Another year! How they pile up. Or rather, how they melt in the mind, into hosts of memories with puzzlingly different time-stamps. Right after taking in a movie that you think you saw “ages ago,” you had dinner with a friend “just the other day.” And then there are the intense experiences that simultaneously whoosh right by while taking forever. All of 2010 was one such experience for me, and today I celebrate its first anniversary, in the birthday of our grandson Will, who seems to have arrived only yesterday but who has palpably been with us always.

The most important thing that I heard in 2010 was William Gibson’s remark (made more than a few years ago) that the future is already here, but unevenly distributed. That’s another way of saying that, while almost nothing ever really happens, everything is happening all the time. Will is a bit of a baby, and a bit of a young adult, but he is mostly a little boy. The only statement that makes complete sense is also completely tautological: Will is — Will.  

As are we all; all of us are more complicated than we can know, even if we could strip away the callouses of inattentiveness and the built-in oblivion that make life bearably uneventful. I can’t tell you how much of me is sitting here writing, how much stuck somewhere in last week’s projects, or how much has shot ahead in pursuit of, among other things, plans for the ongoing development of this Web log. All of me that’s present wishes you very hearty good wishes for the New Year — and all of me that’s anywhere thanks you for reading.

At the beginning of Daniel Kehlman’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005), the mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss journeys to Berlin, accompanied by his son, Eugen. The dyspeptic Gauss asks his son for a book.

Eugen gave him the one he had just opened: Friedrich Jahn’s German Gymnastics. It was one of his favorites.

Gauss tried to read, but seconds later he was already glancing up to complain about the newfangled leather suspension on the coach; it made you feel even sicker than usual. Soon, he explained, machines would be carrying people from town to town at the speed of a shot. Then you’d do the trip from Göttingent to Berlin in half an hour.

Eugen shrugged.

It was both odd and unjust, said Gauss, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-à-vis the future.

Eugen nodded sleepily.

Even a mind like his own, said Gauss, would have been incapable of achieving anything in early human history or on the banks of the Orinoco, whereas in another two hundred years each and every idiot would be able to make fun of him and invent the most complete nonsense about his character. He thought things over, called Eugen a failure again, and turned his attention to the book. As he read, Eugen in his distress turned his face fixedly to the window, to hide his look of mortification and anger.

German Gymnastics was all about exercise equipment. The author expounded at length on this or that piece of apparatus which he had invented for swinging oneself up or around on. He called one the pommel horse, another the beam, and another the vaulting horse.

The man was out of his mind, said Gauss, opened the window and threw the book out.

This passage has been much on my mind this year, because it pinpoints a truth about life in history that most people have no reason to attend to. They grow up in the world they’re born to, and it always seems natural. For tens of thousands of years, it’s true, human beings had no reason to imagine the possibility of other ways of life, but already by Gauss’s time (the early Nineteenth Century) the difference of a century or two in the timing of one’s arrival on earth could have a baleful effect on one’s opportunities. Today, differences appear much more rapidly. Had I been born a decade earlier, I might well have died, years ago, of colon cancer: my continued existence has depended upon the invention of fiber-optic cables, one of which detected a pre-cancerous tumor that turned out to be tricky to remove.

Far more palpably, as an everyday matter, I’ve lived long enough to make use of the Internet. To blog, even. If there’s one thing that I’m sure of, it’s that I was born to blog.

Here is a portion of the foregoing passage (translated by Carol Brown Janeway above) in the original.

Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauẞ, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, daẞ man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit and mache eine zum Clown der Zukunft.

Sogar ein Verstand wie der seine, sagte Gauẞ, hätte in frühen Menschheitsaltern oder an den Ufern des Orinoko nichts zu leisten vermocht, wohingegen jeder Dummkopf in zweihundert Jahren sich über ihn lustig machen und absurden Unsinn über seine Person erfinden könne.

“Seltsam sei es und ungerecht” … “unziemlichen Vorteil” … “Clown.” I will continue to try, in the New Year, not to throw German Gymnastics out the window.

It’s the day after Christmas, and we’re expecting a whopping pile of snow here in New York. How nice it would be to do what we did yesterday: absolutely nothing. But we have a date at the Museum; we’re taking a friend from Malaysia to brunch. I’m going to pack my camera, in hopes of capturing some winter wonderland magic out the window.

When I say that we did “absolutely nothing” yesterday, I exaggerate. There was plenty of regular breathing. (And some irregular breathing, too: Kathleen had a bit of a cough.) I made a hero sandwich, and ate half of it in the middle of the afternoon and half of it at midnight, after we watched Eat Pray Love, a movie that seemed about twenty times more ridiculous on DVD than it did in the theatre. (But still very pretty, and almost saved by Richard Jenkins’s fantastic rooftop scene.) Kathleen survived on dinner rolls, applesauce, and a bowl of alphabet noodles. She never really got out of bed. I spent the day planted in my chair, reading The Kindly Ones. (“It’s too depresssing! They’re losing the war.” But I couldn’t put it down.)

The holiday bustle culminated in a lovely Christmas Eve with Megan, Ryan, and Will. We sent the O’Neills home with half a shelf of new books. “But we didn’t bring presents,” Megan protested. We assured her that she and Ryan had indeed brought a present — a little fellow who turns one year old next Saturday morning.

