on occasion, the consumption of human flesh—is a defining aspect of Tantric Buddhism.

Professor Linrothe is quick to mention, however, that the outrageous legends surrounding siddhas have been obscured and elaborated upon over the centuries, and that the particulars informing any one tale may be forever lost. All the same, there are some surprisingly funny—and remarkably human—truths to be gleaned from the art on view. One of my favorite paintings in Holy Madness depicts the nomadic Virupa, a Yoga master and miracle worker, contesting his bar tab. Clearly, some miracles are harder to pull off than others.

Take to the Sky, the smaller of the two shows, focuses on flying as a symbol of spiritual aspiration, of “gradually [transforming] the nature of the body base, giving rise to a physical base made of pure rainbow energies.” Unlike with the outsized personalities dominating Holy Madness, a careful eye is needed to discern the figures soaring through the peripheries of these elaborate scenarios. The flying mystics usually play second fiddle to a deity situated at the center of the composition. Nonetheless, they are crucial as emblems of (to crib a phrase from the Dalai Lama) the “madness of enlightenment.”

The images seen in Take to the Sky are often dauntingly encyclopedic. Staggering assortments of deities, monsters, narratives, fauna and flora inhabit upended worlds of earthly delights and, here and there, unspeakable brutality. Scenes of dismemberment—even zombies!—exist harmoniously with moments of exquisite tenderness. Certainly, there are few images in world art as guileless in their conception of lovemaking as that of Ghantapada and his consort getting busy among the clouds. Learning Ghantapada’s story—he was a celibate monk who was conned by the king into having sex and (as an unintended consequence) discovered true love—only makes the pictures that much sweeter. This is but one of the innumerable and indelible glories awaiting you at the Rubin Museum.

Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas and Take to the Sky: The Flying Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism are at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, until Sept. 4 and Jan. 18, 2007, respectively.

As surely as the tsunami followed the earthquake, the questions-the perennial, never-satisfactorily-resolved questions-of theodicy followed the tsunami. Theodicy, of course, is the subdiscipline of theology devoted to the attempt to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, just and loving God who intervenes in history-the God most Western religions believe in-with the recurrence of catastrophic slaughter from "natural" causes such as tsunamis and man-made evils such as genocides.

The same morning "Was God in the Tsunami?" arrived in my inbox, I checked on my favorite Web site, Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com), which links to the most notable essays and reviews of the day, and found a box that linked to no less than four articles with headlines such as "Faiths Ask of Quake: 'Why Did You Do This, God?'" and "To God, An Age Old Question." It was just the beginning.

Let me concede that yes, there are many paths to faith, but it is an underappreciated scandal that, philosophically, the "age old question" of theodicy has not been satisfactorily answered without resort to vague evasions ("It's all a mystery," "We just can't understand God's plan," "It will allow good to manifest itself in the hearts of the survivors," "We live in a fallen world," "The dead are better off in heaven"). A failure that asks us to just have faith that it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Yes, Voltaire misconstrued in Candide, probably deliberately, Leibniz's Theodicy: Leibniz was claiming that God created the best of all possible worlds consistent with free will-the freedom to choose evil without which choosing good means nothing special. The best of all possible worlds consistent with the nature of human nature, in other words-and its predilection for choosing evil. The question Voltaire should have posed is whether a better, less murderous human nature-consistent with free will-could have been created by Leibniz's God.

Of course, the inadequacies of traditional theodicy are not a problem for those like my colleague Jim Holt, one of the best translators of arcane philosophical controversies (Kripke on naming!) for non-specialists. Mr. Holt once wrote that the evidence suggests that "the world is not presided over by a deity who is all-good and all-powerful, but rather by one who is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective." He arrives by a different route at the answer offered by some extreme Gnostic sects who believed this world was presided over by a malevolent demiurge posing as God.

And the inadequacies of theodicy are not a problem for those who don't believe in an all-powerful God. Harold ( When Bad Things Happen to Good People) Kushner is one of those who thinks the problem of God's tolerance of catastrophic evils is solved essentially by making God a weakling-loving, but not really in charge, despite all the boasting in the Bible about God's powers, including the tsunami-related powers of raising and lowering the waters at will (remember that whole Flood thing?). Kushner is there on Beliefnet advising people to read the 23rd Psalm, which seems to me a wildly inappropriate choice, promising as it does that God will always be at our side to lead us beside still waters. So it's all good, except for the 150,000 who didn't exactly get the still waters that day.

I recall the asperity with which this easy out (Kushner's "God is not all-powerful") was dismissed by Yehuda Bauer, the former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, when I asked him about it in Jerusalem. "There's no way there can be an all-powerful and just God," Mr. Bauer said. "Because if he's all-powerful, he's Satan [considering the recurrent prevalence of genocidal evil in the world]. If he's just [meaning just but, as per Kushner, too weak to make the world just], he's a nebbish …. I don't need a God like that."

It'sremarkable, though, how Kushner's cop-out has become the contemporary evasive answer to questions of theodicy. Inside my faded paperback copy of When Bad Things Happen …, I found a bookmark that had evidently been there when I bought it. It's from the Full Circle bookstore, 50 Penn Place, Oklahoma City, Okla.

I had evidently bought the book when I went down there right after the Federal Building bombing to do a story (for The New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1995) on how the culture deals with questions of theodicy in the aftermath of catastrophe.

"Full Circle," indeed. Rabbi Kushner's well-intended book didn't do the job for me back then, and it doesn't do it now, although it has become an almost unquestioned meme. Poor God-He means well, but He seems to have lost the superpowers he had in the Bible. Some sort of spiritual Green Kryptonite slipped him by Satan, I'll bet. So He's struggling and weak and nebbishy and we have to buck Him up.

But for those who don't try the easy way out, the great conundrum of theodicy was recapitulated on the Arts and Letters Daily Web site by its editor, Dennis Dutton, in his lead-in to the links:

"If God is God, he's not good. If God is good, he's not God. You can't have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe." It's a version of the challenging syllogism posed by J.L. Mackie in a 1955 issue of the journal Mind, an argument which contemporary theodicies have been trying, without notable success, to refute ever since.

The lack of success seems to have lent a tone of desperation to some. I was struck by the police-interrogation tone of one of the links: "Faiths Ask of Quake: 'Why Did You Do This, God?'"

"Yeah, Tough Guy, why'd ya do it? Your prints are all over the crime scene, Big Guy. You have the right to remain silent …. " You can almost hear the late, great Jerry Orbach, who's now presumably in a position to put the question, kicking a chair in the squad room to get the Divine Perp's attention.

Then there was a link to "Tremors of Doubt" in The Wall Street Journal by David Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, which had the virtue of conceding that the conventional consolations of pop theodicy "about God's inscrutable counsels" or that "all this mysteriously serves God's good ends" are "odious banalities," and that even believers can't assume that theologians have answered the theodicy question adequately.

It was only the beginning of the orgy of theodicy that followed, if one may use a profane term for a sacred quest. Foolish things were said by men of all faiths (almost always men, by the way; it's what feminists used to call Male Answer Syndrome): the rabbi in Israel who pronounced the tsunami "an expression of God's great ire with the world"; the Buddhist sage who said it represented God's resentment of the "huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth"; the mullah in Indonesia who said that it was "a reminder from God he created the world and can destroy the world."

