I’ve taken a break recently from War and Peace (which is heavy to carry on planes), to read the much slimmer war novel City of Fear by Ward Just. This was my third Just novel, the others being Echo House and Forgetfulness. These three excellent books share some common themes. Just’s big story is the evolution of official Washington from Kennedy’s Camelot to the Reagan Era. The capital changes from a Cold War city–whose leaders were morally troubling but tough, ideological men on the federal payroll as soldiers, politicians, and spies–into a city of fixers: corporate lawyers who instead of litigating make phone calls and pull strings on behalf of clients. The main decline takes place during the Vietnam War, which Just covered and which is clearly a moral linchpin for him. Often the shift occurs within families, creating tensions between Cold-Warrior fathers and fixer sons. The fathers have Midwestern roots, usually in industrial Wisconsin or Downstate Illinois. The Midwest stands for America, in contrast to the “federal city”–which, however, Just evidently loves. Certain parts of DC receive particularly affectionate attention in his pages, especially a corner of Georgetown north of Q and east of Wisconsin that becomes a lofty refuge for several of his characters. Vietnam and France, where the author lives today, also figure repeatedly.

I have emphasized the commonalities, but these are wonderfully diverse novels, each intricately constructed even though a plot summary would retell a lot less action than you’d expect in a fictional book about spies and wars. (Marriages and father/son relations are central.) The narration involves frequent flashbacks, stories within stories, and ruminations told with implied indirect discourse. Sometimes I think the structure is contrived as well as simply complex, as when a character in City of Fear looks up from a conversation to see a relevant event playing on the TV. Then again, coincidences happen–especially to people near the center of power in media-saturated environments. Events really do revolve around them.

This is a remarkable painting that I saw in the San Diego Museum of Art last week. I like it for two reasons that often seem to apply to great works.

First, it’s good in itself. If you had no idea where it came from, you might guess that it’s a nineteenth-century American work, or possibly even a contemporary painting based on a photograph. Regardless, you might appreciate the striking composition, with a few large items displayed in an asymmetrical curve before a black background–the melon slice and cucumber extending into our space. You might also admire the realism of the fruit contrasted with the almost abstract frame.

But then you find out that it was painted in 1602 by a rather mysterious figure named Juan Sanchez Cotán. Before Cotán, no one had painted fruit or other inanimate objects by themselves–only as details in larger works. Cotán painted several “still life” paintings of fruit around 1600, and then entered a Carthusian monastery where he painted only religious works until his early death. With his fruits and vegetables, Cotán launched a genre that remained very important for Dutch genre painters in the 17th century, for impressionists and post-impressionists, and then for Cubists and other high modernists. Representing vegetables on a table became a means of exploring space and light, of commenting on art, and of making subtle points about affluence and decay.

Thus Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber has qualities that you cannot infer from the image alone. For instance, we can call it “original” and “influential” because we know what comes before and after in the history of art.

Implication: If someone painted exactly the same picture today (whether or not he copied the original), it would be a different work of art with an entirely different significance from Cotán’s painting. Borges explored the same idea in “Pierre Renard, Author of the Quixote.” The fictional Renard writes passages of Don Quixote verbatim without consulting the original book, thereby creating a work that is identical to Cervantes’ masterpiece in terms of the letters on the page, but entirely different in value and purpose.

I just finished Kim, which was my favorite novel when I was 12 years old. I wanted then to be Kim, a boy spy in the Orient. Later, I would have avoided the book as imperialistic and juvenile. But a favorable word by Pankaj Mishra sent me back to it. It is a bit of a “Boy’s Own” adventure, and it is certainly imperialistic–in an interesting way. It is also finely constructed, challenging, and beautiful to read.

I was attentive to the different ways that Kipling’s characters understand or fail to understand cultures other than their own. Almost the full possible spectrum of such understanding is represented. Right at the beginning, we meet the English curator of the museum in Lahore, a man learned in the languages and religions of South Asia. He derives some of his knowledge from “books French and German, with photographs and reproductions,” drawing on the “labours of European scholars” accumulated over at least a century. (That body of work is a remarkable achievement.) But the curator also recognizes an old beggar as “no mere bead-telling mendicant, but a scholar of parts,” and engages the Lama in a respectful conversation, from which he continues to learn.

In Chapter 4, a “dark, sallowish District Superintendant of Police” speaks fluent Hindi or Urdu and wittily urges a woman to veil herself–enforcing not a British law but a local custom. She observes, “These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white woman and learning our tongues from books, are worse than pestilence.” In Chapter 11, we learn that the same policeman is actually a Government spy, “not less than the greatest” agent in the Secret Service. What makes him effective is his deep affinity for his Hindu subjects.

