Gotham Diary:
Bedtime Reading
10 March 2015
Early this morning, I fell out of bed. I was trying to get up, but I fell in a heap instead. I slipped, it seemed, as I was trying the chancy back-out maneuver that always makes me feel like I’m trying to climb down from a Tiepolo ceiling. I’m still new at it. Until recently, I slept in one position only, half sitting-up. Immobile for the entire night, I eventually contracted painful bedsores. Then, on our trip to San Francisco in January, I discovered that, with the help of long, king-sized pillows, I could sleep not only in a more supine position, thus taking some of the stress off my duff, but also on my right side, at least for an hour or so, until my shoulder got sore. As soon as we got home, Kathleen ordered similar pillows. No more bedsores! But I could sleep on the right side only, with my back to the edge of the bed.
Unwinding from this side-sleeping position, into a standing-up position, will require further thought, if I am to avoid further tumbles.
I was able to get up from the floor without pain or ado. Presently I was lying on my back, in bed, wondering what the damage was going to be. Over the next couple of hours, what would begin to throb or burn or spark? What muscles had been pulled, what tendons torn? Would I have to use a cane? Would I be able to use a cane? What would become of my tightly-organized householding schedule? Well, that one was easy. I knew what would happen to it. Pffft is what would happen. Presently I fell back to sleep.
When I woke up, I felt fine. I still do. No: what I feel is insanely lucky. That can’t happen again!
It was a long evening. Dinner was late because because. Kathleen came home an hour later than she thought she would, and because this is precisely what I expected, I allowed it to put off my starting in the kitchen. Then what I thought would take fifteen minutes took thirty-five. The food was good, and we ate slowly. We continued talking after our plates were clean. I said that I was going to watch a movie, which was fine with Kathleen. While washing up the dishes, however, I decided that it was too late for a movie, and that, instead, I should read a chapter of Sperber’s Marx, and, not only that, but, sticking to my schedule, do the laundry. This meant that I wasn’t in my sleepies (a Thomas Jefferson shirt from Peterman and a pair of fleece shorts) until half-past midnight.
I was restless, not tired. I had read the chapter (“The Editor,” about Marx’s career as a newspaperman in Cologne, during which he was an acerbic free-trade Hegelian who actually advocated military action against communist insurrectionists), but couldn’t settle on what next. Having finished Munich Airport — for some reason, the ending didn’t go down properly, and, while not positively unsatisfactory, it wasn’t satisfying, either — I thought I’d give The Buried Giant a try, but it was too intense, in the way that Never Let Me Go was intense: not at all difficult on the surface but nevertheless disturbing. I’ve learned from reviews what the “giant” really is, and can already see the novel, like its immediate predecessor, as a parable of what we take to be our ordinary modern life. Not, so not, bedtime reading.
I turned to Making It Up, Penelope Lively’s anti-memoir. This is a series of stories in which characters start out in positions taken from Lively’s life, but only to be drawn in quite different directions. The first story, “The Mozambique Channel,” concerns the evacuation of British women and children from Cairo, where Lively was born in 1933, in the face of Rommel’s advance across North Africa. Some went to Cape Town; others went to Jerusalem. Lively’s mother took her and her nanny to Jerusalem, so the story is about a nanny on board a ship bound for Cape Town. I had just finished that, and was about to begin the next one, which involves, I take it, an unwanted pregnancy in the early 1950s, when abortions could be deadly. Again: not bedtime reading. I got halfway through an essay by Tony Judt that heaped contumely upon the imperialism of Ariel Sharon, but I had to put it down. (Everything on that front has simply gotten worse!) Finally, I crawled into bed with A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, by Katie Whitaker. This is not my sort of book at all. Its central, unforgivable sin is the anachronistic portrayal of a seventeenth-century political marriage as a romance filmed at Shepperton or Pinewood. Almost as bad, Whitaker takes the letters exchanged by Charles and his French bride at face value, when in fact they’re largely courtly boilerplate. I’m reading, or not reading, A Royal Passion because Ray Soleil gave it to me when he was through with it. When he sees what I’ve just written, he’s going to tell me to throw the book away. But I can’t. For all its faults, Whitaker’s book does tell the important story of the quite deservedly “turbulent” career of one of those arrogant idiots who have occasionally worn the English crown.
Interesting, the way the English have always had of getting rid of arrogant idiots. Edward II, Richard II, Richard III, Charles I, Edward VIII. In France, they’d have been allowed to Ruin Everything. But not in Merrie England! (Never you mind what they did to Edward II.)
At dinner, Kathleen and I talked a little bit about humanism. My humanism, as I’m beginning very reluctantly to call it. I have mentioned in the past that “Humanism” is currently claimed by two groups, neither of which I belong to. There are the atheist humanists, who are really more interested in atheism than in human beings; and then there are the neo-Thomists, who are more interested in eternal souls than in human beings. Both are colored by Enlightenment humanism, which holds that we are all more or less alike, and could get on better than we do, if only malefactors of every stripe were not profiting from our divisions. I’m not an Enlightenment humanist, either.
I think that we are all very different, partly because of what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” The more alike any two people might be, the more intensely they’re going to focus on their differences (no malefactors required). Sociologists and other abstract thinkers like to put people in groups, but groups only exist in situations of mob frenzy. The members of an exclusive country club may look pretty much the same to you, but you can be sure that that’s not how they see themselves. We band together not to form groups but to surround ourselves with a range of varieties small enough to be lived with. In some unfortunate people, the sense that they’re not like anybody else and that nobody understands them is a cause of pain and disconnection, but for most people, I believe, it is a source of the most profound satisfaction — at least when things are going well.
Consider: when was the last time that you were happy to hear that “You’re just like my good friend X“?