And the media kept headlining the search for answers: "Why Does God Allow Terrible Things to Happen to His People?", an essay in The Times of London asked. And there was an essay that addresses the question not to God, but to those who believe in Him: "How Can Religious People Explain Something Like This?" (Martin Kettle in the U.K. Guardian, the rare essay that suggested there were no good answers.)

And then, at the end of the week kicked off by "Was God in the Tsunami?", this shocker: On Sunday(!), Jan. 2, the London Telegraph dropped the bomb "Archbishop of Canterbury: This Has Made Me Question God's Existence." What's next? "The Pope Says: 'I Am a Wiccan!'"? (It's true that the archbishop waffled a bit and called for prayer, but he did say his faith was "upset" by the catastrophe.)

One thing a reading of these essays reminded one of is that natural disasters are both more and less problematical for defenders of the faiths. On the one hand, earthquakes and the like don't involve man-made evils and thus the question of the depravity of human nature-and the difficult question behind that question: whether humans are at fault for their depraved nature, or whether the deity who created them could have done a better job creating humanity consistent with free will.

As my friend Errol Morris puts it: The difficulty with man-made evils is not "man's inhumanity to man," the problem is precisely "man's humanity to man." The wickedness of humanity is not an aberration, but more like the norm.

No, man or human nature can't be held responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis-except in those bloodthirsty theodicies which persist in seeing the punitive hand of God punishing man's collective sinfulness by the slaughter of innocent children not old enough to sin. A hard-to-defend but scripturally habitual response from a wrathful God for the sins of a sinful human nature He created but is somehow not responsible for.

Nor are natural disasters as much of a problem for Deists, or for those who believe in a god who stopped intervening in human affairs after the creation of the universe or the creation of man. Catastrophic evils might call into question what is meant by the "intelligent" in "Intelligent Design," but not Design itself.

But for those who believe in a God who has intervened in history, as he is portrayed in Western scriptures, a God who can raise and lower the waters, punish and save at will, has miracles at his disposal, and should be able to separate the sheep from the goats, the saints from the sinners: For that sort of God, the indiscriminate slaughter of 100,000 saints and sinners-children and parents alike-presents more of a problem.

If God is responsible for the fall of a sparrow, it's hard to exempt him from other, more dramatic natural developments. Sure, you could say it's not His fault: He left us in a broken world, a fallen nature to reflect our own inner Fallen Nature. A vale of tears, whose horrors better prepare us to value the heaven that awaits us (well, some of us).

But in general, in this view, we're better off dead-or, as some respondents on the Beliefnet comments section had it, the tsunami victims were lucky, they'd received a gift: They're in heaven ahead of time.

Let me return to "Was God in the Tsunami?", the Beliefnet missive written by Rodger Kamenetz, a Jewish Buddhist or a Buddhist Jew (it wasn't quite clear-he had equal reverence for both traditions, it seemed). On the plus side, the author made the important point that any attempt to defend the deaths of tens of thousands of children not old enough to sin as part of "God's Plan," as His collective punishment for man's wickedness or some other variation on the blame-the-victim theodicy was an obscenity (my word, not his).

And he gets points for citing King Lear-not Lear himself, but Gloucester's bitter complaint that "We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys. They kill us for our sport," It's not the only answer in Lear, but it's one that fits the bare facts.

But then Mr. Kamenetz (whose essay has the alternate title "Was God in This Disaster?") lets himself get distracted by the Talmudic and Buddhist mystification. Proving once again that not all "wisdom of the sages" is equally wise, or must necessarily be approached with the same reverence.

He gives us a story he says is from the Talmud that has Moses getting to heaven and learning that one Rabbi Akiba is the wisest interpreter of God's words and actions. Moses asks God what Rabbi Akiba's reward will be. "God shows him a vision: Akiba tortured by the Romans in the marketplace, his flesh stripped from his body." Moses asks God why this incomprehensibly horrific fate for such a wise man. "God answers with a riddle," we're told: "It arose in thought."

Say what? "It arose in thought." That's the best he can do? A Bill Clintonesque "because I can" boast?

Is it just me, or does this story not exactly speak well for God? I guess you could say it "arose in thought" for the Roman soldiers, so you could put the blame on them, but the way it's told here, it seems clear it's God showing off both his power and his self-mystifying inscrutability.

A God who encourages watching torture-as in the theology of Aquinas, who imagined that one of the pleasures that God would offer the souls He saved would be gazing down from Heaven upon the cruel and prolonged tortures of the damned in Hell. Recreational sadism from Heaven's luxury skyboxes ( Summa Theologica, Question 94).

This was one of the logical outcomes of certain orthodox Christian doctrines that used to drive William Empson crazy. Read Empson's Milton's God, his last, most lacerating book, almost totally devoted to denouncing the God of Paradise Lost-Milton's massive effort at overcoming the contradictions of theodicy. And arguing from a study of Milton's posthumously published and ambiguously heterodox De Doctrina Christiana that Milton had doubts, too. (Actually, it's almost impossible to find a copy of Empson's Milton's God; someone should bring it back into print.)

But to return to "It arose in thought": That's not a "riddle," that's a rebuff. In cruelty, it goes beyond the God of Job with his brusque "none of your business, buddy" brush-off. I wonder if the author of "Was God in the Tsunami?" is aware of how impoverished a God this sorry "riddle" gives us?

Perhaps recognizing that this isn't going to resolve any doubts or offer much consolation, he makes his Buddhist move. He's met the Dalai Lama, he wants you to know, and "One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said-these aren't his exact words-that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination."

The implication being that the child is really not lost at all-in fact, he or she is still right there in your life, in a low-maintenance way, I guess you'd say. In the imagination, of course, but "constantly" there. Maybe more present than when he or she was alive. I wonder how well this works when he tries it out on parents who have lost children.

The comments on the listserv in response to the essay were mainly divided between atheists and believers, both factions, in their own way, absolving God from responsibility. For the atheists, if he doesn't exist, he couldn't have done it; for the believers, God has no responsibility for the catastrophe, just for the goodness displayed by the rescue workers in the aftermath, and the few "miraculous" stories of survival.

This is something I find particularly annoying: a God who can intervene to save a handful out of a hundred thousand and gets credit for all the goodness displayed in the aftermath of the havoc He wrought.

"Why this need to defend God?" someone (that would be me) finally posted on the Beliefnet comment board in response to the multiple alibis for God that others were posting. All so eager to rush forward and exonerate their version of God from any connection to the slaughter. It began to smack of "they doth protest too much": The disaster somehow gets transformed into a display of God's wonderfulness. In a way, doesn't this sort of thinking suggest a kind of Stockholm syndrome? He's the only God we've got, He's got us imprisoned in this hell of a world-so, after a while, we worship Him.

One of the most glaring instances of this sort can be found in a quote in a story the Post carried on Jan. 2.

It was the heartwarming story of a baby boy born prematurely while his mother fled upland from the waves as they hit the coast of India.

Yes, it was the heartwarming "MIRACLE OF LIFE" that the Post headline had it.

But then I have to admit that I cringed when I read the words of the baby's father (who had given him the name "Tsunami"-I'm sure the parents of those who lost babies will think this is really cute).

But the thing that made me cringe was this quote from the father of Baby Tsunami: "It's all God's grace!" he said.