To control requires understanding and respect. It changes the ones who rule as well as those whom they govern. The two cultures grow more alike, either enriching or adulterating themselves (depending on your perspective and the way the merger turns out). Some Europeans in Kim do not understand this dynamic. For instance, the Rev. Bennett says, “My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind.” He can’t even understand when Kim, in Urdu, calls him “the thin fool who looks like a camel.” To misunderstand is to lack control, as the Russian and French spies find to their humiliation near the end. They believe they can “deal with Orientals,” but they utterly misread the people around them.

And then there is the lama, who doesn’t wish to understand because he doesn’t want to rule. “It was noticeable that the lama never demanded any details of life at St. Xavier’s, nor showed the faintest curiosity as to the manners and customs of the Sahibs.” As a result, the Europeans affect him not at all. (Even the spectacles that the curator gives him never change the way he sees the world.)

So the imperialism that Kim describes and–presumably–celebrates is a process of careful, respectful interpretation and learning. It’s not surprising that the head of the Royal Ethnographic Survey is also the chief spy for Britain, or that an Anglified Bengali should wish to use charms and to describe them in scientific papers for the Royal Society. This “Babu” is, in fact, the perfect example of an imperialistic mix, with his invocations to Herbert Spencer as a prophet of karma, his Latin tags, and his brilliant mimicry of diverse Indians.

Kipling himself spoke Hindi before English, and his father was the curator of the Lahore Museum. So Kipling was the kind of imperialist he celebrated. What he overlooked was the economic exploitation essential to the British Raj. The British didn’t just “oversee justice”; they also made the rules to maximize their profit. The only hint of that fact in the novel is a complaint that the Babu makes when he pretends to be drunk in order to manipulate enemy spies. He is actually a British spy, despised in all his disguises. Yet perhaps Kipling faintly understands that the Babu’s complaint is just.

For better and for worse, the United States has never produced many people who yearn to understand, love, and control foreign countries. We intervene often enough, but we tend to beat a quick retreat when we find distant lands impossible to understand or to master. There have been fine American scholars of distant cultures; but they are rarely the same Americans who have invaded and governed such places. Today, after the new Counterinsurgency Manual and the shift in US tactics, American soldiers are busy learning Arabic and Pashto. I am not sure that their knowledge will last or accumulate, nor that it is motivated by the kind of love, affinity, and urge to possess that was so common among Anglo-Indians. I suppose the strongest example of real American “imperialism” is domestic; white Americans have periodically immersed themselves in minority cultures and have thereby helped to change and control them.

This is a detail of Tintoretto’s “Tarquin and Lucretia” (1578-1580), which belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago but is now in Boston for the astounding exhibition entitled “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice.” (Probably never before have so many comparable paintings by these competitors been hung together.)

In the detail, pearls are strewn across Lucretia’s clothes; Tarquin has just broken the strand. The spheres are caught on their way downward, spaced at growing intervals.

People have always known that objects move, and have always depicted motion in still images–since the ancient cave paintings. But I think Tintoretto’s painting may reflect a new way of thinking about motion and space. The image represents a precise instant at which each pearl would occupy a different and predictable location because of the mathematical laws of nature. The objects are frozen, but their locations allow us to infer their movement.

Galileo revolutionized science by claiming that nature was a book written in the language of mathematics. Tintoretto painted Galileo’s portrait from life in 1605-7, which shows that the two geniuses knew each other. By 1638, Galileo had proved (either in a real experiment on the Tower of Pisa, or in a thought-experiment) that objects of different weights would fall at the same accelerating rate. And forty years later, Tintoretto was interested enough in this Galilean conception of time and space that he painted pearls accelerating down Lucretia’s chest. It was another thought-experiment.

In Tiepolo’s “St. Dominic Instituting the Rosary” (1737-9), the rosary itself plummets at high speed from an enormous sky painted on the ceiling of the Gesuati Church in Venice. That is an excellent example of baroque theatricality, but not a unique one. By then, Europeans automatically thought of motion in Galilean terms. Tintoretto was perhaps the first to paint that way.

Mr. Huang is a youngish artist who uses cheap, discarded objects (soda bottles, baggies) and electronic components such as motion-detectors, LEDs, and fans to create objects that seem animal. My family and I saw his installation at RISD this weekend. It was like a whimsical aquarium; anemone-like creatures on the floor deflated their plastic bags shyly when you walked near them, and the big jelly-fish-like thing in the middle turned to watch you with its human eyes. It all sounds like something that Pixar or Disney would create. I respect their talents, but Huang is a studio artist rather than an entertainer, and I think the difference has to do with the following factors. He has a sense of humor but doesn’t play for laughs. His use of banal waste products to make lovely organic objects stimulates subtle ideas about nature and human action without driving home an obvious point. He leaves the wiring and electronic gadgets unconcealed; there’s no pretense to being something other than an art installation. Most important, Huang is a fine and careful individual craftsman. My little daughter and I were inspired to make something somewhat similar when we got home, and I developed a sense of how remarkably hard it would be to copy a Huang.