At the post office yesterday, a clerk and I engaged in a passive-aggressive encounter about the mailing of about fifty small parcels. Each one contained a VistaPrint desk calendar featuring Kathleen’s photographs. The clerk wanted to give me stamps. I wanted her to print them. Being the customer, I won, but I was made to feel awkward. It turned out that I’d negligently proceeded from the general queue to the “stamps only” window. The clerk really ought to have sent me back to the head of the line, but that wouldn’t have been passive-aggressive, would it? Instead, she weighed each and every one of my identical packages, printing out postage in the amount of $1.56, while commiserating with customers who came directly to the window (which can have its own queue) and advising them that “this gentleman” would be taking “quite a while.” I thought how, had I been waiting for stamps only, I’d have bored rays of hatred and contempt into my back, rocking with indignation each time I bent over to pick up yet another batch of buff envelopes from the shopping bags at my feet. But I wasn’t waiting for stamps only; I was discharging a daunting holiday obligation that involved going to one of my least-favorite places, a United States Post Office. I apologized to the clerk several times, but each time she told me that it wasn’t my fault. There you have it, then. When it was all over and I took the extremely long receipt — you can’t just print fifty postage stickers, because each one contains all sorts of priceless information, such as the destination’s ZIP code, so the receipt reported fifty transactions — my discomfort simply vanished, and I went on with my day of slow-motion holiday bustle: Staples (new landline telephones); the bank (cash, sweet cash — which is what we used to say Notre Dame’s “C.S.C.” stood for); the Shake Shack (an imprudent but scrumptuous lunch al fresco); Yorkshire Wines (champagne for the doormen; can you believe that someone tipped our Dominick $500?); a Christmas tree stand (perfect! and only $40!); Radio Shack (batteries); the East 86th Street Theater (The King’s Speech); and the New Panorama Café. In between the second shack and the movie (which I saw with Kathleen), I read from a profoundly unseasonable book, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, about which more anon.

The blagueurs have been packed off on vacation, with instructions not to fall too far behind on the feeds. The change in routine is unpremeditated, but it doesn’t discomfit me as it once would have done. I need a holiday, so I’m going to take advantage of the holiday season as a cover. You probably need a change of routine, too.

I need to think a bit about the Daily Office. I’ve had great fun taking it over, as it were. Until November, the Office was little more than a frame for longish extracts  from Web pages that I found interesting. There wasn’t much for me to say about them — without repeating them. Then, in one of those ironic developments that keep life interesting, I decided to make things simpler by summarizing the material myself. This immediately resulted in lots more writing by me, but it really was easier. Instead of quoting Frank Rich, while trying to come up with artful paraphrases of what he was saying, I could simply fold the gist of his remarks into my response to them, writing more or less off the top of my head. (What a curious expression that is!) The Daily Office much easier to do and much more quickly done.

But if writing the Daily Office took less time, it still took a long time to prepare. In order to write about Frank Rich, I have to read Frank Rich, and in order to find a bit of Frank Rich that engages something that is on my mind, I have to read a lot of other interesting but, for the moment, not particularly relevant material. For that’s what the Office is about: the frankly egotistical business of sharing bits and pieces of writing that reflect what I’m thinking about anyway.

Many bright people prefer to think things through on their own, but my cast of mind is essentially sociable. I don’t have much to say unless somebody else says something first. I can’t understand why anybody would listen to me — I don’t listen to me. I listen to good writers. The number of good writers used to be manageably, if disappointingly, small. Like everybody else, I used to read books and magazines. It takes a while to read a book, which means that you spend a while in the company of one mind. Magazines offer more variety, but if they’re any good they’re filtered through a distinctive editorial outlook — a handful of minds at the most. But then the Internet was invented, and my mind was suddenly engaged by hundreds of others.

Thinking about this change lately, I’ve recurred to a thrilling experience that I had at the age of fourteen. Accompanying my parents on a business trip to San Francisco, I was staying at the Fairmont Hotel, atop Nob Hill. The hotel had recently added a modern tower at the rear of its imposing pile (which survived the earthquake), and to surpass the competition across California Street (the “Top of the Mark”), the designers mounted an outdoor elevator that ran between the lobby level and the top-floor bar. Outdoor elevators were remarkable in those days, but this outdoor elevator offered something much more remarkable.

As the elevator began its climb, Powell Street receded, but the view of bland neighboring buildings did little to challenge the excitement of being in an outdoor elevator. Higher up, though — I don’t remember how much higher — the neighboring rooftops fell away and, with them, the whole world: suddenly, there was all of San Francisco, with the Bay and its bridges, and Oakland and the mountains and, for all you knew, Sacramento. The excitement of being in an outdoor elevator dissolved in the excitement of seeing the city from a rocket ship. The view was amazing, but it was the sudden transformation of the view that book your breath away.

That’s what reading the Internet has been like. From a few dozen books and magazines, I’ve passed to a horizonless panorama of ideas and expressions. Most of it isn’t very interesting, but there are so many orders of magnitude more of it that a very great deal of it is. I could get lost in it — and that’s what I’m afraid of doing. That’s why I’m taking this little break, under cover of the holiday season.