I can't really blame the guy for saying whatever he says at a moment like that. He's got his baby. But think of the implications. Either he believes that his family has special grace, and that the tens of thousands of other families who lost children suffered the torment of a lost child because they deserved it, because they lacked "God's grace." Or he believes that God looked down and saw tens of thousands of imperiled children and decided that this one deserved the special intervention of his "grace" and the others didn't.

If you believe that God intervened to save this one little life, you have to believe that He chose not to intervene to save the lives of all the other children. He wanted them dead.

I would propose a truce between believers and unbelievers so they can stop fighting over the credit for the goodness of the rescue workers, whether it should be assigned to God or to man, so that we can remove God-and the critique of God-from the equation entirely for a while and save our energy to support the recovery unencumbered by this perennial debate, however important and profound.

Here's the terms of the truce: Unbelievers will stop pointing out the inadequacies of the believers' theodicy, their justification for God. And believers will stop claiming credit for God for everything good that happens, unless they are willing to condemn Him to a perp walk for all the crimes committed on earth, many in his name.

Ms. Lhamo lives in a modest apartment off Queens Boulevard with her teenage son, Shady. A Buddhist shrine dominates one wall of her living room, accompanied by a motorized prayer wheel that spins perpetually. On a recent afternoon, she was dressed in a traditional turquoise Tibetan gown-like a sari, but fuller and thicker-with a slash of pale pink on her right shoulder. It contrasted with her toasted-almond skin and the long, braided black hair that cascaded down her back to the small of her knees.

Ms. Lhamo was born in 1968 (more or less-Tibetans don't pay much attention to birth dates) near Lhasa, the country's mountain capital. Her parents were a former nun and monk who met in a Chinese-run labor camp. Ms. Lhamo's grandfather had been killed by the Chinese government for being a vocal supporter of the Dalai Lama and providing assistance to Tibetan insurgents. Ms. Lhamo lived with her parents in the labor camp until she was 13, at which point the Chinese sent her to a factory town to work in a wool-processing plant. This was a common practice, Ms. Lhamo said, in order to break Tibetan familial bonds. "Every child worked at that time," she said. The children were packed onto trucks, and "many of us in the truck didn't know where we were going." She was forced to perform for other factory workers, singing songs that extolled the virtues of Communism and Mao. Occasionally she was allowed to see her family. "If you are a really good worker, after three years, you can see your parents for one month," she said.

Then, 11 years ago, Ms. Lhamo decided to follow her abiding dream since childhood-to see the Dalai Lama-and so she made plans to escape. "I really wanted to see why my family had so much faith in him," she said.

Ms. Lhamo paid Nepalese sherpas to smuggle herself and her son, who was 5 years old at the time, into Nepal, and from there to India. The journey across the Himalayas was particularly arduous because of Chinese patrols along the border and Tibetan informers working for the Chinese. "It's like a dream, but it's really unimaginable," she said. "If people catch you, then they turn you in." For some impoverished Tibetans, the reward for turning their countrymen in was too much to resist. Others demanded money from the refugees themselves.

"They ask you for money, and whatever you can pay, you pay," Ms. Lhamo said, her brow furrowing. "We saw people beaten and dead on the road who couldn't pay."

It took a month for Ms. Lhamo's band of refugees to make the journey to Nepal. They rested for one day, then headed for India. During this leg of the journey, Ms. Lhamo looked down at her trousers one day and thought they'd changed color. Then she realized that it wasn't her pants at all: Hundreds of leeches were covering her legs. She still has the scars. "It seems like 60 years ago now," she said after a long pause.

Her group finally made it to Dharamsala, India. (Tibetans are still using this route, so Ms. Lhamo declined to discuss the precise details of her escape.)

She spent the next two years in a refugee camp in Dharamsala, which is where she first performed as a free artist, and where she realized her dream of meeting the Dalai Lama.

Next she was invited to perform in Australia for a government-sponsored cultural show. She made an impression and soon found herself playing small venues across Australia. In 1995, she released her first album, Tibetan Prayer , on a small Australian independent label, which caught the ear of someone at Peter Gabriel's Real World label. Her 1996 sophomore effort, Tibet Tibet , and her 1998 album, Coming Home , were both released on Real World. She joined Mr. Gabriel's WOMAD music fest and Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair. In 2000, she decided to make the U.S. her home.

She moved in temporarily with the family of Robert Thurman, the director of the Indo-Tibetan Studies department at Columbia University, and his wife, Nina. "Maybe if I hadn't lived with them, I wouldn't have stayed in New York," Ms. Lhamo said. "Bob and Nina knew a lot about New York and Tibet."

In addition to constant touring and recording for her next album (tentatively due to be released next year on Real World), Ms. Lhamo is involved with several Tibetan charities. She said she considers herself lucky, and feels she owes her countrymen. "I live here now and feel I should contribute something," she said. "You become happier because you make a difference.

"People write me from Tibet and ask for money, but I cannot give them all money," she continued, showing pictures of the Tibetans who have written her, many with shrunken, withered legs from infections that resulted from forced vaccinations with non-sterile equipment imposed by the Chinese.

Each year, she involves herself in a different project for Tibet through her foundation, the Yungchen Lhamo Charity Foundation. This year, she's raising funds to purchase prosthetics and shoes for Tibetan children; she previously helped fund the construction of a library near Lhasa (she won't name the town, for fear of retribution from the Chinese authorities). Funding for her charity comes mainly from her concert appearances and CD sales, although she accepts contributions through her Web site (yungchenlhamo.com).

Ms. Lhamo still dreams about returning to Tibet someday. "The repression is less now," she said, "but like the weather it changes …. I will go one day, no matter what happens. Even birds need their bird's nest."

Ms. Lhamo added that the Tibetans are not the only people who have been badly treated by the Chinese regime; the same is true for many of her Chinese neighbors here in the U.S.

"I've met so many Chinese in America who want to see China again," she said. "I really have a big hope it will change soon." She added that tourism and access to the rest of the world have helped the situation. "The Chinese see visitors and learn about the rest of the world," she said. "The new generation of Chinese has seen the world."

For now, she's concentrating on her music and trying to increase awareness of her homeland's plight. Sometimes the fear comes creeping back.

"I still have nightmares about it," she said. "Even if somebody knocks a little hard on the door-then you have to tell yourself, it's New York City."

Our conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door, which turned out to be a Chinese delivery man with Ms. Lhamo's food order. She spoke a few words in Chinese to him, and he smiled and shrugged as he accepted his tip. After he left, Ms. Lhamo explained that she was asking him why the order took so long.

In her travels, Ms. Lhamo said, when people ask her where she now lives, she sometimes feels at a loss. "I am not embarrassed, but I don't know how to explain that I love this country," Ms. Lhamo said. "So much money for guns and army. We need technology, but we also need people's hearts and happiness."

In the end, she said, she feels her adopted city suits her perfectly.

"Nobody says, 'Come to New York and sleep,'" she said. "No, they come here and do something."

-Matthew Grace

The summer of '03 never really congealed: There was no great love affair, no memorable bikini, no lingering zinc-y aftertaste of scandal, the kind that makes you want to scrub your palate with baking soda for two or three hours. It was a summer of retrogression: First, the replacement of Howlin' Howell Raines with The Times ' schoolmarmish new executive editor, Bill Keller. Take enough personal time with your family, he told the paper's staff. All right, Bill! Obediently, moviegoers stood on line to see Finding Nemo , a movie we knew backwards before it was made. Rejected: bodacious, bemuscled power babes Cameron, Drew, Lucy, Angelina and Ahnold: Charlie's Tomb-Raiding Terminators III . Last year's theme parks. Then the lights went out, and Mayor Bloomberg instructed us to turn off the air conditioners. It wasn't terrorism! Sweaty white collars exhaled, then trudged up stairwells to nap for the 4 a.m. spectacle of the West Side lighting up in a cartoon flash. The real action in this crazy world was elsewhere: dopey California, hot Europe, hotter Iraq. It wasn't so much a hot, vicious New York summer as a season that never was. Remember Seabiscuit ? No. It was like that.

Then, like clockwork, Sept. 1. Cool rain, sweet sweep of autumn, dumb Presidential candidates. Sept. 11 looms, choked grief. Winding around it like ivy vines are the signs of life that only autumn in New York brings: new movies, mobs at the Gap, little girls in school uniforms. But there's a tough, no-nonsense attitude that it will take to make it through this strange season. A year from now, Republicans in New York! Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh at the Garden. For now, just Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation , Christina Ricci in Woody Allen's Anything Else , the Yankees in the Bronx, the soaked tennis courts in Flushing, a stern Mayor, a fizzy stock market, crisp mornings, long afternoons, the sun dropping, brisk and efficient. Hemlines are up. Glitzy galas are passé. People are eating sandwiches and chops. Right now, for once, it's the rest of the world that seems nutty, jumpy, neurotic. For the first time in a long time, New York feels like … home.

Wednesday September 3

Pip pip Pipino! Nannies, man your ironing boards : The starched sisters of Brearley stalk back to school today, fresh from their Ivy League–baiting internships and screenings of the hot "troubled-kid" flick Thirteen …. Later, cue "It's My Turn" as celeb hair stylist Ric Pipino -who infamously got the big chop from pneumatic Dutch model Heidi Klum - opens a new, eponymous salon in the Bryant Park Hotel with a party that a publicist assured us will be completely flooded with models … which means we can all kiss goodbye to our "summer boyfriends," such as they were ….

Thursday September 4

Speaking of boyfriends -is yours the sort to read GQ , or does he just sit around idly scratching his private parts (i.e., reads Details) ? Well, the Condé Nast glossy's new editor, Jim Nelson , who we hear is terribly smart if sort of wee , is celebrating his first full-fledged issue tonight with a snazzy affair, and a top-secret, very handsome source tells us that puppet-punching pr*ck Eminem-who is definitely on every "out" list now being compiled for 2004 (after all, when your fans include Anna Quindlen and Frank Rich, you should just pack it in)-may be the honored guest . Meanwhile, if you're one of this autumn's many plaid addicts (a.k.a. "plaiddicts" ): The British company Burberry , formerly known for its trench coats, is launching an accessory shop in our beloved Bloomie's. Expected are Chris Rock's wife Malaak and ageless beauty Dayle Haddon. Bring the latter's sexy son-in-law, Christian Slater!

Friday September 5

Rich bohemians: The children of moneyed, guilty West Village liberal types toke up and head back to Friends Seminary today …. Meanwhile, "edgy" Williamsburg fits in another fancy furniture store, Make Room , masterminded in part by that dude Ken Courtney, who made the "I F*cked Paris Hilton" T-shirts that are rapidly wearing out their welcome. Back on the island : Comedian Orny Adams , a friend of Jerry Seinfeld's , does stand-up! All in all, it's enough to make any sane gal wish she were in London (preferably clad in a Burberry trench), where overhyped magician David Blaine is trying to make his fame reappear by climbing into a Plexiglass box suspended over the River Thames for a 44-day fast-the new Atkins, perhaps?

Saturday September 6

Perez the thought: Thwock … thwock … smash! Ah, the sound of athletic anticlimax . The overanalyzed but much-enjoyed U.S. Open winds up today with a big party for those madly-in-love thespians Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci , plus the squeaky Rosie Perez and Botoxed-looking, Clinton-alienating model Christie Brinkley . To be followed by the men's and women's finals . And while we sadly won't be seeing much of Pete Sampras ' bristly eyebrows anymore, the late Frida Kahlo had the unibrow that keeps on giving: Never-ending Kahlo love (Madonna, Salma et al.) continues to flow at the Jewish Museum, which today mounts an exhibit touching on the Mexican artist's famous "father issues." Which should put her firmly in the camp of 99 percent of the women on Nerve.com.

Sunday September 7

Where's Walter? That pixie of a former Time mag editor turned steamrolling one-man think tank, Walter Isaacson, pops up at the 92nd Street Y today to discuss his latest book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life . "I think Ben Franklin would support America's current efforts of fighting tyranny, but he would have injected more of a note of humility in dealing with our allies," Mr. Isaacson said from Aspen, Colo. "Franklin put more emphasis on the appeal of America's idealism as a constituent of foreign policy. He bequeathed to us the notion that tolerance is the key component of democracy." Ah, big words …. There really is no going back from fall, is there?

Monday September 8

Glamour gamines pull on men's tuxedo pants and a satiny camisole ("for contrast!") and let the nipples just do whatev-ah as the mag throws a "Celebrating Survival and Strength" party to benefit Equality Now , an international human-rights organization. Alanis Morissette will wail something; Julianne ("I'm married!") Moore and Meryl ("I'm still married!") Streep will do their beatific-goddess thang, while Hilary Swank and Julia Stiles work the ingénue angle for one more season …. And speaking of ingénues, Spence girls tug up their knee socks and go back to school today-as do the gum-snapping tykes of Trinity and Dalton .

Tuesday September 9

Double feature?! Premiere No. 1: Dummy, a movie about ventriloquism and vehicle for floppy-haired Oscar-winner Adrien Brody -who, if you ask us, is just a poor woman's Daniel Day-Lewis …. Also, an exclusive screening of Veronica Guerin , starring the scarily talented Cate Blanchett (should be getting Nicole Kidman's roles!), about a reporter who exposes Dublin's biggest drug lords and is later gunned down-which is exactly why we "just said no" to that job in hard journalism. Meanwhile, relentlessly peppy and secretly slave-driving telejournalist Katie Couric hosts Brooks Brothers' 185th anniversary party, which will benefit colon-cancer research. Wynton Marsalis toots his horn before committee members Tina Brown (television hostess), Chris Heinz (ketchup heir), Bill Cosby (comedian), Tom Brokaw (anchorman/hottie) and Chris Cuomo (muscleboy/hothead).

Wednesday September 10

Billy, Kelly or Muffie? Dance with yourself -something we've been doing more and more lately because, let's face it, eligible Manhattan men aren't exactly surging out of the woodwork-at a concert given by 80's relic Billy Idol … or join Time managing editor Jim Kelly at a fête celebrating the "Declaration of Independence Road Trip," a civic-activism project; the guest speaker is Morgan Freeman , who played G*d in this summer's Bruce Almighty and would probably make a damned fine governor of California . Or brush off your ball skirt with pillow-lipped former anchoress Deborah Norville at the Rita Hayworth gala chaired by Princess Yasin Aga Khan and Muffie Potter Aston (who, while not strictly speaking a princess, certainly seems very regal ) ….

Thursday September 11

Manhattan, interrupted: Two hundred children whose parents died in the attack on the World Trade Center two years ago read the names of the disaster's 2,800 victims in a four-hour ceremony. At sundown, the controversial "Tribute in Light" returns for 24 hours. Also tonight, the second annual Cantor Fitzgerald fund-raising dinner at Jean Luc on the Upper West Side; proceeds go to the families of victims.

Friday September 12

Liv and let Liv? So much for solemnity : Scores of aspartame-hyped editors descend today upon Bryant Park for the first day of Fashion Week . Apparently, the "cool" thing to do is have your show in an undisclosed location. So if you're looking for the likes of Marc Jacobs and Zac Posen , we can't help you, 'cause no one tells us anything around here. But at the very least, we can tell you where Kenneth Cole -who was cobblin' shoes in the 80's, back when Zac Posen was having his bronzed-is having his show! Further uptown, actress Liv Tyler (who, speaking of cobbler, should really lay off it, if you know what we mean) helps Salvatore Ferragamo unveil his latest shoe store, as the city officially retires its flip-flops for the year. Ladies: burn them. Please.

Saturday September 13

It's nothing against Spears, dears, but most of us have packed away our midriffs for the seasons. Then there are the bikini-clad models (them again) who today strut the runways of Rosa Cha, the Brazilian designer who, for a small fortune, will put your favorite picture on her swimsuits …. Meanwhile, Kimora Lee Simmons , the delightfully diva-ish wife of Phat Farm designer and musical impresario Russell Simmons, ratchets up her own career another peg ( can't anyone just be a "wife" and "mom" anymore ?), showing off her new line of Baby Phat designs. (O.K., we admit it: We were glued to Ms. Simmons' antics on America's Next Top Model all summer long …. )

Sunday September 14

From divas … to divots! Out in the country, which is how New Yorkers think of Greenwich, Conn., it's the clip-clopping of perky pony feet at Silver Hill Hospital's Polo Classic …. Back in Manhattan, the closest you'll get to the great outdoors is sitting in a ventilated tent, watching the little alligators on Lacoste shirts glide by . No, wait-this just in! You can hop on your 10-speed and circle Manhattan for a good cause: the 2003 Multiple Sclerosis Bike Tour. Better yet, go get yourself a Tasti D-Lite and make your tubby boyfriend pedal the bike-frankly, he could use the exercise ….

Monday September 15

Is everyone preggers? And what is up with New York women acting like getting knocked up is some kind of superhuman "accomplishment," the equivalent of a Pulitzer or something ? Redneck chicks do it all the time and don't feel the need to brag about it, ladies! Tonight, newly impregnated, triple-named thespian Mary-Louise Parker joins her man, Billy Crudup (just grand in Almost Famous , but what has he done for us lately?) in a frenetic display called the 24-Hour Plays : six plays written, cast, directed, rehearsed and performed in 24 hours. And speaking of "frenetic displays," Fashion Week action continues today with Carolina Herrera (neatnik with annoying socialite daughters), Oscar de la Renta (who came rather late to the "de la") and that super-kooky bohemian mom, Betsey Johnson .

Tuesday September 16

A brand-new Hugh ! And it's about time, because if we heard one more peep out of Elizabeth Hurley's floppy-haired, foppish ex, we were gonna hurl …. The Boy From Oz begins previews tonight, starring naughty Aussie Hugh Jackman as the Oscar-winning songwriter Peter Allen , who was discovered by Judy Garland and married her daughter Liza long before David Whatshisname-and yes, our big-cheese editor is polishing his spats …. Meanwhile, Woody Allen premieres his romantic comed y Anything Else , starring pie-humper Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci (has morphed over the years into one of those skinny lollipop actresses with a disproportionately large head). On the runways: minimalists Calvin Klein and Narciso Rodriguez; maximalists Bill Blass and Badgley Mischka!

Wednesday September 17

Well, hello, Dalai! The Dalai Lama arrives in town today-oblivious, one hopes, to the happy commingling of materialism and anorexia under the tents of Bryant Park, as Michael Kors (horsy), Nanette Lapore (ruffly), Anna Sui (sultry) and Diesel Stylelab (ambisexual Eurotrash) trot out their various fineries and fripperies.

Thursday September 18

Bespectacled deconstructionists going for the glam? It's not a pretty sight. Go ahead, girls, take your esoteric allusions to the New York Is Book Country Gala , then find them rudely shattered when you find writers like mystery scribe Mary Higgins Clark, Irish author Frank McCourt -what, you thought he was going to go away?- and secretly saucy food critic Ruth Reichl shaking hands with fans. Us, we're going to show our lit'ry appreciation by staying home with an advance copy of the new Toni Morrison novel , the aptly named Love , which we nicked from one of our poxy Knopf pals ….

Friday September 19

Friday frenzy: Could it be? Is the new Friday actually … Friday ? (Note to New York Times Styles editors: That was a joke . But you can use it for a feature story if you like-5 bucks.) Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and the Tents' 10th-Anniversary Party at Gracie Mansion round out Fashion Week. Meanwhile, the must-read yet-let's face it-often twitty and prancing New Yorker magazine is beginning its annual festival-basically a Burning Man for the Lovely Bones set- with a Fiction Night: readings from Michael Cunningham (likes Sapphic couplings), Jeffrey Eugenides (likes hermaphrodites) and Dave Eggers (likes masturbating). And as if that weren't crazy enough, Susan Sarandon (watch out for her babe daughter ) and director Martin Scorsese are staging an evening with the aforementioned Dalai Lama, who receives a well-deserved Human Rights Award .

Saturday September 20

So Wang, so right: Is it just us, or is New York just one big bridal brouhaha ? Wedding empress Vera Wang addresses the affianced at the Wedding March on Madison , the prospect of which is basically sending us into a panic …. Meanwhile, the aforementioned New Yorker Festival goes into high overdrive with a bunch of celeb interviews , as if it were the Us Weekly Jubilee or something: Hilton Als chats with Björk (let's hope he speaks "weird"). Susan Orlean interviews the deeply-troubled-seeming Nick Nolte , and Susan Morrison talks with comic actor Will Ferrell , who may be the last funny man in America.

Sunday September 21

Weekend with the kiddos? The New Yorker Festival- it's sort of never-ending, isn't it, like the war with the Middle East -continues with free sessions for tykes on storytelling and master classes taught by New Yorker artists. Also, historical preservationist Michael Henry Adams and twee Francophile Adam Gopnik lead a walk through Harlem, the latter making history as perhaps the first-ever New Yorker staffer ever to venture above 96th Street. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama addresses New Yorkers in Central Park on how to develop compassionate thoughts, and then progresses to Lincoln Center for "A Concert for Peace and Reconciliation" presented by Philip Glass and the indefatigably sexy Richard Gere. C'mere, Gere!

Monday September 22

Hudson goes "Hollywood" : The indie-film industry hosts the Gotham Awards , New York's answer to the Oscars, sans the dumbass red-carpet shenanigans . What to watch: Pieces of April , with Katie Holmes (keeping her shirt on this time, much to our male co-workers' disappointment); Raising Victor Vargas , a "slice-of-lifer" about a Lower East Side Latino, with close-ups so extreme you can count pores; and American Splendor , with Paul Giamatti as comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, which you should have already seen, ya slob! Meanwhile, the Fashion Institute of Technology opens its Fashion Walk of Fame , which would be a lot easier to enjoy if some industry "genius" had never invented high heels-am I right, people?

Tuesday September 23

Krugerrands for Krugman! Are we getting warm? 'Course not! It's the first day of autumn, silly, so put on a big pill-y sweater, think "serious" and go hear thinking person Paul Krugman , resident bulldog of the New York Times Op-Ed page , discuss his new book The Great Unraveling , which is about-what else?-the terrible, terrible stuff that's happening to the economy, and how we might make it right!. He'll be moderated by moderate Times business editor Glenn Kramon. Is Mr. Krugman worried about hecklers? "If I was worried about having people mad at me," he told us in low, authoritative tones, "I would have quit long ago." Amen to that, Paulie boy!

Wednesday September 24

Westheimerlich maneuver: Before all those sassy Yale undergraduate sex columnists, there was Dr. Ruth Westheimer , and today the still-kicking horny grandma swings by the Museum of Jewish Heritage and waxes philosophic in a lecture titled "Kantian Neo-Liberalism and Machiavellian Ethics: A Polemic." Just kidding- she'll be talkin' about sex, just like she always does! Meanwhile, thinking woman's sex object Elvis Costello -former lover of Bebe Buell , current lover of crooner Diane Krall -stuffs his huge ass into a fancy suit to play Town Hall.

Thursday September 25

If you're like us, you're a huge Law & Order fan who's sick of seeing Angie Harmon act like a ditz in those Neutrogena commercials-and have already back-ordered next month's new book, Law & Order: Crime Scenes , which "goes home" with the characters, revealing the personal lives of the series' various detectives and attorneys. (Alas, no full-frontal shots of Benjamin Bratt in the nude …. ) Tonight it all comes together, as real-estate maven Patricia Burnham (sold Connie and Maury their apartment in the Dakota) and producer Dick Wolf launch the tome at Elaine's , and we are simply beside ourselves with glee. Now if we could just bag ourselves our very own Jason Sehorn to bring to the party ….

Friday September 26

At the 'plex: Anthony Hopkins and the (how to put this?) almost nauseatingly ubiquitous Nicole Kidman open in The Human Stain , based on the pretty-good Philip Roth novel about an academic in crisis. "Philip Roth is not always a pleasant experience," said screenwriter Nicholas Meyer . "However, he is always articulate, he is always grown up, he is always profound ." Has Mr. Roth read the script? "I thought, 'Why should he read it?'" Mr. Meyer said. "Mr. Roth, after all, had done his part, and bore no responsibility for the final product. Maybe I shouldn't see the movie for the same reason." You've been reading too much Roth, fella!

Saturday September 27

Today is Rosh Hashanah -a happy new year for many, while others clomp over to Bryant Park, where they've blown out all the fashion stardust for a Writer's Block Exhibition . Artist Sheryl Oring has collected over 600 old typewriters from the 1920's and 30's (clickety-clack!) and caged them in huge steel boxes as some sort of "I know why the caged word sings" statement about censorship and free expression.

Sunday September 28

Not in the mood for Sex and the City ? Good: It's not on anymore, and frankly, we're not sorry …. Instead, there's K Street , a new HBO series about the Washington elite (isn't that an oxymoron?), produced by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney and generating more "buzz" than a Phish concert. If you're out prowling the night , the late-night club Lotus, in the still-thrumming meatpacking district , has recently launched something called Suzie Wong's Late Night Cafe to feed its patrons-who, to the best of our knowledge, subsist on Vicodin tablets, but whatever . It's open till 3 a.m. (if you want to be safe, you'll also bring some snacks in a paper sack) ….

Tuesday September 29

Lethem eat cake: Dark-haired, brooding author -and Brooklyn ladies' man- Jonathan Lethem heads to Barnes & Noble to read from his latest thumping novel, Fortress of Solitude , which is supposedly gonna catapult him into the "august" company of those other dark-haired, brooding author Jonathans, Franzen and Safran Foer …. Bleary-eyed, we combed Fortress of Solitude for a juicy excerpt and found this: "That's right! You don't mess with Arrowman!" 'Scuse us, but is this fancy lit'rature, or an outtake from 2 Fast 2 Furious ?!

Wednesday September 30

Who's da boss ? Springsteen, of course! But it was Tony Danza who delivered our favorite moment in music history when he started rapping at last year's People's Choice Awards. Words simply cannot convey our delight. Between that moment, Alyssa Milano's career in softcore porn, and the kid who played her brother later coming out of the closet - what other sitcom was actually more enjoyable after it ended? (Maybe Diff'rent Strokes , but you're too young to remember that-Ed.) One can only hope Mr. Danza is similarly inspired tonight when he croons at Feinstein's at the Regency. Meanwhile, we're getting out our naughty-schoolgirl skirts and big boots and stomping around the office, 'cause it's gonna be a bang-up October …. Oh, and by the way, ladies- bush is back. Shazam!

And I hope I'll have enough room left to get around to that, after my special appeal to Mr. Murray, who is himself, it occurs to me, like Mr. Petty, an underappreciated savant. That's the point of my appeal to Mr. Murray: recognition, the right kind of recognition, the kind he deserves, the kind two wonderfully imaginative, enthusiastic, charming and devoted women are trying to give him. The kind he has so far inexplicably chosen not to acknowledge.

Dear Mr. Bill Murray:

Please don't stiff my friends Chris and Nancy. I'm speaking of Christine Schomer and Nancy Donahoe, the two founders and directors of the Newport International Film Festival who have been courting you, counting on you to show up at the Bill Murray Retrospective they're staging in your honor at the Newport Film Festival, which runs from June 1 to June 6 at that beautiful resort. Actually, they're not calling it a Bill Murray Retrospective , they're calling it a Bill Murray Introspective , as I am sure you know from the catalogue they sent you (along with the highly prized Emil Verban baseball card which Chris Schomer went to the trouble of snagging from an E-Bay auction on the Internet and sending along to you because she knows the sentimental affection and iconic significance with which you have endowed the famously plodding but consistent Chicago Cubs second baseman from the 40's. Talk about devotion!).

Not Retrospective but Introspective, because "His work deserves more than a Retrospective," as they write in their catalogue, "it deserves a look inward. The Bill Murray Introspective offers a contemplation of Murray's singular capacity for conjuring rich convincing inner lives for his characters. Watch Caddyshack again with an eye to just how much Carl [the groundskeeper] communicates with a blank stare. Read the backstory etched into [Ernie McCracken–Mr. Murray's ecstatically vain bowling champ character] in Kingpin . Understand, somehow, without any explanation, the root of the emotion in so many of his lines in Rushmore ."

And these two women, Chris and Nancy, are not pushovers for fame and name, for mere star power. They're both smart and discriminating and the festival they put on is a highly impressive, hugely enjoyable and professionally run event. I served as a juror on their feature film panel last year and they had the city of Newport, a place I once dismissed as a snotty, standoffish burg, throwing open its fabulous mansions to lavish hospitality on the filmmakers and attendees. Their carefully crafted catalogue descriptions of your work are brilliant, compressed appreciations; the clip reel of your career which their program director Maude Chilton put together is a smash.

They've even scheduled a Bill Murray golf tournament and book signing (if you show up to sign, of course–hey, why not call Chris and Nancy right now and give them the confirmation they've been wishing for so devoutly as the clock ticks down toward the festival opening?). A book-signing for your new opus from Doubleday called Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf , a book which I've come to love despite the fact I've never before been able to stand golf or anything connected with it. Because it's not so much about golf as about life: Bill Murray riffing on Life, on his life (I loved the riff on trying to get cast as Joseph in his grade school nativity pageant). "The daddy of all roles: Joseph … the complexity, the layers … How secure was this guy? Unfazed by Nazarene gossip …") Bill Murray riffing on his goofily eccentric fusion of Westernized Eastern philosophy and show-biz shtick. Bill Murray making a startling revelation about the origin of his crazy Zen-slacker take on things: Towering over the golf course in Wilmette, Ill. where he first caddied was a Bahai temple, the very center of the Bahai faith in the West, set down in Bill Murray's hometown. Why? Because, Bill Murray tells us, his hometown is the obverse navel of the earth in the Bahai faith, a point directly opposite the founding temple of the Bahai sect in Persia. How wild is that?

Now Bahai is a unique religion in that it professes to be a fusion of all religions Eastern and Western, an inclusive spiritual communion that prompts some genuinely heartfelt remarks from the usually mock-everything Mr. Murray: "The faith believes in the unity of all religions, the nine major ones celebrated in the nine sides of the temple. Bahais are the victim of genocide in Persia. Where's the logic? Choose no favorites; believe all faiths are equal in God's eyes. O.K., prepare to die for that belief."

All of which tends to confirm the kind of speculation I indulged in a couple years ago in these pages in a column titled "Bill Murray: Secret Zen Master" [Aug. 12, 1996]. An essay in which I tried to make a case that Bill Murray has been seriously underappreciated, that beneath the goofy deadpan mock sincerity of his usual comic persona there is an intriguing and persistent subtext of cosmic/comic spirituality. It's an essay (reprinted in the Bill Murray Introspective Catalogue of the Newport Film Festival) which argues that, "beneath the spectacularly smarmy, self-subvertingly parodistic insincerity of Bill Murray's signature characters … there's something More going on … beneath the mugging, beneath the deadpan insincerity–the numinous shadow of something Unspoken, which the insincerity is mutely gesturing at–the obverse of it [just as the Bahai temple is the obverse of Wilmette, Ill.], a kind of sublime godlike composure, an almost Buddhalike serenity."

I argued that your "signature characters like the schlockmeister lounge singer you created on Saturday Night Live sketches offer a profound critique of self-serving vanity. That your affectation of show-biz phoniness is your way of making apparent, transparent, the phony Bad Actors our egos are–dramatizing the distance between our acting and our Being. It's a far more devastating critique of the self-aggrandizing performative self–of Self itself–than any of the self-absorbed lit-crit theorists have contrived. And an awful lot funnier, too; an all-too-knowing subversion of Selfishness in the service of a higher Selfless wisdom."

And I meant it. Bill Murray is, as I said back then, the closest thing I'll ever have to a guru. And one of the greatest things about talking with Ms. Schomer and Ms. Donahoe about their Bill Murray Introspective was the discovery that they're on the same wavelength about your work. In fact, Chris Schomer unearthed from Caddyshack a monologue from Carl the Groundskeeper about playing golf with the Dalai Lama that may be the Ur-moment of the subtextual spirituality in the rest of your work, your most explicit disclosure of what's going on beneath the surface. It's a passage I shamefully failed to recall in my "Secret Zen Master" essay, a passage that would have clinched the case. A passage that Chris Schomer, with the loving devotion of a true initiate, has gone to take the trouble of getting printed up, on an engraved card, that serves as the invitation to the golf tournament they've scheduled in your honor. To signal that this is not a mere golf tournament, that a deeper game is being played on the greens. Here's Carl the Groundskeeper's deadpan account:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald … striking. So I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one–a big hitter, the Lama–long, into a 10,000-foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga Galunga … gunga, gunga galunga. So we finish the 18th and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey how about a little something , you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

I don't know, you have to rent the tape to fully appreciate it, but there's something both hilariousandbeautifulinCarlthe Groundskeeper's delivery of the last line. "You will receive Total Consciousness. [Pause] So I got that goin' for me. [Pause] Which is nice." Funny on the surface–the Dalai Lama tips his caddy with total consciousness–but there's more to it. It seems to mock the notion of Total Consciousness, but slyly insinuates the idea that in every game we play, the real prize is total consciousness.

But in some weird way–and I'd say this about no one else in public life–Bill Murray may really have the closest thing to Total Consciousness you can find, at least in Hollywood films. And he just keeps getting better as Rushmore demonstrates.

But the most exciting aspect of the Bill Murray Introspective (aside from the prospect of Bill Murray himself showing up and saying a few words–Hey Bill, why don't you call Chris and Nancy now , if you haven't already) is the prospect of seeing a clip from your forthcoming performance as Polonius in the Miramax Hamlet . It's an inspired piece of casting (although, frankly, someday I'd love to see what Bill Murray would do as the Prince of Denmark himself, say on the "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy). What's most inspired about Bill Murray as Polonius is that the role thematizes, as the lit-crit types say, the two-leveled tension in all Bill Murray's work. A tension I'll attempt to explain by reference to one of his most inspired signature lines, perhaps my favorite Bill Murray riff. It's the one from Tootsie , where, you recall, he plays Dustin Hoffman's roommate Jeff, an Off Off Broadwayplaywright-waiterwho's penned a determinedly grim and depressing opus called Return to Love Canal . He's discoursing at a party to other theater types about the effect he wants his plays to have. In a brilliant Polonian fusion of pomposity and theatrical mock profundity, he tells his hearers:

"I don't want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want 90 people who just came in out of the worst rainstorm in the city's history. These are people who are alone on the planet. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rains … But after a performance I don't like it when people come up to me and say 'I really dig your message , man' or 'I really dig your play, man. I cried .' I like it when people come up to me the next day or a week later and say 'I saw your play. [Long pause] What happened ?'"

It's a knowing and hilarious sendup of theatrical pretentiousness and sententiousness, yes (in the manner of Polonius describing the traveling players in Hamlet as "the best" actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral …")

But again, as in all Bill Murray's best work, there's something more there, it's comical, but it's comical-spiritual. When he says he wants to hear people say "What happened ?" a week after they see his play, it's a gesture at the notion of transformation by art–of theatrical rapture that verges on loss of a destabilizing identity. The unstated but implicit corollary to "What happened ?" is "Who am I now?" A transformative experience that suggests what happens to Bottom after his night of sudden transformation, in A Midsummer Night's Dream –a dream beyond imagining, of ecstatic sexual union (an extremely hot version of total consciousness) with a higher being, with Titania, queen of fairies.

By the way, I think the new Michael Hoffman A Midsummer Night's Dream has been unappreciated for its ambition, for its distinctive vision of the Dream : that it is, at bottom, Bottom's Dream . It's Bottom, after all, who is the only one in the play whose transformation has been an ascent to a higher realm, rather than a lateral transposition to a different lover in the same realm. Bottom is the visionary who has to deal with the melancholy return to daily life after his momentary glimpse of total consciousness.

This is classic Bill Murray, this "What happened ?" line in Tootsie : to gesture at transcendence, but only through a scrim of mockery, which nonetheless gives an intimation of a genuinely transcendent realm beyond the scrim.

This is what Bill Murray does best, this is why he's, if not unappreciated, then not fully appreciated for what he's done. He doesn't call attention to it, he doesn't explicate it tendentiously the way I do. He only winks and nods–and maybe gives you a little nudge with an elbow–to gesture at it. Carl the Groundskeeper is Bill Murray's Bottom, our Bottom. "Methought I was … Methought I was …" Bottom stammers as he awakens from his rapturous dream of union with a goddess. What happened ? But nothing, no words can recapture his rapture, and "A man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had." To speak of it is to betray it, that evanescent moment granted to a few only on their deathbed: total consciousness, ecstatic union with divinity. "So I got that goin' for me … which is nice."

Which is why I can't wait to see his work as Polonius, and I say this as someone who's spent the past few months communing with Hamlet scholars on two continents. There are those for whom Polonius remains more of an enigma, more complex than he's played on stage. While much of what Polonius says is subverted by his relentless sententiousness, there are flashes, glimpses of truths not utterly ironized by his all-too-evident hypocrisy. What should we make of "To thine own self be true"? Self-subverting in Polonius' mouth, but is it utterly dismissible because of its source?

This is the Polonian paradox, a paradox which Bill Murray was born to play. This is the realm Bill Murray has inhabited with his comic genius and gives voice to: "windy suspirations of breath" that sound merely mock- serious but which might actually be a kind of test : Can you see past the smarmy, even sleazy delivery to the glimpse of a realm of truth beyond the pompous rhetoric?

And speaking of tests, Mr. Murray, I really don't want to think of your decision whether or not to make an appearance at the Newport Film Festival Bill Murray Introspective as a test for you . I'm sure your inability to commit to an appearance with one week left to go, an inability that is torturing the festival organizers, your biggest fans, is probably more a matter of your schedule and your family obligations and all that. But I feel somehow on one of those six days, June 1 to June 6, you could find a way to show up and gladden the hearts of the two women, Chris Schomer and Nancy Donahoe, who have put their hearts and souls into giving you a fitting Introspective. I don't want to bring up Carl the Groundskeeper's riff on the Dalai Lama stiffing him on that round in Tibet. You haven't stiffed them yet. But I think Chris and Nancy and I would trade Total Consciousness for a Newport Introspective appearance by our Lama, Bill Murray.

How strange? Kundun is a pro-religious, anticommunist movie. How common a combination is that in Hollywood? The scenes between Mao Zedong and the young Dalai Lama are played as phantasmagoria, with the scientific socialist, not the god-king, in the role of the monstrous dream-figure.

Kundun defends a medieval society. Mr. Scorsese bravely gives us glimpses of Tibet's weird antiquity. When the Dalai Lama and his court ponder an important question, they consult a possessed shaman. This Buddhism is not the California Zen variety.

I consulted the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica on Tibetan religion, and found this stern dismissal of the influence that Tantra had upon it: "Some unhappy scholar of a future age may have to trace its loathsome history." But the article goes on to note that a 14th-century reformer purged his country of Tantra's grosser elements, so even Tibet once felt the winds of change.

These changes stopped well short of our notions of modernity-a fact the Communist Chinese have tried to exploit in their lumbering counteroffensive to American Tibet-mania. Chinese flacks boast that, under their regime, literacy has gone up (true, it is literacy in Chinese, not in Tibetan), while Jiang Zemin, on his trip here some months ago, casually remarked that the Chinese Communists had abolished slavery in Tibet.

Prof. Leonard Jeffries, hearing this, looks up from his beakers where he is performing melanin research and asks, "Did the Jew take my people even there?" No, Professor Jeffries, slavery has not happened only to the black man, or in the United States. Serfdom has been the historic norm the world over, and while Jiang obviously seeks to put the worst possible gloss on the pre-revolutionary society of Tibet, it is equally true that no American would volunteer to have lived in its lowest orders.

The Dalai Lama in the movie says that his country was about to change itself, on its own. His honesty is not to be questioned. But if we are honest, we must admit that the heroic devotion shown by his subjects-culminating in the bravery of the horsemen who guide him over the Indian border, and whom he foresees bloody and dead by their mounts as a reward for their service-is a premodern, prerational virtue. They did not get it by passing a law. It sprang from their faith, and their way of life. What is good about Tibet is inextricable from what is odd and ancient.

This should give modern men pause-not just the pathological among us, the socialists and the national socialists, but also we, the democratic capitalists. We, too, bustle about the world, upsetting apple carts. Different goods, lesser goods, even evils are delicate things to change or extract. When a society has destroyed itself, then a hero may build anew in the ruins, as Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey after World War I. Patient conquerors can alter particular institutions, as the British abolished suttee in India, without trying to remake Hinduism. But when a country is moving along under its own steam, it is a rash man, if not a wicked one, who sets his hand to the framework of it.

Americans don't believe this. Got a problem? Call in the United Nations and the A.C.L.U. Where Tibet is concerned, the robes and the chants and the yaks distract us, but anywhere else we revert to our normal frame of mind. Just look at the Pope's visit to Cuba.

Now John Paul II is a celebrity as well as a pontiff, and he won the glam contest, even against Fidel. But if I read once, I read a dozen times the paeans to Mr. Castro's intentions. He increased medical care. He increased literacy. He closed the brothels. After I went to Havana in the mid-1980's, I talked about the trip with an old friend, an incorrigible Communist; when I told him that unmistakable whores cruised up and down the sidewalk outside the Hotel Habana Libre (formerly the Havana Hilton), his face fell. Poverty, isolation, caudillismo-he could swallow it all. But Fidel, he believed, had closed the brothels.

Never mind that the medical care was provided by low-grade nurses. Never mind that the literacy enabled people to read Fidel's speeches, and nothing else. Never mind that the whores simply shifted from brothels to streetwalking (the pretty ones were no doubt reserved for the Communists and their special guests). Fidel was not Batista. Fidel was not whoever preceded Batista. Fidel was new and clean and progressive. Long live progress, long live Castro.

On my visit, I didn't just goggle at hookers. I also went to a church service. In the First Methodist Church of Havana, in fact. A more wretched group of compromised believers could not be imagined. They were the precise equivalent of those Tibetans who stayed behind and made their peace with the Chinese Communists, maybe intending to save what they could, maybe intending to get ahead. But no fancy Americans appeared to defend the Cuban faithful. The only fancy American there that day was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom I was covering, who attended the church service in the retinue of Fidel Castro, the jailer of the congregation he hectored. Religion is no guarantee of virtue. Some clerics are like John Paul II, or the Dalai Lama, speaking truth to power. Some are like Mr. Jackson, picking crumbs from the tables of the powerful.

What will happen in Cuba and Tibet? The world is clamoring for the United States to lift its embargo on Cuba, which became obsolete with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would be a nice gesture to end it as a present to the Pope. Tibet looks hopeless-but no more hopeless than the cause of the Baltic nations looked, up until 1989. If the Asian economic slowdown hits China, there could be unimaginable upheavals.

Tibet and Cuba-so alike in fact, so different when Oscar time rolls around. If the Dalai Lama wore a white robe, and John Paul II wore a colored one, would Hollywood see them differently?